Local Services (Southend)

Marcus Jones Excerpts

Friday 5th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Marcus Jones)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) on securing the debate. He has a great passion for his constituency and the interests of the people whom he represents. I represent a constituency that is probably about as far away from the sea as anywhere else in the country, so I will not challenge his assertion that Southend-on-Sea is the best seaside resort in the country.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving me this opportunity to talk about something that I feel strongly about. Local services, whether in Southend, my constituency of Nuneaton or anywhere else in the country, are crucial to local people. He raised interesting points about finance; from what he says, it seems that a bit of a blame game is going on at times. We all know that there are challenges with the public finances. Local authorities account for a quarter of public spending, and it is only right that local government should find its share of savings. We need to reduce the largest deficit in our post-war history.

[Sir David Amess]

To date, neither my hon. Friend nor I have had one letter complaining about the allocation of funds. To whom are representations being made? Surely my hon. Friend agrees that they should be made through local Members of Parliament if the situation is to be addressed. Will he let me know or write to me about that?

[Mr Jones]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I may need to write to him about a number of things that he has raised in today’s debate.

It is important that we recognise that one reason for where we are with the public finances is the profligacy of the last Labour Government, who put the public finances at risk. In the same context, at the last election the Labour party stood on a manifesto in which it said it would reduce funding to local government. That is an important point.

Overall, councils have done a good job of achieving savings while balancing budgets, in many cases keeping council tax low and maintaining satisfaction with services. However, more savings need to be made. We have listened carefully to councils while preparing both the spending review and the local government finance settlement. I thank everyone who took the time and effort to respond to the recent consultation with considered comments about our proposals. Even in the context of tougher public finances, we have given councils extra help to protect services such as those that support the most vulnerable in our society.

Through our £5.3 billion better care fund, we are spreading best practice to all areas of the country and have put national clinical experts into the most challenged areas to help them improve. Over the life of this Parliament, we will maintain the NHS contribution to the better care fund in real terms, including additional local government social care funding worth an extra £1.5 billion by 2020.

Back in November 2013, the Government selected 14 localities in the UK as integrated care pioneers. Southend—then under Conservative control—was one of them. Steps were taken to promote the prevention agenda, reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and keep patients independent in their own homes for longer. Our aim is for local government and the NHS to work together in a genuine partnership and to be held accountable for delivery. There must be a commitment to achieve that ambition on both sides.

That brings me to localism. We are committed to giving local authorities even greater control by the end of this Parliament. By 2020, local government will be entirely funded by its own resources—council tax, business rates, and fees and charges. Many people never thought that possible until very recently. Alongside all the new flexibility, we have to be clear that all public bodies should adopt maximum openness and transparency, which are the foundations of local accountability and democracy.

Since 2010, we have put in place a number of strong measures to improve town hall transparency. People should have access to their local authorities’ meetings and information. We live in a modern, digital world, where filming and social media should be embraced in reporting on public council meetings. That is why we introduced the Openness of Local Government Bodies Regulations 2014, which give any member of the public the right to take photographs and film and audio recordings in public council meetings, and to report on them.

In addition, the local government transparency code now requires local authorities to publish information about their financial transactions and assets. That enables the public more effectively to engage with and challenge their local authority. The code places more power in the hands of the public by increasing democratic accountability through wider access to information. With greater availability of information, not only can members of the public better understand and challenge their local authority’s performance, but greater transparency can lead to better and more efficient services.

The public rightly expect high standards of behaviour from their elected representatives, including local authority members. In 2012, the Conservative-led coalition Government did away with the discredited standards board regime, which had become a vehicle for malicious, vexatious and politically motivated complaints. New arrangements were put in place, giving local authorities control over how they promote and maintain high standards of conduct, and ending top-down, centralist control.

Every authority, including parish councils, was required to put in place a code of conduct that is compliant with the seven Nolan principles of standards in public life: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. When it is found that a local authority member has failed to comply with their authority’s code, the council can censure that member. At the same time, we introduced tough new rules on pecuniary interests to ensure that local authority members cannot put their own interests ahead of those of the public.

Wilfully ignoring the national rules, giving false or misleading information, or taking part in the business of the authority when that is prohibited by the rules is a criminal offence punishable with a fine of up to £5,000 and with being disqualified for up to five years from standing for or holding office in England. With those new localist, proportionate and robust arrangements in place, we are confident that local people will be able to hold their elected representatives to account for their conduct. A criminal sanction will ensure that elected members always put the public’s interest ahead of their own interests.

When people are let down by their local authority, it is important that there is swift and effective redress so that things are put right. A good complaints process can not only enable somebody who has been let down by their council to get swift and effective redress, but be a useful intelligence gathering mechanism for local authorities, alerting them to a problem with one of their services, actions or decisions. Where redress cannot be achieved, the local government ombudsman can consider complaints from members of the public who consider that they have suffered personal injustice as a result of maladministration in a local authority.

There are also routes of redress where services for vulnerable people are concerned. For example, if there is evidence of systematic failure in the provision of good-quality social care, the Secretary of State for Health has the power to require the Care Quality Commission to investigate. Should the CQC consider that the council is failing in its functions, a range of improvement options are available, from a notice requiring specific action, with a deadline for completion, through to the recommendation that the Secretary of State should impose special measures on the authority.

If my hon. Friend would like to write to me with further details of the GP practice that is being put into special measures, I will ask my officials to look into the issue and involve their counterparts at the Department of Health. As he says, local residents must be able to rely on the NHS to provide the best possible care, and we cannot tolerate poor standards of care.

The measures I have outlined ensure that we have a strong, 21st-century local democracy, where local government bodies are clearly accountable to the people they serve and to the taxpayers who help fund them. On my hon. Friend’s final point about redress for members of the public, I would say to him and to his constituents that if the public are so dissatisfied with the situation at Southend council, their final point of redress is, at the next set of elections, to vote in a Conservative administration that will provide high-quality administration for local people.

We recognise the challenges that lie ahead for local government. At a time of big opportunity, we want local government to take that forward, but we also expect it to be responsible, to be accountable, and to be open and transparent.

Question put and agreed to.