Local Government Finance

Marie Rimmer Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Ms Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)]

Life in my constituency is tough for many families. Too many live with the daily consequences of poverty, ill health and insecurity. Many people are vulnerable, and the impact can be soul-destroying. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley) for her work at Christmas time. She was the one who really started our campaign, and I pay tribute to her.

Healthy life expectancy in Knowsley is 50, and in St Helens, which is most of my constituency, it is 57, for both men and women—it was a shock when I read those figures. The call for significant healthcare support is tremendous, and starts much earlier than in some other places, but in St Helens housing and social care is integrated, which has helped with that increasing demand.

Many children do not benefit from the excitement of dance classes, gymnastics, trips out or holidays. Sadly, many are lured into county lines and drug taking. Many of our children need special educational provision, and some wait for a special and unique service. The cost can be enormous, and provision is rare and very often not local. Those children lose out, and their families watch and worry while they wait for the solution to arrive.

Revenue support grants are always complex, mysterious and hard to nail down. Added to that, 14 years of austerity did not help. St Helens borough council lost £127 million. We were capped in the poll tax, and we had to put the rates up by 2%—I was the leader of the council at the time. We were one of 21 areas that were capped. We had to deliver over £10 million overnight or we would have been surcharged. We had three months to deliver a new plan. We were very poor in St Helens.

Our councils are struggling to meet statutory responsibility in social care and SEND provision, not because of inefficiency in the councils but because the funding bears no resemblance to the actual needs of the people on the ground and the lives that they have to put up with. There are ever-growing numbers of people with complex needs, higher costs and a lack of provision. Two thirds of council funding in St Helens is spent on adult social care and children. We lost £127 million from Government, so we have either £9 million or £11 million left—that is what we have.

I have always said that we need a settlement that addresses the real pressures on health and disability, and provides care, attention, safeguarding and protection for the vulnerable, the aged, the abused and children in need. The council gets very little income from the Government now, so money has to be raised from council tax. More and more efficiencies have had to be made, but we could not get more efficient councils than those in Knowsley and St Helens. I go to the council meetings—I have been a councillor at St Helens for 39 years and I praise what I see in Knowsley. Those councils are so efficient and so focused on the people of the area. They are good employers, but they are not focused on the people who work for the councils but on how they can serve and care for local people.

Due to the deprivation of our area and the lack of assets that can be sold, which other councils have, we can raise only a fraction of the amount that councils in the south-east, London and the cities can raise. There is very little we can raise, so everything depends on council tax and our ability to be more efficient in new and different ways—what the council manages to do is ingenious.

The settlement that we were first presented with, which we consulted on, seemed fair and good, but I have to say that when the provisional announcement was made just before Christmas, I was horrified. Housing had been included in the index of multiple deprivation, but we are not suffering from that deprivation in Knowsley and St Helens. I am not saying that it should not be there, but it should certainly not be there with the weighting that it has. That is where our money went; it went down from the first figure that we were consulted on just like that. St Helens would have been high and dry, but I will not go into the details.

I have got the figures on what the impact would be for Knowsley, which are the same figures as those of my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley. I knew that St Helens would be bad, but I could not get the figures. My hon. Friend went off and started the work, and we did what we could to get this going.

Although this is called “fair funding”, it is not fair funding, because we are all different. I have listened to what Members said about people living in rural districts, and I have sympathy. We need to have a system that really looks at what costs are the highest and what is needed. No one can criticise the people who have this extra funding now, but it will not be there forever.

Following sustained lobbying, we have 90% off our high-needs deficit. That is the deficit that we have on SEND provision. Knowsley’s high-needs deficit is tremendous—far greater than that of St Helens—so that will and does help. What goes on is just wonderful.

We will get £14.7 million through the recovery grant over the three years, but that does not resolve the problem, because it is not part of the formula. We will have to commence straight away looking at what we are going to do, because we would have been much worse off than we were already. That is just one council; I know that there will be others like it, so we need to look at that issue.

I pay tribute to Ministers for the work that has gone on, as well as local authorities, chambers and finance departments. I also pay tribute to MPs and councillors for the work that they have done. It cannot have been pleasant for them to see what they saw. Having looked at this matter, I know that they have recognised things, but we will need to look again at fair funding in the future.

I sincerely thank all those who have been involved in coming to help for some of the worst affected boroughs in the country. I can assure hon. Members that this has not been party political. We do not think like that—I certainly do not, and I know that my hon. Friends the Members for Knowsley and for Bootle (Peter Dowd) do not either. Our Benches are full of former council leaders from our area who have done this for many years. I have been in local government and Parliament for 48 years, so I know what I am talking about—I see what I am talking about—and it is not made up.

I will support this measure tonight, but that does not mean an end to the lobbying; we will obviously start again. I am sure that Ministers will listen to what other people have said. Maybe there needs to be flexing here and there, but we need to recognise the needs of each area. We cannot leave them to deprivation and deny their needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

I do not remember the specifics of that, but I can say that, whereas the last Labour Government doubled council tax despite it being regressive, that did not happen under the Conservatives, whatever introductions there were. Those taxes were held down, because that is what conservatives do. They recognise that it is better to leave money in the pockets of people to make their own decisions, not take it away from them.

Families across the East Riding are now asking a very simple question, because they know that promises do not pay bills. How will this local government finance settlement, and the £200 council tax bombshell that follows it, help them cope? Let us be clear about what is happening: the Chancellor underfunds, councils are squeezed, council tax rises, and families pay. Council tax is, as many Labour Members have said, regressive. The lower the income, the heavier the burden. The smaller the home, the sharper the hit. At the very moment that household budgets are tightest, this Government tighten them further.

Nowhere is that clearer than in social care. In the first Budget since Labour came into office, the Chancellor allocated over £20 billion to health. Why did they not recognise that so many of the problems in the NHS actually come from the failure of funding in social care? It could so easily within the same spending envelope have eased the pressure on the NHS by better funding social care so that to keep those who are ready to leave hospital from occupying the beds that they do—they have for the past few years, and they do today.

The Government did not put sufficient additional money into social care, and in Beverley and Holderness, with an ageing population and rising adult care needs, that imbalance matters. Instead of funding care properly at source, Ministers shift the cost on to council tax payers—and then they claim that they have fixed it.

I saw the real-world cost of squeezed council budgets when I visited Sunk Island last month. On Sunk Island Road and Brick Road, residents endure patch upon patch of repairs that are never truly repaired. They are paying more yet still waiting for lasting fixes. This is the pattern: more tax, less certainty, higher bills, patchwork results.

Government should strengthen communities, not squeeze them, so I ask the Minister: when families are stretched to breaking point, why is this Government’s answer yet another bills hike? In Beverley and Holderness, the only change that this Government appear to deliver is the small change left in people’s pockets after the Chancellor has emptied them.

[Ms Rimmer]

What can councillors do to fund the statutory duties? People were given much better in the past, but we have to ration the services. They are quality services, and the integrated health has helped us with our social care. I do not want to go into party things, but the fact is that, under the Conservatives, St Helens lost £127 million a year from the support grant. We were left with something like £9 million or £11 million from the Government—that is all it was.

The only way councils can get the funds to provide services is from the Government and income to the councils. Where should we get the funds from? We have no assets to sell, and we get very little. Yes, we have low-paid jobs, so it is a hike, but what we should be doing is taking it from the broadest shoulders; they should be bearing the burden. It is inappropriate and incompatible that the people on the lowest pay the biggest proportion of their incomes on the necessities of life, while others have mansions—some people have a cottage and nothing else. We do not all have a mansion in London, so we need to look at wealth.

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady, who always speaks passionately and with deep knowledge of her community. As she says, she does not make unnecessary party political points.

The one thing that unites the House, including the Government Front Bench, is a recognition that the funding system is broken. I spent many years campaigning, across different funding pots, on the distribution. Everyone looks at the quantum, but they do not look at the distribution. It is easy to get into a world of complexity, and the number of people who turn up for meetings on distribution gets very small, but it is actually critical. We need a new funding settlement, and how we deliver that, given the political realities, is to go in early and hard. Unfortunately, this Government have not done that. They are delaying and delaying, and as their political potency weakens, it becomes harder and harder to deliver. It is a bit like the police reorganisation we touched on earlier today. It is unlikely to happen in the dribs and drabs of a Government who are struggling.

We need a long-term settlement that is based on need. There is no perfect assessment of that, but what we have is complexity, as we heard in the brilliant speech from the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) on the Lib Dem Benches earlier. The system has elements about how many pubs there are and what some level of cost was in 1991 and all sorts of other things. The truth is that, in this most fundamental set of services—my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) rightly identified 800 of them—for the constituents in the deprived areas of the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) and in mine, nobody can see the transparency. Perhaps we should look on the Back Benches initially for a cross-party view on building a fairer funding system.

There is one more thing, and I do not know why no one has talked about it very much in my 21 years in this place. The fact that a £200,000 house in Beverley pays a lot more council tax than a £2 million flat in central London is absurd, and very rarely does anybody mention it. We need to fix things, but if we cannot fix something as absolutely inexcusable as that—and, collectively, we have not—it is no wonder the public are looking at us so askance.

I would be happy to talk to the hon. Members for St Helens South and Whiston and for Hartlepool (Mr Brash) and others to see where we can make some common ground on having a more rational system, because at the end of all this, the complexity and lack of transparency end up in social failure. As the hon. Lady rightly and passionately says, it is those who are the most vulnerable and the least able who pay the highest price, and whether that is in her part of the world or in mine, that is not acceptable. We have all come here to make it a better place, and one of the things we need to fix is this.