Local Government Finance

Mary Glindon Excerpts

Wednesday 8th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

I shall concentrate on what the local government settlement means for my council. I have advised my colleagues many times before in the Chamber that North Tyneside council has a mayor and cabinet system. Unfortunately, it currently has a Tory cabinet and mayor, but 35 of the 60 councillors are Labour. No doubt that number will increase in May.

The mayor has decided to go for the zero council tax increase deal, which many councillors would argue means a loss of money year on year. That remains to be seen. As a result of the local government settlement, our Tory council faces a cut of £17 million, and following the fashion of the Tory Government, it wants to make savings by cutting services to the most vulnerable members of our community. They want to cease the breakfast offer for breakfast schools, remove free fruit and milk for key stage 2 pupils and increase home care charges by £50 a week—those charges rose by 51% last year and are currently £151 per week. Even before the budget is set, my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr Campbell) and I find ourselves pleading the case for hundreds of bowlers in North Tyneside, because the council wants to increase their bowling fees by 400% over the next three years, which will put this sport out of the reach of many older people, for whom it is genuinely a lifeline.

The mayor has come up with an even more radical solution to her difficult budget problem. She and the cabinet want to outsource almost all council services to the private sector by October this year. The only services that will stay in-house will be legal services and the safeguarding of children and young people. Everything else is up for grabs. North Tyneside is no stranger to outsourcing, having outsourced council repairs some years ago, but that proved to be an inefficient and costly service for those who used it—the number of complaints that my office gets every week testifies to that.

There is no getting away from the fact that private companies need to make profits. As the leader of the Labour group in North Tyneside, Councillor Jim Allan, said, the private sector has no magic wand with which to deliver the same services at the same level but with less money. It does not work like that. Outsourcing just one service would take time. For one, there would be the consultation with the public, which is not happening in North Tyneside, and what about the human resources implications, working with the unions and the tender process? How can all that be done for multiple services in a six-month period?

Everyone from residents to staff and councillors realises that budget cuts can mean change, but this seems a change too far. The North Tyneside council that I was a councillor on for 15 years was always striving to achieve, always looking forward and always trying to work with its residents in the most positive strategic way, but now our Tory mayor and her cabinet are bowing to the pressures from the coalition Government, taking the easiest way out of managing the huge Government cuts and throwing North Tyneside on the mercy of full market forces.