Local Government Funding

Mike Freer Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[James Morris]

Over the past 13 years, as I said, we have had centralised policy dictated from Whitehall. At a difficult time for local government, it is even more important that we invert that pyramid and have a bottom-up decision-making process in which local government can take more control of its decision making.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that top-down policies cost more than bottom-up ones? Under the previous Government, local authorities had more than 1,000 targets to report on, which cost my local authority £3 million a year.