Draft Dorset (Structural Changes) (Modification Of The Local Government And Public Involvement In Health Act 2007) Regulations 2018 Draft Bournemouth, Dorset And Poole (Structural Changes) Order 2018

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Conor Burns

Wednesday 16th May 2018 General Committees

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I will make two points. First, I will elaborate on the point that we exchanged views about in my intervention. I rather admire the persistence of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, who has fought a long-running and passionate campaign, and stirred up a great deal of passion in Christchurch. I recognise that there are concerns. Were it possible to have produced a situation in which Christchurch went, so to speak, UDI, I think we would all have been perfectly content with that in principle.

However, as the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton rightly said, it is the job of the Minister and Parliament to legislate in a way that provides for stable, viable and effective local government. I do not think that there is a solution in which Christchurch is on its own and can provide for its people any of those things. Therefore, the unenviable fact is that we are either all forced not to proceed in this way, or Christchurch has to be in one pile or another. It has ended up, in the judgment of the Secretary of State, as being in the pile that the councillors themselves proposed—namely, as part of the conurbation, which actually, geographically, it is.

That is an unfortunate fact, but it does not—this is my second point—in any way justify overturning a set of proposals that have come from the people of Dorset and Dorset County Council. It is not a matter of the democratic tyranny of the majority. Rather, it is a matter of the viability of local government and local government services in our county. That is the main point that I wanted to make.

I am not by disposition in favour or reorganising Governments. My view is that, on the whole, when people reorganise Ministries, a lot of people change their desks, there is a great discontinuity and very little is achieved at the end of the day. What the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton said about the 1974 reorganisation echoes with me. I remember very well in the early ’80s when I was working in Downing Street that we were still wrestling with problems that had arisen as a result of that top-down reorganisation.

For the record, I opposed the top-down reorganisation that created the unitaries in Bournemouth and Poole and left the two-tier structure in the rest of the county, because I did not think that it would end up being viable. As a matter of fact, I think history has shown that it has not. I am not a proponent of top-down reorganisation. I am not a proponent of reorganisation at all. While I am at it, I think the biggest mistake of the Government in which I served for six years was our attempted reorganisation of the national health service which, as it turned out, would have been better not reorganised. I just want to make it entirely clear that I am not a mad reorganisationist—I may be mad, but I am not a reorganisationist.

What drove me strongly and passionately to support this set of proposals was something else completely. In West Dorset, I have one of the highest proportions in the country of frail elderly people. I am not alone in that—many of my colleagues from other Dorset constituencies have very high proportions of frail elderly people, and of course there are many others in other parts of the country. The provision of support and care for those people is the single biggest determinant of the effective functioning of the national health service in my part of Dorset.

That is not atypical around the country, but the lack of support for those people, in particular the lack of domiciliary care to look after them when they come back out of hospital, is not only a source of unending misery for many of my constituents—not just those who are directly affected but their relatives—but a colossal strain on the entire national health service, including the A&E and the back of Dorchester Hospital alike. Unless we resolve that, we will move in the next few years from having a massive problem to having a massive crisis in my part of Dorset and many other places. The number of frail elderly people is increasing apace in Dorset, as it is in many parts of the country.

If Dorset County Council had large funds available to solve that problem, that would be one thing, but it does not. It is highly cash-strapped. It is partly to blame for that, because its children’s services department’s budget is, as all my hon. Friends from Dorset know, under extreme strain due to mismanagement. However, it is partly not to blame—even if it did not have that problem in its children’s services department, it would not have the resources to look after the increasing number of frail elderly people. I am sure that the pressure being put on the Government to liberate more funding will in due course produce more funding, but I am equally sure that that will still be insufficient to deal with the matter, just as the increase in the precept was insufficient.

This is a real-life crisis for very many real individuals. It is not a game about local government. It is not to do with sentiment about where people happen to think they are part of. It is about something very much deeper: the life condition—the wellbeing—of frail elderly people in my constituency and of other people who are queueing up to try to be treated by a hospital that is under undue pressure because it has to deal with the consequences of the insufficient care of those people. There will be no realistic or feasible cure for that under any administration in the next five, 10 or 15 years except to achieve massive efficiencies.

The efficiencies that will be engendered by this reorganisation are partly administrative. The Minister referred to them. We believe that rather more than £100 million can be saved over a number of years. There is some precedent for that. We know what happened when our fire service was amalgamated with Wiltshire’s, the same thing is happening with our police service, which is being amalgamated with Cornwall’s and Devon’s, and we have already seen in my area and those of some of my hon. Friends the power of the amalgamation of the back offices of Weymouth and Portland, North Dorset and West Dorset Councils. We are now broadly financially solvent, exclusively because of that amalgamation of effort. We know this can be done, and it is very important.

[Conor Burns]

The situation that my right hon. Friend is powerfully explaining is also the situation in the conurbation—in both Bournemouth and Poole. There are enormous pressures on adult social care. Given the demographics in both the conurbation and the rural part of the county, those pressures will increase over time. He mentioned the delivery of those services to his constituents by Dorset County Council. It may be worth pointing out that that authority also delivers those services to the other districts in Dorset, including Christchurch.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

That is absolutely true. The sad irony is that what I am saying is as important for the citizens of Christchurch as for the rest of us. I am sure that what my hon. Friend says about the need for accommodation is absolutely right. Bournemouth and Poole have been in the lead on the number of elderly people migrating to those parts for many decades, long before he came to occupy his distinguished position. His predecessor in that seat—I am long in the tooth, so I remember him well, as you will, Sir Henry—complained about the large number of frail, elderly people who had to be supported and the lack of money to do so. That is not a sudden development—it has just got much, much worse over the years. Finally, I will say something about the other kind of efficiency to which the Minister referred.

Open Public Services White Paper

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Conor Burns

Monday 11th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Letwin]

The hon. Lady has to deal with a question between herself and her own Front Bench. She will have noticed that the right hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell) made it clear that she thought that our proposals lagged behind what the Labour Government had already tried to do. I do not think that the Labour Government would ever have accused themselves of trying to privatise everything in sight. If the Opposition are saying that the White Paper continues measures that the Labour Government were doing, they cannot possibly accuse us of trying to privatise everything in sight. Nor would it be sensible to privatise everything in that way. The White Paper makes it absolutely clear throughout that we are neutral as between public sector providers, voluntary sector providers, community groups, mutuals, co-operatives and the private sector. I hope that we will eventually get over this absurd ideological divide, because we want something very simple—namely, the best service for the person who is using it. We do not care who provides the best service; we just want to ensure that the best service is always available and that people have a choice between providers so that they can get it. I would have thought that that would join the two sides of the House.

[Conor Burns (Bournemouth West) (Con)]

Between 1997 and 2010, there was a 57% real-terms increase in public spending, but there was no such corresponding increase in productivity in the public sector. How does my right hon. Friend envisage his plans increasing productivity and delivering greater value for money, including for our taxpayers in Dorset?

[Mr Letwin]

I am delighted to help out my hon. Friend and Dorset colleague on this. What he says is absolutely true: there was a vast increase in spending on public services during the last Government. Alas, the improvements in the outcomes were not as great as the inputs. That is precisely what we are trying to tackle, and we are doing it in an age-old way, by introducing innovation and diversity of supply, as well as choice and power for the people using the services, so that there is real pressure on all providers to improve. We need continuous pressure for improvement and continuous transparency on whether the services are improving, as well as a continuous ability for people who find a service being provided better elsewhere to choose the best service. Those are the methods that always improve quality.