Robert Neill
Main Page: Robert Neill (Conservative - Bromley and Chislehurst)(11 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Hilary Benn
The hon. Gentleman clearly has not been listening to what I have said since taking up this post. I have said in this Chamber before that, were a Labour Government now in office, of course there would be cuts to local government, but they would not go as far or as fast as the ones the Government are making and they would not, as I will point out, be allocated to local authorities in such a fundamentally unfair way.
The truth is that the Secretary of State continues to lose in his battles with the Treasury, assuming, of course, that he tried to fight for local government in the first place. The truth, even if Ministers refuse to admit it, is that local councils are now facing—this is why the word “modest” causes such anger—the largest cuts in their funding in the political lifetime of every single Member sitting in the Chamber.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman stand by the £52 billion of cuts for 2014-15 that appeared in his Government’s Treasury pre-Budget report in 2009? If not, what cuts would he make, and where?
Hilary Benn
I do indeed stand by the statement my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling), when Chancellor of the Exchequer, placed before the House and the country. I remind the hon. Gentleman that when he and his colleagues came into government the economy was growing—[Interruption.] It was. There is no good shouting about it. The signal achievement of the Chancellor over the past three years has been to put the British economy flat on its back, which is why we are in such difficulty.
The consequences of what is going on are these: first, local government is having to deal with cuts that are unfairly distributed; secondly, residents are having to come face to face with the consequences of those cuts; and, thirdly, the changes to council tax benefit are being made even worse by the effects of the overall cuts to council budgets. I want to address each of those in turn.
The Local Government Association says that
“funding for local government is projected to fall by 3.9% in 2013-14 and a further 8.5% in 2014-15. This means that the grant to local government will fall by 33% in real terms over the current spending review period.”
It is not possible, by any measure, to call that scale of reduction modest. The LGA goes on to say:
“Modelling work from the local government association shows a funding gap of £16.5 billion by 2019-20, if reductions in support continue on current trends.”
It is not modest; it is massive, and it is about time that Ministers started to recognise the truth of what they are doing.
If denial was not bad enough, the language that Ministers have used about those who are serving in local government has been, frankly, extraordinary and offensive. According to The Daily Telegraph, the Conservative council leaders of Derbyshire, Essex, Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Kent and East and West Sussex wrote to the Prime Minister last month to complain about the Ministers on the Government Front Bench. They referred to “patronising language” and said that the nature and tone of constant criticisms of councillors’ work by Conservative Ministers is “most worrying”. They also highlighted
“ill-informed…criticism and sometimes highly inaccurate personal attacks.”
They—remember that these are Tory council leaders—concluded by saying:
“We believe it is essential to bring to your attention our concerns regarding some government policy affecting local government, the rhetoric that accompanies it and the effect it is having on our people.”
It is no good Ministers asking local government to take on an enormous challenge—which it is doing—if at the same time the people they expect to step up and respond are criticised, patronised and belittled.
Perhaps the Minister will explain why allowing councillors to save for a pension has, in his words,
“a corrosive influence on…independent thought”—[Official Report, 19 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 105WS.]
Let us stop and think about that statement. If being able to save for a pension has a corrosive influence on independent thought, what hope is there for all of us in this House? That is an insult to councillors and it shows a fundamental lack of respect for people who are working really hard to cope in difficult circumstances.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
The speech made by the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) reminded me of a certain type of popular film. It was technically proficient, but it really ought to have been transmitted in black and white, because it was so full of dated thinking. It was reminiscent of those films that we sometimes see at the British Film Institute or of the re-runs of 1970s sitcoms that we see on television at about 1 o’clock in the morning. That is a shame, because, in all the huff and puff, the seriousness and importance of the local government settlement was rather missed. That became apparent during the interventions on the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), whom I congratulate on presenting the settlement admirably. There was a degree of collective denial that I have not seen since I used to visit clients in Wandsworth prison.
The reality is that Labour has never been able to understand that it was committed to making significant cuts in public spending, which would have kicked in in 2014-15, and that because local government accounts for some 25% of public expenditure, it was inevitable that those reductions would have to take place in local government. It is a bit rich of the Opposition to say that we have behaved in an unfair fashion, when we have essentially continued with their formula system—despite my having some thoughts to the contrary when I was the Minister responsible—with an emphasis on the equation of needs and resources.
We have updated their system to give more accurate population figures and to be fair to those in rural areas to the degree that a case could be made. The updating of population figures tends to work to the benefit of London and other metropolitan areas with more transient populations, and no doubt for that reason the helpful Library research paper states:
“Excluding London—”
we all know London has particular circumstances—
“northern regions will receive larger start-up funding assessments—”
that is, in effect, the successor to formula grant—
“than their counterparts. The South East, South West and Eastern regions will receive the lowest levels.”
On spending power the paper states:
“Excluding London, northern regions and the West Midlands will have larger spending power per dwelling than their counterparts.”
That reflects the fact that the Government accept that there are greater pressures in some parts of the country—I always accepted that as a Minister, just as my hon. Friends on the Front Bench do now, and it must be recognised. That is exactly what the Government have done and to pretend otherwise is, if hon. Members will forgive me, disingenuous in the extreme.
Steve Rotheram
Following the cuts to Liverpool, is the film the hon. Gentleman identifies, “A Tale of Two Cities”?
Robert Neill
That is a good try but the hon. Gentleman must realise that we have a persistent inheritance of underperformance by Labour Governments, and there is an unwillingness—demonstrated by his intervention and many others—to move on with the serious issues about how we deliver the best services for local authorities.
For example, it was significant that the right hon. Member for Leeds Central made no mention of the fact that we have created other funding streams for local government through the new homes bonus. That scheme accounts for the increase in receipts in some councils. They are meeting the housing deficit that Labour left behind and we are rewarding them—of course, Opposition Members have no concept that a local authority should actually be rewarded for efficiency and enterprise. That is alien to their culture, hence the criticism. No mention was made of the fact that the localisation of business rates is the first significant move of devolution in fiscal terms—the Treasury is giving up and forgoing revenue in favour of local authorities—since the second world war. I hope that in due course as the economy grows, the local share of that business rate will increase from its current level of 50%. That is 50% more than was available under local discretion when the rates were effectively nationalised and redistributed, usually under an extremely opaque formula of which the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) was one of the advocates.
Mr Kevan Jones
I am surprised that the Prime Minister sacked the hon. Gentleman; he obviously hopes he is in line for some honour or future preferment. He mentioned the new homes bonus, but councils that will benefit most from that are those in areas of housing growth. That does not include parts of the north-east and elsewhere where, because of the Government’s incompetence, the housing market is not only flatlining but declining.
Robert Neill
I have a lot of time for the hon. Gentleman but he does not do himself justice by that intervention. He is in no position to criticise given that we inherited the lowest ever level of housing starts in peacetime thanks to his Government. I do not think that works. Given the area he represents, I am tempted to suggest that he might like to take on board a further note from the helpful Library research paper on assessments of funding:
“For shire districts and single tier authorities controlled by the main political parties, average start-up funding assessments and spending power per dwelling will be lower amongst Conservative controlled authorities and higher amongst Labour controlled authorities.”
If that is not recognising the reality and fairness, what is? Of course, a similar comparison could not be made with county councils because there were no Labour county councils to compare the figures with.
Robert Neill
Durham is in the unitaries. I was glad to hear recognition of local authorities as among the most efficient parts of the public sector. That may have something to do with the political control of the majority of local authorities. In reality, this settlement is not just about the important level of funding for this year and next year, but about setting a course that rewards local authorities that think outside the box.
An important point to make about that is that it is slightly depressing to hear, in a number of interventions from Opposition Members, the mantra, “We are worried about the cliff edge; we need to rebuild the base.” With respect—I say this from my experience, for what it is worth, in local government and from my period as a Minister—that is a profoundly misguided approach to adopt. The world of public service delivery is changing. Simply rebuilding the base on its old basis is not the answer. The base will never be as it was before, because the way we do things will never be as it was before. We are seeking to give local authorities the flexibility in their funding arrangements to find new ways of using their budgets, not simply saying, “Let’s get back to the old levels of money and the old way of doing things.” That was the mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. On the contrary, through the initiatives announced by my hon. Friend the Minister to reward efficiency much more—I hope we can look at what more we can do in future—we are giving local authorities an incentive to work together. It is not about how much local authorities get; it is about how they use it.
To give one example, I have mentioned in the past the London borough of Tower Hamlets—that well known local authority—which, among other things, manages to spend £1.2 million on eastend life, its information newspaper, which contains restaurant reviews, the football scores and other things that are entirely germane to local council services in its area. No doubt Opposition Members will say, “Oh, what’s £1.2 million here or there?”—that is not the sort of money they are interested in—but let us contrast that with my borough of Bromley, which has never run a municipal newspaper in its life, but which, when it needs to, simply takes out an advertising wraparound with the free sheet. I can tell hon. Members that Bromley has been done: it is appointing a shared director of public health, because part of the important ongoing work on public health funding—to which the right hon. Member for Leeds Central referred—is aligning it more closely with social services and adult social care funding. That is what Bromley is doing: it is working with a Labour council next door on joint procurement of IT services. Bromley is also looking at joint working on its legal and library services.
Those are the things that sensible councils across the country are and should be doing. To sneer at that and say, “Oh, this is just ‘50 ways to insult people’” indicates a mentality that I have not seen in public life since King Charles X of France was evicted from the Tuileries by the mob in the warm-up for “Les Misérables”. At the end of the day, they have not moved on and they have lost—