Local Government Finance

Robert Neill Excerpts

Thursday 17th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Greg Clark]

In the spirit of Christmas, I will be charitable to the hon. Gentleman, who understandably wrote his response before hearing the statement. Far from its being a tactical settlement—that is how he put it—there could be nothing more strategic than a settlement that, for the first time ever, gives what local council leaders have long called for: the certainty of a four-year funding settlement, previously denied them, which gives them the chance to manage their affairs in exactly the way they want.

As the hon. Gentleman might have expected from our previous exchanges, during the past few months I have spent a lot of time with local government leaders, listening to them talk about the most important pressures on them and the most important concerns that they would like to see reflected. They communicated very clearly that funding adult social care was the major priority for all kinds of councils, and in this settlement we deliver the extra resources that we promised. The distribution among the authorities reflects that—something I would have thought he would give us credit for.

On the overall settlement, few authorities would even a few months ago have expected the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to be able to announce, in effect, a flat cash settlement for local government for the whole of the spending review period.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned reserves. The fact is that local council reserves have increased over the past five years from £13 billion to more than £22.5 billion—a 71% increase. We do not assume in the settlement that local councils will make use of them, but they have the opportunity to do so because of the four-year settlement we have granted them.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the head of the LGA. I have met all the leading groups in the LGA, including his Labour colleagues. Because we are the biggest party in local government the hon. Gentleman suggests that the LGA is Conservative-controlled, but I have met local government leaders of all sorts. Lord Porter regards our discussions as fruitful and thinks that this is a fair financial settlement for all types of council and addresses the concerns they have put to me during the past few years.

Let me just refer to the expectations and the advice we received from those on the Labour Front Bench. When we had the financial statement last year, the previous shadow Secretary of State said that what councils needed was help with longer-term funding settlements so they could plan to protect services, and more devolution of power so they could work with other public services locally to get the most out of every pound of public funding, and that nowhere was that needed more than in social care. That is exactly what we deliver in this spending review settlement: prioritising social care, exactly what local government asked for; multi-year settlements, for which local government campaigned for many years; and the devolution of power to councils through the localisation of income, with councils responsible to electors and not to Whitehall.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

May I, too, wish you, Mr Speaker, and other Members a happy Christmas? I wish I could wish a happy Christmas to those on the Opposition Front Bench, but given that they look as flat as a soufflé that has gone off, we need not bother.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on delivering what is, frankly, the most imaginative local government settlement I have heard in my time in the House, including those that I had to deliver myself. He has listened to local government. I particularly welcome the reflection he has made on the importance, stressed by the London Borough of Bromley and others, of the pressures on adult social care. Will he ensure that the same can-do attitude, which my local authority and all the people he talked to in the LGA have, is reflected in the health sector? Where we have co-terminosity with clinical commissioning groups, we really need the drive of local government, and the accountability of local government, to take those partnerships forward.

[Greg Clark]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and characteristically self-effacing. During his time as a Minister in the Department, he made an enormous contribution to reforming and driving forward decentralisation.

I can confirm that part of the point of the money we have secured for the better care fund is that local authorities and the NHS work closely together, and to recognise that our elderly people, whether they are cared for in hospital, care homes or at home, are our joint responsibility. This provides the opportunity for councils to work together in the interests of our growing elderly population.