Education Funding in London
Debate between Robert Neill and Graham Stuart(9 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Robert Neill
The hon. Lady is almost an hon. Friend when West Ham are playing on Saturdays, and we hope for a good end to the season. She is right, and that brings me to the second point about funding. First, some outer-London boroughs are no better funded than shire counties anyway, yet in London there are much greater costs than in the rest of the country; and secondly, there is an artificial distinction in how funding in London is split up between inner and outer London. If justice is to be done in a formula, we need to move away from that distinction, which is purely historical. It goes back to the creation of the Greater London Council in 1963, when the then Inner London Education Authority was in fact part of the old London County Council, which had been a county education authority, while the outer-London boroughs had been educational authorities in their own right, either as parts of counties or as county boroughs. The historical anomaly that the hon. Lady mentions is the fact that her local authority is an amalgamation of two county boroughs that are part of the east end but were not in a county of London, so are treated as being in outer London, whereas Wandsworth, for example, which, in many respects, is much more prosperous, is an inner-London borough. That is a wholly illogical and unsustainable distinction that we need to break down because it distorts the arrangements.
Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
My hon. Friend is right. The funding system we have today, handed over from the previous Labour Government, is broken in London and in urban and rural areas alike, and needs to be fixed. On additional costs in London, no proposal that I have seen from anyone, including F40, suggests anything other than that London would continue to have significantly more money per head than other areas.
Robert Neill
I am grateful for that point, and I accept it. Provided that we get that built in, this need not be an argument, but rather a question of making sure that any formula reflects the diversity of needs that exists within London.
Local Government Finance (England)
Debate between Robert Neill and Graham Stuart(9 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Robert Neill
Yes, of course. That is precisely why the Government set up the local enterprise partnerships, and why under the previous regime we set up the arrangements for top-ups and tariffs, which I hope we can simplify in future.
The simplistic idea that we cannot be, to some degree, masters of our own destiny is wrong. In particular, what seems to me utterly wrong is that a local authority such as Bromley, which has historically had the lowest unit costs per head in London, was treated on a formulaic basis in exactly the same way as local authorities that had never bothered to keep their unit costs down and which were never, therefore, driven by efficiency in the same way as we were. Once, when I commented that there was no reward for efficiency in the formula, I was told by a civil servant, “Well, Minister, surely efficiency is its own reward.” He did not grasp the concept. I am glad to say now that Ministers and officials in the Department for Communities and Local Government do grasp the concept, which should be fundamental to the way we go forward.
I welcome what has been done for Bromley, but more importantly, I ask the Secretary of State to ensure that we take forward those basic principles to the next degree so that when we get to the calculation of the needs element, I hope we will remember that there are more than simply the old-fashioned demographic trends in what constitutes needs. As has been observed, the way that needs were calculated in the past, for example, took a simplistic weighting of density as equating with deprivation. That was not the case at all. The way that both inner London and outer London have changed demonstrates that clearly.
Robert Neill
I had better not because I need to save time.
Very often, the greatest driver of adult social care is not purely deprivation; it is age profile, as much as anything else. We need to build that sort of thing into the equation. We also need to make sure that where local authorities—