Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Robin Walker and Daniel Kawczynski

Wednesday 30th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

5. What assessment he has made of the benefits to Northern Ireland of being part of the UK.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr Robin Walker)]

As part of the world’s sixth largest economy, Northern Ireland benefits from sharing resources to fund public spending on defence, education and health, and from access to the UK’s unique international networks. It also benefits from the Government’s UK-wide policies, including recent increases in the national living wage and the personal allowance. As Conservatives and Unionists, we should always support the Union and Northern Ireland’s place within it.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

In an interview on Radio Ulster this morning, I reiterated our unwavering commitment to Ulster from the Tory Back Benches. I trust that the Minister agrees that, despite the DUP’s initial reservations about the withdrawal agreement, they will hopefully realise that it is in all our interests for it to be passed as soon as possible.

[Mr Walker]

I do agree with my hon. Friend. I think it is clear that this deal safeguards Northern Ireland’s place in the customs territory of the UK, safeguards the principle of consent, and safeguards the right of the Northern Ireland Assembly to opt out of future arrangements if it chooses. It absolutely safeguards Northern Ireland’s constitutional position as part of the United Kingdom.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Robin Walker and Daniel Kawczynski

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

T3. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline—the undersea oil and gas pipeline that Germany intends to build directly to Russia—has been condemned by the American Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, as a threat to the security of countries in central and eastern Europe. Does the Minister agree with that sentiment?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr Robin Walker)]

This is an important issue. We need to ensure that Europe continues to protect its security and diversity of supply, and that is something on which we will continue to work with colleagues at the Foreign Office and at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Robin Walker and Daniel Kawczynski

Thursday 9th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but we have seen some welcome comments from the other side in the negotiations. Following a recent meeting with the Taoiseach, President Juncker said:

“During the Brexit negotiations, the EU and Ireland must look to minimise the impact”.

Michel Barnier has also said that the EU must do its utmost to uphold the success of the Good Friday agreement. We remain fully committed to preserving and maintaining the Belfast agreement and its successors, and we will continue to work hard on that with our allies.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I welcome the strong commitment to the CTA in the White Paper. Shrewsbury has benefited for many generations from Irish citizens coming to work in our community. Will the Minister give them an assurance that their rights will be protected in UK law, much of which predates our membership of the EU?

[Mr Walker]

Absolutely. I assure my hon. Friend that we remain committed to preserving the rights of Irish citizens within the UK. Irish citizens have had special status within the UK since well before the establishment of the EU, and that is rooted in the Ireland Act 1949 and reflected in British Nationality Acts. That status provides Irish citizens in the UK with additional rights beyond those associated with common membership of the EU. The family ties and bonds of affection that unite our two countries mean that there will be always be a special relationship between us.

Funding for Local Authorities

Debate between Robin Walker and Daniel Kawczynski

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow two such eloquent speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) and for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips), touched by the very magic dust that they invoked in making their case so strongly. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing this debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.

The topic of how we fund our local authorities may sometimes seem arcane—a matter for policy wonks or political theorists—but as earlier contributions to the debate have shown, it is in fact intensely practical, with real and direct implications for services in all our constituencies. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) for making such a strong case in principle for this small amount of funding that could make a very big difference in rural areas.

In debating this subject, we touch on the very machinery of the country and the whole range of services on which our electorates depend. I do not make the case for endlessly increasing local government funding, as perhaps some Opposition Members have tended to do. My constituents are clear in the belief that local government needs to bear its share of the burden in reducing the deficit and restoring our economic credibility, which was so damaged under the previous Labour Government.

A number of colleagues have mentioned the BBC survey, which shows clearly that it is possible to deliver improved services in difficult circumstances if we work hard at it, something that both Worcester city council and Worcestershire county council have managed to do in the past few years. In recent surveys my association has been conducting across Worcester, the vast majority of my constituents believe that local councils can do more to reduce waste and improve efficiency. Even a substantial majority of those who assign themselves as Labour voters agree with that statement.

What I will make the case for is fairer funding. Each area should get its fair share and should have the best opportunity to deliver services fairly. I am not making the case for each area to pay the same council tax, but it is noticeable that in general, as many colleagues have pointed out, the very rural authorities that are getting funded less are on average paying higher levels of local taxation than urban authorities. Surely it should be a matter for local decision makers to decide what should happen with regard to council tax and to bear in mind the wishes of the people who elect them.

Worcestershire county council has done an admirable job of keeping council tax frozen for a number of years, but it is noticeable that our council tax payers bear a higher share of the burden of the cost of vital public services in our part of the world than they do in urban authorities elsewhere in the west midlands. Worcester city council has made millions of pounds of savings in the past couple of years, but it fears that further cuts will be necessary in the years ahead as a result of not getting a fair share of funding.

I want both our councils to have the best chance of keeping council tax frozen for as long as possible, but to do so we need to ensure that we are getting our fair share of funding from Westminster. I want councils such as Worcestershire to be able to continue to have no library or Sure Start centre closures because they have managed things properly, and to receive fair funding from the Government. As others have already set out, as it currently stands the local government funding formula is not fair and it disadvantages rural areas. The huge gap—on average approximately 50% between rural areas and purely urban areas—is shocking and unjustifiable.

As a member for a city seat it may seem strange that I should be concerned about this, but Worcester, like many county towns, suffers a double penalty by being an urban district in a rural county authority. The vast majority of our funding is granted on the basis of the county unit, with little or no account taken of the many specific urban problems we face. Within Worcester, there are super output areas in the top percentile of deprived wards in the country, yet the overall funding that our local authority receives reflects what might be expected for a green and leafy prosperous county. As other Members have pointed out, rural does not necessarily equate to prosperous.

Worse, and as other colleagues have pointed out, there are additional pressures on all rural authorities, with extra travel costs for almost every part of local government, smaller units covering wider areas and particular challenges for social care. Where these costs are shared among all areas of a county, it is not surprising that the urban core can sometimes miss out. I therefore strongly support a better deal for rural areas and believe it is in the interests of all my urban constituents for the challenges of rural sparsity to be better recognised in the funding system. The local government funding formula is by no means unique in disadvantaging rural areas, as other formulae in education and health do the same. Unfortunately, these effects do not exist in isolation for each individual department, but have a cumulative impact.

In other debates, I have regularly made the case for fundamental reforms to the school funding formula, and I am grateful for the support of both Liberal Democrat and Conservative colleagues. I shall continue to make the case, but as the majority of funding for schools still passes through local authorities, this is not irrelevant to today’s debate. In fact, the growth of academies and the diminution of local authorities’ role in allocating school funding has created additional pressures as lower funded local education authorities struggle to achieve the same economies of scale as they once did.

The so-called education service grant, or the withdrawal of funding from local authorities for the funding of academies, has placed an extra burden on local education authorities in the worse-funded areas, as it has been withdrawn at a national average rate while these areas tend to receive much lower than national average funding. In Worcestershire’s case, this means that we are giving £116 back to the Treasury for every academy pupil, even though the actual funding that it would have spent in maintained schools was £101. Now is not the time for me to fulminate against the outrageous £1,100 per pupil funding gap between pupils in Worcestershire and in neighbouring Birmingham.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the extraordinary role he has played in this Parliament in setting out the all-party caucus for campaigning on changing the funding mechanism. This change is the No. 1 pledge I have given to my constituents. For the record, I would like to thank my hon. Friend, and I am sure that other hon. Friends would want to do so, too.

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend is extremely generous. I believe this campaign has strong support across the Back Benches. It is an issue that we can take forward; we must see real progress made on it. I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s comment, but it is, of course, a team effort in which many others have played their part.

In Worcestershire as in many other counties, the education department shares staff and resources with the broader children’s services area, so wherever education funding is under pressure, it places additional pressure on other aspects of children’s services, including looked-after children and safeguarding—issues raised by a number of Opposition Members. As a long-standing supporter of the f40 campaign and having met Ministers many times to discuss it, I know that reform of the school funding formula is on the way and I have every confidence that we will eventually get a fairer deal, but we need to learn the lessons of what seems to have gone wrong with local government funding and not repeat the same mistakes.

It appears that in this case the Government set out to correct some of the imbalance in funding for rural local authorities, but then introduced a damping mechanism that outweighed the impact of the change—effectively, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said, putting the whole thing into the deep freeze rather than simply damping it. In effect, a funding reform designed to move things in a fairer direction has been so watered down as to make the problem worse. That cannot be allowed to happen when it comes to school funding, and it should not be allowed to happen to the wider CLG funding for local authorities.