Food Waste

Debate between Rory Stewart and Angela Smith

Thursday 11th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Angela Smith]

I am listening with great interest to the Minister. He is coming remarkably close to endorsing Food 2030. May I ask once again, what is the Government’s strategic plan on food and farming, and when will we hear more detail about it?

[Rory Stewart]

The answer is that I am going to evade that question. We do not yet have that plan, and I am not yet in a position to give the hon. Lady a deadline on it, but I promise her that we are thinking hard about the subject. I am happy to sit down with her and talk about where we have got to with that thought and take on any suggestions that she has.

Food to the value of £108 billion and the one in eight jobs connected to food and farming in the UK are connected to what every hon. Member in this Chamber deeply believes in, whether it be poverty alleviation, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys; the legislative programmes advocated by the hon. Member for Bristol East; the important arguments on the environment and resource depletion advanced by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion; or the civil society examples from Zero Waste Scotland produced by the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West.[Official Report, 15 June 2015, Vol. 597, c. 1-MC.]

I want to end with a huge invitation. I do not see why this need be a party political issue. There is obviously an enormous amount of knowledge in this room and I should be delighted to sit down with anybody who has good ideas about what we could do to tackle something that matters deeply to British citizens, the food industry and the packaging industry, and which matters deeply in respect of the resources on which our biosphere depends.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered tackling food waste.

Funding for Local Authorities

Debate between Rory Stewart and Angela Smith

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Angela Smith]

My hon. Friend hits on a key point. That is why I mentioned the old pit villages in my constituency which even now carry the deep scars that were left behind, not just on the landscape but on the lives of the people who were, in effect, abandoned following the wave of closures in the late 1980s and early ’90s. People underestimate how difficult it is for an authority such as Barnsley to rebuild an economy that was built almost entirely in villages. It is not easy to rebuild that type of economic infrastructure once it has disappeared.

Local government provides many of the public goods that our constituents consume, whether they live in rural, suburban or urban areas. These include emptying bins, educating our children and picking up the pieces of shattered lives when things go wrong. Local government is the backbone of our civil society. There is no doubt, however, that it is approaching a crisis that is not of its own making, but that has been made in the offices of No. 10 and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

We have all seen the infamous graph of doom, which shows that councils will eventually run out of resources to run anything except the most basic of services. For my two councils that catastrophe will occur in 2018, when all discretionary spending will disappear and major cuts will have to be made to adult social care and other core functions. Councils up and down the country are being asked to do more and more, but with less and less resource.

In addition, it is clear that this Government decided early on to contract out many of their austerity measures for delivery to local councils across the country. The average cut to departmental budgets has been about 7% in real terms according to the special interest group of municipal authorities, but local authorities have seen their share of funding fall by 27% over the same period, with only benefits and welfare being cut more, which, of course, has in itself had a direct impact on demand for local authorities.

To compound matters for the core cities, while the average loss of Government support in England will be £240 per household in the years 2013-14 and 2015-16, the core cities will see a reduction of £352 per household. On the issue of rural and urban areas, metropolitan areas are bearing a large part of the local government reductions—much more than has been acknowledged so far in this debate—which is not at all helpful in terms of delivering for the rural areas in those metropolitan boroughs. That is on top of the already unequal cuts that core city authorities have experienced since 2010, which have seen them lose a third of their grants from central Government.

If that was not bad enough, these cuts have not been the end of it for many local authorities. The hidden cuts, including those major cuts to grants, are not so obvious to many of our constituents. For example, a £400 million cut occurred when council tax support was transferred to local authorities, and the cut to the early intervention grant removed £430 million at a stroke from local authorities. These cuts are now on a scale never seen before and they are having a chilling effect on local services.

Contrary to the belief of the Secretary of State, local government has not been a place of excess. In fact, it has been recognised for many years as the most efficient branch of government, and that makes it even more likely that cuts to its funding will have to come out of the services it provides.

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Angela Smith]

No, because I have already taken up a fair amount of time due to interventions.

By the end of this financial year Sheffield will have made savings amounting to £182 million—about a third of its discretionary budget. As many will know, that is because the only part of the budget that councils can actually manipulate is relatively small. In the case of Sheffield, it is about 16% of the overall budget, meaning any savings have to be focused on that relatively small proportion of the available resource. That has had a huge impact on leisure, the arts and environmental and street scene functions. Indeed, the impact is being felt across the country, hence the campaigns springing up against library closures everywhere. In Sheffield it has led to the closing of Don Valley stadium, the removing of funding for leisure centres—the only two leisure centres in my constituency have both closed—as well as a significant reduction in library services and a move to fortnightly bin collections. The story is the same in Barnsley, with the £35 million removed from its budget leading to library and leisure centre closures and cut backs in grants to voluntary organisations and other vital services.

Our local authorities are becoming shadows of what they once were. Local people in my two boroughs are increasingly being asked to travel further to access services such as libraries and leisure centres at a time when funding for local bus services is also being cut by central Government. If this situation continues, how far will people have to travel, paying increasingly expensive bus fares, to get to the services they need?

As has been said, on 1 April the Government introduced the new business rate retention scheme, which fundamentally changed the way in which local authorities receive their resources. Although these changes to the new settlement funding assessment make it difficult to make a comparison between previous and future years, the end result for Sheffield and Barnsley seems to be the same—another round of cuts, with Barnsley having £40 million less to spend up to 2015 and Sheffield facing a further shortfall of £80 million up to 2015, rising to £106 million by 2018. To put those figures in perspective, £80 million equates to Sheffield’s current total spend on libraries, environmental heath, trading standards, refuse collection, crematoriums, street lighting, youth services and services to people with mental health issues.

The new settlement funding assessment, along with the retention of business rates, means that from now on the only way my two local authorities and many others can realistically grow their revenues is through growing the business rate income. Indeed, that is the exact intention of the Government’s thinking. That is great for Westminster, because companies are falling over themselves to locate there, but not so great for Barnsley, given the difficulties it faces. That does not mean that Barnsley does not want to compete or attract new business, or that progress has not been made, but it is hard. The borough, along with its neighbour, Sheffield, still has a long way to go. That is hardly surprising, given the deindustrialisation that it suffered in the ’80s. Even if businesses can be attracted, the work that is required to fill the economic gap left by the contraction of traditional industries is immense. To fill Sheffield’s £38 million funding gap for next year, the equivalent of two new Meadowhall retail centres would have to be built. That is a tall order to say the least.

I started my comments by saying that local government is important. It is also true that more and more people will require the services that it provides. Those who rely most on local authorities are the elderly, the young and the vulnerable. The possibility that councils will run out of money for all but the most basic of services is fast becoming a reality. As I said earlier, Sheffield will run out of money for all functions other than children’s and adults’ services, and will have to start cutting even those key functions, by 2018. Every day, I hear stories of vulnerable people being isolated more and more as councils pull out of the services that they used to provide. I fear the sort of society that we are becoming as councils stop providing the support that they have provided until now.

If the Government continue down the already well-trodden path of exporting their austerity measures to local authorities, many parts of the country will see local services cease. It is the most vulnerable, the elderly and future generations who will bear the brunt. It does not matter whether those people live in rural areas in Devon, Sheffield or Barnsley, or in metropolitan or urban areas—they will suffer.