Simon Hoare
Main Page: Simon Hoare (Conservative - North Dorset)Local Government Finance (England)
Simon Hoare Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Greg Clark
It is very straightforward. The amount of transitional relief is in proportion to the reduction in revenue support grant, and so Staffordshire had less than Surrey. That is purely mathematical. I should have thought that the addition of nearly £3 million to the council’s budget would have been welcomed by council tax payers. In fact, I know that it has been.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
As my right hon. Friend knows, I welcome the statement wholeheartedly. May I take him back to what he has said about certainty? That is welcome, from a district and county council perspective. Will he give further consideration over the coming weeks to providing certainty to town councils that they will be exempt from having their precept capped? They are trying to work in greater concert with district councils, and that parallel certainty will help them to forge such deals.
Greg Clark
There is a lively debate as to whether the bigger town and parish councils should be part of the capping regime. I have resisted drawing them into that, but I look to parish and town councils to exercise economy, recognising that the services that they provide are much valued but that they are paid for by council tax payers. If those councils continue to operate in an economical way, they may not give rise to the question on which my hon. Friend seeks certainty.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne). I concur with him and share his thanks to councillors and council officers, of all politics and none, for the work that they do, day in, day out, on behalf of their communities across the country.
To listen to Opposition Members, one would have thought that the settlements for their areas had been stripped away in order to adjust ours. Had that been the case, I would have shared their anger, but it is not the case. No draft settlement that was announced in December has been driven downwards. The Department and the Treasury, to whom thanks must be due, have found additional money. I find myself asking this question, because I am not convinced by the synthetic froth of anger that we are hearing from Opposition Members. Where were they—with the honourable exception of the shadow Minister and the hon. Member for Workington (Sue Hayman)—for the debate on the local government settlement just a few weeks ago? They were not here. They thought that they had got away scot-free, and that our areas were getting the clobbering. They have suddenly woken up and taken an interest in this situation.
Graham Stuart
My hon. Friend is right that it is a synthetic froth. Let us take Tameside and Trafford. In the original settlement, Trafford was facing a 28% reduction in Government-funded spending power, against 19% in Tameside. Surrey was facing a 54% cut—I would never normally speak up for Surrey—so it is no wonder that it got some transitional relief.
Simon Hoare
My hon. Friend is right. Frankly, the Opposition party has been rumbled on this. Let us not kid ourselves, this remains, even after the welcome announcement made by the Minister on Monday, a tough settlement. It leaves an unfair and unsustainable gap between funding for rural and urban areas. That continues. It has just been made a little less tough. There is no golden goose being given to Tory local government.
Liam Byrne
I hope that the hon. Gentleman will take back the point about synthetic rage. If other hon. Members had a hospital such as the one in my constituency, which is £54 million in deficit, and where delayed discharges are up 1,000% in a year because of public funding cuts, they would have a responsibility to stand up and say, “Think carefully about how you distribute money.” If they are representing a city such as Birmingham where there is another £92 million to come out of social care on top of the crisis that is already there, then, collectively as a country, we have a problem. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will take back his comment and recognise that there are genuine questions about the distribution mechanisms being put forward by the Secretary of State.
Simon Hoare
If Birmingham City Council is funding its local hospital, it might explain some of its problems. That is not a responsibility of the city council. I do not know how the right hon. Gentleman has the brass neck to stand and ask Government Members to retract comments when the note he left in the Treasury continues to hang like an albatross around his and his party’s neck.
Simon Hoare
No. Of the right hon. Gentleman, I am never frit. Of course I will give way.
Liam Byrne
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is being courteous and collegiate in giving way. He will also remember that I left a Budget that was going to halve the deficit over the course of the Parliament, which his Chancellor has still failed to achieve.
Simon Hoare
The right hon. Gentleman has obviously been to Specsavers—he has the rose-tinted glasses and he is looking through a completely different Labour history.
Mr Speaker
Order. There is an unseemly tenor now to the debate. I urge the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) to return to the path of virtue, which he ordinarily occupies, in terms of the conduct of debate. I remind the House that we are discussing not budgets, but Local Government Finance (England).
Simon Hoare
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I take that Lenten reprimand in the way that it was intended.
The Labour Opposition are judging this Government by their standards. The formula that they put in place when they were in government was patently skewed. It was gerrymandering on a massive scale. That is why, in my closing remarks, I turn to the future. The announcement that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made on Monday makes a tough settlement for local government across the piece just a little less tough. It provides an opportunity and a breathing space, particularly for counties such as Dorset, which was going to have revenue support grant for only two years—Dorset County Council, that is—rather than for four. That is where the transitional relief has had to kick in, and the rural services delivery grant has also come in to help. But that help is temporary, so I will be pressing, as I am sure will some of my hon. Friends—no doubt Opposition Members will do so too—for an efficient and speedy review and formulation of the new methodologies to be deployed in calculating what our local authorities need. I think the Ministers get that point.
In broad terms, the motions that we are debating are to be supported. There is additional help for my rural areas, which I welcome. The Secretary of State listened to my call for the £5 de minimis and has put that in. Something similar applies to the localisation of planning fees. In closing, I repeat my call in an earlier intervention for town councils to work fully in concert with district councils. They should be exempt from having their precepts capped. That will allow them to forge a deeper relationship with senior tiers of local government, instead of the year-on-year question of whether they would be capped or not. I welcome the settlement and I will join the Government in the Lobby tonight to support it. Rural communities throughout the country, which have suffered for too long under a faulty Labour manifesto, are now getting—