Local Government Funding
Debate between Simon Hughes and Siobhain McDonagh
Simon Hughes
I remember—my right hon. Friend alluded to this fact—that the situation in Northumberland, which went through an enforced change in its local authority nature, boundaries and so on, was more difficult. Others are in difficult situations, too.
The LGA’s third point concerns accounting for what it calls “missing grants”. There is uncertainty about more than £1.1 billion of specific grants on which councils rely and where the Government have yet to announce future funding levels. I do not know whether the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), can tell us when he winds up whether those announcements can be made at the same time. The sooner they can be made the better.
The fourth point concerns fees and charges that are set centrally, such as licensing fees, which have often been shown to be inadequate in covering the full cost of the related services and I ask the Government to deal with that across Government. There are many sub-issues with fees and charges. I hope, for example, we stop the nonsense of having differential fees for burials depending on which side of a boundary one lives—[Interruption.] This is a serious point. People who happen to have moved across a boundary, having lived all their life in one authority, find they have to pay, say, 10 times as much to have their late husband or wife buried. Those things are offensive nonsense and we need to deal with them.
The last point is that we need fair grant distribution. That is where I make the strongest plea, alongside the right hon. Member for Don Valley. We must ensure that all the funds that have come from Government to local government this year are the starting point for the calculation for the next year. I have been reassured that things are moving in that direction and I want them to move completely in that direction over the next few days.
London Councils makes similar points. Southwark, like Lewisham, is a borough that has had the protection of a floor and cap, as many authorities have had to. Southwark, like London Councils, argues that funding floors should be set at the highest possible level to prevent cuts falling disproportionately on the local authorities with the highest need. That is important. Those points have been made, by and large but not exclusively, by authorities that are not Conservative-run, but authorities run by the Tories are in that boat, too, as well as authorities where there is a joint administration.
Let me make a final couple of points. Also included should be any other local authority funding that has been cut, if for understandable reasons. For example, in Southwark there was the Aylesbury private finance initiative for our largest estate, which was due to be rebuilt. Because that work had not started, the Government have said that they cannot advance the money. I understand that argument, but it needs to be taken into account as part of the picture. I make a specific plea on that point.
I am conscious that the Government will go down the road of returning business rate control to local government. That is a good thing. I am very conscious that in the localism Bill, which I think is coming into the public domain this week, the Government will give much more discretion to local government on how it raises and spends its money. That is a very good thing. I have always argued that the Department that looks after local government should stand up to the Treasury so that local councils can have the power of general competence, including total general financial competence. For example, they can then borrow against their asset base—their housing stock in the case of Southwark—without having to go to the Government cap in hand to get permission. The Treasury’s hand has been unnecessarily authoritative. I understand why, but in any other parts of the world local council spend does not count in the same way and in the same accountancy column towards public sector borrowing requirement totals.
I have a couple of messages to give local councils through the Government. Again, I shall reflect some things that have already been said. Councils must be careful not to pick on the voluntary sector when times are hard for them. It is easy to do that. It is easy suddenly to decide to take all or the bulk of the money away from organisations that are not in-house. Sometimes, councils must reduce their own management and costs. That might be a more effective way of dealing with reductions than taking money away from the voluntary sector, where local authority funding contributes towards a larger whole. I hope that there will not be any such abuse of the relationship. Voluntary sector organisations are often valuable partners and they need to be given as much support and encouragement as possible.
Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)
I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but does he not think that that is the basis of the debate? If the cuts are early and quick—if they have to be decided in three months—people will go for the easy options rather than the restructuring, because the restructuring will take longer to come into effect. Cutting a voluntary sector budget is almost immediate.
Simon Hughes
I will not dissent from that. I am trying to act in a spirit of consensus and I hope that we will be careful. To put it bluntly, there are both good and poor voluntary sector organisations and although I am not saying that they should not have their grants checked and revisited regularly, the good ones need protection. There is sometimes scope for rationalisation in the voluntary sector. In Southwark, the three pensioners’ organisations are becoming one. That should have happened a long time ago—I argued for it—and it will make them a stronger body. I also make a plea that non-statutory youth services should be particularly protected. Colleagues on both sides of the House have argued for that.
Local government must get the message that it should not be paying anybody more than the Prime Minister. It is very simple. Salaries have been ridiculous and unjustified. It has been everybody, and it is not the fault of a council of any particular colour. They have been following each other into this competitive game. To put it bluntly, nobody in the public sector needs to earn more than about £150,000 a year. I am sorry, but I have a really hard-line view about this. We need to start to scale down the ridiculous salaries. If the public sector behaved properly, perhaps we would have some morality in going to the private sector to say that it should not pay such ridiculous salaries either.
Times might be hard, but I ask local government please not to sell off the family silver, which it might live to regret. I am having a local spat with my local council leader because Southwark council has decided that it wants to sell off the three historic metropolitan borough town halls. That is unnecessary. The buildings could be reconfigured and kept in use and they would be far better places and venues that would be far more valuable than the alternatives that have been mentioned.
I have followed the example of the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) in being positive about trying to find a way of doing things much better in the future. We need common agreement on how to decide the formula. I hope that we will minimise redundancies in all cases, because nobody wants any more redundancies than there should be. I hope that when we get the settlement—probably next week—there will be the maximum collaboration between the major parties to try to ensure that where there is still unfairness, we seek to persuade the Government to make adjustments between the provisional settlement and the final settlement so that the latter is better. This will not be an easy time for local government—no one is pretending that—but I hope that today’s debate will mitigate that and that we can all encourage Ministers in the Department to ensure that they win as far as possible every remaining battle they have to fight with the Treasury.