Local Government Finance

John Bercow Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I shall try to keep my remarks brief.

The Secretary of State has set out our position in relation to debt and the public finances. We all know that we have a structural deficit of £109 billion, and we all know how much interest per day is being paid—£120 million. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) made an impassioned plea on behalf of his city and said that we had had the discussion about the deficit and we should now move on. But that is the problem: we have had the discussion about the deficit and now we are seeing the consequence of years of overspending. We cannot get away from it. I wish we could. I did not stand for election and get sent to this House to be part of the difficult decisions that we have made. All of us as politicians love to hand out lollipops, kiss babies, cut the ribbon at the fête and do the nice things, but the sad reality is that we also have to take the difficult decisions when the nation is in the most difficult position it has been in for years.

Mr Speaker, you will recall that some years ago you sat on Lambeth council when it was under Labour control. At that time, you were a powerful advocate for the Conservative party. After your period in office, I was elected when it was a hung council. You were not able to influence events dramatically in Lambeth as you were in a minority under a majority Labour administration. In a hung situation, things were much more discursive—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. May I say very gently to the hon. Gentleman that although I am sure his advertisement of my curriculum vitae is well intentioned, it is on the whole undesirable for right hon. or hon. Members to invoke the past positions or experience of the Chair in support of their own arguments? I feel sure that he is dextrous enough to advance his own argument without any assistance from me.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I meant no discourtesy, Mr Speaker.

Moving quickly to my own history, when I was elected in 1994 we had a hung council. We had a mess to sort out. All three parties worked positively together to do that and, frankly, to look at how to un-bankrupt a council that by then had £1 billion of debt. Difficult decisions were made. The emphasis was very much on ensuring better front-line services. My experience was that although we made difficult rebalancing decisions, we were able not only to protect front-line services but to improve them quite dramatically. People on the doorstep were saying that they were now getting front-line services, as opposed to excessive bureaucracy and—I regret to say in the case of Lambeth in those times—in some cases corruption, so positive changes can be made when difficult decisions are taken and things are reworked.

One thing that I particularly welcome is the council tax position. Council tax has been increased in the last decade or so—I believe that it has doubled—to the current level of £1,439. That is an awful lot of money and a massive increase. We know that, because of the deficit, it is not possible to increase local government spending on the grant settlement side of things. We also know that people have been flayed alive for over a decade, given the amount of council tax that they have been asked to pay. I therefore particularly welcome the Government’s decision to work positively with local authorities to freeze council tax. That is important to constituents such as mine who live in deprived circumstances. Many of them are elderly, and many are poor. Stopping council tax rises benefits them massively, particularly those on fixed incomes. Therefore, on the one hand, we have a set of tough decisions aimed at ensuring that we make those efficiencies, and on the other, we have managed to stop council tax rising, which is important.

I totally agree with the Secretary of State when he says that we need smarter procurement. We are doing that in Kent, with the Kent Buying Consortium. He has said that we need better asset management, too. Many people are more than aware of the position in Newham, where there is a new, flashy building that has cost an awful lot of money. We have to be much more cute about using asset management. We have the streamlining and merging of operations, and in Dover and Shepway we increasingly have shared services, so that there will be a shared chief executive and shared back office. That agenda has been embraced in Kent, which is important. It is also important to consider how best to deliver services. Suffolk county council has at times been a bit over the top with its chief officers, but it has led the way on how services can be run, with care homes operating as social enterprises. In my constituency, I am promoting the case for a care home in Deal to be transferred to a community interest company when the local authority feels unable to continue running it.

That is the right way forward. I do not think that this is a debate in which we should necessarily be partisan or throw rocks at each other, because we know the financial position. I could quote the figures showing that Labour was going to cut the budget by £5 billion—that was in Labour’s pre-Budget report—and all the rest of it, but would that help matters? No, because we know the position of the nation’s finances.