Local Government and Social Care Funding

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The treatment of the great city of Birmingham has been appalling. The people of Birmingham deserve the resources they need to have decent public services. He has been a feisty champion of the needs of the people of his constituency and that great city and will continue to make that case.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

rose—

[Andrew Gwynne]

I will give way to another great Birmingham MP.

[Steve McCabe]

If ever there has been a city subject to close Government scrutiny it is Birmingham. For five years, it has been subject to the Government’s improvement panel, so the Secretary of State knows the financial situation in Birmingham inside out. How does he justify forcing up the council tax in a city where 42% of the children are in poverty?

[Andrew Gwynne]

Absolutely. I will leave it to the Secretary of State to answer that, because I think that Birmingham has been dealt a bad set of cards by this Government.

It is not just Birmingham. Researchers from Cambridge University have exposed the uneven impact of the Government’s funding of local government. They have found that since 2010 changes in local authority spending power have ranged from a drop of 46% to a fall of a mere 1.6%. When we compare these reductions to the indices of deprivation, we see that more deprived areas have been forced to undergo bigger cuts in service spending, with smaller spending cuts in the least deprived areas. Nine of the 10 most deprived councils have seen cuts three times the national average.

These findings are backed by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which also suggests that since 2016 the most well-off councils have actually seen an increase of 2.8% to their spending power, while the poorest areas have seen very little growth, despite having faced the largest pressures on their services.