Draft Energy Performance of Buildings (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2021
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray.
The measures under consideration are not controversial, and we will support them, but this is perhaps an opportunity to express some concern about the Government’s green homes agenda more widely—
The Chair
Steve Reed
Absolutely, and in response to comments made by the Minister.
Homeowners, for example, would have had more encouragement to green their homes had the Government not cancelled the zero-carbon homes standard, which was due to come into force in 2016, only later to replace it with a future homes standard that will not come in before 2025. Every year of delay pumps millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere and families spend years more in homes that are colder and more expensive to heat. Many people have commented on the failings of the green homes grants—
Steve Reed
It is connected with the issues of concern, and the Minister was speaking about encouraging home-owners to green their homes. Sorry, I was merely making comments in response to the Minister.
Steve Reed
Absolutely.
In a report last week, the Public Accounts Committee said that the Government have “no plans” to meet climate change targets, two years after setting them in law. The UK’s stock of 27 million houses includes some of the worst insulated and least energy-efficient homes in Europe. We hope that the Government will take the example of what is proposed in this SI to move further with that agenda and to deliver a big improvement in work to hit our climate change targets by making homes in the UK warm, dry and affordable to heat.
The provisions in the draft regulations are welcome, but we need the Government to get more serious about the green transition necessary to tackle the climate crisis. The green homes agenda should be a central plank of that.
Oral Answers to Questions
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op) [V]
I offer my condolences on behalf of the Opposition to the family of Julia Clifford on their very, very sad loss.
High streets need support to help them to recover, so will the Secretary of State guarantee that the funding that all areas receive under the levelling-up fund will be at least as much as they received under their local growth deal?
Robert Jenrick
I am delighted to hear the hon. Gentleman’s and the Opposition’s new-found enthusiasm for business and supporting the wealth creators in this country. Of course, it was just over a year ago that they were supporting the overthrow of capitalism. The Leader of the Opposition’s relaunch last week was not quite the Beveridge moment that it was billed as, but we will keep on supporting small businesses on the high street. The Chancellor has done that very successfully over the course of this year in difficult circumstances, with the business rates holiday, the cut in VAT and the support for business grants. We are going to be doing more, as the hon. Gentleman said, with the £4 billion levelling-up fund, which builds on the success of the £3.6 billion towns fund. That will ensure that communities across the country—but particularly those that are furthest away from the labour market, have the highest levels of deprivation and have not seen the levels of Government investment that we would wish hitherto—get the funding that they need to move forward into the year.
Local Government Finance (England)
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
I start by echoing the Secretary of State’s praise for frontline council workers and others involved in delivering frontline public services, including volunteers. They really have done a tremendous, heroic job in supporting communities through the unprecedented circumstances of the past year.
Last November, the Chancellor of the Exchequer told councils that he would
“increase their core spending power by 4.5%.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2020; Vol. 684, c. 829.]
The Communities Secretary followed suit, telling us that English councils would see a
“4.5% real-terms cash increase in core spending power”—[Official Report, 17 December 2020; Vol. 686, c. 431.]
What they did not make quite so clear was that those funding increases were based on the assumption that council tax would go up by 5%. To be clear, in the Treasury spreadsheets, that is an assumption, not an option.
It is hard to believe, but this Conservative Government have chosen to clobber hard-working families with a council tax hike after the Government’s incompetence left the country facing the worst crisis of any major economy. Household budgets are under pressure like never before. Millions of people are fearful for their job security. Millions have seen their incomes plunge. Millions more families are using food banks or going into debt just to survive, and now, thanks to the Government, families are being forced to pay the price for Conservative failure with a council tax hike made in Downing Street.
We know that Government Members have been coached to say that councils have a choice in this, but with social care by far the biggest factor driving up councils’ costs, there is no real choice at all. Councils that refused to implement the Tory council tax hike would have to cut social care for older people in the middle of an unprecedented health crisis that is primarily affecting the same older people.
Let us not forget that because a council tax increase raises less money in poorer areas, the Government are deepening the postcode lottery for social care, instead of ensuring that every older and disabled person gets the care they need, wherever they live. The Government are not levelling the country up, in the way the Secretary of State just described. Instead, they are pulling it apart.
We know the Government recognise that there is a social care crisis, because the Prime Minister admitted it on the day he entered No. 10 Downing Street. He boasted that he had a plan to fix it, but no one has seen a dot or a comma of it ever since. All we have seen are sticking plasters while the crisis rages on and more and more older people are denied the care they need and deserve. The Government’s failure is simply increasing the pressure on our NHS when we should be doing all we can to protect it.
Last March, the Chancellor told councils that he would fund them to do “whatever it takes” to get communities through the pandemic. On the back of that promise, councils set to work correcting the Government’s failures on personal protective equipment distribution, contact tracing, shielding and much more, but the Government did not repay those costs. Instead, they left councils facing a £2.5 billion funding black hole. That is not my figure; it comes from the Conservative-led Local Government Association. If the Government had not broken their promises, there would be no need to plug the gap now with a council tax increase.
Perhaps the Government could not find £2 billion to prevent a council tax rise because they had already stuffed the money into their friends’ pockets. Despite stark warnings from the National Audit Office last November, the Government have handed out £2 billion in crony contracts to companies with close personal links to senior Conservative party politicians. More than 500 companies were fast-tracked for covid-related contracts simply because they had relationships with Conservative MPs. That made them 10 times more likely to secure contracts than other businesses that could well have done the job better.
The chairman of Clipper Logistics donated £725,000 to the Conservative party. He was rewarded with a £1.3 million contract to set up an Amazon-style PPE distribution network. Instead of the next-day delivery service that care workers were promised, they had to wait so long to receive any PPE at all that town halls had to pay to go out and find their own. Then there is Randox, which pays the Conservative right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) handsomely to act as an adviser. The Government gave Randox a contract worth half a billion pounds last year to provide covid tests, but they were so defective that 750,000 had to be recalled.
Serco, of course, is responsible for the Prime Minister’s “world-beating” test and trace system, which is so world-beating that the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies described it last year as having only a “marginal impact” on reducing the spread of the virus. It never worked properly, but it cost £22 billion. Serco’s chief executive is the brother of a former Conservative MP and his wife has donated thousands of pounds to the Conservative party. The company counts among its former senior executives the current Minister for Health. The Government handed Serco a £108 million contract for a failing system that could have been run better by directors of public health for a fraction of the cost, and then Ministers rewarded that catastrophic failure with another £57 million contract for “management services support” at testing sites. This is not the behaviour we would expect in an advanced democracy such as our great country; it is the wilful incompetence and endemic cronyism that we would expect in a tinpot dictatorship.
The Government are simply wrong to force councils to hike up council tax after their own mistakes led this country into the deepest recession of any major economy. Not only is it unfair on the families forced to pay the price of Tory failure, but it is economically illiterate, because hitting people with tax rises in the middle of a pandemic makes them tighten their belts and stop spending, when we should be rebuilding confidence to promote economic recovery.
The Conservatives’ priorities are wrong, which is why Labour will not vote for their Tory tax hikes today. They should be helping families manage hard-pressed household budgets, not stuffing billions of pounds into the pockets of Tory party donors. They should be fixing the social care crisis, not forcing hard-working people to pay more but get less as social care is cut back even harder. They should be promoting economic recovery on our high streets, not choking off spending with tax hikes at a time when families are struggling simply to make ends meet. But it is still not too late. I urge the Government to think again, scrap Rishi Sunak’s council tax bombshell—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Gentleman must refer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as the Chancellor of the Exchequer or as the right hon. Gentleman, and not refer to him by using his name.
Steve Reed
I absolutely agree. I urge the Government to think again, scrap the Chancellor’s council tax bomb- shell, stop stuffing billions of pounds into Conservative party donors’ pockets and stand by their commitment to support councils and communities to get through this crisis.
Madam Deputy Speaker
I am sorry to have stopped the hon. Gentleman in his peroration, but it is really important in these times, when things are not normal in this Chamber, that we stick to the highest standards, and I thank him for immediately putting right his phraseology. It was not a great mistake, and I am grateful for his support.
Towns Fund
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
The Government like to talk about levelling up the country, but sadly their record shows they have done the precise opposite. Since they were first elected in 2010, the Conservative Government have imposed £15 billion-worth of cuts on local authorities, and they did not share the pain equally either. The 10 poorest council areas have faced cuts 18 times bigger than the 10 richest, as the Government embedded inequality. Initially, the Conservatives’ failed ideological austerity stalled Britain’s economic recovery after the global financial crash. Last year, they left the country so woefully unprepared for the covid-19 pandemic that we are now suffering the highest death rate in Europe and the deepest recession of any major economy.
Right now, many of our towns and high streets are at breaking point. After a decade of Conservative cuts and now the recession, they are on their last legs. Councils cannot support high street businesses because the Government have left councils with a £2.5 billion funding black hole, after breaking their promise to compensate them fully for the costs of tackling covid-19.
Conservative changes to planning rules allow developers to convert shops into low-quality flats, so that they can never reopen as shops again, creating dead zones on our high streets. Now the Government plan to choke off spending on the hope of rapid economic recovery by forcing council tax rises on families already struggling to pay the bills in these unprecedented times.
The Government spent the past decade levelling the country down, stripping out jobs, assets and investments from parts of the country they chose to hold back. They have closed nearly 800 libraries, 750 youth centres, 1,300 Sure Start centres and more than 800 public toilets. That is political vandalism on our high streets, but it goes much further than that. They have deliberately pulled our country apart by deepening and entrenching inequality. Whole regions have been starved of investment, leaving them without the infrastructure, jobs or skills to attract good new employers. People should not have to leave the towns they live in to find a decent job because all that is available back home are the low-skill, low-paid, insecure jobs that are a hallmark of this Government’s economic neglect.
As my hon. Friends the Members for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock), for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) have said, opportunity should be open to everyone, wherever they live. Aspiration should not be capped because someone lives in a part of the country that the Conservatives chose to abandon. Social care should be an entitlement, not a lucky dip. Our high streets deserve a brighter future than the long stretches of graffiti-covered shutters that are the visible legacy of Conservative misrule.
As my hon. Friends the Members for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) and for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) point out, the towns fund is a wholly inadequate fix for how the lost Conservative decade has blighted our high streets. The Government stripped out £15 billion of funding, and now they expect gratitude for giving less than a quarter of that money back.
Some funding is better than no funding, and we support those areas lucky enough to get something, but what about everywhere else? The vast majority of towns and high streets are getting nothing at all, as we heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett), for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) and for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer), my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders). Instead of the open and fair process that communities want to see, the Conservatives are stitching up backroom deals that carve most towns out of the funding they so desperately need.
Steve Reed
I am sorry, there is not going to be time. How embarrassing, yet how typical of this Government that the Secretary of State and the right hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) stitch up a cosy deal to funnel public money into each other’s constituencies, taking it from towns and high streets with higher levels of deprivation. The Conservatives are pulling our country apart. Labour wants to see our country come back together again. People living in every town in the country deserve their fair share of investments.
The real yardstick of success would be if the towns fund put new opportunities on people’s doorsteps in every town and made every part of the country a good place to set up home and aspire to a better future, but that is not what we are seeing. The Public Accounts Committee says that the Government are unclear what they expect from the funding or how they will measure its success. That simply is not good enough.
Many new Conservative Members, as we have heard this afternoon, like to trumpet how towns in their constituencies were selected to benefit from funding, but they are remarkably quiet, are they not, about the much bigger sums of money the Conservative Government took away from those places in the first place. The Conservatives took £275 million away from Bishop Auckland’s local council. They took £165 million away from Blackpool. They raided £203 million from Crewe, £324 million from Penistone and Stocksbridge, and £197 million from Wakefield. The towns fund gives back only a tiny proportion of what the Conservatives have already stripped away. It is like a burglar breaking into a house in the dead of night, stripping it bare and then expecting thanks for handing back the TV set.
We will not secure the economic recovery by killing off our high streets, and we will not protect the NHS by starving older people of the social care they need. We will not rebuild our country by choking off spending with a Conservative council tax hike that is timed to hit hard-pressed family budgets just as the furlough scheme comes to an end. If the Conservatives really want to bring lasting prosperity to towns and regions that they have held back, they have to do better than the towns fund. This country needs a real plan to bring jobs and investment to every town and high street, not the short-term fixes and back-room deals cobbled together by the same Government who pushed our high streets to the brink of disaster in the first place.
Holocaust Memorial Day 2021
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
The House has made it clear today in this very important debate why future generations must know the history of the holocaust. I congratulate the very large number of Members on both sides on their extraordinarily moving contributions; there were too many, unfortunately, to refer to individually. I also congratulate the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for the quite remarkable ceremony online last night.
Like many Members across the House, I have also joined a group of students from my constituency on a visit to Auschwitz, and I thank the Holocaust Educational Trust for organising that. We walked in the shadow of the words, “Arbeit macht frei”, tracing the footsteps of millions who walked to an unspeakably brutal death. We stood on the railway tracks where the cattle wagons unloaded their human cargo and where a Nazi doctor selected those who would live and those who would die. We walked through rooms packed with the remains of human lives—shoes, human hair, children’s tiny clothes and toys. The lessons of history could not be starker, more painful or more necessary for a new generation.
I thank, too, Labour Friends of Israel for taking me to Jerusalem, where, like many other Members, I toured Yad Vashem, Israel’s remarkable museum of the shoah, which catalogues the hatred and demonisation that led humanity into the abyss. The great tragedy is, as many Members have said, that we still have not learned the lessons of the holocaust; genocides happened again in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, and against the Yazidi, Rohingya and Uyghurs. We see time and again where hatred leads humanity, and it is why all of us have a duty to call out bigotry wherever we find it.
I wish to acknowledge the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), because I share her horror at having realised after 2015 that antisemites had entered the Labour party, intent on infecting our party with their poison. As the Equality and Human Rights Commission report has shown us, our party was too slow to act. My friend, Dame Louise Ellman, a most distinguished former Member of this House, was subjected to the most aggressive antisemitic abuse by some members of her own local party, who demonised her for the wrongs of a foreign Government. A measure of our party’s recovery will be when Louise and the others who were driven out feel able to rejoin the party they grew up in and to which they gave so much.
My small contribution during that time was to help establish the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which runs an operation to identify, expose and disable online antisemitism. The project targets antisemitic extremism on the far left and far right, but where it identified antisemites who had become Labour party members, we reported them immediately for expulsion. When we identified how antisemites were operating online, we proposed legislative change, engaging with both the Government and the Jewish community leadership. I look forward to the online harms Bill bringing forward necessary new safeguards into law.
Labour’s new leader made clear in his acceptance speech last April his determination to root out antisemitism and make our party a safe space for Jewish people to be members of and to vote for once more. We understand the hurt that antisemitism has caused to the Jewish community and we will continue to work closely with and listen to the community as we seek to heal that pain. With the support of the Leader of the Opposition, I have asked every Labour council to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, with all the examples. We have backed the Secretary of State’s request for universities to do the same, and we support the establishment of the holocaust memorial and learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, right next to this place, the heart of British democracy.
I wish to finish with a story of hope. My friend and constituent Eric Sanders is 101 years old. As far as I know, he is the oldest living member of the Labour party. Eric was born to a Jewish family in Austria in 1919. Growing up, he experienced at first hand anti-Jewish hatred, and restrictions on where he could learn, work and go, and on whom he could love. He watched, personally, Adolf Hitler drive into Vienna after the Anschluss that incorporated Austria into the Nazi Third Reich. Eric came here to Britain, where he joined our armed forces to fight for freedom. After the war, he settled in south London, became a teacher, married a young woman and started a family. Today, Eric is a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather. He tells me how very proud he was to be awarded the Decoration of Honour by the President of Austria—that country’s highest civil award—just a few years ago. That act of recognition after the wrongs he suffered has allowed Eric finally to make his peace with the country of his birth. Just days before his hundredth birthday, I took a group of Austrian university students to meet Eric at his home in Norbury in south London. It was so moving to see a new generation of Austrians talking with a Jewish member of an older generation about what had happened to him and so many others in their country.
Eric would be the first to say that his story is now mostly in the past, but his story will not end with him if it inspires a future generation to build a better world. Today, as we reflect on the horrors of the holocaust, let us recognise that that anguished cry of 6 million voices from the past is our calling to build a better future, and in that, let us come together and find our light in the darkness.
Council Tax: Government’s Proposed Increase
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
I beg to move,
That this House calls on the Prime Minister to drop the Government’s plans to force local councils to increase council tax in the middle of a pandemic by providing councils with funding to meet the Government’s promise to do whatever is necessary to support councils in the fight against covid-19.
Right at the heart of the local government funding settlement, there lurks a rather nasty little surprise. What the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government trumpeted as an increase in funding for councils was nothing of the sort. Instead of the promised “end to austerity”, we got a Conservative council tax bombshell.
The Government made a choice to clobber hard-pressed families with a 5% council tax rise, after the Government’s mistakes led our country into the worst recession of any major economy. There are two big problems with that: it is economically illiterate to push up taxes while the economy is in crisis; and it is dishonest to trumpet the end of austerity when most councils will still be forced to cut services even after they impose the Conservative tax hike, because the rising costs of social care outstrip any increase in revenue, and the Government have done nothing about that crisis.
Felicity Buchan (Kensington) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman please explain, if he does not think that councils should be increasing taxes, why the Mayor of London is proposing to increase his precept by 10%?
Steve Reed
It was actually the Secretary of State for Transport who told the Mayor of London that he had to increase council tax. [Interruption.] Oh yes, it was. The reason there is a funding gap in London is that Londoners have done the right thing and followed the Government advice to keep covid-safe by keeping off public transport as much as they can. Transport for London’s revenues have therefore collapsed, but the Government have refused to provide the financial support to cover that problem. I imagine the Government thought they were punishing the Mayor of London ahead of the London mayoral elections; what they have actually done is punish Londoners, and that is wrong.
The Government’s message to council tax payers is: “Pay more but get less under the Conservatives.” Last March, as the country went into lockdown, the Secretary of State made a commitment to fund councils to do what was necessary to get communities through the crisis. He was right to say that—I give him credit for doing so—but just two months later, he broke that promise.
The Conservative-led Local Government Association estimates that councils face a £2.5 billion funding gap as a result of the lost income and additional costs of supporting communities through these unprecedented circumstances over the past year. The Government’s planned council tax increase will raise just under £2 billion next year. If the Government had not broken their promise on funding, councils would already have that amount available to them. Of course, the Government threw away £10 billion on crony contracts for companies with links to senior Conservative politicians. Just a proportion of that money would have plugged councils’ funding gap entirely.
The Government’s failure over the past year has left Britain with the worst recession of any major economy and one of the highest death rates in the world. Now, with their inflation-busting tax hikes, the Government are making hard-working families pay the price for Conservative failure, and the timing really could not be worse. The Tory tax hike will land on people’s door mats in the same month that over 2 million people come off the furlough scheme. Many of those people are worried sick about their future job security. Millions more are worried about their income falling. This is no time to clobber them with a tax hike.
Gary Sambrook (Birmingham, Northfield) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman mentions recessions and bad timing for increasing council tax. When he was leader of Lambeth Council, he increased council tax in 2007 and 2008, during the economic recession. Why did he think it was okay to do so then?
Steve Reed
I am glad the hon. Gentleman raises that, because when I won control of Lambeth Council for the Labour party in 2006, we took over from an administration, jointly run by the Conservatives, that had raised council tax by 33% over four years, and yet service performance was on the floor. I froze council tax, with no increase at all for two years, and despite doing so, we raised the performance of standards that were left on the floor by Conservatives and achieved an outstanding rating in every single category of children’s services. We did that because Labour Members understand value for money, while Conservative Members simply do not.
The proof of that is in what the Government are trying to do with the council tax rise this year. Families who are worried about paying their heating bills or putting food on the table simply cannot afford it. It will put them under even greater financial strain and it will hit high streets that, right now, are struggling to survive. Many local businesses are on their last legs financially after years of restrictions. These tax rises threaten to choke off spending, just as we need the economy to start opening up and motoring after the pandemic.
With the Government now in full retreat on the devolution agenda, there is still one thing they are very interested in devolving, and that is the blame for cuts and council tax hikes made in Downing Street. The Secretary of State tried to justify the tax hike by claiming he is giving councils a choice—I am sure he will repeat that at the Dispatch Box today—but the truth is he is not. The Government’s funding plans, published in December, include the expectation—an assumption, not an option—that council tax will go up.
Councils’ biggest long-term financial headache is how to pay for social care. As more people, thankfully, live longer, councils need more funding to offer frail older people the care they need to make the most of their lives, but the Government have cut funding over the past decade, forcing councils to restrict care, so it is available only to those in the most severe categories of need. On his very first day in office, standing on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister told the country he had a plan to fix the social care crisis. No one has seen a dot or comma of that plan since, so councils have been forced to keep cutting, because the Prime Minister’s plan does not seem to exist—unless the Secretary of State can tell us differently when he speaks at the Dispatch Box.
Let us not forget that because a council tax increase raises less money in poorer areas, the Government are deepening the postcode lottery for social care, instead of ensuring that every single older and disabled person anywhere in our country gets the care they need, regardless of where they live. This Government are not levelling the country up; they are pulling the country apart.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
If we do not raise this money in council tax, it still has to come from somewhere. How would the hon. Gentleman raise it?
Steve Reed
The Secretary of State has already given the hon. Gentleman the answer, and I am very pleased to repeat what the Secretary of State and the Chancellor said last March: they would fully compensate councils for the cost of getting the country through the crisis. A £2.5 billion funding gap is what they have left, according to James Jamieson, the Conservative leader of the Local Government Association. That is more than the amount that will be raised in council tax, and the hon. Gentleman can do the maths as well as I can. That would not be necessary if the Secretary of State kept his promises.
The costs of social care this year will rise faster than any additional income that is being made available to pay for it, so the only choice the Government are giving all our town halls is to put up council tax while families are still suffering the effects of the recession, or to cut social care during an unprecedented global health pandemic. That is no choice at all, and it is why the Government have got this so badly wrong.
Older people have suffered enough, thanks to this Government’s failures. Over a third of all covid deaths in the UK have been in care homes because the Government were too slow on distributing personal protective equipment, too slow on rolling out testing and too slow to act on hospital discharges that seeded the disease in those very care homes.
Councils need funding to pay for the care older people deserve, and not just during this pandemic. Hard-working families need support to cope with the hit that their incomes have suffered over the past year. Struggling high street businesses need the Government to encourage spending, not choke it off. Councils of all political colours will be forced to put up council tax this year, not because they want to, but because the Government have left them with no real choice. The costs of covid will have to be paid for, but not by raising taxes on people who cannot afford it at a time when their incomes are under so much strain and the pandemic is still raging.
Make no mistake: this is a Conservative tax hike made in Downing street and imposed on hard-working families after the Government’s mistakes left our country facing the deepest recession of any major economy. We will not secure our economy by choking off spending, we will not protect the NHS by denying older people the care they need and we will not rebuild our country by killing off our high streets. I urge the Government, even at this late stage, to think again and scrap their plans to force town halls to increase council tax at a time like this.
Robert Jenrick
I certainly can. My right hon. Friend is fortunate to have a good Conservative council and it will benefit from the largest ever rural services grant in the settlement, which will give more money to help deliver the sorts of services that his constituents will rely on in a very rural part of the country.
The shadow Communities Secretary as leader of Lambeth Council hiked council tax by more than £100, including a 5% rise at the height of the unemployment crisis presided over by the last Labour Government. Yet today he believes that councils should not even have limited flexibility to do the same. Labour leaders in local government do not want limited flexibility to increase council taxes; they want to abolish the right of local people to veto excessive tax increases altogether, so that they can increase taxes by as much as they want. We all know where that leads for Labour councils: while council tax has fallen under the Conservatives in real terms since 2010, the last Labour Government presided over a doubling of council tax and, in Labour-run Wales, it is trebling.
Perhaps the Leader of the Opposition should pick up the phone, check in with his own local leadership from time to time and get their ducks in a row before opposing the very same flexibility that their councils are the greatest advocates of. From Leeds to Telford to the Wirral to Sefton, the A to Z of Labour local councils have demanded that we allow them to increase council tax “without limit”. They describe in their responses to the local government settlement that keeping their tax-raising instincts in check is frustrating, “an imposition”—not an imposition on tax payers, I hasten to add; they barely get a look-in. It is all there in black and white in the Labour councils’ responses to the local government settlement.
Steve Reed
The Secretary of State may want to correct the record, because actually I froze council tax, with a zero increase, the year following the crisis in 2007-08 and the year after that as well, but does he recognise that it is the Conservative leader of the Local Government Association, James Jamieson—a councillor I am sure he knows very well—who has called for the cap to be lifted for council tax increases and for a referendum to be abolished, not the Labour party Front Bench?
Draft West Yorkshire Combined Authority (Election of Mayor and Functions) Order 2021
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
Thank you, Mr Hollobone; I might not avail myself of all the time that you have generously allocated to us.
I am grateful for the Minister’s comments. I suspect this will not be the most ferociously divisive and controversial matter to come before us in current times. Labour Members support the creation of the combined authority and Mayor for West Yorkshire. In fact, we would like to see the Government go further and faster. The pandemic has taught us many things, and one of them is about the limitations of over-centralisation and the benefits of opening up power more widely across the country. In that context, the leader of the Labour party is establishing a constitutional commission, which I hope will be able to work across parties, and certainly with civil society and the public, to try to find more ways to open up power and decision making to people across all parts of the United Kingdom and into every community that makes up our country.
I am not going to challenge the Minister on the proposals but I have a few questions to ask, in the spirit of looking for the Government to go further and faster. Will the combined authority and the Mayor of West Yorkshire play a role in decisions about the allocation of funds through the levelling-up fund and the UK shared prosperity fund? Are the Government considering the devolution of further powers to the combined authority or, indeed, to Mayors and combined authorities in other parts of the country, as part of the deepening of devolution? There have been some delays in the publication of the devolution White Paper. Can the Minister tell us yet when we might expect to see that White Paper and be able to engage in the debate that will follow about the most appropriate way to move forward with a devolution agenda, particularly as we build back after the pandemic?
Oral Answers to Questions
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Luke Hall
I thank my hon. Friend for her question. She is right to say that councils have done an incredible job in responding to the pandemic. We have provided an unprecedented package of covid-related support for councils, which is now worth £10 billion over this year and next year. It includes £1 billion of unring-fenced funding, as well as support with lost income from tax, sales, fees and charges. Buckinghamshire will benefit from more than £54 million of covid support this year and £11 million for next year. Councils are the unsung heroes of the response to this pandemic and we are standing squarely behind them.
Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
May I take this opportunity to congratulate Christina McAnea on being elected the general secretary of Unison? It is Britain’s biggest trade union and of course has many members who work in local government.
Let me turn to the Minister. How is it fair to force councils to choose between hiking up council tax for hard-working families during the worst recession in 300 years, or cutting social care for older parents and grandparents during an unprecedented global health pandemic?
Mr Speaker
And hopefully Chorley will be on the Secretary of State’s high street fund.
Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
As we have been hearing, high streets are struggling like never before. When will the Government level the playing field on business rates between high street retailers and online businesses, so that they can compete on equal terms?
Robert Jenrick
The Chancellor announced earlier in the year an unprecedented business rates holiday, which is benefiting thousands of businesses the length and breadth of the country, and he will be considering what further steps are necessary. I know that he is making a statement later today, and we will bring forward a Budget in March. We all want to support small independent businesses on our high streets, which is precisely why I encourage the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues to support the planning reforms that we have already introduced, such as the ability to build upwards, to bring more homes on to the high street and to turn a derelict or empty property in a town centre into something more useful for the future. Those are the ways that we attract private sector investment and enable small builders and entrepreneurs in Croydon, in Newark and in all parts of the country to face the future with confidence.
Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 4 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement, and I echo his words of thanks to council staff for the sterling work they have carried out in the most daunting of circumstances. However, the Secretary of State’s announcement today leaves local authorities facing a vast funding gap that will inevitably lead to job losses, cuts in key frontline services, such as adult social care, and the closure of yet more treasured community assets such as libraries, youth centres and leisure centres.
Perhaps one of the most shocking aspects of the settlement is the Government’s plan to force councils to hike up council tax while the country still faces an unprecedented health crisis and the deepest recession for 300 years. The Government are proposing a council tax hike more than twice the rate of inflation. The Conservatives have decided to clobber hard-working families when their jobs and incomes are already under extreme pressure, and in return, those taxpayers will get fewer services.
Council tax is a regressive tax that hits families on average incomes harder than the wealthy. It also raises less money in poorer areas. A 5% increase in Surrey raises £38 million, while a 5% increase in Blackburn with Darwen raises just £2.8 million. An older person living in a less wealthy area, such as one of the red wall seats, will see their Conservative MP tax them more but cut the care services they rely on.
In his first speech as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson stood on the steps of Downing Street and said he would
“fix the crisis in social care once and for all with a clear plan we have prepared”.
No one has seen a dot or comma of that plan in the 18 months since. Costs for social care are soaring, yet today’s settlement will make the crisis worse and will hit older people living in less affluent areas hardest.
In 2011, the average band D council tax was £1,439. With the Conservative council tax bombshell announced today, the average bill for next year will be £1,909. That is a rise of 33% under this Conservative Government. The message to the public is clear: “Pay more but get less under the Conservatives, with Rishi Sunak’s council tax hike coming your way in the middle of the worst recession for three centuries.”
Can the Secretary of State please tell us how he expects families to afford a 5% council tax hike in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis? When can we expect to see the Government’s plan to fix the social care crisis instead of leaving older people struggling without the support they need? Given the urgency of the pandemic, how much are the Government increasing the public health grant next year, and what does the Secretary of State expect councils to do about the 25% lost council tax and business rate income that he is not compensating them for?
Robert Jenrick
I echo the hon. Gentleman’s thanks to local council workers across the country. He talks about our pledge to support local councils and to ensure that they are fully funded for the work that they have done during covid, and we have made good on that promise. We have provided £7.2 billion already. Local councils to date have reported that they have spent £4 billion and are projecting that they will spend almost £6.2 billion to the end of the year, so we will have provided local councils with as much, if not more, funding than they have reported.
The hon. Gentleman refers to funding for local council tax losses and for sales fees and charges. Our schemes are extremely generous in both regards, providing 75p in the pound of losses for local councils to ensure that they can weather the particular storm that they have been through this year. He refers to council tax costs. Local councils are not under any obligation to increase council taxes. We only have to look back at the record of the last Labour Government to see what happens under Labour. Under Labour, council tax doubled. Under this Conservative Government, council tax is lower in real terms today than it was in 2010-11.
It is difficult to see how the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues can pose as the guardians of taxpayer value. I appreciate that he is on what we might call a sticky wicket in this regard. We only have to look at his local Labour council in Croydon. It purchased a hotel above the asking price, which has now gone bankrupt. It created a housing company with a £200 million loan and it could not say whether it had built any houses. The cabinet has been described as acting like some kind of wrecking ball, except that the wrecking ball was directed at its own council. Or, indeed, we could look at Nottingham’s Labour council, which was described recently by its auditors as having “institutional blindness” to its financial mismanagement and ineptitude, which included creating an energy company called Robin Hood. That is a rather unusual definition of Robin Hood’s activities—instead of taking from the rich, it robbed off everyone.
The truth is that under Labour councils, it is the public who lose out. The public will pay the price in Croydon in lost jobs, poorer services and, ultimately, higher council taxes. We will continue to support local councils, the overwhelming majority of which, of all political persuasions, have done a sterling job this year, and we will ensure that they get the resources they need to continue that work into the new year.
The Future of the High Street
Steve Reed Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)
As today is the first day of Hanukkah, I would like to wish everyone in the Jewish community chag sameach.
I am afraid that the Government are standing by as Britain’s high streets decline. Footfall on our high streets was down by 10% under the Conservatives even before the coronavirus hit, and about one in 10 high street shops were already standing empty. Since 2010, the Conservative Government have presided over the closure of 773 libraries, 750 youth centres, 1,300 children’s centres, and 835 public toilets. This Government are devastating the vibrant high streets that are the heart of our communities and of our British way of life.
Mary Portas, who led a Government review of the future of British high streets, now has this to say about the Government:
“They need to wake up. It’s shameful that they have still not readjusted their thinking on how Amazon and the delivery giants should be paying equivalent rates of tax online. It’s shameful they’re not doing anything about it. Their slowness in understanding, their tardiness, is ridiculous.”
She is angry because the Government have done nothing to address the massive disadvantage that high street businesses face compared with online retailers. Labour has repeatedly called for a root-and-branch review of business rates to make the system fairer and help high street shops to compete with online tech giants. Debenhams has recently gone into liquidation, with a potential loss of 13,000 jobs. Arcadia has gone the same way, putting 12,000 jobs at risk, with the loss of leading brands like Topshop, Burton and Dorothy Perkins from our high streets. Retail is clearly changing as shopping moves online—a process speeded up by the pandemic—so it is all the more astonishing that the Government have done so little to level the playing field between bricks-and-mortar shops and online retailers.
We all owe a debt of thanks to retail workers for all they have done to keep the country going through the pandemic. They have put themselves at risk to keep our shops open and the shelves well stocked, so what a disgrace it is that the Government are rewarding so many of them with job insecurity and job losses. The covid-19 pandemic has deepened the emergency on our high streets. Since the economic crisis began in March, up to 20,000 shops have closed and 200,000 people have lost their jobs in retail and hospitality, but instead of offering the help that is needed, the Government are refusing to properly support businesses under the highest tiers of covid restrictions.
Hospitality businesses and their supply chains are in particular trouble. Some 5,500 pubs and bars have already closed in the 10 years since the Conservatives came to power—that is one pub gone every 14 hours that they have been in government, for a full decade. This sector now urgently needs support to survive; otherwise our high streets will be further blighted with the closure of more pubs, bars and restaurants. After struggling to survive the pandemic for nine months, businesses are now in a far weaker financial position. For many that rely on the Christmas period, trade is dramatically down this year.
It is astonishing that in these circumstances the Government have chosen to cut business support compared with what was available earlier this year. Analysis by the House of Commons Library shows that 99% of hair and beauty salons are receiving less support than in March, along with 95% of cafés, 92% of gyms, and 77% of pubs and restaurants. Do we really want to emerge from this crisis with so many of these vital small businesses closed down or boarded up?
The Government’s planning reforms further threaten the viability of our high streets. Earlier this year, they forced through changes that give developers sweeping powers to permanently remove shops from our high streets, creating dead zones by converting retail units into low-quality flats that can then never reopen again as shops or community spaces. Back in March, the Government promised to fully compensate councils for getting communities through the pandemic, but they broke that promise. That breach of trust leaves councils less able to support the economic recovery in our high streets. According to the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, councils face a £1.1 billion covid funding gap, leading to in-year cuts and job losses at right now, and there is worse to come next April, with a £4 billion funding gap that means more cuts, more job losses, and less support for economic recovery for struggling businesses and struggling high streets.
If that was not bad enough, the Government appear to be on the brink of the greatest act of vandalism ever inflicted on the British economy in peacetime, with the chaos and catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit pushing up costs, cutting off supplies, and closing down exports. The abiding image of this Government will be a boarded-up shop on a rundown high street. The Prime Minister was not joking when he said “eff business”, because that sums up this Government’s entire approach. The Conservative-led Local Government Association estimates that the Government have cut £15 billion from council budgets over the past decade. The towns fund puts back less than a quarter of that devastating loss. It is better than nothing, and we welcome the funding for towns that have received it, but what is less welcome is why so many deserving towns have not benefited at all. Those high streets, and there are hundreds of them, have been left to slide further into decline because Conservative Ministers deliberately carved them out of receiving any funding. Towns such as Heywood, Halifax and Sunderland surely deserve better than this.
There is a better future for our high streets if only the Government would seize it. The British people want their high streets to be vibrant, lively and thriving places that they can feel proud of. There is a better future where high streets can take advantage of the change in shopping habits to break free of the straitjacket of uniformity. We could encourage more small local businesses by levelling the playing field on business rates. We could create more community spaces, instead of forcing the closure of libraries and community centres by continually slashing council funding. We could work with developers to create more shared work spaces and touchdown desk spaces that reduce the need for commuting, instead of creating dead zones where the shops used to be.
In all the darkness of the pandemic, one of the bright spots for many people has been the rediscovery of a strong sense of community. What an opportunity we have to build back better, to reinvent our high streets for the future as the beating heart of those communities, but instead we are stuck in a cycle of levelling down under an incompetent Government without a vision that matches the ambition of the people of this great country.