Financial Sustainability (Local Government)

Debate between Steve Rotheram and David Crausby

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jesse Norman]

Let me put on the record that the heat maps are not reflective of imbalances in deprivation funding at all. Let us take an example that is completely open and known to everyone, which is the scandal of the private finance initiative, in which 106 new hospitals were built at enormous cost. The vast preponderance of them were built around a model of funding that was for very large outpatient hospitals in major cities, and it was deliberately targeted on those cities. The result has been, at a time when health care has been moving to a much more localised, technology-enabled solution, a disaster for health care. We will find that these great hospitals, including the new one being built in Liverpool, struggle as a result.

[Mr David Crausby (in the Chair)]

Order. Interventions should be kept short.

[Steve Rotheram]

It absolutely beggars belief that individual Members of Parliament do not understand that every area is different. Areas that had infrastructure from Victorian times, hospitals that were literally falling apart and schools that leaked, needed intervention at that time—not in 15 or 20 years, when the country might well have been able to afford it. Intervention was needed.

I am no great fan of PFI, by the way, but according to the latest figures the Chancellor is signing off as many PFI contracts, worth as much, as the previous Labour Government did. Members really cannot have it both ways—be anti-PFI while not even standing up to their own Chancellor, who is signing off these huge contracts, including the one for Liverpool.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said:

“Tough times do indeed require tough decisions”—

nobody would argue against that—

“but this Government, as they have shown time and again, from the bedroom tax to the top rate of tax and local government funding, take most from those who have least. That is unfair and unjust.”—[Official Report, 18 December 2013; Vol. 572, c. 746.]

A cumulative 52% cut to Liverpool city council will mean not only that it has to make staff redundant, which means even more human misery and an even higher benefit bill, but, as I have said, that it may not even be able to fulfil the requirement to deliver statutory services to the level that it has to date. In other words, keeping our libraries open will be virtually impossible. Services for the young and old will be decimated. Children’s centres will be affected. Street lights and roads will not be repaired at the same rate, and the legacy of our year as European capital of culture will be damaged, possibly beyond repair.

Perhaps the most devastating aspect of the whole debate is the fact that decisions continue to be made, by a Minister and his boss in a cold and calculated manner, that I know will detrimentally affect Liverpool’s history, heritage and traditions and adversely affect every man, woman and child in our city.