Covid-19: Funding for Local Authorities

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2020 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I pay tribute and give my thanks to the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) for securing this important debate.

I will focus my few remarks on the support that local authorities have given, and continue to give, to businesses. Thanks to Government support, South Lakeland District Council provided the largest single number of grants to local businesses of any shire district anywhere in the country, and it is not hard to understand why that would be the case. We are the tourism epicentre of the United Kingdom and, after London, the biggest visitor destination in the country. The largest single employer is hospitality and tourism, and at the worst part of the crisis 40% of the entire workforce of my constituency was on furlough. We have seen a sixfold increase in unemployment.

The diversity of employment is significant as well. One in four people in my constituency work for themselves. At the beginning, after initial grants and furlough, which were very welcome, were correctly provided by the Chancellor, there were some gaps in support. Discretionary awards were then made through local authorities and delivered expertly, fleet of foot, by local authorities, including my own in South Lakeland, to people such as small bed and breakfast owners, those who ran businesses from their own home or shared space with others, or those who did not get any support in the first tranche. Thanks to the campaigns of many and the Government listening, on that occasion, district councils such as mine were able to provide support, and they have done so well.

That gives us a clue as to how the Government should behave towards the remaining 3 million people who have still received no support. I am thinking about many people on maternity leave; people who have been self-employed for less than 18 months; those who are running small, limited companies, such as taxi drivers, hairdressers, personal trainers and the like; and those who just missed the cut-off date for the payroll, at just the wrong moment in March.Those people have been left with zero support since March and are struggling to pay their rent or mortgage and feed their kids. I pay tribute to them for their campaigning. I beg the Government to allow councils to do for those people what they did for the first set of excluded people back in March and April.

I thank councils for all they do at the forefront, providing social care, schools, special educational needs provision and child protection, and looking after the homeless and those in housing need. I am confident that in Cumbria we had the most effective localised Test and Trace system in the country, with public health being run incredibly well at a local government level in my community.

I will just say, on top of all that, how odd it is that the Government think this is somehow a bright period in which to force top-down reorganisation of local government in Cumbria, North Yorkshire and Somerset. Even if a Government thought there was some wisdom in changing the balance of local government in those places, how crackers—how out of touch—would they have to be to think now is the moment to do it? I urge the Minister to provide funds for local authorities to support those who have been excluded from support so far, and to not distract our social care home managers, our carers, our teachers, those people caring for the homeless, and those leading the economic recovery in our communities. Do not divert them from their vital task by a pointless act of navel contemplation—a top-down reorganisation.