Toby Perkins
Main Page: Toby Perkins (Labour - Chesterfield)
Mr Denham
I am sure we all wish the former permanent secretary at my Department well in his new position as permanent secretary to the Scottish Government. I took the right decision on Norwich and Exeter, and I was right to back the desire of those cities to run their own affairs. It was a decision that I reached after many months of careful consideration, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne. I have to say that it was all too typical of this Government that, within two days of the new Government being formed, the Secretary of State—who talks about localism—decided to quash the aspirations of those councils to run their own affairs, in a timescale that meant that he could not possibly even have read the evidence that had been submitted by so many councils. I will return to the attitude of the Secretary of State in due course.
On 10 June, the Secretary of State announced £1.165 billion of cuts in local government spending in England in the current financial year. Because those cuts were so big, the Secretary of State should have come here to defend them. They were part of the £6 billion of cuts proposed by the Tories during the election. We opposed them as too early and too damaging to economic recovery. The Liberal Democrats also opposed them. As the right hon. Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne)—now a Liberal Democrat Cabinet member—said during the election campaign:
“If we took Tory advice and cut spending and raised taxes precipitately, growth would stop. Unemployment and benefit spending would rise further. Tax revenue would stall.”
But now he has taken Tory advice, and he will be held to account for what happens.
Now the Lib Dems support these cuts, and their credibility as a progressive alternative to the Tories is shot to pieces. These are cuts that no local council had any chance to prepare for, coming as they do well into the financial year. As the Tory leader of West Berkshire council told us,
“This is unprecedented. We have never faced cuts in the middle of the year.”
As the Tory leader of Telford said,
“this is money that we had planned to spend this year and will now have to be cut.”
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is right to be furious that the Secretary of State is not attending the debate. The Secretary of State seems to see himself as some sort of Conservative John Prescott. Does my right hon. Friend share my feeling that that fine gentleman would have been proud to stick up for his Department instead of letting it take the majority of the cuts, and would have come here to defend his decision rather than skulking off to the scene of former crimes?
Mr Denham
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Despite some apparent superficial similarities between the two gentlemen, one thing is clear: John Prescott never ran away from a debate or argument, unlike the Secretary of State—[Interruption.] I did not say he never ran away from a fight; I just said he never ran away from an argument.
The truth is that the cuts were not only made too fast, but made without consultation. There was no discussion with local councils about whether or how they could be made. The Local Government Association initially put out a press release welcoming the fact that it had been promised consultation, but ended up sending a desperate letter two weeks later saying, “Will you please tell us what’s going on?” The cuts came ahead of the Budget, which sets out cuts of 25%, 30% or 35% to local council services.
Grant Shapps
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his particularly eloquent contribution. Local authorities spending their time publishing weekly newspapers, or weekly Pravdas as the Secretary of State described them, is just not their role. We talk about front-line services, supporting people, homelessness and priority programmes to ensure that the sick, elderly and vulnerable are protected, but Opposition Members want to talk about local weekly Pravda newspapers published by local authorities. It simply is not the answer. What we want to do is ensure that local authorities are engaged in front-line services that help their population, not services that rival the local newspapers. We want to allow the local newspapers to operate without interference from local authorities.
Everyone knows that money is tight. Every strategy that we employ nationally and locally should focus on getting more for less. Innovation and efficiency must be king. The emergency Budget makes it clear that there are challenging times ahead. We want to ensure that local government is fully engaged with the next spending review. In particular, we expect councils to be involved in the series of events over the summer to discuss and debate various aspects of public spending. We will use the spending review to drive decentralisation across local government and national Government.
Toby Perkins
The Minister has said a couple of times that councils will have to do more for less. As a member of the best value and efficiency scrutiny panel on Chesterfield borough council for the past seven years, I know just how hard our council and many others worked to produce the efficiencies demanded under Gershon. Can the Minister tell us of any council leaders who have not been trying to give more for less in the last years of the Labour Government?
Grant Shapps
I accept that the hon. Gentleman and local authority leaders and councils throughout the country work hard to do those things. However, sometimes just doing something in a closed situation is not enough and we have to invite the whole general public to take part. We need to publish the stuff online, make it fully transparent and let people see what is really going on. As I explained in the context of my Department’s responsibilities, if that had been done, I do not believe that those tens of thousands—and even hundreds of thousands—of pounds would have been wasted on pointless projects. On a smaller scale, there will be examples in town halls throughout the country of money being spent on unsustainable projects, which best value committees sometimes do not reach, but a large army of armchair auditors will. It is called the general public; it is called transparency, and it will work effectively.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
May I take this opportunity to say how pleasing it is to have not one but two Lancastrians as Deputy Speakers?
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I rent a constituency office from Tameside council and have parking permits from both Tameside and Stockport.
I pay tribute to the work done by all councillors, irrespective of party affiliation. Having served as a local councillor for 12 years before entering the House, I fully understand how difficult the role is. It is often a thankless task, yet to serve local communities in local government is also a massive privilege and honour. I do not think we do enough to recognise the work of those who serve in local government.
I also want to place on record my tribute to Councillor Roy Oldham CBE, who served as leader of Tameside metropolitan borough council from 1980 until this year. Those 30 years at the top made him the longest serving council leader in the country, and his achievement in transforming the borough from sleepy backwater into one of the leading metropolitan districts in the country—the best in the north-west according to the Audit Commission—is a testament to his drive and vision to make the borough a leading council. Roy is currently recovering from illness and I wish him well. I am sure the new council leader, Councillor Kieran Quinn, will want to make his mark on the borough too, and build on the excellent achievements of the past few years. It will be a tough job, not least because of the tightening financial situation, but I am sure he will do his best for the area and I have every confidence that Tameside will continue to be at the forefront of local government.
The recent Budget was called the “unavoidable” Budget, and some important choices were made in it that will impact heavily on local government. There was a certain irony in the use of that term, however, as the report earlier this month from the new Office for Budget Responsibility indicated that the previous Government’s fiscal plans would have eliminated the bulk of the structural deficit by 2015. So these cuts that go so deep so quickly may not make the economic sense that the Government would have us believe. Clearly, they have decided to go further and faster, but these cuts seem more ideologically driven than based on sound economic fact. We will soon find out both if the Conservative-Liberal Government have been correct and about the wisdom of these actions.
It appears that the local government sector and workers will be facing the worst situation for a generation as the Chancellor tries to cut spending just as Baroness Thatcher did but in half the time. That will mean brutal cuts in the budgets of all Departments. The Chancellor is talking about 25% cuts across the board, but as we are told that the education, health and defence budgets will get off relatively lightly, I strongly suspect that other budgets, such as that for the Department for Communities and Local Government, will have to be cut by much more than a quarter. We will see what the real cost is to these Departments.
I urge caution. We need to be careful in how we address the local government cuts. Many local agencies now work in very close partnership one with another, so a cut in one area may well be to the serious detriment of activities in another. Budget cuts in local government will not be in “silos”, as all agencies are now largely linked up. We therefore need to look at the interactions between various services. It is easy to cut the aids and adaptations budgets for adult social services, but if the result of cutting a £100 handrail for an elderly constituent is to have to pay thousands of pounds for a hip operation in the NHS, that will not have saved the public purse.
We must not miss the bigger picture. If the cuts start to dismantle these working arrangements, service provision will be back as it was in the 1980s: Department-based, with no thinking outside the box and little joint thinking. For example, interrupting good local management on antisocial behaviour, family intervention and domestic violence will have a real impact on the communities I represent—on people who truly depend on services that no one else will provide and that no one else is better placed to co-ordinate.
As I have said, the scale of the cuts poses a serious challenge to local authorities’ ability to deliver services that meet the expectations of people—in my constituency, especially people who live in Stockport and Tameside—over the coming five years and beyond. The Tameside part of my constituency will be particularly affected. It has been ranked as an area of high deprivation, the 56th most deprived local authority area in England. Already, the changes to benefits and tax credits will have a disproportionate effect on Tameside residents due to the existing high levels of income deprivation, and may lead to even more people calling on council services in their time of need. This will be happening at the same time as further funding cuts to the council and its partners start to bite—a double whammy for the people of Tameside and the people of Reddish, to whom I will turn later in my remarks.
Tameside had expected to receive some £23.5 million of area-based grant funding in 2010-11. That has been reduced by £2.34 million—about 10%. Services will clearly be cut at a time when demand will inevitably rise, so Tameside is already anticipating and preparing for a number of hard choices over the coming years. The council has developed a medium-term financial strategy. It expects cuts of up to 10% a year for area-based grants and specific grants—about £5 million in total—on top of cuts to formula grant funding and restrictions on council tax, with a possibility of reductions in capital funding as well.
There will also be an impact on voluntary and community sector grant funding, a sector which contributes significantly to the capacity to deliver improved outcomes through community-based work. Activities to provide opportunities to young people may have to be reduced, along with youth provision, which is non-statutory, in order to ensure that work with vulnerable and looked-after children is maintained. It is therefore crucial that the council and its partners be able to maintain their levels of investment, both grant and mainstream, in effective prevention work. This Government must be clear that local government plays a vital role in delivering crucial services across communities and should be a spending priority, rather than taking more than its fair share of the burden.
I am also extremely concerned about the knock-on implications for regeneration in my constituency. Excellent work has been done by the Denton South Partnership in Haughton Green, one of the deprived parts of my constituency. This has been a model of effective partnership working, bringing together all the agencies such as the council, the primary care trust, the police and local housing associations. I pay tribute to the work of David Howarth, the chair, and all the members of the partnership. However, such a proactive approach to solving problems will go if all the partner agencies face the same budget reductions, which will lead to massive disinvestment in the communities where help is needed most.
I turn briefly to the Stockport part of my constituency, where there is also a great deal of concern. Cuts of £1.69 million to the area-based grant—
Toby Perkins
My hon. Friend is highlighting the extent to which the cuts, which would not have been made under a Labour Government because of our commitment to supporting people in their efforts to get work, will be targeted at the most deprived people in our communities. Does he agree that targeting areas in which disadvantaged people are out of work is a particularly cruel measure for this Government to take?
Andrew Gwynne
It is, and I agree fully with my hon. Friend. Parts of my constituency are still trying to recover from the previous Tory Government’s attack on those communities, despite the great work of the last Labour Government, and that progress needs to be maintained.
The area-based grant is finance used to help various services, such as those for deprived and vulnerable children. What is the alternative to cuts in services such as family intervention? If those services are cut locally, more children may be taken into care because there is no early intervention to fix problems quickly, which would cost the taxpayer significantly more. It costs approximately £24,000 a year to take a child into care. The cuts could well impact more harshly on less affluent areas of Stockport, such as Reddish. Liberal Democrat Stockport council does not do anything like enough for its most deprived communities, including the Reddish wards. I am concerned that they will be an easy target for the kind of cuts we now face. So there are a number of concerns for constituencies such as mine, because the Government’s announcements will hit a host of services that affect local people. It is clear that the areas that will be most affected are poorer areas in the cities and metropolitan boroughs. Labour has a strong record of increasing funding for local authorities in those areas and using them to deliver national priorities by harnessing the best locally.
This Government clearly have a new view of localism, which does not take much account of local people. These cuts fail, as they break all promises not to balance the books on the backs of the poorest, and they show that the Government’s claims of fairness are pretty empty and do not seem to look much beyond the world outside the comfortable home counties.
Mark Pawsey
It is not centrally driven at all.
The changes will be made by local authorities and I believe these changes, restoring freedom to local authorities, will encourage more people to put their names forward for the role of councillor. The previous Labour Government presided over more than a decade of economic prosperity during the ’90s and the early part of this decade—and they should have been taking advantage of that; as we said, they should have been mending the roof while the sun was shining. They failed to do so, and it falls to the coalition Government to implement the efficiency savings, to cut the quangos and to reduce the regulatory burden, as is so desperately needed.
According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report entitled “Mapping the Performance Landscape”, commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government in 2006, it was estimated that a typical council spent £2.6 million a year in reporting performance information to central Government. The previous Government also failed to heed the warnings provided by the very councils that they so tightly guarded. In a comprehensive area assessment published in January 2010, the councils were warned that
“the burden of inspection has not been reduced as a consequence of Comprehensive Area Assessment”,
and
“nearly two-thirds of respondents to the latest CAA watch survey disagreed or strongly disagreed that the burden of inspection was being reduced as a consequence of CAA.”
It is time that central Government stopped smothering local councils and provided them with the level of authority they need to get on with their role of serving and responding to the residents who elect them.
I believe that Labour Members are overstating the effect of the changes that local government is being asked to make. We should remember that this is an emergency Budget in which local government is being asked to contribute £1.166 billion-worth of savings to the £6.2 billion of cross-government savings for 2010-11.
Mark Pawsey
I am running out of time, so I will proceed, if I may.
Removing restrictions on how local authorities spend their money is a vital part of allowing them to deliver efficiencies and focus their budgets on front-line services. I refer again to the statement released by the Local Government Association, which understands the need for the plans that the Government are introducing.
In some areas, certain groups have had massively more than their fair share of funding, so it is only right that, during such times as these, they should reduce the burden. Let me cite the example of the £30 million that will be saved by ceasing the Gypsy and Traveller sites grant. Here is a relatively small community that has benefited hugely and, in my view, disproportionately from public expenditure and is a matter of great concern to the settled community in places such as Bulkington in my constituency. By way of showing that further savings can be made, I refer to my home Rugby borough council; by not replacing its chief executive, it is enabling savings of more than £100,000 a year. Another example is Warwickshire county council, which is estimated to have made savings of £19 million in value-for-money savings in 2008-09. So there are early signs that the councils themselves recognise the need for radical reform, which needs to begin immediately, and they are tackling the challenges posed by the new Government.
In addition to seeking savings in expenditure, the Government are taking steps to minimise the effect of council tax on individuals and businesses, and are providing support for hard-working families through a council tax freeze. They have demonstrated immediate support for front-line services by protecting £29 billion of formula grant. Unlike the Labour party, the coalition has listened to advice from those affected by poor over-regulation.
In conclusion, I believe the proposals on local government finance are reasoned and proportionate, and appropriate in difficult economic times, and I shall support the amendment.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
I want to start by adding my congratulations to my hon. Friends the Members for Dudley South (Chris Kelly) and for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) on their excellent maiden speeches. I am sure the rest of the House will join me in hoping that they will speak again in this Chamber in the very near future.
Today’s debate is very important. As Members will know, local government financing represents approximately 25% of Government spending and is responsible for delivering many of the essential front-line services our constituents rely on. Such a level of spending therefore cannot be immune to the spending cuts forced on us by the parlous state of the finances we inherited from the Labour Government. The historic local government funding formula has for far too long been used, especially by the Labour Government, not as a political tool but as a political weapon—a weapon with which to beat the shire counties of England for having the temerity to vote Conservative.
Local government finance is a particular concern to me and to my constituents, as my constituency suffers greatly under the historic funding regime. This year, each child in North West Leicestershire is having £3,888 spent on their education, compared with the £4,497 spent on each child in the city of Leicester—a difference of some £600 per child per year, and the disparity is increasing. Last year, the difference in funding was £550 per child.
Andrew Bridgen
Let me make a little progress and I am sure the theme will become clear.
That funding difference is putting the children of North West Leicestershire at a major disadvantage. The two biggest senior schools in my constituency—Ashby and King Edward—are disadvantaged by nearly £1 million and £500,000 respectively each year compared with the city of Leicester. That simply is not fair.
Perhaps the biggest unfairness emerges when we consider the level of deprivation in North West Leicestershire. According to the last census, in one ward in my constituency 468 children were living in income-deprived households, yet their educational needs were funded by £600 less this year than were those of pupils in the city of Leicester. That cannot be right, and I look forward to the pupil premium redressing this unfairness.
Despite these funding shortages, Leicestershire county council is performing excellently and is a four-star council. According to independent inspectors,
“the Council is good at managing its money and making savings to spend on the most important services”.
The independent inspectorate also comments on how
“Leicestershire County Council manages its finances well. Council tax is low compared with other areas and it provides a wide range of good and excellent services. This means it provides good value for money. In 2008/2009 it saved almost £11 million and it is on track to make further savings this year. These savings are then spent on improving services”.
It is vital that well-run local authorities such as Leicestershire be looked at sympathetically when it comes to departmental spending cuts. Fit organisations have little fat to cut away; it is the bloated authorities that have been disproportionately funded and badly managed that should be looking at trimming their organisations. Perhaps they will decide not to do that, and to pass on the costs of their inefficiency to the long-suffering taxpayer. I urge us to remove the cap on council tax increases, which will allow them to do just that. Councils that choose to take that path will then expose their profligacy, waste and poor management to the wrath of the electorate, leaving them fully accountable for their actions—hopefully through the ballot box.
It is not just in education where my constituents are suffering the effects of the previous Labour Government’s policies, but also housing. The Labour district council in North West Leicestershire, before being relieved of office in 2007—with the biggest swing in the country against Labour in those elections, but that is another matter—left the council housing stock in a lamentable state, rated as “poor”, with no stars. Despite this, owing to Labour Government policy we have the ludicrous situation in which a third of all the rents we collect every year are passed back to central Government to maintain housing stock in other areas, despite the fact that a third of our housing stock is classified as “sub-standard”, that we have elderly residents who are still forced to rely on solid fuel for heating and water, and that rents are increasing. We need to end this unfair and inefficient arrangement. I also look forward to councils being able to retain moneys raised by selling council houses, so that they can be re-invested in building new council houses in the district.
When the Opposition talk about local councils not building social housing, they might want to consider the fact that, in answers to questions in the last Parliament, the Government conceded to my right hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) that the £200 million a year collected in local council rents nationally was not even spent on housing but simply entered the general taxation coffers. Despite this, they have left us with the largest deficit in the history of this country at £156 billion.
There is a comparison to be made between the financial management of the previous Labour Government and the management of North West Leicestershire district council when it was under Labour control. During those sad 33 years of Labour control, my constituents faced an above-inflation council tax rise year in, year out.
Toby Perkins
The hon. Gentleman says that his constituents suffered under a Labour council for 33 years. If it was so terrible, why did they keep voting for it?
Andrew Bridgen
I think we needed to have a shake-up of the Conservative party in North West Leicestershire, which came in 2007. When the people of my constituency make their minds up, they make their minds up, and we had the biggest swing against Labour in those elections, as I pointed out.
Even in the year when it was thrown out of office, the Labour council increased council tax by 4.1%, and its performance was rated as weak and some way behind that of comparable councils. Three years later, the situation is somewhat better. The council is now rated adequate and is improving year on year. This has not been achieved by the Labour methods of tax and spend. As Winston Churchill said, for any society to believe that it can tax itself to prosperity is as ridiculous as a man standing in a bucket and believing he can lift himself up by pulling on the handle. The Conservative-controlled district council has introduced below-inflation increases of 2% in 2008 and 2009, and this year has introduced the sort of increase that the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) would doubtless describe as “a 0% increase”. Much to the relief of local residents, the council is improving services through prudent financial management and by trimming away the fat of previous administrations.
The east midlands and Leicestershire have fared little better under Labour on other essential public services. On policing, based on the 2009-10 budget and the 2008-09 crime survey, the east midlands region has the lowest grant relative to the number of crimes in the whole of the UK. The east midlands receives just £1,330 in grant for every crime, whereas the north-east region receives an extra £800 per crime to deal with the offences in its region. Let us consider what happens with other essential services. The combined fire service of Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland is the lowest funded per capita of any shire county fire service in England. Those and many other inequalities must be borne in mind when funding decisions are made.
I must reiterate that the fat, bloated local authorities are the ones that need to put their house in order when it comes to the inevitable cuts, which must be made this year, next year and for several years to come because of the awful financial legacy of the Labour Government. In conclusion, all I ask on local government financing is for a fair settlement for the east midlands, for Leicestershire and for my constituency of North West Leicestershire.
Mr Spencer
It was widely recognised—globally—that this country’s finances were in dire straits. Global economic markets were betting against our economy. We were saved only by the markets’ recognition that an election was coming, and that hopefully a Conservative Government would take over. We are in the fortunate position that the coalition has tackled those issues and saved this country from the enormous abyss it was facing.
The only way to deal with local government is to give power back to local government. Local people are much better placed to make local decisions. I welcome the decentralisation of local government and its management, and I sincerely hope that when we pass that power down the structure, better decisions will be made. I am very much encouraged by the thought that that will happen.
I am quite frustrated by the number of Opposition Members who have said that the leafy shire counties are all right thank you very much. Hon. Members should come and look at Nottinghamshire and at Sherwood. We have some challenges and some areas of real deprivation, such as Ollerton, Rainworth, Blidworth and Bilsthorpe right in the middle of Nottinghamshire county.
Toby Perkins
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for referring to some of those areas, many of which are former pit villages. I have played cricket in a lot of them. The hon. Gentleman fails to understand that the areas he is on about are precisely the areas that are going to suffer from the cuts that his Government are making. We are talking about rich, southern shire counties such as Surrey, not his constituency. The hon. Gentleman is arguing for cuts that will greatly affect those mining villages.
Mr Spencer
The simple fact is that those areas of Nottinghamshire face enormous challenges. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman recognises that some of the shire counties face the issues that many hon. Members claim exist only in Labour seats. We are going to have to deal with the enormous mess that the Labour Government left and tidy up some enormous problems. That will be a really big challenge, make no bones about it. Conservative Members recognise that it will be a big challenge. I do not think that Labour Members recognise what an enormous problem that is going to be.
Nottinghamshire county council was under the control of Labour for 28 years. In the last 10 years of that Labour control, the council tax doubled. That is the sort of pressure that Labour-controlled county councils put on people in the villages I mentioned—on pensioners and vulnerable people. That was a great shame. Fortunately for the people of Nottinghamshire, the Conservative party took control of Nottinghamshire county council. The increase in the council tax this year under Conservative control was 0%. I am proud of that, and the council will attempt to deliver it again next year. It is about protecting and reducing the cost imposed on pensioners and vulnerable people in those areas.
The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) mentioned Building Schools for the Future—a good example of how bureaucracy is built into policies. BSF was quite a good scheme. Two schools in my area—Dukeries college and Joseph Whittaker school—are desperate to be rebuilt. The county council had to spend £5 million to get itself to a position in which it could bid, and we have not laid a single brick. That £5 million could have been spent on improving the schools rather than jumping through the hoops that the previous Government required.
Fortunately, the county council is now able to prioritise and use the money available to it. One of the statistics that sticks in my mind is that for every £7,000 of Government spending available locally only £350 is not ring-fenced and is available for local authorities to spend in the direction that they want. That is a shocking indictment of the centralisation and control and ring-fencing that has taken away local autonomy and the ability of local people to make local decisions. Fortunately, some councils under Conservative control are able to make the most of that £350 and prioritise things such as new pavements, filling potholes and trying to recover some of the damage done by previous administrations. I very much welcome that.
The one thing that has really impacted on my constituency is the removal of the regional spatial strategy, and I am particularly grateful to the Minister for doing that straight away. It put enormous pressure on the green belt of Nottinghamshire in my constituency. I am grateful that we can now have a grown-up debate in Sherwood about where housing is to go and what sort of housing it should be. The sort of housing is just as important. In areas of my constituency we have had to build large houses where they are inappropriate. We would be better building social housing so that vulnerable people could be housed and younger people could get on the housing ladder. In other areas, pensioners who live in four or five-bedroom houses on their own would like to move but cannot because there is nothing suitable locally. I welcome the fact that we can now have a grown-up debate about what sort of housing we put into Sherwood and where. We are desperate for the correct sort of housing and for the employment that goes with it.
Before the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) left his place, he referred to Ashfield, my neighbouring constituency, and I would have welcomed his coming to look at the town. I was at a manufacturing company that falls under Ashfield district council in the town of Hucknall, called F. J. Bamkin and Son, which made socks for the Ministry of Defence for many years until the previous Government passed the contract to a far eastern supplier and, sadly, put enormous pressure on the company.
The most important thing that we can do is to remove some of the ring-fencing from the money that is passed to local government, and remove the enormous amount of bureaucracy that local authorities find in their way and the hoops that they have to jump through in order to tap into that money. Then, just maybe we can not only ensure that local people make the right decisions for their local areas, but protect the vulnerable people who were so badly let down under the previous Administration.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
When the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) suggested that we were going to get a dose of reality, I was hopeful, but, sadly, those hopes were dashed. It is ironic that on a day when the Secretary of State should have been here answering the charge of betraying local councils, he should instead—like the spectre of Tory cuts past—return to Bradford, where he would no doubt have asked for many other crimes to be taken into account. What we are seeing, of course, is simply the return to the Tory cuts from which local government suffered so badly in the 1980s.
One thing that stands out from this whole debate is the fact that the Liberal Democrats have not been involved in it. As far as I am aware, there has been only one contribution from them—from the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming)—yet the Liberal Democrats were supposed to be the party of local government. Here we are discussing 20% of the total cuts being made this year falling on the local government sector, and the Liberal Democrats are absent—absent without leave. I think it is simply scandalous that a party that prides itself on its contribution to local government should refuse even to engage in the debate.
Local government has not had a fair deal. Even in the current climate, local government has taken far more than its fair share of the cuts that have come this year. The cuts coming in future years will undoubtedly fall most substantially on the most deprived people in our communities.
Given the limitations of time, I want to focus on one particular area—the impact of the cuts on the voluntary sector. I spent the weekend at the Old Whittington and Brimington galas in Chesterfield. There were numerous examples of great community groups there. In every single case, they were worried about the funding they would receive. How can the Conservative Government possibly create the big society when the voluntary sector, which will be fundamental to it, is going to face such substantial cuts in their funding when these local government cuts go through?
What needs to be acknowledged is the vital role that local government plays in our society as the founding stone and bedrock of democracy. As to the funding cuts to area-based grants, they will specifically target the most deprived communities. What we have seen, then, is an ideological Budget and an ideological decision that specifically disadvantages the poorest people and reduces the ability of those in the more deprived communities to work their way out of poverty. It is a strategy of diminishing local government and scrapping the measures that would demonstrate the damage being done. Many of the measures the Government are currently taking will, under the cloak of reducing bureaucracy, actually reduce the accountability of local government and other public sector organisations, and reduce the ability of the public to hold those services to account. It is all part of the seizing of power by the Secretary of State under the cloak of localism.
These measures will reduce the ability of councils to provide their services. Council leaders know that when they want to provide their services they will be told they have more power, but they will not have the money to deliver the services, and neither will they have the ability to raise the money, because the Secretary of State is informing them that they cannot increase council tax. Therefore, what they will actually have is simply a choice between scrapping services, which will disadvantage the most deprived people in our community, and hiking up charges for a whole raft of services, which will mean fewer people access them.
If the Secretary of State genuinely wants to make efficiencies, then let us see a commitment to Total Place, which is the ideal way of supporting partnership working to deliver the changes to communities and of reworking spending to be more efficient. That will also engage other organisations to work with local government, so we can create a progressive society out of the situation we are in, rather than our having these savage cuts that will disadvantage the most deprived people in our communities.