Baroness Primarolo
Main Page: Baroness Primarolo (Labour - Life peer)
Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
We have had the benefit of a full day’s debate and, by goodness, we needed it to draw out from Members on the Government Benches the full colour of their rhetoric.
Let me pay tribute to the two maiden speeches made today by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal), who, with great elegance and lightness of touch, paid tribute to both his Sikh heritage and his predecessor, and by the hon. Member for Dudley South (Chris Kelly), who also praised his predecessor.
May I thank all Labour Members, who have contributed so strongly? My hon. Friends the Members for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) and for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) spoke about the shambolic way in which the Government have dealt with the programme of cuts, and my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish also talked about the holistic nature of agencies in local government. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who chairs the Communities and Local Government Committee, gave a forensic dissection of the drift and incoherence of Government policy on social housing, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) rightly picked up on the human aspects of all this.
Other good speeches came from my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), who talked about how unfair the cuts are, from my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), who talked about the impact on the future jobs fund in her constituency, and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), who reminded us in his powerful speech that it is the people who sweep our streets, who teach and who look after our elderly who are most affected. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) made the point, which Members on the Government Benches would do well to listen to, that we did fix the roof while the sun was shining.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) talked about the Conservative party as modern-day Leninists. I wonder whether the Secretary of State, as a modern-day Stalinist, would agree with that. My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) talked about the impact on the voluntary sector and the big society, and, finally, we had a bravura performance involving Daleks and, again, the Secretary of State, from my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson).
Those speeches, and the examples that hon. Members have given, have shown that the impact of the cuts is being felt already. As the Financial Times survey of 22 June showed, Connexions Positive Activities for Young People and free school meals are highly visible services that will be cut the most. The Chairman of the Select Committee also pointed that out. Just as there was nothing in the Government’s Budget for younger people, so there is nothing for younger people in these cuts. The Government are removing subsidies from the six-month offer and they are ending the second tranche of the future jobs fund. All that means 40,000 to 80,000 youth jobs going.
Those decisions are not based on evidence. The editor of the Local Government Chronicle has said that in this short-term world—the short-term world that Members on the Government Benches inhabit—it is judgment and ideology that are key to decision making. As I used to be told at school, it is like the old speaker’s notes, “Argument weak here, shout like mad,” for those on the Government side.
Analysis of the future jobs fund shows that there was significant improvement in relation to the 12% figure up to the end of January 2010. As the leader of Barnsley council said, the Government have scrapped the scheme when it was just getting going. The future jobs fund worked towards success and breaking a vicious cycle.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), in his excellent speech, talked about the way in which the Government have ignored Total Place and the way in which free schools, elected police officers and NHS commissioning are all part of pushing towards silo government. The Government are taking up positions based on departmental silos to avoid taking collective action across departments. What about their new policy proposals? Where will the equity be in schemes that will cream off significant amounts of money? What will the position be for students with special educational needs, for example, in the new free schools? Total Place shows what can be done, but, unfortunately, the Government parties seem to have a completely confused approach to it. The danger is that their shambolic representation of this issue will entrench inefficiencies as those silos and the salami-slicing of budgets set in.
What do the Government expect to fill the vacuum? The voluntary sector and the big society. Although the coalition expects third sector bodies to play a key role, the cuts that have been announced will be a triple whammy for them. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden), councils will cut the sums that third sector bodies currently receive. The resulting financial pressure will restrict the capacity of those organisations at the very time when they are expected to take on a greater role—another point made by many Opposition Members.
In what environment will those third sector organisations that are expected to fill the void be expected to operate? Will they be able to secure proper service level agreements and guarantees, given that councils will be under significant funding pressures throughout the current Parliament? What will be in it for them, and will they even be able to perform that rescue job when their capacity has been hit in the ways that I have described? No wonder so many of those bodies and their representatives—the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the chairman of the Charity Commission and the chief executive of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations—are criticising what the Government are doing. As Stephen Bubb has said, “If politicians in government would only recognise that there is a cost to volunteering, and that charities and other third sector organisations can’t simply expand their volunteering to fill the gaps.”
Many charities rely on public money to function, and funding from central and local government now accounts for 36% of charities’ incomes. Apparently, the Secretary of State warned Tory councillors last Friday that they might experience cuts of between 30% and 40% during the current Parliament. No wonder—again—that third sector bodies such as Age UK, and outside experts such as the King’s Fund, say that the Government’s actions will leave councils with almost no money with which to support people in their own homes.
What about George Osborne’s other great white hope—[Interruption.] What about the Chancellor—for now—and his great white hope, the private sector? As Opposition Members have pointed out quite straightforwardly, no account has been taken of the existing dependence on public contracts. No attempt has been made to squeeze out or drop out. Many refuse contracts are already outsourced; how will those contractors cope with Comrade Pickles’s latest diktat about weekly refuse collections? [Interruption.] I refer to the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State.
The cuts faced by local government are part of a continuum: savage public sector cuts that will have a devastating effect on local economies. They should not be viewed merely within the framework of job losses in town halls or recruitment freezes. The ability of councils to boost economic development in deprived areas has been taken away, and those in the poorest communities will suffer most. Reports from the Greater Manchester business leadership council have already shown that public sector job cuts can push retailers into relocating from towns and cities with high public sector employment.
These Budget measures will lead to 725,000 job losses up to 2015. What structural abilities will be available to sort this out, given that the Government are leaving the regional development agencies in limbo and there are no successors around? The Government need to be wary of the dangers of a squeeze on public pay. With a work force demonised and demoralised by them, where will it lead us?
Given the way in which these cuts have been made, I want to make a final point about the financial structure. [Interruption.] If the Secretary of State had been here for most of the debate, we might have taken a little more notice of what he has had to say. What I want to say is that this huge leap in the dark—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Will Members contain themselves just a bit as we approach the end of the debate so that we can hear all the contributions, as opposed to all the private conversations that are taking place?
Mr Marsden
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
This huge leap in the dark is based on the market fetishism and sado-monetarism that are practised by so many Members on the Government Benches. The Office for Budget Responsibility has shown that the Budget of my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) was prudent in its estimate of the budgetary outlook.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. Mr Blunkett, the Minister is declining to give way at this point, and he says that he will give way later on.
Andrew Stunell
I shall give way in a moment, when the right hon. Gentleman has listened to this statistic. [Hon. Members: “Oh!”] Well, a few facts would not go amiss in this debate. In 1998, 4.6% of local government expenditure was ring-fenced. The previous Government put it up to 14%, and we are getting it down to 7.7%. That will give councils the freedom and flexibility that they need to concentrate on local priorities and to protect the front line.