Bob Blackman
Main Page: Bob Blackman (Conservative - Harrow East)(13 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Alex Cunningham
We accepted that there would be the cuts outlined by my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint). However, we believe that cuts must be fair, and that cuts as deep and as fast as those proposed by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats must be questioned.
I hope to secure a Westminster Hall debate in the new year about the impact of cuts on the voluntary sector, 32% of which relies on local authority funding. I know that many excellent third-sector organisations fear that the cuts will severely limit their work. Stockton is trying hard to protect our third sector, but will face real challenges. I should be interested to know how cutting funds for those organisations will do anything to further the big society programme on which the Prime Minister is so keen. The third sector is the big society in action, and exposing those groups to possible cuts seems incoherent given the emphasis on big society and localism.
Of course, we must not consider local authority cuts in isolation. PricewaterhouseCoopers forecasts that for every job lost in the public sector, another will be lost in the private sector. That means 1 million lost jobs. One industry that we know relies heavily on the public sector is the building industry, which has already lost out in Teesside as a result of the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme, as well as the scrapping of the new hospital to serve the North Tees and Hartlepool area. Spending by local authorities boosts the economy, and there is no doubt that the cuts will indirectly make life difficult for many local businesses.
Alex Cunningham
No, I will not.
Let me finally say something about the Cleveland fire service, which is critical to the safety of people in the area that I represent. I am told by the Fire Brigades Union that 68% of Cleveland’s funding comes from a central Government grant. Given that that grant is set to fall by 25%, the chief fire officer is seriously concerned about the possibility that lives will be put at risk by the cuts. The seriousness of the situation is exacerbated by the fact that our local area has large numbers of high-risk COMAH— control of major accident hazards—sites owing to chemical and other manufacturing in the area. The Minister responsible for the fire service has already refused my request for him to visit Teesside and see the problem for himself. I have written asking him to meet local MPs across the political spectrum, as well as representatives from Cleveland fire authority, to discuss the issue here in Westminster, and I hope that I shall receive a positive response.
These cuts place our communities at real risk, and I hope that the Government will think again.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
It is an honour to follow such a thoughtful speech as that made by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). Before I came to the House, I spent some 24 years in local government—20 years as leader of my group, 10 years setting budgets and 10 years proposing opposition budgets. Throughout that time, I gained a great insight into how local government finance works and has worked over many years under different Administrations.
We should remember that in that context, local authorities have, over the past three years, faced 3.5% reductions, or efficiency savings, forced on them by the then Labour Government. In London, some 23 of the 32 local authorities have been on the floor of the settlements. For the past three years, therefore, they have always had below-inflation increases. If education is stripped from those budgets, they show a real-terms reduction in funding in London over the past three years. Pretensions that local government saw its halcyon days under the Labour Government are, I am afraid, completely false. We need to put them properly in their place.
We must also consider the proposals made by the Labour Government at the time and what local authorities anticipated if Labour had won the general election. We know that they would have halved capital expenditure, and this Government are preserving capital expenditure and ensuring that there is investment for our future. That is critical for the whole ambit of local authorities and all public sector authorities.
We also must consider what local authorities now have to administer. The budget for which I was responsible in the London borough of Brent was some £1 billion, but we only had discretion over £250,000 of it. The rest was passed from central Government to the local services without any interference or control by the local authority whatsoever. We need to recognise those changes.
Graham Jones
Is that not precisely what is happening when the Government announce that they are ring-fencing education funding? Is that not just a repeat of what the hon. Gentleman has just described?
Bob Blackman
Clearly, the Government are removing artificial ring-fencing from local government expenditures. Local authorities up and down the country rightly complain about having been given money in very tightly constricted salvos that could be spent only on particular services in particular ways. Often, they could not spend it within the given time frame and so would lose it. That is ridiculous.
We need to look at how money can be saved. There is multiple handling of cases in local authorities. I know of social services cases in which the application for disabled facilities grants has gone through 17 pairs of hands before being approved. What nonsense. We have to streamline systems to ensure that, at most, one person reviews a case and another checks that it is correct. Applications should not go through 17 people.
We should have computer systems that capture data once. People who apply to a local authority for particular services frequently have to fill out a multitude of forms and the relevant information then has to be entered many times by various people in different areas.
Bob Blackman
No I am not. I am saying that when the weakest and most vulnerable people in society are asked to give information to local or national authorities, we can enter the data once, administer the benefits they are entitled to and make sure they get the proper benefits, rather than having the multiplicity of systems that grew up under the Labour Government.
We spend more than £1 billion on administering housing benefit, but why does every authority need a separate back-office organisation for that? Those contracts are administered by a small number of suppliers, so why not combine them, strip out some of the administrative overheads and remove duplication?
Heather Wheeler
We have done exactly that in South Derbyshire. We have got into a grouping with Northgate and we will be the east midlands hub, so if hon. Members want to save money and pay us to do their housing benefit, we will do it for them.
Bob Blackman
I thank my hon. Friend for taking this opportunity to advertise the hub that she is involved in.
Clearly, we need smarter procurement in local government. It almost makes me spit when tenders for local government services come back with visibly inflated prices because they are for public, rather than private, services. Many of the tenders for public services that come back would not be accepted by any private service. We need to examine that carefully.
We also need to create an environment in which there is greater opportunity for mutualisation. One thing I did in local government was to create a local authority mutual insurance operation for London. It would have saved my authority and every authority that joined it £1 million a year, but it was deemed to be illegal so we could not operate it. I ask Government Front Benchers to change the position so that local authorities can come together to save money for local residents and also provide much better services.
We should consider what unused assets local authorities have. An awful lot of land could be sold in appropriate ways and the money could be used for appropriate reinvestment in the local area. We also need to consider local authority balances. Some authorities have sums of money sitting totally unused instead of benefiting the public, whereas other authorities have very small balances and will find the reductions much more painful. Many authorities need to examine their conscience and use those resources to benefit local people.
Everyone knew that the cuts were coming. Everyone knew that there needed to be a plan. In the authority on which I served before I came to the House, we had a plan to reduce our expenditure by £100 million over four years—that is, £25 million or 10% a year. If we could do it without a huge impact on public services, I do not believe there is any authority in the country that could not do it.
Bob Blackman
No, I shall not give way as I do not have much time. [Interruption.] No. I have been given the extra time already.
The borough that I have the privilege of representing now also has a plan to save some 10% of its expenditure per year, and the plan is ready to go, depending on the settlement. Clearly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) mentioned, there are wide disparities in the formula grant that authorities are given. That is the key issue that the Government must address to make the system fairer, more transparent and more open, so that we can all examine it and make sure that the right resources are going to the right authorities.