Disadvantaged Communities

Bobby Dean Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger.

I think we would all agree that it is a basic human right to have a decent place to call home, a neighbourhood where one feels safe, an opportunity to earn a decent living, access to healthcare and a clean environment. If people have those things, they can thrive and, together, form communities that then flourish. If we empower people to take decisions locally, those communities will make choices that lift up the people in them and protect their local environment.

However, under the last Government, it was made harder for communities to take those decisions. Their resources were slashed and they were forced to compete with each other, with towns set against each another in bidding wars through short-term, race-to-the-bottom policies. The Liberal Democrats are disappointed that the Labour Government plan to take decisions away from communities, using the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to remove local authorities’ power to have a say in planning. We are worried about how proposals for local government reorganisation may move decisions on local services further away from people and their neighbourhoods.

The proposal to provide three-year settlements for councils is reassuring, but only if the funding covers the true cost of providing the services people need—not knowing three years out that the council will be forced to reduce its services is not helpful. Although the 2025-26 settlement offered some additional funding, in many councils—particularly those with high levels of social care spending—the Labour Government’s jobs tax, which increased employers’ national insurance contributions, was not fully reimbursed. The same was true of the packages for fire authorities, and the issue was particularly problematic where high levels of on-call firefighters were on the payroll, meaning that those authorities were seriously disadvantaged.

Turning to the mission-critical neighbourhoods, it is absolutely right that there is a Labour focus—sorry, a laser focus, although I appreciate that there is a Labour focus—on lifting them up and drawing them into every part of society, not just to improve people’s lives, but because if those places are economically active, healthy and safe, the rest of us benefit too.

I want to focus on two main issues for communities: housing and transport. We all know that, for years, people around the country—and not just in those neighbourhoods—have given up. They have given up on the chance of owning a home or of even renting a decent place to call home. They have given up on the opportunity to bring up children and have a meaningful career.

In many rural areas, which may not make up the most deprived areas, there are pockets of extreme poverty that are completely forgotten. There are farmers whose children underperform in schools and are loaned their school uniforms; they live in homes that have not been updated for 60 years.

[Bobby Dean (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

My hon. Friend talked about communities being overlooked because they are contained within wealthier communities. My constituency is in the outer London borough of Sutton, which, by London standards, is on the wealthier end. We have two distinct communities in St Helier and Roundshaw, and those estates absolutely need more support, but they consistently get overlooked because of the way that local government funding works. First, it is on a borough-wide basis, so when the deprivation scores are added up, they are not entitled to much. Secondly, the indices used are extremely outdated and fail to take account of the true cost of housing.

Housing prices in London and the south-east have skyrocketed over the last 10 years, and the indices do not take that into account, which means the average Londoner is now worse off than the average person in many other regions of the country, once we take housing costs into account. Does my hon. Friend agree that whatever reforms we make to better target resources at disadvantaged communities, we must ensure that local government funding formulas take housing costs properly into account?