Catherine McKinnell
Main Page: Catherine McKinnell (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne North)(11 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak, and for the additional time to present a deeply concerning issue for the people of Newcastle upon Tyne.
The coalition Government talk about localism and devolving power, but they are clearly trying—and they are fooling no one—to shift the blame, claiming to give power and responsibility to councils while savagely and disproportionately slashing their budgets and ability to do what they do best. That is exemplified by changes to council tax benefit, which devolve responsibility for administering the benefit while cutting funding by 10%, which is effectively 11% in Newcastle, forcing local authorities into the invidious position of having to pass that cut on to local people who are struggling with the rising cost of living. It is also exemplified by the bedroom tax that is coming, as councils will be forced to absorb that into their budget or pass it on to people who are struggling, having been hit by the Government’s economic mismanagement.
I want to focus on the disproportionate cuts imposed on local authorities such as my own, Newcastle city council. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State referred to the comparison between his local authority, Leeds, and Wokingham, but we are all familiar with the comparison often made between Newcastle upon Tyne and Wokingham. Over the period of the 2010 spending review, the Department will see a 33% cut in real terms in funding. True to form, Conservative and Lib Dem Ministers have passed those cuts on to the most deprived and vulnerable areas in the country. Those who can least afford it are shouldering the greatest reductions in funding.
As hon. Members may be aware, I have raised this with the Minister both in an Adjournment debate and yesterday in Deputy Prime Minister’s questions, because my local authority, Newcastle city council, is in a dire financial position as a result of a combination of ever increasing cost pressures and hugely disproportionate reductions in funding from the coalition Government, which has created a budgetary black hole. The city treasurer has revealed that the funding gap in Newcastle by the end of 2014-15 will not be £90 million, as originally thought. Following further announcements by the Secretary of State at the end of last year, that will increase by an additional £10 million, so the black hole will now be as large as £100 million over the next three years. Around half of this is a direct reduction in central Government grant funding, with the rest being unavoidable cost pressures that the council must absorb. Based on the Department’s own figures, the cut in Newcastle’s spending power between 2012-13 and 2014-15 will be £218 per person, compared with a national average cut of £134 per person. At the same time, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State set out, the Prime Minister’s own local authority is getting an increase in spending power of 3.1% in its local government finance settlement for 2013-14. The claim that we are all in this together would be laughable were it not such an insult to the reality that people are facing.
The most deprived areas where the needs are higher are once again being punished by this Government, willingly assisted by Liberal Democrat colleagues. Newcastle city council has produced research that reveals that the 50 worst affected councils will receive a reduction of £160 per head on average, with the 50 councils least affected receiving a cut of £16 per head. Yet the 50 most affected have, on average, a third of children living in poverty, whereas the 50 least affected have child poverty rates of 10%. It is truly shameful.
The excellent heat maps produced by Newcastle city council clearly and easily illustrate where the Government are aiming their cuts: at the most deprived northern areas and inner London boroughs. Put simply, the areas that are being hit hardest are the areas that are most in need and require the most support—the areas where more children are taken into care, the areas where fewer adults are able to fund their own social care, the areas with higher levels of statutory concessionary travel, areas with more specialist housing need and higher levels of homelessness.
When we raise the situation currently faced by Newcastle and many cities like it, Ministers are fond of touting the tired comparison between my city and the town of Wokingham. Let me continue in that vein. By 2015 Newcastle will receive funding cuts of £218 per head. In the same period Wokingham will receive cuts of just £27 per head.
Catherine McKinnell
I will gladly give way if the Minister can explain how that is fair.
Brandon Lewis
Will the hon. Lady acknowledge that her authority will have a spending power cut of just 1.1%? That is below the national average.
Catherine McKinnell
The Minister is well aware that he is talking at cross purposes with what I am setting out, which is the impact over the next three years, not in the next financial year. I hesitate in case it is out of order to say that it is very disingenuous for the Government to present these figures in a way that does not match up—
Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. Lady should not attribute an unworthy motive to the Minister. Therefore I feel sure that through her dextrous use of language she can find another word to make her point.
Catherine McKinnell
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for keeping me in order. There is clearly a difference of opinion about the impact of the cut and the period we are talking about.
Yes, Newcastle still has spending power per household of £2,522, which is over £700 more than the £1,814 per household in Wokingham, but Newcastle is more deprived and has higher needs. Newcastle has 550 looked-after children, compared with 70 in Wokingham. That is 101 looked-after children per 10,000 children in Newcastle and 20 per 10,000 in Wokingham. Newcastle has nine times the cost of statutory concessionary travel owing to high numbers of poorer pensioners travelling in the city, and Newcastle has fewer people able to fund their own social care, greater homelessness needs, higher council tax support needs and a lower council tax base.
I am sure many of my hon. Friends have already highlighted similar differences between the settlement in their authority and those in other—predominantly Conservative—local authorities, which are not seeing the same level of spending cuts. Local authorities are having to slash front-line jobs and close Sure Start centres, libraries and many other vital services as a result of these unfair and disproportionate cuts.
I must return to a point I raised with the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday regarding some Liberal Democrats in Newcastle who are campaigning against the impact of the cuts. Once again, I would extend a welcome to any Liberal Democrat MPs who want to join us in the Lobby tonight and vote against this unfair settlement. Otherwise, they have no place campaigning against the impact that will result if it goes through.
Mr Stuart
My hon. Friend is right. The Opposition have made it absolutely clear that they wish to maintain the unfairness that impacts on the services provided to his constituents day in, day out. That is their message. Further to that, every single Opposition Member who says that they do not want this level of reduction in the overall amount spent on local government is calling for that money to come from cuts to the NHS. That is the truth. The Labour party has made it clear that it will not protect the NHS. It is only the Government who are committed to doing so and Labour Members, in every impassioned speech they make, are calling for reductions in spending on the NHS—real-terms cuts in health—so that councillors’ pensions can be protected alongside services.
Catherine McKinnell
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Some of the cuts that are being driven through in many of our cities will increase NHS costs because of the lack of support for vulnerable children and elderly people. The general lack of public services will ultimately be detrimental to people’s health.
Mr Stuart
I cannot help noticing that the hon. Lady absolutely refuses to rule out cutting the NHS, because that is her party’s policy. Most parties that go into opposition split—they start to divide. The unity of Labour in its commitment to cutting the NHS is, from the point of view of party loyalty, admirable. The hon. Lady, like other Opposition Members, has made it clear that the NHS can pay so that local government will not have to be asked to be more efficient and make savings.
Rural areas have long been poorly funded compared with urban areas, and they start from a significantly lower base. Talking about cash reductions in areas that receive much higher amounts of money does not give a fair and balanced picture. I agree that we should see the argument from all sides with regard not only to cash reductions, but to percentage cuts. The hon. Lady heard the Minister say that the percentage cut in Newcastle, which has a vastly greater budget than rural and deprived areas of the East Riding, is experiencing lower levels of reduction. To make out that it is the opposite and that this is an unparalleled assault on cities such as Newcastle misrepresents the settlement.
As I have said, the costs of delivery in sparsely populated areas are often higher than those in urban areas and, overall, rural residents earn less on average than people in urban areas. Labour Members have made out that everybody in an urban area is in the most terrible, deprived state, but most people in the cities are not and lots of people who live there earn more. They have higher average earnings than those in rural areas. Council tax in rural areas, where incomes are lower, is £75 a head higher. If we apply that across the household, we will see that the spending power in rural areas is lower. I sympathise with Labour Members on the closure of cultural centres in their areas, but my area does not have any because we do not have the money—the distribution is not fair.
Fair-minded people should recognise that reality. For too long, strident, sectarian interests have been allowed to dominate the debate. I call on Ministers to do more to understand the real costs of delivery across different service areas and make sure that we have a more informed debate than the political mud-slinging of those who represent urban areas as being entirely deprived. I do not want to be guilty of that in a rural sense.
The Department’s consultation in summer 2012 promised some improvement, but 75% of it was damped away. Since then, in meetings with the Minister, who, as I have said, has been most generous with his time, we have tried again and again—it is interesting to see Department officials present—to get the numbers so that we can all agree on them. I have brought along with me, especially for the Minister—I will hand it to him—the official governmental criteria of classification of councils, because Ministers have told me that they are not sure precisely how it works. Will the Minister who winds up the debate tell us what is happening to rural areas? I know this is not how money is allocated, but will the Department please do the assessment, if it has not done so already, of where the money is going to councils?
The official criteria of classification were agreed across Government in 2009. The document defines areas as rural-80, local authorities, rural-50, significant rural, major urban local authorities, large urban and other urban. Does it say that it is impossible to classify them? It does not—it is not true. It has been done by Government and the least that Ministers owe us is to tell us how those numbers work out across those particular designations.
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
I do not know how the Government and Government Members can justify what they are doing to local government finances. It is rare that I agree with a Tory, but I absolutely agree with the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), who is no longer in his place, who said that those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt—perhaps that is why he is no longer in post. That attitude is apparent in the cuts to local government spending—cuts that disproportionately affect the poorest communities.
Newcastle city council research shows that Bolton, the 36th most deprived borough, will receive a cut of £178.26 per head over the four years, while Epsom and Ewell will lose £15.18 per ahead. It is not fair and it is not right. Why did the Secretary of State sign up for the biggest hit across Whitehall? Why did he sign up to £5.6 billion of cuts to local authority spending—a higher percentage than other Departments? If it is to pay down the deficit and debt, well it is clearly not working, because both are increasing because of those savage cuts. [Hon. Members: “No they’re not!”] The poor are paying the price of an economic crisis not of their making.
Julie Hilling
The deficit is going up too.
The Government will not even take responsibility for these cuts, because they simply try to pass on the responsibility to hard-working councillors up and down the country. They are masters of the politics of passing the buck. They try to say that it is the fault of Wigan and Bolton that services are reduced, that libraries are closing and that youth workers are being made redundant. How dare they? They like to paint a picture of profligate local authorities wasting taxpayers’ money, but that is not true of the councils in my constituency.
One of the senior officers in Bolton told me that he had worked in local government for 24 years and never known a year in which the council had not had to make savings of £3 million or £4 million from the main budget area. However, he went on to tell me that he had never seen anything like what is happening now. Bolton has already had to find cuts of £60 million to its budget since the election, and it will now have to find an extra £43 million over the next two years, out of a controllable budget of £178 million. Of course services will be affected; it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise.
The Secretary of State has told us all to go and challenge our local authorities on the cuts, so I did. I took his list of 50 ways to save, and asked people on my council what they were going to do about it. Their response was illuminating. They asked me what on earth I thought they had been doing over the years. They also said that most of the changes would save only pennies, in comparison with the £43 million savings that they needed to find. As Members would expect, however, I did not accept that. I went through every one of the 50 suggestions with them. They said that they already share back-office services and, where possible, procurement and IT. They pointed out, however, that those things could not be achieved overnight because contracts came up for renewal at different times in neighbouring local authorities. They control spending, they have transparency and they take cheats to court. Their reserves are already committed. The Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation was set up 30 years ago to enable combined procurement. They collect 99% of the council tax due, which is a great achievement in the 36 most deprived areas.