Local Government Finance

Debate between Graham Stuart and Stephen Williams

Tuesday 10th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Williams]

That would indeed seem rather odd on the face of it, but we are talking about the settlement now, not making projections about the future. What happens in future will be a matter for the next Government, in whatever configuration they are, and we will have to see where we are at that point.

Several hon. Members talked about additional resources for rural authorities. We recognise the challenges that those authorities may face in delivering services to their communities. My right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole and my hon. Friends the Members for Beverley and Holderness and for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) made a powerful case. We have listened, and that is why, for the ongoing settlement, we are adding £15.5 million for the most sparsely populated rural areas. My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said that poverty is found in rural areas as well as in urban areas. Indeed, the only area of the country that still has objective 1 funding from the European Union is Cornwall—not one of our big cities.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments about rural areas. Labour Members have not said anything about unemployment. In the shadow Minister’s constituency, there has been a drop in unemployment of more than 60%. In Liverpool, Riverside, the figure is more than 45%. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) said, long-term unemployment is also down in his patch. That is the reality that underlies this debate. That is what the Government are doing, though Labour Members said that there would be 1 million more unemployed. We have had to fix the mess that the previous Government left behind.

[Stephen Williams]

That is absolutely right. Contrary to the predictions made by the shadow Chancellor, in particular, that unemployment would sail to over 3 million and we would have disorder in the streets, it has in fact fallen dramatically, certainly in my constituency of Bristol West, where it is dramatically down on the 2010 figures.

We are providing an additional £74 million to support upper-tier authorities to help them to respond to local welfare needs and to improve social care provision. We have deliberately shifted the emphasis from keeping councils dependent on grant to providing them with the tools they need to grow and shape their local economies. For Britain to prosper, every part of the country needs to fulfil its potential. That will not happen if councils remain entirely dependent on Whitehall. We have set up a system that rewards councils that go for growth: those that are supporting businesses, attracting investment, and helping to create jobs. Councils that are open to new business will see the benefits of that growth through a retention of their business rates. Those that support new house building are rewarded through the new homes bonus. Many councils, of all parties, agree that these measures are having a positive impact on their ability to deliver better outcomes in their areas.

That is not all. Contrary to the impression that we are somehow drawing the heart out of local communities through this funding settlement, we have to see it in the context of resources that have been given to local areas. For instance, £12 billon is being given to local enterprise partnerships in England to spend on local economic priorities. Those growth deals will help to train young people, create thousands of new jobs, build thousands of new homes and start hundreds of infrastructure projects. We will have had six rounds of the regional growth fund, spending £2 billion helping innovative businesses to grow, and through the £90 million coastal communities fund, which also helps rural authorities, we are investing in jobs and growth in our coastal towns.

As well as growing their economies, the best authorities are transforming the way they do business. We are supporting them as they do so, achieving real savings and, importantly, improving outcomes for the people who use local services.

In November, we announced the latest round of successful bids to the transformation challenge award. We will provide about £90 million to support 73 projects that will improve services and ultimately save the public sector more than £900 million. Councils must demonstrate a readiness to learn from each other and from projects proven to develop change elsewhere.

We are committed to helping local places deliver more integrated local public services that improve outcomes for everyone. A good example of that is the better care fund in relation to health and social care. Initially we had hoped that £3 billion would be pooled locally, but we were pleased to see the figure increased to £5 billion. Several Members said that that was double counting, but that £5 billion, spent by the NHS and local government, is overseen by health and wellbeing boards, with local councillors taking the lead in shaping integration between social care and the national health service.

There can be no doubt that councils are rising to the challenge. Every council has issued a balanced budget this year. The majority of residents remain satisfied with the way their council runs things, which is testament to the great skill that authorities have shown; I pay tribute to them for all their efforts. Councils continue to have significant spending powers—as I have said, they have more than £112 billion this year—but they must satisfy local taxpayers that they are using every pound of their money to best effect to deliver efficient public services.

Finally, to rise to the challenge put down by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston, I think that all three main parties in England are moving at different paces. My party probably got there first, in coalition, and our coalition colleagues have also embraced localism and regional growth. We see a strong future for local government—with cities driving their local economies and counties having the opportunity to do so, too—with more powers, more responsibility and an end to the situation where England is the most centralised state in Europe.

Question put.

Local Government Finance

Debate between Graham Stuart and Stephen Williams

Wednesday 12th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Williams]

Many Members have contrasted the spending power of cities with that of southern authorities. However, it is absolutely clear that the spending power of authorities such as Newcastle is far in excess of that of many other authorities with similar responsibilities but entirely different demographics. It is completely wrong to say that unfairness is built into the system, given that the top 10% of the most deprived authorities in the country are the authorities with the most power to spend on their citizens.

As has been acknowledged during the debate, we are moving to an entirely new system of local government finance. I accept that there is more to be done and that there is a need for reform in the system, but I am sure that that reform will come when the economy has fully recovered.

Reference has been made to the amounts that are raised through council tax, and the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), was criticised for his “language of begging bowl”. As someone who, when I was a council opposition leader in Bristol, went on deputations to local government Ministers in both the other parties, let me put it this way: local government had a supplicant relationship with central Government, and that is what this Government are trying to change. We are putting more incentives in the system for local authorities to build more houses. The business rates retention will encourage local economic growth: for the first time, local authorities will retain more of the benefit from economic growth in their own areas rather than handing 100% of it to the people in the Treasury, so that they can decide how much should be distributed around the country according to their own formulas and principles.

Another of the new incentives is the new homes bonus. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Kris Hopkins), will be pleased that his authority in Bradford is to receive £2 million in new homes bonus. Leeds will receive £3 million in new homes bonus, and my city of Bristol will receive £2.2 million.

The other major criticism that we have heard today is that some parts of the country have lost out at the expense of others, either as a result of this settlement or over a long period. However, the settlement represents a fair deal for every part of the country—north and south, district and county, city and shire. As I said a few moments ago to the Chairman of the Select Committee, councils have an average spending power of £2,089 per household, and the average spending power reduction will be just 2.9% in the forthcoming year. Moreover, protection is built into the system for the most deprived areas of the country, which are the most dependent on grant.

We have also recognised that services are sometimes more difficult and expensive to deliver in rural areas. Many Members, particularly those on the Government Benches, recognised the real difficulty that rural authorities experience in delivering services to their constituents. I certainly recognise that poverty is found in all parts of the country. It is not necessarily concentrated only in city-centre constituencies such as mine; it is found in Barnstaple, in St Austell, and in many other rural and sparsely populated parts of the country. That is why we have already set aside £9.5 million—£1 million more than last year—to help the authorities in the most sparsely populated rural areas.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey)—there were many Devonian speakers in the debate—for saying that we ought to go a little further. In fact, today we have announced a significant amount of extra money: £2 million. That means an extra £44,000 for North Devon district council. My hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) said that the average per authority was £30,000, but Cornwall’s unitary authority will have just over half a million pounds extra.

Local authorities need to protect taxpayers by keeping their council tax down. For many of our constituents, the council tax bill represents a huge part of their monthly outgoings. In many cases, it is much more significant than other utility bills, so to denigrate the Government’s policy of encouraging local authorities to freeze council tax is to miss a major point of what the Opposition call the cost of living crisis. If they do not recognise that council tax is part of the cost of living pressure that all our constituents face, they are living in another world.

It is no surprise to find that Labour Members live in another world. Under the previous Government, council tax more than doubled, pushing a typical bill up to £120 a month for hard-working people and pensioners. This Government, however, have done everything possible to protect families from further increases. Over the past three years, council tax bills have been cut by 10% in real terms across England, and we are encouraging local authorities to continue to freeze their council tax. We will further incentivise them to do that not only by offering them a grant but by putting that grant into the baseline so that they can have certainty for future years.

Already, 137 local authorities have confirmed that they intend to reduce or freeze their council tax bills, including—as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) pointed out—almost all the Liberal Democrat local authorities. They include the local authorities led by directly elected mayors in Watford and Bedford, and the Liberal Democrats in my own city of Bristol want our city’s mayor to follow their example.

The referendum principle has been mentioned by many speakers today. The hon. Member for Sheffield South East criticised the Government for taking time to announce what the referendum threshold should be. We confirmed on 5 February that it will remain at 2%, which was the assumption that the local authorities were working on when planning their budgets. The hon. Gentleman was around during the last Parliament, and I must gently remind him that the previous Government frequently capped local authority council tax increases without announcing the cap until March, after the local authorities had set their budgets and started to prepare the bills to pop through people’s letter boxes. We have certainly improved on that situation.

There are many things that local authorities can do to balance their books in an efficient way. The Government are encouraging such efficiencies, and there is still plenty of scope. For instance, the Liberal Democrat council in Kingston-upon-Thames is investing in a combined heat and power system that will benefit its council buildings and private sector buildings, saving money and carbon at the same time. Cambridge council is protecting and enhancing local shops, which is good for local residents, good for tourists and good for local economic growth. The process is now being incentivised by the retention of business rates.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Further to the speech that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) made earlier, will the Minister confirm or deny that the Liberal Democrats stood in the way of a fairer deal for rural areas?

[Stephen Williams]

I am not privy to every conversation that takes place, as my hon. Friend knows. I can assure him, however, that possibly the most powerful person in the Government with his hands on the purse strings from our side of the coalition, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is most certainly a friend of rural areas. He has pushed for the freeze in fuel duty, which is another example of the Government listening to the cries for help from rural communities. There is a danger, in these debates, that we see matters purely in the context of the silo of our own Department. I agree entirely with the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears)—the former Secretary of State for this Department—that it is a mistake for Governments to do that, and we have not done it. Across the piece, we are doing our bit to help rural areas, including through freezing fuel duty. Had Labour’s plans been put into effect, rural motoring would have cost much more.

There is more that local government can do to hold down costs. An example can be seen in the tri-borough initiative in west London, involving Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster councils. The leader of Kensington and Chelsea council told me recently that the initiative was on track to save £40 million by combining back office and management services.

In conclusion, this coalition Government are all about building a stronger economy and a fairer society in order to help people to get on in life by giving them more power to decide what happens in their community and supporting their local area in ways that will allow their community to thrive and prosper. There is no doubt that some difficult decisions have had to be made about public finances, and councils cannot be exempted from that process. But councils have taken important steps towards modernising and transforming their services, and I certainly pay tribute, on behalf of all of my colleagues, to the efforts that many councils have made to live within their difficult budgets. I also think we must all acknowledge that more could be done to reduce the costs of delivering their services while keeping council tax down, and I have every confidence that they will rise to the challenge.

Fuel Prices and the Cost of Living

Debate between Graham Stuart and Stephen Williams

Wednesday 16th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)]

First, I want to strike a note of empathy with people both in my constituency and around the country who are struggling with the spike in prices that we have all witnessed in recent months—and, indeed, the last couple of years. This morning, I asked those in my office to check the petrol prices at the garage nearest to my home in St Andrews in Bristol: the Texaco garage on Gloucester road. For the first time, prices in Bristol have risen above 140p. One of the most popular places to fill up in the city is Tesco in Eastville; my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), will be familiar with it. Prices there are now 136.9p. Everywhere in the city of Bristol, prices are now above 130p, yet only a couple of years ago I remember being surprised when prices went through the £1 barrier.

In cities, there is competition: there is competition on the forecourts, and there are also alternatives on public transport. Many rural constituencies, such as those in the south-west, mid-Wales or, indeed, Scotland, cannot benefit from that price competition, however. My hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) was present for the earlier part of the debate, but has had to leave to attend a Scottish Affairs Committee meeting. He told me that on the island of Colonsay in his constituency, the price of diesel is 163.3p, a full 23p higher than the price in my constituency.

We face a fourfold political challenge. We have to decide how to respond to the pressure on household budgets, how to make that response against a background of having to maintain the taxes and duties necessary to tackle the appalling fiscal legacy left us by the last Government, and how to continue to incentivise a switch to a lower-emissions and lower-carbon economy. Finally, we must consider the background of international factors, such as movements in the oil price and in exchange rates, which are effectively beyond our control. We have to respond to those factors and political challenges responsibly, not in the blatantly opportunist way set out in this motion.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

My constituents, like those in many rural areas, are not just suffering from the price of fuel at the pump. As they do not have gas at home but oil-fired central heating, the price of which has increased too, there is a double whammy of cost. There is therefore a strong moral case for making sure that the Government find ways to help the most vulnerable people in rural areas, despite the appalling legacy left, as my hon. Friend rightly says, by the Labour party.

[Stephen Williams]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about the price of heating oil, which many households in rural communities have no choice but to use.

The first challenge is how to respond to the pressures on household budgets that I was describing. The coalition Government have said that their priority is to ensure that as we make difficult decisions, the poorest and most vulnerable households are protected. We have already made progress on reducing income tax for the lowest-paid, and I look forward to further progress being made in the Budget. We have a triple lock in place for pensioner households and we are going to introduce work incentives in order to tackle worklessness, which is the major cause of poverty in our country.

However, we also have to tackle the deficit. We have been waiting 10 months for a specific proposal from the Labour Opposition on tax, and this motion is the first detailed one that we have received. The critique that we have heard repeatedly from them is that they want fewer cuts in public expenditure and more emphasis on raising tax, yet their first detailed proposal is for a reduction in tax. In effect, this is another uncosted spending pledge. The hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), who led for the Opposition, rightly said that the increase in VAT represents about 3p on the pump price that we all have to pay. We know that each penny of that pump price raises about £500 million for the Exchequer, so the motion is proposing a £1.5 billion spending pledge. However, the Opposition cannot tell us, other than in an allusion in the motion to the banking levy, how on earth they are going to find that £1.5 billion. As has been said, they are in effect proposing a new VAT rate of 17.5%, but they know that under international law, they cannot do that.

This duty as a whole raises about £30 billion as a contribution to reducing the deficit, and it makes up about 62% of the pump price. That is a considerably lower proportion than a decade ago, when the share of the pump price represented by taxes was in excess of 80%. I well remember, when I was on the Opposition Benches and the Labour party was in government, that the person who is now leading the Labour party had much promise when he became Energy Secretary. He certainly talked a good talk in that post, although he was perhaps making up for the rather “brown” years of the Labour Government. Now that he is in opposition, we find that his words were hollow and he has moved on to opportunist ground.

We need to move to a transport system that is more sustainable, with more efficient engines, a different mix of fuels, and electric cars, as proposed in the coalition agreement. As our dependency on hydrocarbons declines, we also need to move to a completely new fiscal model for taxing the use of road space, because road fuel duty and vehicle excise duty are a blunt fiscal instrument.