Helen Jones
Main Page: Helen Jones (Labour - Warrington North)Local Government Finance Bill
Helen Jones Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
As the Minister said, many of the amendments in this group are technical. I do not wish to take up too much time on them—[Interruption.] That is the Minister’s job, not mine. If his Whips want him to talk for longer, that is his problem. There are a number of issues I want to raise in relation to one or two amendments.
We do not have a problem with Lords amendment 1 or the subsequent amendments dealing with discretionary rate relief in enterprise zones, or with Lords amendment 2, which implements a recommendation by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. We support that, as we did in the other place.
The group of amendments beginning with Lords amendment 19, however, which deals with administration of the rate-retention system, raises a couple of questions on which I would appreciate clarification from the Minister. Billing authorities are being required to estimate their income before the start of the financial year. That estimate will determine the amount to be paid to Government as a central share and the amount to be paid to precepting authorities, to be transferred to their own funds. There are a number of amendments consequent on that change. If amounts are different, I understand that they will appear as surpluses or deficits on the authority’s collection fund. However, will the Minister clarify what would happen where a firm paying a major proportion of the authority’s business rates closed down mid-year—an example we have raised throughout the Bill’s progress? Surely that would lead to a deficit in the collection fund, so what would the local authority’s position be? Can a collection fund be run at a deficit, or would the shortfall have to be made up from reserves? I should make it clear that I am talking about a really catastrophic event, such as a firm that pays maybe 20% or 30% of the business rates in an area closing down, as happened with Alcan in Northumberland, for example.
As the Minister said, Lords amendments 34 to 38 deal with the arrangements for assurance. It is rather typical of the muddled way in which the Government go about things that they are having to make arrangements to take effect subsequent to the abolition of the Audit Commission before they have actually abolished it—so far they have only a draft Bill. The amendments ensure that the Secretary of State will define the assurance requirements though directions and produce certification instructions—I am sure he will work on them personally over the Christmas holiday. The amendments show the mess that the Government have got themselves into. They have no legislation ready to abolish the Audit Commission, yet they are having to put in place provisions in this Bill. The Government have ended up giving yet more power to the Secretary of State, in what was supposed to be a Bill to give more power to local authorities.
I would be grateful if the Minister clarified those points before we move on to the next group of amendments.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
I welcome the stance that my hon. Friend the Minister has taken with this Bill. It is sensible to adopt the Lords amendments that he has outlined, and I am glad to see them. When I was responsible for the Bill in my previous role, they seemed to me to offer useful clarification and to strengthen the Bill.
I am particularly pleased that my hon. Friend referred to pooling. It is important that we encourage local authorities to explore to the maximum the opportunities that pooling makes available. The reason for that—the reason I think the Lords amendments are helpful—is that as the economy picks up, as it will, development opportunities will in many cases enhance the interdependency of neighbouring authorities. My London borough of Bromley is a good example. Many people in Bromley work in central London, but they are effectively part of the same economic area. The borough council pays for the services it gives people as residents, who contribute to the London economy through their work in the west end, the City of London or elsewhere, including, in some cases, across London borough boundaries—they may work in Croydon or somewhere such as that.
There is therefore great merit in giving local authorities not only the maximum flexibility to pool, but the maximum encouragement to do so, because one would not want a council to approve a substantial development on its boundaries that might bring it all the financial benefits, but which needed planning support from neighbouring authorities under the duty to co-operate and their good will because of where the work force come from. Pooling is important, and the Lords amendments give us sensible flexibilities.
Importantly, pooling fits with some of the other parts of the Government’s localism agenda. One of the arguments made earlier—I noted it in their lordships’ discussion—was about enabling local authorities to have adequate critical mass with their retained business rates, which they can use for tax increment financing, for example. The Bill has been important in taking steps forward on that. A pool will have a greater critical mass of funding, which can be used to approach the markets and enables greater leverage.
Brandon Lewis
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and hope that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, will allow me 30-seconds’ leeway to thank him for his kind words. This is the first time I have been at the Dispatch Box during a debate in which he, who he is a good friend, has spoken, so I want to put on the record how fortunate I am to be following in the footsteps of someone who laid so clear a path, and one that I support and agree with. Equally, that offers a challenge, because I have quite an act to follow. As in all the matters we are discussing this afternoon, he is absolutely right that enterprise zones are structured in that way so that there is no such disincentive. It is important to bear in mind how the incentives work. Business rates retention offers local authorities a clear incentive to help drive growth, because they will benefit from all the growth they see. That is something we very much want to see so that local authorities are absolutely at the heart of driving economic growth.
I will turn now to some of the question hon. Members asked. The hon. Member for Warrington North asked what happens when a major business goes down mid year, a point the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) also touched on. The payments to major precepting authorities would be set on the basis of estimates of income made by the billing authority. Those payments will not change, so billing authorities might need to consider how they would fund any shortfall in the short term before the safety net calculations are made.
Helen Jones
Will the Minister explain how a billing authority would fund a shortfall of 20% in its business rate income?
Brandon Lewis
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but he will excuse me if I stay within the remit of the Bill and do not delve into changes to financial and tax arrangements that the Treasury, the Welsh Assembly, the Local Government Association and many Members across the House will undoubtedly have a view on. I welcome his decision to choose this moment to start that debate.
What I think is important in business rates retention and the way it moves the goalposts and the way local councils work is that it is really starting to shift back to what local authorities always want—I know this from my time as a council leader—which is to have their hands on the purse strings and the ability to have a direct impact on the amount of money they can bring in. They want more direct control over the way they work, their decisions, the way they develop the local economy and community and the way they involve the community. Local authorities will see a financial benefit and will be able to use that income to provide even more benefits for their communities and residents, and perhaps they will also use it to keep council tax down and, in so doing, further develop the work the Government are rightly doing through the council tax freezes we have brought in over the past few years. This is a very important step forward, and we are pleased that local government seems to be enthused by it. We hope that it motivates them towards growth.
We are looking at the consultation results that we have received, and we will return to them later this year. We are setting out a whole new framework in which local government can work and where it becomes part of driving its local economy. That is not only a key part of how it shapes its community; it means that it can benefit from the advantages and growth that it sees in that community. The community will see that the local authority is benefiting in that way, and we will get a positive circle that can only be good for our communities, for our residents, and for economic growth in our country.
Lords amendment 1 agreed to, with Commons financial privileges waived.
Lords amendment 2 agreed to, with Commons financial privileges waived.
Before Clause 9
Council tax reduction schemes: review
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment (a) to Lords amendment 3.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to discuss Lords amendment 16, amendment (a) thereto, and Lords amendments 18 and 83 to 90.
Helen Jones
Amendment 3 was moved in the other place by my noble Friend Baroness Hollis of Heigham. It calls for one very simple thing: a review of how the new system for council tax support is working three years after the Bill as enacted comes into effect. We tabled amendment (a) to make clear the original intention of the amendment in applying only to England because this is a devolved matter in Wales. When my noble Friend introduced the amendment in the Lords, she made a clear and persuasive case that was supported by a good majority.
The Government opposed the measure at the time, but I understand that they may now decide to accept it; the Minister will tell us. Opposition Members may wonder why that is, but in fact, we know why. The Government know that their policy on council tax is a shambles. It is so bad that they cannot even convince their own Members to support it. Their councils in North Yorkshire, including the Foreign Secretary’s council, have campaigned against its unfairness. The departmental Secretary of State’s own county council says that it has major implications for some of the most vulnerable members of the community. West Oxfordshire, the Prime Minister’s council, has refused to implement any scheme at all and will rely on the default scheme. Westminster, the Tories’ flagship local authority, which we hear so much about, says that it will not implement it because residents are already adversely affected by changes to local housing allowance and other benefit cuts. This is what Westminster said in one of the documents that it submitted:
“The previous Community Charge (Poll Tax) experience shows that there are inherent difficulties in asking benefit claimants to pay small sums of Council Tax. This can make the debt difficult, and in some cases uneconomical, to collect.”
It also says:
“A decision to pass on the funding cut to claimants would be a reputational risk for the Council, as residents will perceive the cut as a local authority decision (rather than a central government given benefit cut).”
Andrew Gwynne
In their consultations, Tameside suggested that it would need to make £3.575 million of savings, while Stockport said that it would need £2.4 million of savings in relation to any new council tax support scheme. If Stockport or Tameside applied for and were eligible for the DCLG’s support mechanism, Tameside would get only £460,379 and Stockport £385,550. This is so unfair.
Helen Jones
Indeed; my hon. Friend is exactly right. I will want to return to those issues later.
What is happening, of course, is that councils that are better off with fewer claimants can afford to subsidise the scheme, while others cannot. I have quoted Westminster, the flagship Tory local authority, and that is before we even move on to what the Government’s noble Friends in the Lords say. Last week Lord Jenkin was asked by the BBC whether there were echoes of the poll tax in this proposal. He said, “Yes, oh yes”—and after all, he should know, as he was the architect of the poll tax. When he warns the Government of the risk of backlash, they should listen, because he knows what happened last time. The late Lord Newton of Braintree—not, by anyone’s standards, a woolly liberal—is recorded as having said in the Lords last year:
“Is it sane?...I can hardly believe my ears”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 6 October 2011; Vol. 730, c. GC377.]
These are the Government’s allies, let us remember, and if they are aware of the problems it is no wonder the Government are now thinking about a review.
The Liberal Democrats—those who are here—should listen to Lord Greaves, the architect of many of their by-election victories, who told the Lancashire Telegraph that the scheme was “disgraceful” and told the Financial Times that it was
“the poll tax all over again.”
How far have the Lib Dems fallen that the party of Lloyd George is now voting for Pickles’ poll tax?
No wonder the Government are trying to find a way out of the mess they have created. No wonder they have decided not only that a review might be a good idea but to bring in some transitional relief as well.
Annette Brooke
Can the hon. Lady clarify the position of Labour Front Benchers? Do they object to the principle of localising council tax benefit—the principle, and not necessarily the situation we are in—or would they prefer that the system were returned to the Department for Work and Pensions and thus centralised rather than localised?
Helen Jones
Labour Front Benchers believe in a fair deal for vulnerable people wherever in the country they happen to live, and we do not believe that a disabled person in Wokingham should be treated differently from a disabled person in Wigan. Our principle is that the help that someone gets should be dependent on their situation, not on where they happen to live. That is a key part of our policy. Let me say this to the hon. Lady: this is a policy designed to hit the poorest people hardest, especially the poorest people who happen to live in the poorest local authorities, which have already taken the biggest cuts in spending power, as we have seen during the passage of the Bill. Let us remember the figures. Liverpool will have lost £235 per person in spending power. In Hartlepool, the figure is £183. In Wokingham—I could not resist mentioning it just once more in the context of this Bill—it is a grand total of £1.
Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I put it to my hon. Friend that we may well have disagreement between individual Members, and possibly even parties, about whether it is a localist measure to devolve council tax benefit to local authorities or whether it is sensible to have a national benefit, but no one who is sensible, looking at this, can possibly agree that it is proper and right to make a 10% arbitrary cut in the amount of money available for such people at the time that the system is being decentralised. That is what is utterly objectionable and what the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) should be apologising for.
Helen Jones
My right hon. Friend is right. The reduction in the money available for council tax benefit is not the only thing that we are dealing with. The very same councils will be hit by the Government scheme for business rate localisation before being hit again by the reduction in the amount available for council tax. The Government call it a 10% cut, but in fact it is much more than that, because their calculations are based on what they think the cost of council tax benefit payments will be next year. It is no surprise to hon. Members who have followed the Bill’s passage through Parliament to learn that the Government believe that the cost will go down. In fact, the number of claims is rising as more people face reduced hours of work or unemployment. The Government have produced a wonderful document, which could have been written by Pollyanna, stating that claims will go down because the number of people on jobseeker’s allowance will go down and pensioner take-up will decline and so on. That is nonsense.
Robert Neill
The hon. Lady is very good at rubbishing proposals for reform, but will she accept her and her party’s responsibility for getting into a situation whereby spending on council tax benefit doubled on their watch? Given that they are so good at criticising everybody else, what would they do to reform the situation and actually help councils get people back into work?
Helen Jones
I say to the hon. Gentleman that the one thing we would not do is target the poorest and most vulnerable for cuts at the same time as giving a tax cut to millionaires. The Government’s priorities are entirely wrong.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
Surely one thing we could do is agree with Birmingham council’s proposal to defer the plan for at least one year, so that the transitional arrangements can be properly worked out and places such as Birmingham will not end up losing about £10 million, which no fair-minded person would believe was the deliberate intention.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. During the passage of the Bill we have repeatedly tabled amendments asking for the measure to be deferred, but the Government have always turned them down. His figures are right, too: Birmingham will lose more than £10 million, Manchester almost £5 million, Liverpool £6.1 million, Haringey £3.8 million and Cherwell £747,000. The poorest authorities are losing more money overall, have more claimants and are therefore less likely to be able to make up the shortfall.
As I have said, a person’s entitlement will no longer depend on their position—it will depend on where they live. An unemployed person in Peterborough will be treated differently from an unemployed person in Portsmouth, and a disabled person in Wokingham will be treated differently from a disabled person in Wigan. That is why this is a wrong-headed policy that will need review and, when we get to that review, the policy’s ill-effects will be all too apparent.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend is being incredibly generous in giving way. I have mentioned the £3.575 million that the Tameside council scheme will lose. That comes on top of the council’s delivery of £43 million of savings in 2010-11 and 2011-12 and £22 million of savings this year, and it estimates a further £70.4 million of savings over the next three years. That is the real unfairness of this—it is hitting the same communities time and again.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend makes his point eloquently. The Government have always failed to acknowledge not only that this policy affects the same economies again and again, but that it has a devastating effect on local attempts to grow their economy. The very people who are losing money are those who went out and spent money in local shops and businesses, because, by the very nature of their low incomes, they have to spend everything they get. Councils are now faced with the most awful decisions and the people being hit hardest are people with disabilities, their carers and, most of all, the working poor—the people who this Government try to pretend do not exist.
We all remember the former Housing Minister, the right hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), telling a Select Committee that if someone was working they would not get council tax benefit, because they would not need it. He did not believe that people who were in work received council tax benefit. He did not believe in the existence of those 743,000 people who are on non-passported council tax benefit and are in work. I admit that I sometimes find it difficult to believe in the existence of the right hon. Gentleman, because he has so many different identities—I often wonder whether he is an internet marketing guru masquerading as a member of the Government—but those working people on low incomes are certainly there and cannot be ignored.
Among the options that councils are consulting on are: paying no award less than £5 a week; restricting awards to the cost for a band D and, in some cases, even a band A property; restricting awards between 80% and 90% of value; increasing the taper; and abolishing the second adult rebate. The list goes on and it gets worse. One council—Tendring—is proposing residency criteria, so that people will only become eligible for support if they have lived in the district for five years. If someone moves there for work—after all, the Government want people to move for work—and happens to lose their job, hard luck: they will not get a penny. Those of us who know our history will recognise that proposal immediately for what it is. It is a reinstitution of the Poor Law—if someone needs relief, they should move back to their own parish, or in this case their own borough. On that basis, I wonder whether the Government live in the 21st or the 18th century.
It is no wonder that the Government have introduced a £100 million transitional relief fund. There is no better proof of the shambles that they are in than the fact that they have made that announcement after local authorities have begun consultations on their schemes.
Mr Betts
My hon. Friend is making a very important point. This should not come as a surprise to the Government. The Communities and Local Government Committee inquiry reported in September 2011, and in the report we drew attention to the problems at that time with the time scale, the difficulties with implementation and the unintended consequences. We asked the Government to consider a delay in order to allow more time for everything to happen. Their only response has been to complicate matters even further with a £100 million offer right at the last minute and in the middle of a consultation process. Could there be a more cack-handed way of running a policy?
Helen Jones
I am tempted to say to my hon. Friend, who is the distinguished Chair of the Committee, that I cannot think of a more cack-handed policy, but then again this Government constantly surprise us by coming up with something more cack-handed than we had ever thought of. He is right about the problems with the transitional relief fund. Councils have begun consultation on their schemes, but now the Government want them redesigned to qualify for a transitional grant. Their conditions include the requirement that those currently receiving 100% relief should pay no more than 8.5% of tax, that the taper does not increase above 25%, and that there is no sharp decline in support for people entering work. Having embarked on a system that they insisted should rest on local decision making, they are now dictating how the scheme should be designed.
Even so, that does not solve the problems. There is no legal clarity on whether councils will now have to consult again on these new schemes. Could the Minister give councils some advice about that? There is no indication of how, if they have to do another consultation, its cost will be met, and there is still a £400 million funding gap, even according to the Government’s own figures.
Andrew Gwynne
To return to Tameside council, one of the two authorities in my constituency, it tells me that the recent announcement on transitional funding will cause it added difficulties and that
“the indicative grant would be insufficient to bridge the funding gap, and the money is for one year only.”
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend is entirely right. It is not sufficient to bridge the funding gap. It seems from the indicative amounts that my own local authority will get back £320,000, including money for the police and fire authority precepts, but lose £1.3 million. Birmingham will get back £2.4 million out of £10 million, Manchester £1.1 million out £5 million, Liverpool nearly £1.5 million out of £6.1 million and Haringey £888,000 out of £3.8 million.
Helen Jones
The hon. Gentleman, as a former leader of a local authority, should know that in the current circumstances, local authority treasurers are advising councils to build up reserves because of the uncertainty of the system that the Government are introducing.
Brandon Lewis
Will the hon. Lady share with the House her view on whether borough treasurers should run their local communities and councils, or whether the leaders and politicians should make those decisions?
Helen Jones
Of course the politicians should make the decisions, but in cases such as this they make them based on proper professional advice. If they did not, the Minister would be the first to criticise them.
Mr Raynsford
My hon. Friend will know that under the Government’s proposals, the entire downside risk—the risk of further expenditure as the result of an increase in the number of claimants or further demand for council tax benefit—all has to be borne by the local authority, so it is hardly surprising if treasurers are advising their councils that they need to build up reserves against eventualities imposed on them by Government decisions.
Helen Jones
My right hon. Friend is entirely right. I suspect that if a council found itself in financial difficulty and did not have reserves, Ministers would be the first to stand up and accuse it of failing to plan prudently for that eventuality.
The scheme will last only one year. Will schemes have to be redesigned again after that? If so, people will have had to cope with three different council tax benefit systems in three years. Currently, they might pay nothing, but next year they might pay 8.5%. After that, who knows—15%, 20%, 30%? There is huge uncertainty for the poorest people in the community.
As my right hon. Friend says, local councils will also be left with huge financial uncertainty. The Government believe that the number of pensioners claiming council tax benefit will drop, but everyone who deals with benefits believes that it will rise, because in future the sum in question will be shown as a reduction in someone’s council tax bill rather than a separate benefit. If unemployment goes up in an area, if a major employer closes down or if there are increases in part-time working, as there have been recently, local authorities will bear all the financial risk.
Andrew Gwynne
Does my hon. Friend share my confusion about the Government’s thinking and the lack of joined-up decision making between Departments? Universal credit is being introduced, which was supposed to simplify the benefits system, yet here we have the Government making the council tax benefit system more complicated and setting it aside from the universal credit proposals.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend is quite right. One problem with the system that the Government are introducing is that people will face two tests for benefits, possibly with two different tapers. For someone in the universal credit pilot, it will have to be decided whether the council tax benefit taper is applied before or after the universal credit taper. That clearly has not been thought through.
Mr Betts
That is not the only complication, of course. An individual whose income has changed and who has difficulties will now face the problem of going to the local council offices to sort out their council tax benefit, then going to the Department for Work and Pensions—either at the office if they can get there, or online or over the telephone—to sort out their housing benefit changes. Will that not confuse things enormously for people who are already struggling with financial difficulties?
Helen Jones
Absolutely right, and because of that there is real doubt among local authorities about whether they can collect payments from people who have never had to pay anything before and simply will not have the money to pay. Treasurers are predicting collection rates of only about 40% or 50%, and local authorities predict huge deficits because of the likelihood that they will not collect most of the money. What, then, are local authorities to do? Will they take people to court when they know that they do not have the money to pay? That would carry a huge cost to recover a small sum of money.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is helpfully shedding a lot of light on an extraordinary mess. It has been widely reported that it is the product of a spat, a huge row in Cabinet between the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, who wanted to promote localism and show that something of a localist character was happening, and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who wanted sensible reform of the welfare system. Unfortunately, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government won. Is that my hon. Friend’s understanding of how we have got into this completely indefensible mess?
Helen Jones
My right hon. Friend may well be right. The Government seem to be able to get into a mess quite easily. The problem is that the people on the receiving end of their decisions are the poorest and most vulnerable in our community.
George Hollingbery
There is no doubt that the hon. Lady makes a powerful argument, and as a former deputy leader of a council I appreciate the difficulty that councils will have. It is also an unfortunate truth that those who need benefits will suffer most when they are withdrawn. However, I do not quite follow her argument about what she would like done about that. Does she wish the whole scheme to be repealed, so that we end up with the status quo ante, does she wish to have further delays in the scheme, or does she wish to implement it in part? I understand her arguments against it, but I do not understand what she thinks would replace it.
Helen Jones
We made it clear that we did not want the scheme in the first place, and we voted against it. We made it clear that if the Government were introducing universal credit, they should make it universal. The clue is in the name—if there is to be universal credit, it has to include everything.
George Hollingbery
There is a question that clearly follows, which I know is asked many times of the Opposition. Given that half a billion pounds of annual savings are attached to the change, can the hon. Lady please tell me where the extra half a billion pounds of savings would come from?
Helen Jones
First, we would not give millionaires a tax cut. We would introduce the measures that the shadow Chancellor has set out, which would raise money to invest in infrastructure. The hon. Gentleman also has to bear in mind the contradiction in the Government’s policy. They want councils to grow their local economies, but at the same time they are taking a massive amount of money out of the most deprived local economies—money that would otherwise be spent in shops and businesses.
Helen Jones
May I make a little progress? I have given way quite a lot.
We need to think clearly about who the people affected are and what the Government think of them.
I have been reading the Minister’s blog; it is very entertaining and I recommend it to my hon. Friends as it is a treasure trove of Tory doublethink. The Minister begins by repeating the usual mantra that if someone is not in work, it is their own fault. He states that too many people
“expect to be able to rely on benefits and those who are hard at work are starting to get the hump.”
Let me say to him that 1,540 people in Great Yarmouth might start to get the hump with him because they are employed and in receipt of council tax benefit.
There are others. Will the Minister tell his disabled constituents, the vast majority of whom would like nothing better than to have a job, why they face an increase in their council tax? The Government trumpet their council tax freeze while imposing council tax rises on the poorest people in the country. When the Minister next visits a group of carers in his constituency—people who do daily the things that most of us could not imagine doing, and who save the country millions of pounds every year—will he say why their reward is an increase in council tax?
Elsewhere on his blog, the Minister writes that
“the sign of a compassionate country and a modern democracy is how it caters for those who are most vulnerable.”
That is what I mean by doublethink, which I think Orwell defined as the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time, while believing in both of them.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend believe that the only localism in which the Government are interested is localising responsibility for cuts? The Government like to talk the talk on protecting the vulnerable while making it necessary for councils to cut the assistance that such people desperately need.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend is entirely right. We have said throughout discussions on this Bill that it is about centralising power and devolving the blame—after all, Tory-run Westminster council recognises that. That is the test the Minister set for his Government—the sign of a compassionate society in a modern democracy—but I am afraid the Government have failed that, and failed some of the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society. Benefits for people who are disabled will no longer depend on their disability, but on where they happen to live. We are talking about people who are sacrificing their careers to look after members of their family who are ill or disabled, and those who go out to work every week for poverty wages, because they believe that working—when they can work—is the right thing to do.
The Government seek to stigmatise those people as scroungers and they should hang their head in shame. Those people are doing the right thing, contributing to society and doing their best on a low income. The amounts they are being asked to pay may not seem much to people on the Government Benches, but to an individual or family living on the edge, they are unobtainable. Every penny they have is accounted for and there is nothing left for emergencies. To try and find even a couple of pounds at the end of the week is out of the question; it is just not there. That is why council treasurers are expecting to collect only 40p in every £1, and why we risk a repeat of the poll tax fiasco, when thousands of people left the electoral register to try and avoid the tax, and 5,000 people went to prison.
Andrew Gwynne
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point about how the council tax benefit scheme is likely to hit some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, in particular the working poor. They are likely to be the same people who are also caught up with changes to housing benefit, and potentially with under-occupancy rules, and who have seen their tax credits reduced.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend makes the point I was about to come to. We are talking about many of the same people who have lost tax credits because they cannot get extra hours at work, and many will also be losing housing benefit, as well as having to find money for extra council tax payments. I know the Government do not want to hear this, but we are going to say it again and again because it is true: the Government are introducing these measures on the same day as they fund a tax cut for millionaires. Nothing could demonstrate better how out of touch this Government are with the lives of most people. I wonder whether the Minister is proud of the system he is introducing.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
Many hon. Members are already facing in their constituency surgeries people who are on the edge. Those people have fallen behind with small amounts each week, and are then faced with arrears and liability orders. Then the bailiffs arrive, and there is an additional charge of £120 to the local authority, or up to £200 for the bailiffs’ costs. There is physical intimidation by bailiffs. This supposed reform will increase that on a scale we have not seen before.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend is entirely right. Many of us will have seen in our surgeries what is beginning to happen to some of the poorest people in our communities. I have seen people crying in mine, either because of what they face now, or because they know what is coming in April but do not know how they will cope. Many of those people are working—they are going out to work.
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
All Labour Members—and, I imagine, a few Government Members if they think about it—recognise the picture painted by my hon. Friend. Does it not mean that a number of the vulnerable people who will suffer as a result of these measures will need extra support from the local authority, or from the voluntary and third sectors, to get the advice they need? That advice will not be there, however, partly because the council is having to pay the administrative costs of the system that has caused the problems in the first place.
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend is entirely right. I already find in my constituency that the organisations to which I used to refer people for help—as, I am sure, did many of my hon. Friends—are so overburdened, or in some cases have closed down, that help is simply not there. This is a very short-term policy that is causing financial instability for local councils and is an attack on the living standards of the most vulnerable people. The least the Government can do is hold a review in three years’ time.
It may be that the Government still believe that the system will work—although that is increasingly looking unlikely—but I think they are beginning to get cold feet. They know what these reforms will do in their constituencies and local authorities, and that they will be unworkable. By the time we get to the review, it is likely that the Ministers who introduced these measures will have moved on. The poorest and most vulnerable people, however, will still be paying the price. I hope that the Minister will at least accept a review, because by the time it takes place, it will be obvious what a miserable, vindictive and failed scheme this is.
Robert Neill
That was a vintage performance from the hon. Lady, full of high-blown rhetoric, plenty of sneering, sarcasm and knocking copy, and devoid of a single element of constructive analysis. It was devoid of any sense of constructive alternative, and recognition of the reality of the economic mess for which her party was responsible. It was devoid of any sense of shame. The greatest shame in the House lies on the Labour party. The greatest threat to the living standards of the most vulnerable—
Robert Neill
I will give way to the hon. Lady as often as she gave way to me—once.
Helen Jones
The hon. Gentleman is getting very worked up again, but may I remind him that, when his Government took office, the economy was growing and unemployment was falling? If he calls that a failure, what does he call the longest double-dip recession since the war?
Robert Neill
I call the greatest deficit in our peacetime history a failure. The benefits system that Labour created was so confusing and complex—it has some 32 different benefits in it—that it is virtually impossible for anyone to navigate it. I call that a failure. I call the fact that spending on council tax benefit doubled over the 13 years of the Labour Government a failure, because they did not achieve what should have been the objective of aiding people back into work. Some of my constituents have not known the opportunity of work for three generations. I call that a failure. The suggestion that the Labour party did anything other than fail is a bogus one. No amount of rhetoric and high-flown words can hide that reality.
We have not heard from Labour Members what they would do about the problem. They have made not a single constructive suggestion.
Helen Jones
I wish to press the amendment.
Question put, That amendment (a) to Lords amendment 3 be made.