Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Hilary Benn and Iain Stewart

Friday 20th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn]

We have made it clear that we will have a fairer allocation from within using funding that is there at the moment. The right hon. Gentleman’s problem is that he cannot justify what the Government have done, and therefore applying more fairness so that everybody has to make a contribution is the right thing to do.

The National Audit Office and others have said there is not much evidence that the new homes bonus encourages house building that would not have taken place anyway. It is top-sliced from revenue support grant and tends in the main to be taken from the more deprived communities with the greatest needs and to go to communities that are less deprived with fewer needs. We will phase that out and redistribute the money back to local authorities on a fairer basis. Government is about making choices. We will devolve £30 billion of economic powers from existing money for county and city regions.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hilary Benn]

I have been very generous in giving way, but I am going to bring my remarks to a close.

We will devolve that money so that local authorities, coming together, have powers over skills, business and employment support, housing and bus regulation. We have talked about London today. If bus regulation, the ability to control routes and fares, is good enough for London—and it is—why is it not good enough for the whole of England? That is something we will do.

The truth is that the Secretary of State has devolved in one other respect: he has passed responsibility for taking difficult decisions down to the areas with the greatest needs. As we know, the 10 most deprived local authorities have seen their council spending reduced by 16 times more than the 10 least deprived. He has taken most from the communities that can least afford it.

I asked the right hon. Gentleman at the beginning of this week about the real impact on social care for elderly people—I said I would come to this—of the decisions he has made, or, to be more precise, as a result of his failure to stand up for local government and social care. He tried to pretend that the fact that there are 220,000 fewer elderly people now getting a hot meal a day, which is what research demonstrates, had nothing to do with him. He even tried to blame the councils, but it is everything to do with the way he has unfairly applied the cuts to local government. If, as he claims, it has been fair to all, north and south, how can he explain cuts to social care being deepest in the councils he has hit the hardest as the result of the decisions he has made? That is what NAO analysis confirms. Everyone knows the answer to that question is that he has taken most from those who have least. Worse is to come. The Office for Budget Responsibility says we will see

“a much sharper squeeze on real spending in 2016-17 and 2017-18 than anything over the past five years.”

Those cuts would be extreme and irresponsible, and have a big impact, including on social care. The Health Secretary takes all the stick for the problems in the NHS, but the Communities Secretary is fanning the flames.

We need a different approach. Local communities and local government are crying out for a different approach. Times are tough, but there is no justification for applying the cuts to local government in such a fundamentally unfair way. There is no justification for taking decisions that mean elderly people in one part of the country are less likely to get social care or a hot meal a day because they live in an authority that has been penalised by the right hon. Gentleman. There is no reason why local communities and the people they elect should not be given the powers and the tools to build homes for their children and their grandchildren. There is no reason at all why all the city and county regions of England—all of them—should not get the economic powers to help them to build their own strong local economies, invest in skills, build homes and create jobs for the future. All those things are possible, but it will take a change of Government to make them happen.