Jo Cox
Main Page: Jo Cox (Labour - Batley and Spen) Local Government Funding
Jo Cox Excerpts(8 years, 3 months ago)
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Jo Cox (Batley and Spen) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) on securing this important debate. She and I serve together on the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, and we have received deeply worrying briefings of late on the future of local government finance, some of which I will touch on.
It is right, as a principle, to offer councils a four-year funding settlement to help them plan for the future. I welcome the Government’s initiative. However, when councils simultaneously face rumours about huge new services, such as the attendance allowance or public health, for which they may be expected to take responsibility over the same timeline, they are left with no security in their financial planning. I speak to council finance directors who are struggling to understand what will be expected of them over the next four to 10 years, which means it is incredibly difficult to plan.
The reality is that many councils have very little room left for long-term financial planning. My council tells me that it is firefighting from budget to budget without long-term certainty, and that it will be 2.5% worse off in 2020 than today, compared with national average cuts of about 0.5%. That figure does not seem very big, but it is about the size of the entire libraries budget, and let us not forget that it comes on top of incredibly severe cuts over the past four years that mean that Kirklees Council will be spending about 15% less than it spent in 2010.
I do not believe that anyone becomes a councillor to cut local library services by 32%, to cut children’s music services by 94%, to remove £700,000 from the budget to cut grass or to completely scrap community events and festivals, which is what is happening in Kirklees. Many of my constituents are feeling the even sharper end of council cuts to adult social care and other important services. My fear is that the Government want to blame local councillors.
I am struck by the fact that families living in a £70,000 terraced house in Batley in my constituency will now be getting £60 less per family member in council services than they did in 2010, but families living in a £2 million home in Oxfordshire will be getting £50 more per family member. That seems blatantly unfair, and my constituents struggle to understand it. That disparity in core spending power over the course of this Parliament is staggering and seems to be growing. For councillors such as mine in Kirklees, it does not feel like we are all in this together.
I welcome the intent behind the proposed business rate growth retention, but the Government’s announcement leaves many unanswered questions. In Kirklees Council, the potential funding gap—
Philip Davies (in the Chair)
No; I do not like doing it, but I have to cut the hon. Lady off in her flow.