Local Government Finance Bill

Lilian Greenwood Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Commons Chamber

[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.