Lord Pickles
Main Page: Lord Pickles (Conservative - Life peer)(13 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)
I beg to move,
That the Local Government Finance Report (England) 2011-12 (House of Commons Paper No. 748), which was laid before this House on 31 January, be approved.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
With this we shall discuss the following motion:
That the Limitation of Council Tax and Precepts (Alternative Notional Amounts) Report (England) 2011-12 (House of Commons Paper No. 774), which was laid before this House on 31 January, be approved.
Mr Pickles
Over recent weeks, my coalition colleagues and I have had many conversations with local government. We have spoken to individual authorities, the Local Government Association, London Councils and other representatives, and let me say how much I respect the mature and responsible attitude that all have taken throughout those discussions. They know that we are sailing in choppy economic waters, and that cutting Labour’s massive budget deficit is the responsible and the right thing to do—and many have planned ahead.
Only the most blinkered could have failed to see tough times coming. The House will recall that the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) said in March 2010 that if Labour were to remain in power we would see spending cuts “deeper and tougher” than those of the 1980s—I suppose that that is one Labour pledge we are able to deliver—so let us not pretend that anyone thought that we could spend, spend, spend indefinitely.
Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)
Even if the Secretary of State sets the context in terms of a cuts agenda for local government, why have this Government chosen to hit most harshly local authorities such as my own, the fourth most deprived in the country, while not inflicting the same level of cuts on authorities that are politically from a coalition background and socially in a much more advantaged position?
Mr Pickles
If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will come to that point in a moment. If I do not satisfy him, I will happily give way to him again.
Thanks to Labour, the nation’s credit card is maxed out. The longer we leave it before we start to pay it off, the worse it will be and the more we will have to pay. Unless we tackle Labour’s borrowing, interest—just the interest—on its toxic legacy of debt will hit £70 billion a year by 2014-15. That is more than we currently raise from council tax, business tax, stamp duty and inheritance tax combined.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
The Secretary of State mentions the business rate. Could he tell the House how much, in billions, the Treasury contribution will be in the coming year over and above the yield from the business rate, which has to be redistributed to local government in any case?
Mr Pickles
Last time we discussed this, the hon. Gentleman made some interesting suggestions about the level of the business rate with regard to the surplus. I am happy to confirm to him what I said last time: that the process of distribution from the Government is based largely on the uniform business rate, and any surplus—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman needs to understand that the settlement is made within a defined period and that business rate income goes up and down. The Treasury puts money in and takes money out according to the buoyancy of the business rate. The hon. Gentleman is a distinguished Member of the House who is very familiar with these matters, and he should know these things.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
He is right honourable, and he knows a lot more about it than you.
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman is quite right to correct me; I beg the right hon. Gentleman’s pardon. He is indeed a very distinguished gentleman, and of course he knows a lot more than a lot of people in this House, including, I suspect, the hon. Gentleman. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] It is obvious from my hon. Friends’ reaction that I do not need to put that to a vote.
Mr Pickles
I will give way in a few moments.
The phasing of the settlement will be challenging. Councils can choose how they respond. Some have chosen to wring their hands and say that it is all too hard, or to play politics with front-line services. Others have chosen to step up and to protect vital local services, reducing every trace of waste, protecting the most vulnerable and reforming services to deliver better results for less.
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman must pay more attention. When I say that I will give way in a few moments, that is exactly what I mean, but there is a queue, and he is a little way behind.
Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster councils are merging their back offices to save £35 million. West Norfolk is freezing council tax and car park charges, as well as councillors’ allowances. Reading borough council has decided not to cut but to increase funding for voluntary groups. We have heard today that Ribble Valley borough council has also decided to protect voluntary groups and not to cut front-line services.
I am grateful that many councils have brought the same constructive attitude to discussions about the funding settlement. They have helped us to put the finishing touches to a settlement that is sustainable, fair and progressive. We have focused resources on the most vulnerable communities. We have given more importance to the levels of need within each council. We have grouped councils in four bands. The most dependent on Government funding are seeing proportionately lower falls in grant. The more deprived places will receive far more funding per head than the better-off places. For example, Hackney will receive £1,043 per head and Wokingham will receive just £125 per head. These changes have made the system fairer and more progressive than ever.
Hazel Blears
The Secretary of State knows that I have raised the issue of business rates in this House on a number of occasions. To pursue the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that the business rate take will be £24.9 billion for 2010-11 and £26 billion for 2011-12. The Secretary of State has distributed £3.5 billion less in 2010-11 and will distribute £7 billion less in 2011-12. Is he saying that the OBR forecasts are out of sync by £3.5 billion and £7 billion? Surely the rising trend in business rates means that there is more money in the pot. If he distributed more money, we would not have to have the cuts that we face.
Mr Pickles
I am most grateful to the right hon. Lady. What she needs to understand is that two figures have been suggested—one by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Following those figures, we decided to move some things from ring-fenced grants into the general grant. That accounts for the difference between the two sizes. With regard to the level of potential surplus, there is a possible notional surplus in 2013 and 2014. As I explained to the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), what happens is that within the total sum available for grant, if there is a surplus, all is redistributed. However, as happened under the right hon. Lady’s Government and under previous Governments, the amount in the revenue support grant is reduced on a compensatory basis, because the level of the total settlement is fixed. There is no difference; it is just a different way of calculating.
Mr Pickles
How can I turn down the hon. Gentleman? He has been up and down like Tigger.
Ian Austin
I am very grateful to the Secretary of State. Nobody disputes that savings have to be made by local authorities. [Interruption.] Well, nobody does. The Government cannot have it both ways. On the one hand, they say that we were planning cuts slightly smaller than those that they are imposing, and on the other they say that we were not planning any cuts at all. I am not sure what their argument is.
On the sorts of cuts that local authorities are making, is the Secretary of State aware that the axe hangs over Dudley’s benefits shop, which is helping people who have been made redundant during the recession and hard-pressed home owners who face the risk of repossession to sort out their finances? It seems an utterly ludicrous decision when it costs £300,000 a year to run and brings £2 million into the local economy, of which £1.5 million is spent on supporting local businesses. In the light of what he said about local authorities making inappropriate cuts that target the most vulnerable, will he join me in pleading with Dudley council not to close the benefits advice shop?
Mr Pickles
I feel a certain degree of camaraderie and fraternal friendship with the hon. Gentleman, because unlike his party’s Front Benchers, he has said that Labour’s cuts would have been just slightly less than those that we are presenting. I think that is probably true, but the challenge facing local government means that just a couple of million quid would not make all the difference. There are very challenging circumstances.
Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr Pickles
In a moment—I need to respond to the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) first.
Let us consider a number of local authorities. Some have been talking about thousands of redundancies. I do not want to appear partisan, but Sheffield is talking about 250. Sunderland, a Labour council, is not planning percentage cuts in its Supporting People provision. Walsall is not planning to make an overall cut in its voluntary sector funding. It is possible to deal with the situation.
Mr Pickles
In a moment.
The hon. Member for Dudley North has to understand that these are local decisions. We have ensured that there are sufficient funds to protect the vulnerable, but ultimately local councils have to make local decisions.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
Does the Secretary of State agree that we are hearing a confused argument from the Opposition, but that it seems to involve a spending commitment of about £7 billion? That money would surely have to be made up through about 2p on income tax, would it not?
Mr Pickles
My hon. Friend is of course perfectly right. The Opposition seem to think that it is magic money, but it would actually come out of people’s pockets through business rates or income tax. The reason why we are in this position is that the guilty people on the Labour Benches allowed things to get out of hand.
Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend go into some detail for the benefit of the House about his commitment to the vulnerable through the transition grant allocations? I have had a cursory look at them, and they seem reasonably generous and seem to take account of the need to look after some of the most vulnerable parts of the country.
Mr Pickles
We have done three significant things. First, we moved the relative needs threshold to 83% from 73%, which makes a considerable difference and is far more than the Labour Government ever offered poorer communities. We then divided up authorities based on their level of funding, from the most dependent on grant to the least dependent, and ensured that the most dependent received smaller cuts. Then we managed to find an additional transitional amount to ensure that no authority loses more than 8.9%. I will have a further announcement to make about that.
Joan Walley
My constituents do not want the House to make politics of what is happening. Everybody understands the situation in respect of the cuts as a whole, but in areas such as Stoke-on-Trent, where we have deprivation and people out of work, we have made representations to the Secretary of State and his Ministers to say that we want time: we want time to plan how we can keep what is most important. This finance settlement gives us no encouragement whatever that this is anything other than the Government blaming local councils for what is happening.
Mr Pickles
The hon. Lady and her councils were given quite a lot of time. The former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West, made it clear that changes were going to be made, and a number of the most vulnerable areas were hit by the fact that it was made clear that the working neighbourhoods fund was going to end in March this year. It seems to me that a number of councils did not make any provision for that and blithely assumed that the money would continue, despite the fact that the Labour Chancellor made it perfectly clear that it was ending. Ladies and gentlemen on the Labour Benches who cheered his Budget announcement did not raise any objection at the time.
Mr Pickles
I will give way in a few moments, but I shall make a little progress, if the Chairman of the Communities and Local Government Committee will forgive me.
The changes make the system fairer and more progressive than it has ever been. The second thing that we did is try to marry the need to tackle the deficit with the need to help councils to adapt, as I told my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field). In December, I said that no council would face more than an 8.9% reduction in spending power and that we would provide a grant to cushion councils that would otherwise have had a sharper fall. Today, we are going further by increasing the transition grant to councils from £85 million to £96 million next year, which means that the average reduction in spending power is just 4.4% and that no council will see a reduction of more than 8.8%.
Let us look at one of the problems that we faced. Concessionary bus travel is a classic example of how the previous Government did things—they made a grand promise without any clue about how it would be funded. Administration of concessionary bus travel under Labour was a shambles. I do not think that councils should have to pay for the misjudgment of the Labour Government, so I am topping up the formula grant by a further £10 million next year to compensate shire districts.
Thirdly, we are committed to protecting local taxpayers. Council tax bills more than doubled under Labour, while front-line services such as bin collections halved. It is only right that we give hard-working families a helping hand.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State agree with the sentiments of his colleague, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell), who in writing to Liberal Democrat councillors about the final settlement, says:
“This final settlement certainly does not solve all problems, nor does it add significantly more money into the pot. I know it will still be very disappointing for many councillors.”
Mr Pickles
Of course the settlement is very disappointing, but the Government would not do what we are doing had we not found the nation’s finances in chaos and with a record budget deficit. The only reason that we are doing this is that the right hon. Lady failed to control her party.
Mr Pickles
I would give way to my right hon. Friend, but I feel like I have been persecuting the Chairman of the Communities and Local Government Committee.
Mr Betts
The Secretary of State said that this is a matter for local decision, and that there is no need for any council to make cuts to front-line services. Can he name one single council in the country that has so far managed to reach a budget decision without any cuts to front-line services?
Mr Pickles
Yes, I can—Reading and Ribble Valley have done so. We have a list, but the hon. Gentleman is ascribing words to me that I did not say. I said that before authorities touch front-line services, they should look at sharing back offices, chief executives and top offices, move back services and improve procurement. That is what I said. There is a very big difference—right across the country—between councils that have attempted those things and those that have decided to cut deep into public services.
Mr Pickles
I will give way to my right hon. Friend, but then in a few moments I will of course do so for my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey).
Sir Alan Beith
Does the Secretary of State accept that it was almost impossible to introduce the required degree of fairness to areas of low council tax income given the historical settlement that many local authorities, such as Northumberland, have suffered over the years and the financial crisis that faced the country? Do we not need to approach fairness again in a more fundamental review of local government finance?
Mr Pickles
My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I certainly hope that this year’s settlement and next year’s are the last ones to be put together on the current corrupt, useless and incomprehensible system. It is the Government’s intention fundamentally to review the local government financial system, and I hope to bring proposals to the House later in the year.
Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
The Secretary of State has praised some local authorities for planning ahead for cuts, but he did not mention Manchester, which was planning to make cuts of £50 million. However, because he singled out one of the neediest cities in this country for one of the worst settlements, the council is now having to save £110 million next year and £170 million over two years. When a council has to lop off £39 million from adult services and £45 million from children’s services, how can he say that he is protecting the most vulnerable?
Mr Pickles
There does seem to be a big difference between how Sheffield and other large authorities are going about this, and how Manchester is going about it. The reduction purely in grant is some 15% over the period, but the council is choosing to cut 25%—above and beyond the reduction in grant. But those figures only really stack up if we completely ignore the level of council tax revenue. That is why we are able to say that no authority is receiving a reduction in their spending power of more than 8.8%. That remains an absolute fact, on a measurement that those on the Labour Front Bench urged us to use. The Local Government Association also suggested that measurement, and it is a very sensible way of doing things.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
My constituency has some of the most deprived areas anywhere in the region, but for the last eight years we have received among the lowest local government settlements there have been. My local authority has been preparing for the even tougher times we face because of the economic crisis that we were bequeathed. Why does the Secretary of State think that other areas of the country have not?
Mr Pickles
It appears that there are two kinds of authority. There are Conservative and Liberal Democrat authorities that seem to be making a genuine attempt to protect the front line, as are a significant number of Labour authorities, but there are several that are simply grandstanding. They have perhaps made one or two financial mistakes in the past and are seeking to hide them by claiming that the financial settlement is the problem.
Mark Pawsey
My right hon. Friend spoke about the need for councils to control executive salaries. Does he have some words of comfort for Rugby borough council, which has chosen to save £100,000 by not replacing its chief executive and devolving the responsibilities to deputies and the elected leader of the council?
Mr Pickles
Hammersmith and Fulham is obviously the apple of my eye in London, but the decision taken by my hon. Friend’s council is a very sensible one. I am delighted that chief executives have taken a cut in salary, and I am even more delighted that the salaries advertised for chief executives have gone down considerably.
It is only right for hard-working families to be given a helping hand. We are providing an extra £650 million so that local authorities can freeze council tax for a year from April without local services losing out. We give each council that freezes or reduces council tax the equivalent of a 2.5% increase instead. More than 130 councils have already said that they will take this offer and more will follow as they finalise their budgets. No council should think that it can get away with squeezing its residents.
In the long term, local people should have the power to veto excessive council tax rises, but for the time being the Government will use their capping powers to protect them. Today I have laid before the House a written statement explaining the principles that we are using to define what excessive council tax means. An authority will be liable to be capped if it couples an increase in council tax of more than 3.5% with a reduction in its budget requirement of less than 7.5%. However, for most council tax payers, I very much expect this to be largely an academic exercise, because I believe that every local authority will freeze council tax in this difficult period.
The public will be helped in that process by increased transparency. I am pleased to announce to the House that every council in the country has now agreed to publish every amount over £500, so that their council tax payers can judge whether cuts in services or decisions about those services are just. I say “every council in the country”, but I mean “every council in the country with the exception of Nottingham”. The Labour deputy leader in Nottingham says that the council has
“no intention of publishing the data unless it is forced to do so by law.”
He says:
“We have said that we will publish accounts over £500 if it becomes a legal requirement to do so,”
before adding, rather peculiarly:
“We are happy for information to be”
transparent. Well, information cannot be transparent unless it is published. How come every council tax payer in England can look on their council’s website and see how it is spending their money except for those in Nottingham? Is there something peculiar about people in Nottingham that means that they cannot be trusted with that information?
Mr Pickles
I shall give way in a moment, once I have made this point. The right hon. Gentleman is a senior Member of the House, but I would be grateful if he extended me the courtesy of allowing me to make a few points.
The deputy leader of Nottingham city council is a gentleman called Graham Chapman, which is obviously the same name as the late and long-missed member of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. It seems to me that the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) should get on the phone to that gentleman and tell him, as his namesake’s mother did in “Life of Brian”, that he might be the deputy leader of Nottingham city council, but he is a very naughty boy. If it is necessary for me to use the powers that I have to force Nottingham, I will, but why should this process be held back by one obdurate council that simply wants to play politics with transparency?
Hazel Blears
Let me take the Secretary of State back to his assertion that no council will lose more than 8.9% of its grant. Is he not completely ignoring the fact that the poorest authorities get area-based grant? Some 11% of my council’s budget in Salford is ABG, because we are deprived and poor, and we need extra help. Slashing the area-based grant means that our cuts next year will be 15%, which is a massive amount in the first year.
Mr Pickles
I can bring better news to the right hon. Lady, because the figure will not be 8.9%, but 8.8%, which I hope she finds helpful. She arrives at those figures only if she completely ignores the figures for council tax, which are such that we can give her a guarantee that her council’s spending power will not be reduced by more than 8.8%. Because I have enormous respect for her, I shall make just one further point. I thought about this issue seriously, in a situation where money was clearly being reduced, and I came to the conclusion that if I increased relative need, the best way to help authorities such as hers in taking the money down would be to put it into the block grant. That is because the block grant has such a distributive effect. I accept that there is a degree of swings and roundabouts involved, but her authority came out of that process better than it might otherwise have done.
Mr Blunkett
This issue of transparency is absolutely crucial. Is it not a fact that the 8.9% and the distribution of grant took place after the area-based grant—and therefore the specific funding for specific deprivation—had already been taken out?
Mr Pickles
The right hon. Gentleman will forgive me for correcting him: it is not 8.9%; it is 8.8%. We have put some additional sums into the process—[Hon. Members: “Answer!”] I am sorry that he perhaps did not hear the answer that I gave to the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). I took a view, which I think was correct, that his authority, Sheffield, would have lost out more had we not put those sums into the block grant. He seems to forget that we have moved relative need to 83%.
Thanks to the constructive approach of many councils, we have arrived at a funding settlement for the next two years that is progressive, fair and sustainable. It is important to see this settlement in context. This coalition Government are committed to an historic shift of power and influence. We are seeking to restore real responsibility and authority to councils. We are ending the regional spatial strategies, comprehensive area assessments and local area agreements, and we have made a bonfire of the three-letter acronyms.
The general power of competence in the Localism Bill will give councils confidence to get on with the job. We have already ended grant ring-fencing, with a few exceptions, so that councils can decide for themselves how to spend their money. I am determined that we will continue to push back the tide of bureaucracy, end once and for all the micro-management from Whitehall, and give councils the space to show the ingenuity, ambition and leadership that local people expect. The settlement shows that this coalition Government will not shy away from the tough decisions needed to tackle Labour’s public sector deficit, and we will continue to do everything possible to support local councils as they protect and improve front-line services over the years to come.
Caroline Flint
I am not sure that there is anything to celebrate. Whether we are talking about the Supporting People grant or Sure Start, one thing is certain: neither has not been ring-fenced, and therein lies danger. Manchester city council, for instance, faces a 35% cut in its Supporting People grant.
Mr Pickles
I am sure that the right hon. Lady would not want to put an incorrect statement on the record. Will she confirm that the Supporting People fund was not ring-fenced under the Labour Government?
Caroline Flint
Unlike the Secretary of State’s hon. Friends, we put money into the Supporting People grant to support local initiatives. Now councils face cuts in their Supporting People funding, and have no alternatives to the decisions that they are having to make.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
The Secretary of State has obviously listened to many representations in the past few weeks, but the question is whether he has actually heard what people have been saying and whether he is prepared to act. Today, we have found out that, presumably after prostrating himself on the floor before the Chancellor, he has come away with a further £10 million.
Mr Betts
Local authorities are going to get a further £10 million on top of the settlement they were previously promised. Even if that £10 million was given to one authority, such as Salford, instead of its reduction in total spend being cut from 8.9% to 8.8%, there would hardly be dancing in the streets. Authorities such as mine in Sheffield are getting nothing extra out of that small amount of additional money: they will still get a cut of more than 8%.
Mr Pickles
The figure is £10 million extra to district authorities. That is why the cut for authorities is no longer 8.9% but 8.8%. Extra money has gone in—not a lot, but we have been able to drop the cut a little.
Mr Betts
The Secretary of State’s words are very apposite—it is not a lot of money, but there are an awful lot of reductions up and down the country that local government is having to deal with.
My first point, which I made in a Westminster Hall debate but still have not received an adequate response to is that the overall cuts in Government expenditure over the four-year period are 19%, whereas the cuts for local government are 26%. Why is local government experiencing higher cuts than the overall average cuts to Government spending? We know that the services delivered by local government are important to our constituents. Some of those services go to those in most need—social services provision for aids and adaptations and for looked-after children. Some of them concern quality of life—for example, libraries, parks, playing fields and sports centres—and others are essential, such as refuse collection, street repairs and street lighting.
Most local authorities are doing all they can to protect their social services provision and to protect looked-after children and children with particular disadvantages, so it should come as no surprise that even when they have looked at back-room services and sharing services with other authorities, councils throughout the country of all political persuasions are cutting services such as libraries and bus services and changing their methods of refuse collection.
Mr Betts
—over which authorities do not have discretion. The figures include the housing revenue account and working capital that is needed to manage the cash flow of an authority, and they probably include identified sums in the authority’s capital accounts for major projects. All those things tend to get lumped together. The Secretary of State says that is not true. If he produced a list of figures for each local authority that extracts all those sums, that would be very interesting to see. I look forward to a copy of that being placed in the Library.
Mr Betts
Manchester city council has to make its own local decisions, and I am not here to support or defend every action of every local authority. I thought that leaving such matters to local councils was what localism was all about. We must not put them in the position where they have to make cuts in front-line services, as Somerset, Gloucester and other authorities are having to do.
I support what the Government are doing on ring-fencing. I believe, as I have been saying for many years, that abolishing ring-fencing as far as possible is the right thing to do so that local authorities have more discretion in how they spend the money available to them.
On the question of business rates, I followed up with the LGA the issues I raised with the Minister for Housing and Local Government in my Westminster Hall debate. It has received legal advice on the matter from Bevan Brittan solicitors, which states that in this instance the Secretary of State has not set the distributable amount as a sum equal to the difference, but has chosen to budget for a surplus and set the distributable amount some £100 million lower at £19,000 million. That is simply unlawful, and that is the legal opinion the LGA has received—[Interruption.] I am raising the issue with the Secretary of State and giving the advice that the LGA has given me. If it is inaccurate, will he publish a precise assessment on whether he intends to budget for a surplus on the business rates and whether he believes to do so is lawful so that Members have the full and proper picture?
Mr Pickles
The hon. Gentleman occupies a senior position and so should know that all business rates have to be redistributed to councils by law. It is not possible to do what he is suggesting we are doing, because nothing can be done with a surplus other than giving it back to local authorities. He does not seem to appreciate that total public expenditure is within an envelope, but revenues from business rates go up and down, so councils are compensated by central Government.
Mr Betts
I understand that revenues from business rates go up and down, so when they go up more should be distributed to local authorities as a result. [Interruption.] Rather than engaging in further debate on this, I am happy to pass on to the Secretary of State the legal advice that the LGA has given me and ask him, if he believes that it is wrong, to issue a detailed correction. That seems an appropriate way to proceed.
Mr Betts
I will of course send the letter to the Secretary of State, and I look forward to his response.
On the question of putting salaries above £58,000 into the public domain, the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) ought to be pursued. If the Secretary of State is right, and he encourages local authorities to put more and more services out to the private sector, to the voluntary sector and to social enterprise, he will find that fewer people on those salaries are employed in the local authority sector. Somebody with responsibility for a service might be “TUPE’d” outwith that service to the private sector or to a social enterprise, in which case his transparency will therefore decline. So, when services are contracted out, could the requirement for transparency about salaries of more than £58,000 be transferred as well, and applied to contractors across the piece? That would be a way forward for the Secretary of State, and his Cabinet colleagues might like to look at it as a good example of transparency in practice.
The figures on Sheffield are misleading. The figures that have been quoted are for those redundancies that have been announced so far. Many vacancies in Sheffield are being held unfilled, and they are going to affect services. We know of several hundred posts that will not be filled by one means or other, and we also suspect that the Lib Dem administration there is trying to delay and avoid decisions, waiting to pass them on to the new Labour administration that will take office in May. The budget has not yet been finalised, however, so no one can quote a figure of 250. Several hundred jobs are likely to be lost as a result of the budget—many times the figure given today.
There are real problems with the settlement, but the fundamental question that comes across from local councils and the Local Government Association is, “Why are the cuts front-loaded?” Can the Government please provide an explanation? That fundamental problem is causing chaos in local authorities and massive cuts to services throughout the country.
Hazel Blears
My hon. Friend is absolutely right; we share the same concerns. The Greater Manchester fire and rescue authority has had to make even further cuts because the figures changed halfway through its budget process.
I want to make just a few observations about the position that Salford is in. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said, “We will not balance the books on the backs of the poor.” However, Salford is one of the poorest authorities. We are in a consultation process with our community, and I spoke to my leader this afternoon. We are looking at the possibility of having to close libraries and one of our sports centres, as well as taking £1 million out of our youth service and £500,000 out of adult social care. Unlike many local authorities, ours has said that it still wants to provide services to elderly people who have moderate, as well as critical, needs. That has always been a priority for Salford, but we are still going to have to take £500,000 out of that service. We will also have to make a 42% cut in the Connexions service. I want my youngsters to get the skills and to have the ambition to get those jobs in Media City, but how can they aspire to that kind of future if they do not have a proper careers guidance service?
We are having to cut the citizens advice bureaux by 15%—it is the minimum we can do, but we know that people will be out of work, as we are looking at losing 450 jobs in the city. People will have debts and will need advice, so what do we have to do? We have to cut the CAB and the 60-odd independent financial advisers that we funded through the financial inclusion fund, which is about to be slashed. The amount of advice left available will be absolutely minimal. Our voluntary organisations will have to be cut perhaps by 10% to 15%. Again, Salford council is really trying to make sure that it protects those voluntary organisations, but they cannot be immune from the cuts that the rest of the service has to take.
I mentioned area-based grants. I feel strongly about them because area-based grants were specifically directed at poor and deprived areas that had extra needs. The slashing of area-based grants has disproportionately affected those living in the poorest parts of our community. In Salford, it was 11% of our total budget, and much of that money was used to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour, to provide youth services and diversion schemes and to keep young people off the streets and make the community safer. All that is about to disappear.
I genuinely feel that these cuts are unfair, despite the Secretary of State’s smoke and mirrors about spending power, his new definitions and all his obfuscation of the real situation. The cuts in spending power in his area are of less than 1% next year, yet we are looking at 15% cuts in Salford. For the area of the Leader of the House, the cuts are less than 1%; for the Home Secretary’s area, less than 1%; for the Culture Secretary’s, the Transport Secretary’s and the Education Secretary’s areas, less than 1%. These are some of the most affluent parts of the country. I believe that if cuts have to be made, which they do, they must be fair—but they are simply not fair.
I say to the Secretary of State that I have a huge amount of respect for the people of this country: they are not stupid; they understand that hard decisions have to be made, but they also have a well-developed sense of justice and fairness. They will see right through what the Secretary of State is doing. Transparency will come for the Tory party’s actions; people will see right through them.
I commend the campaign launched in the Manchester Evening News. It is a massive campaign against the cuts, urging local people to sign a petition. The Manchester Evening News is not a partisan paper; it represents people right across the conurbation. They, too, can see the unfairness. Nine of our 10 boroughs in Greater Manchester have cuts higher than the national average. The only borough that does not is in the constituency of the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell); that has a below-average amount of cuts. People across Greater Manchester—people in Rochdale, in Oldham and in places right across the area—know that these cuts are deeply unfair. I have no doubt that action will be taken at the ballot box in May.
My final point is about what else could be done. We heard a lot from the Secretary of State about community budgets. As he well knows, I started off my time in the Department with Total Place, which meant bringing together and pooling budgets, co-location, integrated services, systems engineering, and service redesign—all those things that Government Members have talked about. However, for major service redesign, time for planning is necessary—it cannot be done at the drop of a hat, because different skills and competences are involved and people might have to be made redundant. We have heard about the lack of capitalisation for that sort of project; it cannot be done all at once. I echo the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chairman of the Select Committee. Why are these cuts front loaded, which makes it so much more difficult to do the systems redesign that could result in efficiencies without the need for front-line cuts?
The Secretary of State will tell me otherwise, but I genuinely believe that the reason for having the cuts early on is that more freedom to manoeuvre—and to be more generous—will be possible in the two years leading up to the next general election. The Government will hope to reap the rewards from that. I hope that it is not the Secretary of State’s intention to make a partisan political budget in this way. I would like some reassurance that he is trying to be fair rather than to seek political advantage. When we reach the two years before the election and we will have had these massively front-loaded cuts in the first two years, I will be amazed if we do not see the Secretary of State seeking some room for manoeuvre for electoral advantage.
Mr Pickles
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady who, as always, is giving a thoughtful speech. I can assure her absolutely that that it not the intention, and I can assure her absolutely that that is why we have put in extra protection for the most vulnerable.
Hazel Blears
I think that if the Secretary of State came to Salford—as the Minister for Housing and Local Government did recently—and said that he had given extra protection to the most vulnerable members of our community, he would receive the sort of typically robust Salford reply that I could not possibly use in the House.
Over the last couple of weeks, we have heard a great deal about the big society. Apparently Lord Wei is unable to do quite as much as he used to because he no longer has time to volunteer, which I thought was a wonderful irony. As the Secretary of State will know, I strongly support the underlying principles of involving the community, devolving power and introducing more plurality to the provision of public services. However, as has been pointed out by Dame Elisabeth Hoodless of the Community Service Volunteers, Thomas Hughes-Hallett, chief executive of Marie Curie Cancer Care, Sir Stuart Etherington of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, and Sir Stephen Bubb of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations—none of whom are partisan people—while the Government talk of the need to empower voluntary organisations and local communities, they are making massive, deep, draconian cuts in the voluntary sector. That simply does not add up. It is totally contradictory, and it is increasing the sense of cynicism and disempowerment that exists in our communities.
If the Government have any genuine commitment to giving people the power to change their own lives, they must recognise the total incoherence and inconsistency that lies at the heart of their so-called big society. This is not community action; it is do-it-yourself. The Government are telling people, “You are on your own, with no back-up and no ability to take on roles of this kind.” I know that some Members genuinely support these principles, but I fear that, given the cuts that we are seeing, they are going absolutely nowhere except into the sand.
My final plea to the Government relates to community budgeting. For goodness sake, let us get on with it more quickly. We will be able to ameliorate some of the pain that our communities will feel only if we can re-engineer our services, pool the budgets, achieve the necessary co-location, and start to address many of our current problems. At present that programme is minimalist. I think we have been told that four areas in the country might adopt community budgeting. We know what happened with the four big society areas. I ask the Secretary of State to enable us to support many more areas, so that they can provide services in a new and, I believe, more integrated way that could lead to a transformation in the provision of local government services.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Hammersmith and Fulham council is closing nine of its 15 children centres this year, and by doing so it will generate about £2 million in savings. That is part of the £6 million savings in children’s services, which in turn are part of the £13 million savings in social services, which in turn are part of the £27 million that the council aims to save in the coming financial year. The total over the three years is £65 million, or about a third of its budget.
Because of the policies the Secretary of State is pursuing, many councils are having to make unimaginable cuts of this kind. I want to focus on two points in respect of Hammersmith and Fulham council. First, in making those very difficult decisions it has chosen to target the most vulnerable people, and the services that all parties represented in this House say that they wish to be preserved. Secondly, it maintains a charade, with which the Secretary of State has colluded and continues collude, that it is doing this in a new way—that these are new cuts that will not affect front-line services.
In particular—this picks up the point just made by the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt)—the council says that it will pay off debt, and in that way generate revenue income. It says that it will merge back-office services and in that way avoid affecting front-line services. I will break the spell immediately by saying that even if those two ideas—the merger and the disposals to pay off debt—are both successful, which is by no means certain, the total amount of money generated would be about £1 million, or 4% of the total cuts. That is what we are being led to believe is the new way of making cuts.
Before I came to this debate, I had two meetings this afternoon about Sure Start. The first was of an all-party group, to which the Minister with responsibility for children came to speak. He is an honourable man, as well as being an hon. Gentleman, and I believed what he said, which is what I have heard all the Education Ministers repeat. They believe that there is sufficient money to maintain the network of children’s centres and that there is no need to attack their budgets, particularly the phase 1 centres that serve the most vulnerable groups.
That appears to be Government policy, but this is what is happening in Hammersmith and Fulham. First, the closure of the nine centres was announced between Christmas and new year—on page 34 of a report called “Family Support”. Secondly, when that report came up for decision—by that time, thanks to the Daily Mirror and other great organs of state, a lot of the local population had been alerted to the situation—the council said, “You’ve misunderstood what we’re doing. We’re not closing any children’s centres,” but it then proceeded to vote through, on 10 January, the 50% budget cut that meant that those centres had to close. Having made that decision, it then began a consultation process—but that process identifies phase 1 children’s centres, the budget for which is to go down from £473,000 to £19,000. Threats were made to the staff, who were not informed before the closure of their centres was announced in the press. Heads of centres were told that they could not talk to me, or even to the Government, about what was happening.
To her credit, the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), did say during a Westminster Hall debate that she was concerned about, and was monitoring, what was happening in Hammersmith and Fulham. If the Government want to hold their line on Sure Start, they need to address the situation in Hammersmith and Fulham. It is not just Sure Start centres; youth clubs are closing too. I received a deputation representing 1,000 young people who use a youth club just outside my constituency that is closing, and I am told that all but one of the youth centres will close. Council estates are being demolished.
I went to a meeting at an old people’s home last Friday where, in order to raise £250,000, the air rights over the car park are being sold to a private school next door, so that no light will reach the old people’s home. Some of those old people spend 100% of their time in that home. This is what is happening in a Conservative-controlled council in London at the moment. This is the reality of the “painless” cuts.
Those are the things that we do not hear about in Hammersmith and Fulham. What about the things we do hear about? What about the paying off of debt—that prudent way of reducing debt? That happened on Monday, when, at a meeting of the council’s cabinet—I believe that the Chairman of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), referred to this earlier—the disposal of nine community buildings was agreed to. Those buildings include four community centres used by more than 100 voluntary groups, all of which will be made homeless, and alternative provision will not be made for them. Those buildings include Palingswick house, an imposing building in central Hammersmith in which 22 voluntary groups occupy space. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State alluded to one of those earlier: the Afghan refugee group.
Because councils have to produce equality impact assessments when they are booting voluntary organisations out on to the street, Hammersmith and Fulham did that. It produced one for the Iranian Association, which caters mainly for refugees from the oppressive regime in Tehran: the Iranian Association was told that the alternative provision was to go to the Iranian embassy. The Kurdish Association for Refugees is also based in the building, and runs not only a cultural advice centre but a museum—one promoted by Boris Johnson on his tourist trail of London. It was told that the alternative to being booted out on to the street was to go to an organisation for the south Asian population based somewhere in east London. The Afghan refugee association was told that there were two alternative sources of provision for Afghan refugees in London, one was an Afghan restaurant and the other—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) has already said—was the southern Afghan club, for the promotion of Afghan hounds. That is how my local community in Hammersmith is being treated by a Conservative council.
Three other community centres all came up with viable business plans that would have allowed them to continue operating from their community centres and pay a commercial rent, which would have meant that over a period of two or three years, the council would not have lost money. Without listening any further to those ideas the council voted through the proposal, and all these buildings will be sold off to produce an income of about £500,000 a year. The opportunity cost for the tens of thousands of people who will no longer have those facilities available to them, including the elderly people and the 750 kids from deprived backgrounds who go to dancing classes at one of these places, is unimaginable. But this is what the council is proud of.
The other thing that the council is proud of is the merger with Westminster city council and Kensington and Chelsea borough council, which was announced yesterday. I alluded in an earlier intervention to the Secretary of State’s claim last October—he associated himself with this claim—that the move would save £100 million. When the report was published yesterday, it said that in the dim and distant future—no detail was provided—this would save about £34 million between the three councils. That is already only a third of the sum that was claimed some two to three months ago. The actual quantified savings for next year, between the three councils, was less than £3 million, and the actual sum for Hammersmith and Fulham council was £500,000. That is the big new idea. [Interruption.] I hear the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) making a sedentary comment. She represents my previous seat, and I always give her credence. She is absolutely right that £500,000 of genuine saving of back-office cost is well worth having, but it is not £27 million, £10 million or £100 million.
That sum is worth having, save for the fact that what those merger proposals envisage is not what hon. Members would like to hear—which is that the savings would come from economies of scale, procurement, and other such administrative matters. We would all support that, but instead the proposals are about creating a new entity that is not Hammersmith and Fulham, not Kensington and Chelsea, and not Westminster. It will be entirely unaccountable to the citizens of any of those boroughs, and it absolutely flies in the face of devolution and localism. No proper risk assessment has been done of the proposal, and £20 million of the notional £35 million will come from cuts in social services. I hate to think about the number of baby Ps that there will be, and the number of elderly people who will be put at risk as a result of these crazy, ill-thought-out and half-baked proposals.
There is no accountability in the arrangement. Two of the authorities have traditionally been Conservative and one has traditionally been Labour. The clear intention is to bind the hands of that authority, so that when it returns to Labour control, as it will doubtless do in three years’ time, it will no longer have jurisdiction over its own spending, because that will be centred in a holding company over which none of the individual councillors has control. Is that really the future of localism in this country? That is the brave new world that the Secretary of State’s favourite council has in store for us.
Tony Lloyd
I will give way to the Secretary of State. I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.
Mr Pickles
Some of the problems that the hon. Gentleman is talking about relate to the working neighbourhoods fund, which was cut by the Labour party. Where was he then? Why was he not lecturing the Labour party about those cuts? He criticises us but he was silent on his constituents’ behalf then.
Tony Lloyd
I invite the Secretary of State to come to my constituency any day of his choosing. We will walk around and talk to local people, and we will ask them about the record of local government under a Labour Government and under previous Conservative Governments. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles said, when the Labour Government came into power in 1997, Manchester had seen services consistently destroyed. They were fragile and vulnerable. Under a Labour Government there was an improvement in standards in education, health—a much more difficult task—housing and crime and disorder. All those improvements strengthened our communities and put the cement back into our society.
That Secretary of State, who chunters away to his friends, is putting all that at risk and he is doing so deliberately. There was choice. There was choice in the Budget process that he lost with his friends in Cabinet. There was choice when he decided to put money into local authorities such as Somerset, and not to put money into local authorities such as Manchester. That is a particularly cruel cycle of choice and a cruel deception.
The Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box earlier today and told the House that he was guaranteeing that Sure Start centres would continue to operate. Let us talk about the reality in a city such as Manchester, which is having to cut children’s services by some 25%. It has had to say that it will give up control of those Sure Start centres, and it hopes that the running of them will be taken over by the voluntary sector or possibly schools. There is no guarantee for the young people in Manchester that the Sure Start centres, which are praised by everyone on the Government Benches, will continue to operate.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith says the political choice of the Tory council is to cut the Sure Start centres. In Manchester, a Labour council has to put those Sure Start centres at risk because of the actions of the Secretary of State and his friends.