Rural Roads
Debate between Stuart Anderson and Helen Morgan(1 week, 6 days ago)
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Stuart Anderson
I thank my hon. Friend for raising that excellent point. We have to look at rural counties, which are not being given the fair consideration that they need. The Government are currently holding back almost £46 million, I believe, from Lib Dem-run Shropshire council, because it has not met their stringent criteria. The council has an amber rating at the moment, and we are not getting the money that we need. Long-term certainty is required to ensure a more proactive approach to road measures, rather than just short-term solutions.
A report published just today by the Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance survey states that the backlog of repairs in England and Wales is worth more than £18 billion. The Government need to provide longer-term highways maintenance funding for councils through to 2032, as the previous Government planned to do. That would provide councils with the certainty they need to effectively plan and undertake repairs to roads. The decisions made by this Labour Government have taken millions of pounds out of South Shropshire.
The second issue is that the Lib Dem-run council now fixes only about half the potholes that were fixed previously. As per its press release last week, the figure was 25,000 over the last year, but if we go back one, two or three years, then we were averaging 38,000 to 41,000.
Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
Will the hon. Member give way on that point?
Helen Morgan
The hon. Member is making what is generally a good speech about rural funding, so it is a shame that he has made it party political. Does he not understand that the Conservative administration, under whose budget we are still operating, cut highways funding, including the proportion for preventive maintenance, for every year from 2022 to 2025? That will clearly have had a knock-on impact. If we do not maintain the roads, they will be in a much worse state at the end of that period.
Stuart Anderson
The hon. Member raises an important point—which I thought she might raise when I mentioned the local Lib Dem-run council in South Shropshire. For years, and under successive Governments, rural areas have not received the correct funding. That is not right; however, this is also about how the money is used. At the moment, the local council has an amber rating and is not fixing as many potholes as it should. At the moment, it is fixing only half the number done previously.
The other thing being raised with me that although potholes are being fixed, they come out and fix them on the Monday, and if there is a bit of rain on Tuesday and Wednesday, by Thursday the road is the same again. I have photos of people undertaking different measures to fix potholes that are completely unacceptable. Those roads are as bad at the end of the week as they were at the beginning.
We need to look at prevention. As a general rule, councils across the country are fixing more potholes than ever, but we are not seeing that in Shropshire, as per the local council’s numbers that I have quoted. Shropshire council continues to spend disproportionate amounts on reactive pothole repairs rather than on planned maintenance, because the Government have not given it the necessary long-term funding clarity. Evidence from the Road Emulsion Association shows that surface dressing extends life by around 10 to 15 years and uses 75% less bitumen and 80% less aggregate. It is campaigning for significantly increased investment in preventive road treatments and the maintenance of longer-term funding for councils. Every council will have to plan and will need clear visibility on the necessary funding.
As the Minister will know, developments in areas like artificial intelligence and autonomous robots could also start to future-proof how we deal with roads. I was delighted at the beginning of the year to see—as many others will have seen—the first autonomous vehicle able to identify cracks in the road and seal them early on, before they get worse. That is also reducing the number of lane closures, time invested and cost. As the RAC has stated—
Income Tax (Charge)
Debate between Stuart Anderson and Helen Morgan(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)
I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I welcome the shadow Secretary of State to his place. He responded to my first Adjournment debate on a Thursday before Easter, and I was very grateful, but he will be disappointed to hear that we have not seen the improvements in ambulance response times that we would have liked to see in Shropshire.
Last week’s Budget brought £22 billion of investment for the NHS. By anybody’s standards, that is a big number, so the Liberal Democrats welcome the investment. The NHS was left in a dire state by the Conservatives, and it is clear that something radical must be done. What is the Conservatives’ legacy? Well, we all know: crumbling hospitals, 7 million people on NHS waiting lists for secondary operations, our constituents struggling to access a GP when they need one, dental deserts such as the one in North Shropshire, appalling ambulance waiting times with horrifying outcomes, and a tsunami of a mental health crisis waiting to overwhelm us. It is clear that investment is needed, which is why the Liberal Democrats put the NHS at the front of our election manifesto and our campaigning since.
It is very important that the £22 billion is spent wisely to keep people healthy and to save money in the future, so I look forward to hearing how the Budget will affect the public health grant and mental health services in particular. Those are two really important areas where we can invest to save taxpayers’ money, and to get better health outcomes for people and avoid their suffering in the future.
It is also really important that the £22 billion of investment is not undermined by a decision made by the same Government on the very same day. It is hard to believe that the decision to increase employer’s national insurance contributions and to lower the threshold—at a cost of £566 per person—was properly thought through before the Budget was delivered last Wednesday. That decision is going to hit GP practices, hospices, social care providers and the charities that provide so much additional care outside the formal NHS structure. A local GP got in touch with me over the weekend to say that the decision will
“serve to directly undermine access and patient care at a time when practices are already under strain due to years of neglect.”
Another said it will “kill the family doctor”.
Why will it kill the family doctor? Because GP practices are not eligible for employment allowance. They cannot put up their prices, and their only option is to cut staff and services, which would be a disaster. The Conservative Government proved that if we cut the number of GPs, we end up with a really big problem in the NHS—one that we are fighting now. Labour’s plan to increase the number of GPs, which is welcome, is surely in jeopardy because of the increase to employer’s NICs. The Liberal Democrats are calling on the Government to exempt GPs from the NIC hike or ensure that they are funded to cover it. Otherwise, no one is going to see their GP within seven days—a right that the Liberal Democrats think people should have.
I want to touch on social care, which feels a bit like the elephant in the room and is likely to be significantly affected by the change in thresholds and rates of employer’s national insurance contributions. We all know that the sector is in crisis, and the Budget took note of this but did not really go far enough to address it. I think we can all agree that we cannot fix the NHS without fixing social care. We know that there are thousands of patients in hospital who are medically fit to be discharged and who would recover better in their own bed at home, but who are stuck in a hospital because the social care packages are not available to allow them to return home.
That bed blocking, which is a horrible term, causes patients to be unable to flow through a hospital when they are admitted. It causes the queues of 12, 13 or 14 ambulances that we see outside hospitals in Shropshire on a regular basis, and it means that those ambulances do not arrive when somebody is in a life-threatening position in their community. Social care is so important in dealing with this urgent problem.
Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)
As the MP for South Shropshire, I have been in the same meetings as the hon. Lady, who represents North Shropshire. In Shropshire, about 80% of council funding goes to social care. Does the hon. Member believe that we need a fairer system to support funding for social care in Shropshire?