Disadvantaged Communities

Vikki Slade Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger.

I think we would all agree that it is a basic human right to have a decent place to call home, a neighbourhood where one feels safe, an opportunity to earn a decent living, access to healthcare and a clean environment. If people have those things, they can thrive and, together, form communities that then flourish. If we empower people to take decisions locally, those communities will make choices that lift up the people in them and protect their local environment.

However, under the last Government, it was made harder for communities to take those decisions. Their resources were slashed and they were forced to compete with each other, with towns set against each another in bidding wars through short-term, race-to-the-bottom policies. The Liberal Democrats are disappointed that the Labour Government plan to take decisions away from communities, using the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to remove local authorities’ power to have a say in planning. We are worried about how proposals for local government reorganisation may move decisions on local services further away from people and their neighbourhoods.

The proposal to provide three-year settlements for councils is reassuring, but only if the funding covers the true cost of providing the services people need—not knowing three years out that the council will be forced to reduce its services is not helpful. Although the 2025-26 settlement offered some additional funding, in many councils—particularly those with high levels of social care spending—the Labour Government’s jobs tax, which increased employers’ national insurance contributions, was not fully reimbursed. The same was true of the packages for fire authorities, and the issue was particularly problematic where high levels of on-call firefighters were on the payroll, meaning that those authorities were seriously disadvantaged.

Turning to the mission-critical neighbourhoods, it is absolutely right that there is a Labour focus—sorry, a laser focus, although I appreciate that there is a Labour focus—on lifting them up and drawing them into every part of society, not just to improve people’s lives, but because if those places are economically active, healthy and safe, the rest of us benefit too.

I want to focus on two main issues for communities: housing and transport. We all know that, for years, people around the country—and not just in those neighbourhoods—have given up. They have given up on the chance of owning a home or of even renting a decent place to call home. They have given up on the opportunity to bring up children and have a meaningful career.

In many rural areas, which may not make up the most deprived areas, there are pockets of extreme poverty that are completely forgotten. There are farmers whose children underperform in schools and are loaned their school uniforms; they live in homes that have not been updated for 60 years.

[Bobby Dean (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

My hon. Friend talked about communities being overlooked because they are contained within wealthier communities. My constituency is in the outer London borough of Sutton, which, by London standards, is on the wealthier end. We have two distinct communities in St Helier and Roundshaw, and those estates absolutely need more support, but they consistently get overlooked because of the way that local government funding works. First, it is on a borough-wide basis, so when the deprivation scores are added up, they are not entitled to much. Secondly, the indices used are extremely outdated and fail to take account of the true cost of housing.

Housing prices in London and the south-east have skyrocketed over the last 10 years, and the indices do not take that into account, which means the average Londoner is now worse off than the average person in many other regions of the country, once we take housing costs into account. Does my hon. Friend agree that whatever reforms we make to better target resources at disadvantaged communities, we must ensure that local government funding formulas take housing costs properly into account?

--- Later in debate ---

[Vikki Slade]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right—there are micro-communities within communities that look wealthy from the outside, and I will come on to some local examples.

In rural and coastal areas, employment opportunities are incredibly limited, as the hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington) said, with seasonal jobs in limited sectors of agriculture and hospitality. The homes have been snapped up by those fortunate enough to own two or more properties, as we heard from Members representing various areas of Cornwall. That is why the Liberal Democrats want to see the loophole closed on holiday lets, to ensure that they pay council tax, and it is why we want to see the introduction of a separate planning use for both holiday lets and second homes in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, so that we can secure the homes we need for our teachers, carers and police officers, and our farmers are better able to use their assets on their properties to support agricultural workers, so that we can provide food security.

The Government’s move away from the rural services grant has been devastating for so many communities and needs to be urgently rethought. As stated by the Dorset Community Foundation last year in its “Hidden Dorset” report:

“On the face of it Dorset is a beautiful, vibrant county but scratch the surface and underneath there are areas that are among the most deprived in the UK.”

There are 17,100 children in Dorset living in absolute poverty—not relative, but absolute poverty—and I am sure the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) will know where some of those communities are. This is in a place that is not considered a mission-critical area.

The plan for 1.5 million homes is laudable, but the Government must refocus on having the right homes in the right places. The lack of focus on social homes is deeply disappointing, especially for a Labour Government, and I encourage the Department to commit to at least 150,000 homes for social rent, as the Liberal Democrats have. We already have a large number of homes lying empty—1.2 million—and the Liberal Democrats have heard little about what is being done to bring them back into use.

Today’s announcement on transport is great news for some communities, but many are still being forgotten. People living in most of the south-west—and it would appear from the latest announcement that the south-west stops at Bristol—have no access to trains, and where they do have a bus, it only comes a couple of times a day. How exactly are those who cannot afford a private car supposed to get to work? Those aged 16-plus cannot get to school or college. One constituent in Bere Regis in my constituency of Mid Dorset and North Poole had to give up an apprenticeship because there was simply no way to get there. Families living on the minimum wage cannot spare the budget to pay for driving lessons—of course, it is not possible to get a driving test either—or insurance, which can run into thousands of pounds.

Will the Government correct the injustice created when the age of participation was increased by ensuring that home-to-school transport is funded to 18 and accepting Lib Dem proposals to create a young person’s bus card, giving under-25s significant discounts on bus fares? Rural areas are most in need of the bus fare cap, so we hope it will be extended, as journeys are often long and require two or more routes to be used, not just in England but across the United Kingdom—including rural Wales, where, oddly, a project between Oxford and Cambridge was badged as an England and Wales project, potentially costing Wales millions of pounds.

Finally, I want to align myself with the comments made by my neighbour, the hon. Member for Bournemouth East. We must eradicate child poverty. I share the frustrations of others that the strategy has been delayed, and I hope this means that we will have a much more meaningful document which includes the removal of the two-child benefit cap. These children have done nothing to find themselves in the position of having multiple siblings, and I hope the Government will grasp the nettle and deliver real change for our forgotten neighbourhoods and our next generation.