Local Government Finance

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner), especially given his closing remarks, which will chime with much of what I have to say. He opened his remarks by saying that he welcomed the settlement; the Liberal Democrats welcome the fact that it is a three-year settlement, but we do not welcome the settlement itself. I looked back at last year's Hansard and the then Minister—now the Minister for the Environment—heralded that settlement as nothing short of ““revolutionary””, which speaks volumes about the limits of the Government's ambitions. If the Government had been truly ambitious, we would have had a lot more to welcome today—as the hon. Member for Wigan said. Instead, we heard the familiar barrage of statistics, with claims and counter-claims about increases and cuts, although the Minister shows an impressive command of the statistics. One of the figures that sticks in my mind was mentioned by the hon. Members for Wigan and for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter): the 40 per cent. real-terms increase in local government funding over the past 10 years. However, neither Member took into account the fact that education is ring-fenced. If we take education funding out of the equation, there is still a real-terms increase of 14 per cent., but it pales into insignificance when compared with things such as health funding.