Local Government Finance

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on his performance at the Dispatch Box in opening for our side and on dealing so ably with such a cunning fox on the other side. The Minister is a good man and handles his brief incredibly well, but his cunningness is such that he was able to carry off with great insouciance some of the things that he had to say, which my hon. Friend picked up so well. To use a football analogy that will be familiar to one or two hon. Friends, when a defender has ruthlessly cut down the forward running through and committed the most atrocious foul, he protests to the referee with the grandest of gestures, claiming that it could be nothing to do with him. When the Minister talks about a tight financial settlement as if it were an act of God and not the responsibility of the Government, who have spent a colossal amount over the past 10 years and are now having to pull the horns in, it is the political equivalent of spreading one's arms out to the referee and saying, ““Nothing to do with me, guv,”” but we know that it is. That is what my hon. Friend spotted, and I look forward to his contributions on the subject for some time to come. I am glad that he is there and I am not. The settlement is wrong for two reasons. First, it is disingenuous. The general public understand inflation and think that if a council gets more than inflation, everything must be all right and that the money should be coming through effectively, but with the rise of 1 per cent. above inflation or whatever it is, the Government are giving the public the sense that, should there be any rises or cuts in services, they must be the council's fault. However, the Minister knows full—this has been well documented by hon. Members in all parts of the House—that the cost pressures in local government in some areas go well beyond 1 per cent. or whatever the gentle increase above inflation represented by the three-year settlement is. Social services have been mentioned, and they include not only care for the elderly, but special needs care for the youngest. Fortunately, more young children with complex and special needs now survive infancy. The costs of that generation as it grows is substantial and mirrors the cost at the other end of life, when those who are fortunate to be living longer have a greater need for more expensive care. These pressures have not yet been fully compensated for in the settlement, and it will be some time before they are. Colleagues have mentioned waste and highways. Some local examples from Bedfordshire will illustrate the disingenuousness. I pay tribute to the three local authorities in Bedfordshire with which I have close dealings, but they are coming to an end, because of local government reorganisation. The Conservatives have run two of them and been the majority party on the other, and all three have done remarkable things over the years. Bedfordshire county council has moved from having a rating of no stars to three in less than two years. Mid-Bedfordshire district council gets consistently good ratings for its local government performance, and Bedford borough council, on which Conservatives are in the majority, is rated an excellent council. I pay tribute to those councils in passing, but each of them can provide an example of the difficulties that the settlement will produce. In regard to social services care for the county, there is the floor issue. For the third consecutive year, the county council will lose money. Being a floored authority has cost it £5.8 million, which has put £39 on the council tax. The local authority business growth incentives scheme—LABGI—will also cost it money. Bedford borough council reports that the next three years' increase in the amount given for the concessionary fares scheme has been calculated by the Government at £450,000, £460,000 and £470,000. The extra £10,000 a year hardly covers inflation increases, and does not say much for the anticipated increase in the numbers of people using the buses. Two or three years ago, Mid-Bedfordshire district council was rate-capped for having the audacity to raise its band D council tax by £1 per month. The hon. Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner) will understand this. It is now trying to provide weekly waste collections and to do the recycling that the Government want it to do, but it is not getting the support that it needs and will be in difficulty. My first charge is that this is a disingenuous settlement, and that it will not deliver what the public expect. We could have seen better. The second thing that is wrong with it is that it does not take the opportunity given to it by the three-year change of delivering one of the things that Lyons spoke of, and that my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) mentioned. It could have taken the opportunity to cut through the question of who is responsible for the increases and what the respective responsibilities of the Government and the local authorities are. Many of the contributions tonight have dealt with that dilemma. Colleagues have tried to say that, if the Government are responsible for one thing, the local council must be responsible for another. The Government just sit and let the blame be passed on. The Lyons report said that"““an independent and authoritative voice is needed to provide better information on funding to inform the public and parliament about the impact of new burdens on local government and the evidence of future pressures””." Lyons could see that the confusion between the responsibilities of the Government and of local government was eating away at the public's understanding of local government and of where responsibility for public finance lay. That is reducing the public's confidence. If all they ever see of national and local politicians is an endless passing of the buck, they will end up saying, ““A plague on both your houses.”” The need for greater transparency is something that we have all recognised in the past few days in another context. The Government could have taken this opportunity to do what Lyons suggested, and to put in place a mechanism to provide that independent voice and to look authoritatively at the responsibilities of local government and of Parliament and central Government, and at the future pressures. The Government need to answer the conundrum by asking where fault and responsibility lie, and who should be credited with certain changes. That would address the serious issue that is affecting the heart of local government and people's relationship with it. The Minister is a fair man who is interested in these issues. I think that he heard me speak on this subject at the local government finance conference in December. I truly would like to see the Government take away that suggestion in the Lyons report and do something with it. If they did so, we would not have to deal with a disingenuous settlement in future. Instead, we would be dealing with a measure that met the concerns of colleagues on both sides of the House. We would have an honest and authoritative arrangement in which we could attach blame where blame truly lay, and in which credit could be given where it was rightly due. That would provide better settlements in the future, and I hope that the Minister will address that point. I hope that those on our side will also do so in due course.