Local Government Finance Bill

First of all, if we are talking about centralisation, the hon. Gentleman needs to think about who nationalised business rates. It was his party. Who was it who abolished London-wide government and who made a mess of the poll tax? In all honesty, I say that making a change in haste in the wrong way is done at one's peril. The warning of that is provided in the poll tax. If we look back at the debates when the poll tax was being argued for, we find Ministers arguing that this was the most wonderful thing. The people who have really made a mess of local government financing in this country are the Conservatives. Local government would much prefer to have the resources they had under the 13 years of the Labour Government than what they are experiencing under the current Government. The point is this. It is not about whether we trust local councils or local communities. The question people looking at this Bill will be asking themselves—and, to judge by the consultation, they are—is whether they trust this Government and whether they trust this Secretary of State to use all these powers in a fair way. To judge by what has been done so far, there is not much room for confidence. We know that this Bill is being introduced at a time when local authorities are facing unprecedented cuts. Cuts do have to be made—[Interruption.] Well, I have said that on a number of occasions, but there is no excuse, no rationale and, so far, no justification for why these cuts are being applied in such an unfair way to communities. As the House knows, one shocking statistic from SIGOMA—special interest group of municipal authorities —tells us everything we need to know about this Government's idea of fairness. It is the fact that the 10% most deprived upper-tier authorities are facing a reduction in their spending power that is nearly four times greater than that faced by the 10% least deprived authorities. Let us take just one example from figures produced by Newcastle city council. For every local authority, it looked at the cuts for 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012-13, transition and council tax freeze grant and the provisional new homes bonus allocations. The figures show that Basingstoke and Deane authority will see a cumulative gain of £6.30 per person, whereas Knowsley will see a cumulative loss of £227.35 per person. If that is not balancing the books on the backs of the poor, I do not know what is. What possible justification can there be for such unfairness? When I asked the right hon. Gentleman about it at Communities and Local Government questions recently, all he could do was bluster, so how can councils have any confidence that they are going to be treated fairly under the Bill, particularly for communities where there is a great deal of deprivation, communities with fewer opportunities for business rate growth and communities where a lot of people cannot find a job?