Local Government Finance Bill

I give my broad support to the Bill and its Second Reading this evening. It will enable the start of the journey away from central control of council funding, and will give councils more autonomy both to raise local funding and to set spending on local community priorities, rather than the perceived priorities of Whitehall. Pursuing the latter over a number of years has created a perverse system whereby councils have constantly been looking to the next Whitehall initiative and the next Government grant. That system has let down some of our most deprived communities, as despite external and formula grants increasing in real terms for more than a decade from 1998 onwards, the gap between rich and poor actually widened during that period. In the scramble to get funding into local authorities, those prescriptive grants would quite often not match the priorities of an area, of if they did, they would often overlap with the current authority provision because the grant criteria could not be tailored to local need. Services could often not be integrated, leading to very poor value for money and a continuous bolt-on of services, which councils then had to make very difficult decisions on, in terms of deciding whether to retain them or not, once the grant funding from Government expired. Pursuing the former and moving away from a central grants system will allow councils to make clearer long-term decisions based on the priorities of the communities that they serve. I wholeheartedly welcome the mechanisms in place in the Bill to ensure that no council is worse off at the outset of the changes. That, together with a system of top-ups and tariffs, will ensure fairness. I also welcome the concept of the retention of future local business rates. I believe that that will make councils, particularly planning authorities, think far more carefully about creating a good mixture of commercial development and housing in their local plans. Many of my constituents feel that any plans for new housing must be matched by the creation of new employment to ensure that communities are sustainable and cohesive, and not just commuter belts for the larger conurbations, with poorly thought out, over-intensive housing developments. It is also vital that the Government address the problem of empty dwellings, which the Bill does. As a Conservative I am a firm believer in a property-owning democracy and therefore the right of an individual to use a property in any way they wish within the rule of law, but I am acutely aware of the situation that we now face with huge numbers of long-term vacant properties—nearly 280,000 in England last year alone—and the councils covering my constituency have 1,100 such properties. With such a housing shortage, and with the proposal of new housing developments across the country, it is morally right that we try to correct the failure of the market in this case and get those long-term empty properties back into use. Therefore I welcome the Government's move to allow councils to charge additional council tax where a property has been vacant for more than two years. That, together with the incentive to get existing properties back into use through the new homes bonus, will have a hugely positive effect on getting our properties back into use. There are many more matters that I would like to speak about in some depth, but I will not do so on this occasion. I welcome the fact that the Bill will come before a Committee of the whole House rather than a Bill Committee, which will give Back-Bench Members an opportunity to raise their concerns about some of the minutiae of the Bill at that point. The Bill aligns with the coalition agenda to move communities from a culture of dependency to one of greater-self reliance, but provides the safety net to bridge the gap where communities have the problems that make it difficult to achieve that self-reliance. I will therefore support the Bill this evening.