Local Government Finance Bill

It is exactly. Let us look at what this Government and this Secretary of State have done on local government. I take my hat off to him, because he is rewarding his friends and his councils in the Tory heartlands. The idea is that we can somehow just write off great cities such as Liverpool and Newcastle, or other north-east cities, as if it does not matter. Do the Government actually care? No, I do not think they do. The Secretary of State said in response to my intervention that Durham would gain under the new proposal. I would like to see the figures showing how Durham will gain, because the county council has seen from its own figures—he is using 2011-12 as the baseline—that it will lose out. This is being rushed, and it will become clear, over time, that it is not the radical approach to local government reorganisation that some people suggest. It is in fact a way of ensuring that prosperous Conservative seats will benefit from the measures at the expense of some of the poorest communities in Britain. I want to turn now to the scandalous situation relating to the localisation of council tax benefit. This measure comes with a 10% reduction from day one, and it will disproportionately affect constituencies such as mine, and more deprived areas with larger numbers of people in receipt of that benefit. Listening to the Secretary of State talking earlier, it sounded as though he thought that those people were the feckless poor. I must remind him that a lot of low-paid workers, who are working blooming hard every day of the week to keep a roof over their heads, rely on council tax benefit. Over a period of time, those people will get the impression that these decisions are nothing to do with the Secretary of State, and that it is the local council that decides how to divide the money up. This measure will have a disproportionate effect on those areas with a large number of people in receipt of council tax relief.