Local Government Finance Bill

That is right. This issue is highly political. All credit to the Secretary of State—he knows exactly what he is doing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) has said from the Front Bench, the measure will end up pushing on to local councils some of the tough decisions on spending that will have to be taken. There are two ways of dealing with this—increasing local rates or cutting services—but that will be happening at a time when demand for local government services in deprived areas such as some of those my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens North (Mr Watts) represents is going up. One has only to look at some of the statistics we have heard on Second Reading and in our debates in Committee. Demand for adult services and other services in County Durham, south Tyneside and Liverpool, for example, will be a lot higher than in Surrey and the south-east. I do not know what the Government have to fear from the reset being on a five-yearly or three-yearly basis. They think they can lock that unfairness into the system, and it is clear that when local people realise that not only are their services going to be cut but they face council tax increases as well, the Secretary of State will say, ““Oh, well, it's your profligate local council that's doing this.”” But in fact, the problem is the system of local government finance being introduced that will directly cause that. We need to keep repeating that point. It is quite clear that the Local Government Association and even some Conservative councils are working on the basis that what the Secretary of State says is not always true. For example, he can offer money for the freeze in council tax, but only for three years. If people take that, they have to realise that there is no guarantee about what they will get just before the next general election. The measures build in unfairness and we need to make sure that the Minister explains why the period will be 10 years. That figure seems to have been plucked out of thin air—there is no justification for it and local governments do not support it—so what is the rationale behind it? The Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) said earlier that there could be in-year adjustments for councils that fall on hard times in terms of their business rate income going down, and that is mentioned in the Bill, but we have not seen exactly how that will be distributed. There is no guarantee that a council faced with large redundancies and the closure of a big provider of local business rate will get any benefit at all, because it will be down to the Secretary of State's determination. On present form, it seems quite clear what the Secretary of State will be doing—looking after Conservative councils.