I shall come to that point directly, but the Minister did not actually contest the NAO figure. The reduction in resources of 1.7% that he has talked about today is a selective figure, because it does indeed
include council tax, the better care fund and other ring-fenced funding, but if that is excluded the LGA says that the reduction is actually 8.5%. Whatever the statistics that the Minister wants to argue about, the truth is that local government has faced the biggest reductions in the whole of the public sector, as we heard in an intervention.
We should first pay tribute to councils for the extraordinary job that they have done—councils up and down the country, of all political parties—in trying to deal with the consequences of the cuts, because their effort has been herculean. I pay tribute to the Minister for his tone, which is slightly different from that of his predecessors, but councils really resented the Secretary of State once famously describing the cuts as “modest”—which I bet he now regrets—and the LGA’s fears for the future of local government as “utterly ludicrous”.