The hon. Gentleman shouts, “We were protecting the health service,” but social care provided by local councils is as important. Of course, that is not protected from the reductions.
The figures I quoted earlier were from the Local Government Association and the Office for Budget Responsibility, so they are clearly right—perhaps hon. Members want to challenge them. The spending that local authorities can control—which excludes schools, public health, which is ring-fenced, and housing benefit—has fallen from 19% of total public sector current expenditure in 2009-10 to 16% in 2015-16. That is a disproportionate cut in local government spending compared with public spending as a whole. There is another way of looking at it: local government spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen from 4% to 2.9%. That is a significant fall.
The Government have tried to spin the 2015-16 cut as a 1.7% cut in spending power, but we should again look at the figures produced by the LGA, which are based on OBR figures. The real figures that local authorities can control, on a like-for-like basis over the years, excluding the better care fund, council tax and the public health grant, which is ring-fenced, show that the cut is 8.5% in real terms. That is the figure.
Ministers like including spending power and they like the better care fund. Hon. Members should read the exchange that the Communities and Local Government Committee had with the permanent secretary recently. He accepted that the better care fund was not part of the grant from central Government to local authorities. That money is included in the budget of the national health service, in the Department of Health. That is where it is accounted for. Ministers cannot count it in both the Department of Health budget and the Department for Communities and Local Government budget. That would be double counting. Ministers count the better care fund in the Department of Health budget, and say, “Ah. We do not talk about the actual grant and money for local authorities. We talk about spending power.” Although the better care fund is in the Department of Health budget, they say that it is part of local government spending power. That is how they get their calculation down to 1.7%. That is how they do it—by sleight of hand. We cannot have that double counting.
That is not to decry or demean the better care fund. The concept of trying to join up health service and local authority social care is obviously a good one.