Local Government and Social Care Funding

I must inform the House that Mr Speaker has not selected the amendment.

I beg to move,

That this House notes that despite the Prime Minister announcing that austerity is over, local authorities’ spending power per household is on course to fall by an average of 23 per cent by 2020, and that nine of the 10 most deprived council areas in this country have seen reductions that are almost three times the average of any other council under this Government; recognises that this has resulted in social care budgets in England losing £7 billion; further notes that at the last General Election Labour committed to a fully costed plan to invest an additional £8 billion in social care over this Parliament; and calls on the Government to ensure that local authorities and social care are properly and sustainably funded.

If I may, I seek the indulgence of the House to briefly place on record, as shadow Communities Secretary, my utter shock and revulsion at the recent terrorist atrocities, both in Northern Ireland and in Sri Lanka, over the Easter break. We send our condolences to the families affected and to their communities. Coming so soon after the terrible events in Christchurch, New Zealand, just before Easter, they serve as a bleak reminder of how fragile our human rights and freedoms are, and how we must redouble our efforts in this place and outside to hold our communities together.

The whole House will be grateful for the way the hon. Gentleman has introduced the debate and for those sentiments. Does he agree that people do such things for publicity and public reaction, and that we should take care to ensure that our publicity and our public reaction confronts and confounds their aims, so that what they do will be in vain, even though it has taken a terrible toll on those directly affected?

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We should stand firm against terrorist atrocities wherever they are perpetrated. We should stand strong as a community, both in the United Kingdom and in the global community, against such acts of terror. We should call them out wherever they take place.

I welcome the opportunity to raise the important matter of local government funding in an Opposition day debate, especially considering how scarce the opportunities are for the Opposition to raise matters in such debates. I pay tribute to the shadow Leader of the House, my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), whose dogged pursuit of that issue has allowed us to debate this important matter today.

In this place our discussion has been dominated by Brexit, but across the country our local councils, and the local services people rely on, are straining at the seams. I pay tribute to councillors of all political persuasions and none for the work they do in serving their communities. I pay tribute to the council officers and dedicated public servants who deliver neighbourhood and care services on the frontline. Years of uncertainty and unfair funding have created a quiet crisis that is now impossible to ignore. Under this Government, the facts speak for themselves: local authorities have faced a reduction to core funding of nearly £16 billion since 2010. That means that councils will have lost 60p out of every £1 that the previous Labour Government provided to spend on local services.

When the Prime Minister entered Downing Street, she promised to build a country that works for everyone, and she then promised an end to austerity. As her time in office probably comes to an end, we are able to reflect on both of those promises. Like in many areas of her leadership, I am sure we will all find that in both those areas she has been sorely lacking.

As usual, my hon. Friend is making a very clear statement about the situation local government finds itself in today. My council is one of the 10 councils to have suffered the heaviest cuts, yet I represent a constituency and a city that is one of the most disadvantaged in the country. It is clear that the decisions that were made about where the cuts should fall have meant that they have been put on the shoulders of the poorest and the most vulnerable, not the richest in society.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. She champions the cause of the communities of Kingston upon Hull. It is one of the most deprived local authorities in England, yet it is one of the areas that have received the heaviest cuts to their spending power since 2010. That was a political choice, and one that has decimated many communities, including the one she represents, across England.

I am sure my hon. Friend will come on to this argument, but does he agree that cuts to essential local government services in many areas inevitably lead to additional expenditure elsewhere? I think particularly of the decimation of youth services and early years prevention, which has undoubtedly contributed to the extra stress and extreme youth violence on our streets.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We used to have something called Total Place, which was all the public sector bodies working together towards a single strategy for a local area. What we have seen as a consequence of the austerity since 2010 is a complete breakdown of that collaborative working. It is worse than that, however, because rather than public bodies working together collaboratively, pooling resources and getting the best possible levels of services for communities, we have seen cost-shunting. For the sake of saving money on youth services, we are seeing a rise in crime that is pushing up costs for the police. Because of the cuts to police budgets, those costs are shunted on to other public bodies. That is not a common-sense approach to dealing with people’s needs and services, to building stronger communities or to spending public money wisely.

On cost-shunting, just this morning we heard from representatives of families with children with special educational needs and disabilities. They were talking about their needs not being met through the education budget, the high needs block from local government or the health needs budget, because each is trying to get the other to pay the bill. Children with special needs and disabilities are falling through the gap and remaining unsupported.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are too many instances across the public sector where cost-shunting is resulting in precisely what my hon. Friend says: vulnerable people falling through gaps that should not exist. I think that in their heart of hearts, Conservative Members, who clearly deal with casework that is similar to ours, will know that that is happening in their areas too.

If the hon. Gentleman is going to apologise for the cuts he has forced on our local communities, I will give way to him.

Very kind of the hon. Gentleman. He was referring to what has happened since 2010. Let us just remind ourselves that the 2010 Labour manifesto said that certain areas would be prioritised and protected. Will he remind us whether that included local government?

I remind the hon. Gentleman that the 2017 Labour manifesto said that we would put money back into our public services, something that he has failed to do in the almost three years since that general election.

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly pertinent speech. Does he not agree that it is completely perverse that public health budgets in York under the Tory-Liberal Democrat council have been slashed, when the NHS 10-year plan says we have to invest in public health?

It shows precisely the short-sighted way that the Government have approached funding local government. The fact that they passed on public health budgets to local government was, I think, a good move. It was one of the few things in the Lansley Act—the Health and Social Care Act 2012—that I thought was good, because it took back to local councils precisely what they were invented to tackle, which is to improve the health and wellbeing of the citizen. Of course, many councils started off their lives 150 or so years ago as local boards of health. Having that focus on public health and on health and wellbeing is absolutely right, but we cannot do that while cutting those budgets. That is the scandal: the areas that have seen the biggest cuts to their spending power, the areas that have seen the biggest cuts to the revenue support grant, and the areas that have seen the biggest cuts to the public health grant are the ones that need that resource the most.

Let me make a point that neatly sums up what my hon. Friend is talking about. In Chesterfield, we have had a reduction of 43.2%. I took the time to look at the reduction in the Minister’s constituency and it is only 12%. That is not a difference of just a couple of per cent. It is three and a half times more in my constituency.

As my hon. Friend will hear as I develop my argument, that is not just a one-off. It is happening across England and it is unfair. The Tories do not get that blatant unfairness, because they have not seen the same levels of cuts in many of their areas that we have seen, yet the impact that has had on the communities we represent cannot be expressed loudly enough.