Neighbourhood Services: Government Support

Motion to Take Note

Moved by

That this House takes note of the levels of government support for neighbourhood services provided by district councils and other local authorities.

My Lords, in moving this Motion, I remind the House of my registered interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council.

I refer noble Lords and the Minister to previous debates that we have had on this matter and in which I have taken part. Having read what I said then, I simply reiterate that it is all still true, because the concerns that I put forward at that time, along with other noble Lords, have simply not been taken up by the Government. On 19 October 2017 there was a debate on the future availability of resources for the provision of district council services; a debate on local government finance generally was introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, in July 2017; and on 25 September this year I made a speech in the debate on the public spending review, which I shall refer to later. However, nothing has changed. Neighbourhood services continue to be the Cinderella of public services in this country. Things such as bin collection, street cleansing and local leisure facilities have less and less money spent on them every year, and the quality and quantity of what is happening, taken as a whole, is deteriorating.

These services comprise much of the work of ordinary district councils in two-tier areas—I am a member of one—but they are also carried out by unitary authorities, metropolitan councils and London boroughs. Some services, such as the maintenance of local highways, are carried out by county councils. However, the amount of funding provided and allowed for them by central government is the same whichever council carries them out, and it is going down. Indeed, an increasing number of these services are being provided by town and parish councils. In many areas, county, unitary and district councils are deliberately seeking to transfer some services to town and parish councils, which can levy an extra council tax to pay for them as an alternative to the services being closed down or seriously deteriorating.

We are told by our new Prime Minister that austerity is over, yet, as far as local government is concerned, the only real increases in funding, with a few exceptions, are for social care. As we know, that itself is inadequate and the social care system is in serious crisis but, nevertheless, there is real extra money going to those authorities that deal with social care. For neighbourhood or street-level services, whether they are provided by districts or larger authorities, there is no extra money at all. In fact, in real terms, the money this year is being reduced yet again.

What are these services that people like me go on about? They include street cleansing—where sweepers and other people clean up litter—and litter removal generally, as well as the local highways and streets services which tackle the potholes that the Government panicked about last year. Other services include local traffic management, street lighting, pavements and housing standards. The increasing number of private landlords in many areas of poor housing mean that housing standards are a growing problem; housing stock that had been improving over several decades—50 years, perhaps—is now in many cases deteriorating again. There are services addressing environmental health, pollution control and antisocial behaviour measures, for which district councils have responsibility following legislation a few years ago. There are local public health initiatives and all the services that safeguard the local environment, with green spaces, local amenity areas and mini parks. All this concerns not only the green environment but the whole urban environment and any public spaces.

If the district councils and local authorities do not go out deliberately to look after these areas and keep them decent, they deteriorate. It is an easy thing not to do. We are talking about children’s play areas, parks, leisure facilities, sports pitches and facilities, community centres and community facilities generally—the whole question of managing the local environment. Town centres, and towns, pose a huge problem at the moment; we are not talking about the big cities here but towns that may be large, small or medium sized. The local authority is very often the body that has to try to get a grip on maintaining viable, decent, properly maintained town centres. If it does not, who else will?

At the moment, there are lots of competitions that authorities can enter to get extra money for town centres, but they are competitions. People spend a lot of time and effort entering these competitions. Some win and get amounts of money—but resources are required for local authorities generally to look after their town centres, not just those lucky enough to win competitions. At a local level, the planning system is absolutely crucial for keeping areas as good places to live.

Refuse collection is on the front line of recycling, which is so important as part of climate initiatives. On community safety, councils may work with the local police and other bodies. The local authority has no duty to get involved but, if it does not, efforts will often not succeed. All this has a particular impact on ordinary districts, because this is what they do. It also affects everybody else and neighbourhood services everywhere.

The fabric of communities all over the country—not all of them, but many—is falling apart, as is the structure of the local services which maintain that fabric. There are rich areas and poor areas, and there are areas which are more affected by this than others. As far as the climate emergency is concerned, local authorities have an absolutely crucial role to play. A large number—maybe over 200—have declared a local climate emergency, but without the resources to do things to tackle climate issues locally, across the wide range of everything they do, it will not come to anything.

On resources, according to the National Audit Office, since the 2015 spending review, districts have had a 13.9% reduction in core spending power in real terms. That feeds across to non-districts in relation to the services they carry out, which would otherwise be district services. Since 2010-11, the median reduction in core spending power for all districts is over 30% in real terms. For the worst-hit districts, including my own, it is 50% or more. If a local authority’s spending power is cut by more than half over 10 years, it has a huge effect on what it can and cannot do. The areas that are affected are very often the poorest areas, because they are the ones which do not have the ability to raise extra money in other ways.

I raised this on 25 September in the debate on the public spending review. The Minister at that time, the noble Lord, Lord Duncan of Springbank, promised to write to me to explain how everything was happening. I have his letter here. It says:

“The Government also announced that it will consult on a 2% core council tax referendum principle, which will allow councils to access additional funding for their local services”.

We know that, but of course 2% is less than the rate of inflation. So it is not enough even on the amount to be raised by the council tax alone, and the amount from other sources is either static or has gone down. The Minister’s letter also says that,

“local authorities should be able to make decisions to meet pressures where appropriate, informed by local knowledge, and be accountable for them”.

I am afraid that if that is what the Government are saying, it will result in a lot of belly laughs in a lot of local authorities.

I am not here to engage in any special pleading for my own local authority in Pendle, although I will mention as an example that the number of people employed by that authority has halved since 2010. Local authority services depend on employing people. There may be greater efficiencies—I am certain that there are—but when you slash your staff numbers by half and many of your remaining staff have gone down to a three- or four-day week, and you are trying to do the same things you did before, it is impossible.

The affected authorities are often old industrial towns in the north of England and elsewhere. Generally, they are places on the edge and in the areas in between. Even in the south-east, authorities are affected. We are not talking here about major cities, but about all the ordinary places that get missed out. I had better be careful about what I say with my noble friend Lord Goddard sitting in front of me, but the north of England is more than just Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield.

One very good example is the new homes bonus, which was introduced to encourage local authorities to give planning permission for new housing. In practice, it top-sliced government money for all local authorities, including the poorest, and redistributed it to those that could build new houses, which were very often already in the pipeline. The truth is that it resulted in the redistribution of money from poor areas and areas where people did not want to build houses to places with high demand for houses and where new housing had already been planned and agreed. It resulted in a redistribution of funding from the north of England to the south-east, the south-west and the east taken overall, with individual exceptions, of course. Now that the new homes bonus has been cut, the top-sliced money has not been returned to the poorer areas from which it was taken in the first place.

I could talk for the whole of this debate, but I will not. The dark clouds of austerity still hang over far too many of the ordinary streets and roads, towns and communities of England. Further cuts are not sustainable. It is no wonder that people in many of these areas are fed up with the system, fed up with everything and vote for unicorns. Two years ago, in a debate in 2017, I said that things were “at breaking point”. They are not broken yet, thanks to the efforts of the staff, the councillors and everybody working in these areas, but it is pretty damned near broken. Something has to happen to put more resources into the ordinary services that people expect when they pay their council tax.

My Lords, I am pleased to take part this afternoon. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for moving this debate on government support to help local authorities fulfil their statutory duties and provide a good range of services to our communities. As the noble Lord alluded to, those services include education, child and adult social care, waste collection, public health, planning, housing, road maintenance and library services, and I too pay tribute to the excellent staff delivering them. It has certainly been a continuing challenge against a backdrop of successive Governments reducing funding for local government, as well as changed funding arrangements that place new pressures and demands, but local authorities have, to their credit, risen to the challenge and responded by opening up and creating new opportunities against possible further pressures for the sector.

In my allotted time, I will focus on libraries, which, in their own way, can be sometimes misunderstood or remembered only as a Cinderella service. That is far from the case. That is why I will concentrate my focus on the importance of libraries, which are continuing to strike out and innovate in our neighbourhood services offer.

I welcome too the local core spending power, which is estimated to increase by £2.9 billion in total in 2020-21, but of course, as I have alluded to, there are financial challenges for councils. I am therefore pleased that local government is demonstrating how it can deliver services, for now and for the future, and that authorities and many others are making an impact by working collaboratively and sharing those precious resources, as well as co-locating with other government, partner or voluntary services. Thinking outside the box is now a must for many councils, which I know are already working and delivering in new and different ways, and making the case for the importance of neighbourhood hubs.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness. Her remarks about community bus services, having new request bus services and refashioning libraries as community hubs, and co-locating other community services, were extremely well made. It is vital that we deal with underfunding, but it is also important that we get the best value from the resources, the infrastructure and the funding that is currently available, and redesigning services along the lines that she was discussing in relation to Lincolnshire, which she knows well, is a point well made.

I have a gentle criticism of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. He said that there were problems, “even in the south-east”. Can I inform my noble friend that there are many problems in the south-east, and most of the issues that he talked about apply equally to London and the south-east as other parts of the country? It is a very bad idea for us to be setting the north against the south, as if somehow the south is a land of milk and honey and the north is all starved. These problems are fairly common across the north and the south, and many of the issues which the noble Baroness referred to about redesigning services are equally important in the south-east.

Recently I visited the wonderful new library and community centre run by Oasis, a brilliant charity run by the outstanding community leader the Reverend Steve Chalke in Waterloo, in the London Borough of Lambeth. He has turned a library that was threatened with closure into a community centre. It also has a school and a debt advice service. The police station next door, sadly, is being closed, and Oasis is hoping to bring that into the community hub, too. There is a community centre and a café there. It is a vibrant community service that has enabled the local authority, working in partnership, to keep open a service that would have been closed even without the cuts which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, referred to. What we need to do—this is part of the role that noble Lords in this House can play—is showcase successful models of delivery, even though politically some of us would like to see fundamental changes in national policy, so that we can make the best of what we have got and utilise our still-rich panoply of local community institutions and infrastructure to provide still-better services.

I apologise for intervening, but we have plenty of time today. I was talking not about local authority housing but about private sector landlord housing in areas of poor housing.

The point is the same, my Lords. If we are to tackle this housing crisis, what is needed is a bold new programme led by district councils and lower-tier authorities—because they are housing authorities—of building new council housing. They should work in partnership with housing associations to improve dramatically the stock of social housing and affordable housing, which is a significant part of the social crisis that the country faces.

One of the biggest changes in public policy over the past 40 years has been that the provision of social and affordable housing, which was regarded as a core function of the state until the 1980s, has totally ceased to be. We need to be self-critical in this: I do not think that the Government of which I was a part did nearly enough. We thought that market-based solutions would meet needs for lower-cost housing; they manifestly have not.

I spent, for my sins, a large part of last night reading the third volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, which I recommend to your Lordships—indeed, some of those whom I see here in the House today feature in it. It is an important contribution to political history. One of the most remarkable things about it is that council housing, which used to be one of the biggest political issues in the 1960s and 1970s, does not feature at all in that volume—it covers the years from 1987 to the end of Lady Thatcher’s career—except in one passing reference to council house sales, which was the only council house policy that Margaret Thatcher had in her 11 and a half years in Downing Street.

The facts are now the facts: the average home in England this year costs eight times more to buy than the average salary; the average share of income that young families spend on housing has trebled over the past 50 years; because of the shortage of social and affordable housing, the number of people living in the private rented sector has doubled in the past 20 years, and private renters spend on average 41%—nearly half—of their household income on rent. Surprise, surprise, a majority, 57%, of private renters are now struggling to pay housing costs, and one in three low-earning renters has to borrow money to pay their rent. Some 800,000 people who are renting cannot afford to save even £10 a month; 27% of private renters receive housing benefit or the housing element of universal credit, which is approximately 1.3 million households nationwide. Meanwhile, the Government spend £21 billion a year on housing benefit because of the very high level of rents, which they have jacked up by removing subsidy and not building more social homes. Last year, only 6,463 new social homes were built nationwide. There are about 1.5 million fewer social homes today than there were in 1980.

Is the noble Lord satisfied that there is space in Lambeth to provide housing for 28,000 more people? It is all very well to say that we have to provide housing for people who need it, but if you are talking about a particular area they want to live in, there has to be the space for the housing.

Yes, I am satisfied, and I would be very glad to do a walking tour of the London Borough of Lambeth to explain to the noble Lord how it can be done, starting with the huge issue of the redevelopment of Waterloo station. It desperately needs redeveloping; Waterloo is the biggest terminus in Europe and if it were redeveloped it could provide huge opportunities for new social housing. If the noble Lord is up for it, we will do it and we will work out how we can provide that housing—and I would like the Minister to come along, too, because then something might actually happen.

My Lords, far be it from me to interrupt the private arrangements of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, but I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Greaves for securing this timely debate. I hope I will not tread on his toes with my comments, but I want to build on what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said about more collaborative working, as well as on the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Redfern, about the need for libraries.

I begin with the position of local councillors, because they are at the other end of the spectrum. To give a brief example, in a previous life, as a young councillor in Stockport, I collected the diaries of Tony Benn. They are an interesting insight into being in government, in opposition and—as at the unfortunate time when I got the book—in what are called the wilderness years; the term is quite apt at the moment. I got my copy and went up to Manchester to get him to sign the book for me. He found out that I was a councillor and said, “I really feel sorry for you, because local councillors have the worst of all worlds. You’re not MPs and you’re not Ministers. You get all the money from government and you have no power. If something goes right, the Government claim it. if something goes wrong, you get blamed for it locally”. It was a position he would not have wanted to be in. I left with my shoulders down, thinking that my career was starting on a pessimistic note. Having said that, we carried on and we petitioned the Government. All Members here who have been in local government have probably made the trek on the train, with the chief officers, to meet a Minister for a nice drink of tea and a biscuit. They will have received the warm words and been sent back on the train—another day of your life gone when nothing happened. That was the never-increasing circle of how local authorities used to work.

Fast forward another 15 or 20 years, and I became leader of Stockport Council, albeit in a different political party—I was in the Liberal Democrats by then. I was determined to change the perception of local councillors and to try to affect the funding formula, because it was the funding formula that was always the problem. As fate would have it, devolution was coming to Greater Manchester. There was an appetite and a belief that we could do things differently and more collaboratively to get more bang for our buck. That was thanks to Howard Bernstein, Richard Leese and one or two others. We 10 councils stuck together and decided to pool our wits and, more importantly, our money, and we got the first ever city deal, the first ever combined authority and the first ever LEP in the country.

My Lords, may I speak briefly, for four minutes perhaps if I am permitted, in the break? I thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for calling this important debate. In listening to what has been said, I reflect on the difficulties politically that we have been facing for quite some time now. We seem to be talking about a lack of stability and extremism, moving from “spend, spend, spend” to “cut, cut, cut”. We talk about the decision to stop building social housing and sell it off, and the consequences of that. I compare that to a country like Germany, for instance, which obviously has its own challenges, but it seems to have achieved a level of stability and continuity of policy over time. Looking at that from the point of view of children, young people and families, what they need above all is continuity and stability. Perhaps, therefore, the current crisis may be an opportunity to think about whether we might do politics a little differently in this country, being a bit more collaborative and consistent and a bit less confrontational and adversarial.

I will address three points briefly: housing, young people and the funding of strategic services. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, spoke eloquently about housing. Over the years, I have spoken with mothers in temporary accommodation, and it has been troubling to hear of their experience, most obviously of isolation. So often, because of the shortage of housing, they are placed a long way from their community—perhaps their ethnic community—and their family and friends, so they struggle because of that. They struggle with great uncertainty. I was speaking with a woman who had experienced domestic violence over many years. She had finally managed to escape from her husband, spent some time in a refuge and was then in temporary accommodation. She spoke of her great anxiety that she might be placed way outside London, where she had lived for many years and brought up her family. Obviously, this was impacting on her mental health, and brought with it the risk that her granddaughter, whom she was caring for, might be removed into local authority care. That is perhaps another reason for us to wish to remain in the European Union or to rejoin it. The housing issue, which people on the continent seem to address far better on the whole, is perhaps just one example of the success of the social contract there, which we seem to have been struggling with for many years. In the United States, which we seem now to be turning towards, they have a very shaky social contract.

On young people, the BBC recently produced a report on children and young people in Barrow-in-Furness. For many years, young people have been struggling there—there have been issues to do with drug and alcohol misuse—and the programme highlighted that younger and younger children are being drawn into evening activities around drinking, often turning up to school when they are unable to concentrate and falling asleep. We also have the continual worries about children and young people being involved in knife crime. Most of the victims of knife crime are young people themselves. I once worked in a hostel where I met a young black woman serving the food whose son had been knifed just recently, and we saw the impact that had on her.

My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my registered interests as a councillor and a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank my noble friend Lord Greaves for initiating this important debate on the current state of, and future prospects for, neighbourhood services. I also draw the House’s attention to the fact that our Benches are less full than they would have otherwise been because today many are attending the funeral of a very special Liberal Democrat.

The National Audit Office produced an excellent report last year on the financial sustainability of local authorities. The data provided in the report admirably illustrates the spending cuts meted out to neighbourhood services. It states that there has been a 49.1% real-terms reduction in government funding since 2010, which translates into a 28.6% real-terms cut in spending power. However, that paints only part of the picture, as there is considerable variation between local authorities. For example, metropolitan and unitary councils have seen a 38% cut in spending power on non-social care services, and the shire districts a 25% cut. Even then, there is huge variation within those figures. As my noble friend Lord Greaves demonstrated, areas of greater deprivation are less able to raise funding through local taxation, thus the cuts there have been even greater. Fifty per cent is a huge cut in any local authority’s funding to provide services.

Further detail of service cuts in this invaluable report shows that libraries have experienced cuts of 33%, parks 27%, community safety 51% and highway maintenance 37%. The LGA survey of public perception last year shows that resident satisfaction rates with services is falling and, for highway maintenance, falling quite sharply—no surprise there for anyone who has to use local roads. The service cuts are becoming increasingly obvious to our residents.

What does that mean in practice for people who are, after all, paying more and more in council tax for less and less? Local authorities have protected spending on vulnerable adults and children in local authorities with those responsibilities, and focused budget cuts on neighbourhood services. In my own council of Kirklees, this has resulted in, for example, the Red House Museum being closed. It was the home of a close friend of Charlotte Brontë and features significantly in her novel Shirley. Of course, local people want to keep the Red House open to the public and a recent petition attracted more than 3,000 signatures from all over the world in a matter of days, but to no avail.