Local Government Finance Bill — House of Commons, 2017-01-23
Topic: Government Operations
Gareth Thomas (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend makes a good point. Many local authorities throughout the country have seen services such as housing similarly disadvantaged by the Secretary of State’s decision. There is no detail of what extra responsibilities will be passed to councils, or which of the additional grants that councils currently receive for their responsibilities will be taken away. Even though councils’ statutory responsibilities are not being properly funded now, Ministers expect councils to take on even more while losing further funding As I have indicated, I welcome the Secretary of State’s confirmation that he will not go ahead with his predecessor’s plan to get councils to handle attendance allowance but, as I made clear in my intervention on the Minister, this merely raises the question of what will happen to other specialist funding. The House will have heard the Minister refusing to rule out the end of the better care fund, which I hope the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) clocked, or the end of the £3 billion public health grant. Members representing rural areas would be right to worry about the future of the rural services delivery grant, which is also flagged up for possible axing in the Government’s consultation document The Minister has again promised that no local authority will lose out. Does that mean that local authorities will not lose out in year one because there might be some transitional help, or does it mean that every council will be better off and able to meet its statutory responsibilities in full throughout the next Parliament? I welcome Ministers’ intention to pilot their policy approach in five areas, and it is crucial that there is a fair system of top-ups and tariffs for redistributing resources between authorities Ministers have indicated that the system will be similar to the one that they introduced under the 50% business rate retention scheme in 2013-14, but that is not wholly reassuring. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has considered what would have happened between 2013-14 and now if 100% of business rates had been retained instead. It found that 16 councils would have seen their funding increase by 20% or more, whereas just one council has seen such a significant increase under the 50% retention scheme. Conversely, 122 councils would have seen their funding fall, with 12 losing more than 2% of their funding. No council has lost that much under the 50% scheme. To have a fair funding system under a 100% business rate retention scheme, the system of top-ups and tariffs must be amended, so why have Ministers introduced the Bill without publishing the responses to their consultation on the detailed implementation of that measure, which closed last July, and without even a date for the publication of their fair funding review The Bill raises more questions than it answers. For example, how will Ministers handle the business rates income of a local authority that benefits from a major national Government decision, such as to expand Heathrow or to build a high-speed rail terminus in its authority area? The business rates of Hillingdon Council, which neighbours my council, have always benefited from Heathrow. Westminster City Council similarly benefits considerably from business rates income that arises because of its fortunate proximity to major national assets. In such cases, how will some of the inevitable growth in business rates income, which will have little, if anything, to do with council policy, be redistributed to help authorities that do not benefit from such big advantages? Ironically, although Hillingdon Council has opposed the expansion of Heathrow, it stands to benefit significantly from business rates growth while doing nothing at all to help to generate it. We also want to explore what would happen if a major business closed or moved away through no fault of the local authority concerned. The sudden loss of a major source of business rates income would have huge implications for the future of local services, but the safety net that Ministers are proposing looks less than generous, especially when we do not know how frequently the needs of each local authority will be reassessed and the top-ups and tariffs system will be reset The decision to allow only mayoral combined authorities to introduce an infrastructure supplement appears petty and vindictive. If a community needs infrastructure urgently, local English leaders should not have to jump through extra hoops to put together funding just because they are not a mayor Too many big decisions relating to how the business rates regime will work in practice are not yet clear, and too many big decisions will remain with the Secretary of State once the new regime is in place—that much is clear. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Chair of the Select Committee, made it clear, it therefore seems a little drastic to abolish the need for Ministers to be held accountable annually for their performance on local government finance. It appears that they will still be decisive players in deciding which parts of England benefit more from business rates and which less so. The House should be able to hold the Secretary of State to account specifically for his performance on this matter Local government in England and the local services that the people of England rely on have been poorly treated by the Conservative party in the years since 2010, and the Bill could make things even worse. We will give the Bill a fair wind tonight and seek to improve it, but if significant change is not forthcoming, we will have to consider afresh our approach to the Government’s handling of this issue.