Local Government Finance — House of Commons, 2018-02-07
Topic: Social Welfare
Brett Charles Anthony Elphicke (Independent, Unknown): It is great to have you in the Chair, once again, Mr Deputy Speaker The contributions to this debate on both sides of the House have been interesting and wide-ranging. On one level there is the political aspect, and I challenged the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon), the shadow Minister, to say whether there was any question to which his answer was not more money. I also asked him where the money is going to come from. That provoked the most interesting discussion in the debate; it is not always just about more money, it is also about how we organise the fundamentals of government. I sometimes wish that we were not shackled in this place by constant debates where the Opposition say that we should spend more money and we say we have to generate it first. We should look at how we organise government best and most effectively Let us examine the case of social care. We all know that the health service sits in one place and social services sit in another, and that, broadly, the overlap is huge and the potential efficiency savings are massive if we are able to bring them together successfully. We should all be working on that together, on a cross-party basis, to the extent that it is possible to do so within our partisan political system. We should be working on how to get the best deal for an ageing population and we should rework our public services. We need to navigate the Scylla of the trade unions and the Charybdis of public spending restraints and pressures in order to come up with ways of reworking the systems—the NHS, social services and county council systems—to make sure that we can deliver, particularly for older people where we are facing challenges I welcome the fact that more money was found for social care in Kent. Kent MPs were deeply concerned at the situation and the leader of the county council was concerned about the funding settlement. As a team we all worked together and met the Minister to make a strong case for Kent. I welcome the extra £166 million for social care, some £3.9 million of which will go to Kent. The increase in core spending power is also really welcome When we talk about local government finance, we tend just to look at core funding or the amount of money for social care, but we need to look at it in the round, because a whole load of it comes from, say, the Department for Education. I am concerned about Home Office funding. In terms of the local government finance settlement, the Home Office does a fantastic job for Calais. Over the years it has handed out £200 million, but it does not give quite the level of funding we need at the frontline in Kent and in Dover, where we take a lot of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. The county council has been making a powerful case that it does not get the kind of funding compensation from the Home Office that it should get for the fact that Kent is bearing the brunt in terms of the number of unaccompanied asylum seekers Let me set out the issues and challenges. The total cost of net funding from the Home Office is £25.4 million. In the current year, the shortfall is £4.6 million. If there are no changes to the financing arrangements, the coming year will see a further deficit of £3.9 million. That affects public services for the residents of Kent, because services have to be provided to people who have come to this country who are not from Kent or normal residents of Kent. That is challenging There is a challenge with care leavers, with a funding gap of £3.1 million. If someone turns 18, the amount of money given to the county council falls dramatically, yet the costs on the council stay very high indeed. We should remember the cost of the Millbank reception centre near Ashford in Kent. For unaccompanied asylum-seeking children there is a gap of £0.6 million, because the regulations entitle all children living in foster care at their 16th birthday to remain living with their carers, if they so choose. There is also £300,000 of ineligible costs There is a large funding gap. I know that there is always pressure to hand out another cheque to Calais and to France—the amount over the past two years now totals £200 million—but I put it to the Home Office that we also need to fund the frontline in Kent and Dover. We need to make sure that we get a decent and fair settlement for the residents of Kent to cover the costs of the county having stepped up to the plate by caring for and doing the right thing by vulnerable unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, many of whom are children fleeing war zones who are in fear for their lives. They are not fakes—children who are really economic refugees—as has been a concern We need to make sure that proper funding is in place for the county council so that there is not an impact on public services that means others lose out. I very much hope that the Home Office will take those points on board and recalibrate the funding to ensure that Kent does not lose out.