John McDonnell
MP for Hayes and Harlington · Labour · United Kingdom
“It is not a laughing matter—I am sorry for interrupting the flow of the discussion. It would be useful if the review looked at NATS’s long-term investment plans, particularly since its partial privatisation in 2001, which I opposed. I thank the Minister for meeting Unite this morning and thanking the workers, who have worked so hard.”
“On a number of occasions, I have raised the case of Lee Cheuk-yan, who many Labour Members will remember was the general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and founder of the Labour party in Hong Kong. He was detained during the democracy movement five years ago.”
“I thank the Minister for his statement. NATS used to be in my constituency and then moved down to Swanwick. Of course, with Heathrow in my constituency, I receive—as I mentioned yesterday—a large amount of correspondence from a whole range of other MPs’ constituents, who think I am responsible for Heathrow airport.”
“I fully agree, and let me also say that wheelchair compensation is significant in this legislation. Most of us have dealt with cases like that. Going back to accountability in the process, a number of different organisations have provided us with notes on the legislation.”
“I apologise to my right hon. Friend; I should have checked this before the debate. The proposed new section 61G refers to priorities and objectives of the Secretary of State, which include a requirement for the Secretary of State to issue a document setting out those priorities and objectives for the CAA.”
“At the moment, when people in my constituency are faced with these problems, they do not know where to go; it is as simple as that. Finally, the debate that we will have on Heathrow expansion and the new policy statement will be interesting, given that we do not know what the flight paths will be. If I was a constituent of my hon.”
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“This is outrageous. This is an attempt to shift the blame to everybody but the Government. Of course MPs across the House were pressing the Government for speed of action—for everyone, not just for a select few—but we were also raising issues of fraud. I wrote to the Chancellor within weeks of the scheme’s being introduced about the information coming in about fraud. I tabled parliamentary questions on 3 July. I simply asked what measures were in place. What response did I get? “I cannot go into specific detail about measures either in place or in development. For the same reason, it is not possible to release the number of fraudulent applications or associated investigations.” I asked the same questions about the number of companies going bust and so on but still receiving grants.”
“Many of us find it nauseating that the Secretary of State has come here to talk about hard-pressed families when she supported the £20 cut to universal credit. I am sure she wants to be objective and have the fullest information. So could we test how much she considered some of these factors, perhaps in the style of the broadcast media? How much more money is generated by the investment in the BBC? Is it £1, £2 or £3? She talks about the north. How much of the BBC’s economic impact is beyond London? Is it 10%, 20% or 50%? Perhaps she could demonstrate her knowledge at least of the BBC’s impact.”
“What I fear most of all is the interference in the Electoral Commission, because that presages the Government coming back with more that will undermine our democracy. I believe that would be a stain on this House.”
“Helen Mountfield QC said that we risked the allegation that this was being done for political advantage. I regret that. I want to deal briefly with the voter ID issue. Personation was the issue that was presented to us, but we found limited evidence of that. Also, the pilots were limited. We had one big pilot, though, and it was in Northern Ireland, where 2.3% of the electorate dropped out. If we extrapolate that to our electorate here, that would mean over 1 million people dropping out. Who would that be, most of all? It would be elderly and disabled people, those in residential homes, and members of the BAME and LGBTQ communities. The reality is that this Bill is being pushed through. Unfortunately, I believe that it is part of a process of voter suppression and that the Conservatives are learning lessons from America.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) on the work she has done, and also my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) on his eloquent presentation. I serve on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and we have urged the House to pause the Bill and not go forward. I too am offended by the limited amount of time that we have been given this evening. The reason we said that is that with constitutional changes such as these, we need to build confidence. The way to do that in the parliamentary process is to have a draft Bill, a Joint Committee and adequate debate before bringing the legislation back here. We took evidence from a whole range of people, and we found no one who supported the Bill being developed at this pace.”
“I wonder whether this report will result in opportunities for the Committee to look at the whole issue of ownership and management of the water companies themselves.”
“I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman’s Committee, and him in particular, on the campaign he has waged over the years on the issue of the purity of our water systems. I look forward to the Committee’s work on monitoring the implementation of these recommendations. As the right hon. Gentleman will know, however, my anxiety about the report is its timidity with regard to the operation of the water companies themselves. My view is very clear: as long as those companies operate as profit-making organisations, I do not see how they will act on long-term investment or, to be frank, the standards of behaviour we would expect of either a body in public ownership or a not-for-profit organisation.”
“The Government can do the right thing—they can save lives. If they do not act, their inaction will be, as Gordon Brown said, a stain on our global soul.”
“The first way to achieve that is for the UK to stop blocking the TRIPS waiver at the WTO; secondly, to encourage UK pharmaceutical companies to share their technology with the World Health Organisation covid technology access pool and the mRNA technology transfer hub in South Africa. A lot has been said about windfall taxes in recent days. Pharmaceutical companies have made windfall profits, largely derived from public funding. If they do not start sharing their vaccines and technology and start saving lives, I can think of no better circumstance for a windfall tax, with every penny used to fund vaccines around the world. If any Conservative Members are anxious about that, let me just say that it was Rab Butler who introduced a windfall tax 70 years ago this March. I believe the time to act is now.”
“I have to say, in terms of the Government’s performance, that the UK has disgraced itself by voting to block the temporary TRIPS waiver that would put human life above private profit. As has been said time and again, we live in a global world and we will not be safe from the virus until we are all safe. We know that the more there is transmission anywhere in world, the more likely that new variants will emerge; some will be more virulent, and others may be more lethal than omicron, although hopefully most will be mild. As campaigning group Global Justice Now has said: “Until we allow low and middle-income countries to access covid-19 vaccines, we will be trapped in an endless cycle of variants”. If we want this pandemic to end, we have to stop its global spread—that means vaccinating everybody.”
“Thank you, Mrs Murray. Last month, the former Prime Minister and World Health Organisation global health ambassador Gordon Brown said that the global vaccine roll-out was a “stain on our global soul”. The numbers are stark: three quarters of health workers in Africa remain unvaccinated; less than 5% of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated. Companies such as Pfizer have made huge profits from their vaccines, but just 1% of its global supply has been delivered to COVAX. Corporate philanthropy is not going to solve this crisis. We cannot sit back and hope that the pharmaceutical giants will do the right thing; to do so is a death sentence for millions of our fellow human beings.”
“I am happy to meet with the Minister or, as I know she is busy, with her colleagues and officials to talk through the review that needs to be undertaken into the operation of refractive surgery, as well as what needs to be done to improve regulation and to ensure that the harms caused by the operations largely being carried out by private companies are addressed and that people are supported in the very distressing situations they have found themselves in.”
“On the complaints, I have to say there have been numerous complaints to the GMC and the General Optical Council. Unfortunately, it is often judged that the case does not meet the seriousness threshold and therefore little or no action is taken by those bodies to regulate and monitor companies that are not abiding by basic guidelines. We have discovered that people are operating without being professionally qualified even in cases that are coming up this year. Those shocking examples demand a response now, after all these years.”
“When things go wrong, the companies often deny responsibility. Sometimes they accept that they need to do something, but they will often delay appointments with the surgeon beyond 12 months and then refuse to accept any responsibility, with people having to be sent off to the NHS for treatment. I want to raise the same issue with the Minister as my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham. It would be really helpful if we ensured that the NHS collated the information about the work it has to undertake and the investment it has to put in to correct the damage and harm caused by those private companies. There was even one company that went into administration and therefore denied all responsibility and liability to patients, only for it to restructure itself and form a new company to continue providing the same services.”
“Over the past decade, we are finding too many examples of where the assessment has been given largely by salespeople rather than clinically qualified staff. Often, the person will not see the surgeon until the day of surgery. Owing to the oligopoly of the companies involved, the pressure of meeting sales targets seems to be more important than achieving good outcomes for the clients or patients involved. Inadequate advice then leads to unsuitable judgments and people undergoing surgery that damages their eyesight. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham mentioned one tragic case, but there are so many others: paramedics who can no longer pursue their career; police officers who are unable to drive professionally any more; and, as hon. Members may have seen in the media, one health worker who took his own life as a result of the distress.”
“I have worked with other MPs and campaigners. We have had private Members’ Bills, ten-minute rule Bills and debates in the House. I pay tribute to the external campaigners. Sasha Rodoy from the My Beautiful Eyes Foundation has brought together literally hundreds of cases, providing people with support and exposing some of the appalling practices. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham referred to the GMC. There are specific examples of where the GMC guidelines are ignored, resulting in real harm. The guidelines basically say that the surgeon undertaking the surgery should meet the person who is to be operated on. There should be a proper assessment of their suitability for the surgery, and advice should then be provided.”
“Part of the problem of the postcode lottery is that people who have concerns about their eyesight can become desperate and resort to alternative methodologies, one of which has been refractive surgery. Refractive surgery is often successful, but there is always a risk. We are talking about both laser surgery and lens replacement, in larger numbers every year. It is a growing issue. Thousands upon thousands are receiving refractive surgery, basically from three main companies: Optical Express, Optimax, and Optegra. Tragically, of those thousands, many hundreds are now experiencing serious problems. They have failed to find a solution to their eyesight problems by turning to surgery, but in many instances have been harmed by the surgery itself. I have been campaigning on this issue for over a decade.”
“I join others in thanking the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for securing the debate. I congratulate him on providing a service to us all by securing so many debates on so many relevant issues. I concur with the previous speaker, the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord), that it is time for a national strategy; we have been calling for one for a while. Like my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Ms Brown), I will talk about refractive surgery. I completely concur with the hon. Member for Strangford, and the general tone of the debate, about the need for longer-term, stable investment, and the worries that we all have about the postcode lottery in access to eyesight assessment, and services to tackle any problems that are identified.”
“I went for my eye test yesterday. I could not get an appointment in Hayes, my constituency, so I went to Uxbridge. Unfortunately, at the same time the Prime Minister did an official visit to the eye test and disturbed it. How inconsiderate could he be?”
“It has proved to be inhumane in its impact, and it is a weapon that will be picked up again to attack the working-class people that I represent. That is why I want to put on record tonight why I oppose it and will continue to oppose it until we have hopefully secured a Government that will throw out this abysmal piece of political weaponry against working-class people.”
“This welfare cap, associated with the fiscal rule, is a base anachronism that should no longer exist. For as long as it exists, as we go through a period where the economic pressures will impact on any Government—the cost of living crisis is easy to say as a phrase, but there is a reality to it and it is already causing hardship in many of our constituencies—I fear that this Government will want to find another scapegoat, and that it will be the poor again. It will be the disabled. It will be those who cannot find a job or cannot get enough hours in a job to keep them out of poverty. The Government will use the same mechanisms, and the welfare cap will be part of them as long as it remains in statutory form. That is why I will be voting against the welfare cap tonight. In principle, this is an appalling piece of legislation.”
“That certainly did not reflect what was happening in my constituency, because everyone I came up against was desperate for a job, and more importantly, they were desperate for a job that paid a wage that would keep a roof over their head and put food on the table for their children. That is where the welfare cap came in. Of all the expenditure, that was the area that had to be capped in some form. Other areas of expenditure that were equally demand-led were not debated. This was done specifically because a scapegoat had to be found, and we went back almost to the attitudes of the poor law and the workhouse. I remember those debates. I was offended by them, I was made angry by them, but above all else I was shamed by them and by the fact that this House could stoop to that level. That is what happened, and people suffered as a result.”
“I think that a cynical decision was made; in fact, I know that a cynical decision was made because Lord Freud, who was responsible for welfare policy and supposed welfare reform, has exposed in recent months that a cynical decision was made. It was not made on the basis of welfare reform or economic management; its purpose was to find a scapegoat. The scapegoat that was unfortunately chosen by the then coalition Government was the poorest in our society: the unemployed, the people with disabilities and, tragically, children as well. I remember the language that was used, and I have to say that it permeated many sides of this House too. Strivers were set against skivers. I remember the tales of the twitching curtain, where some would stay in bed while others went to work.”
“The point has been made time and again that austerity was a political choice, not an economic necessity. Part of that political choice was the introduction of the cap. After austerity was introduced, people woke up to the fact that public services were being cut on a scale we had not seen before. This was impacting on the health service, education and local council expenditure, and in addition to that, there were pay freezes and in the end, because of inflation, pay cuts. There was an understandable reaction against that. I can remember the deep unpopularity of the coalition Government in those early stages.”
“George Osborne then ripped into the ludicrousness of a fiscal rule that no one would ever abide by and that had no sanctions. When he was appointed Chancellor in 2010 under the coalition and proposed the fiscal rule process, some of us thought it was ripe to say the least. However, the most iniquitous bit of that debate was the combination of introducing the individual benefits cap and the overall welfare cap. The individual benefits cap is egregious, and it has forced people into poverty and hardship. In many of our areas, it has affected people’s mental health in a way that has pushed many over the edge and some into taking their own life—that is the tragedy of that element of the cap. The overall welfare cap is part of that political direction.”
“In our debates during the banking crash there was a popular understanding that the cause of the crash was the way in which the system had operated as a result of the finance sector’s greed and incompetence, alongside the mismanagement of financial regulation over decades. The Conservative party made a big argument at the time and subsequently that we were in a weaker position because of our deficit at the time of the crash. That is a feeble argument, but there is some substance to it, and I argued at the time that the reason for the deficit was that we did not have an adequate taxation policy to match our overall expenditure. That argument is for another time, but I say to the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire that I remember George Osborne ripping into Gordon Brown and others when even the concept of a fiscal rule was raised.”
“I will be brief. The debate has roamed over more than just the fiscal rule and the welfare cap, and I will not tread on those other parts of the debate. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) demonstrated the economic and political farce of the current Government. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) made much of the role of Bank of England debt, which would be interesting to pursue in another debate, and the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) pertinently drew attention to the iniquitous nature of the welfare cap. The hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) made an interesting contribution, but his definition of Parliament’s role as being to protect property is something of a 17th-century view of democracy that we might want to debate elsewhere.”
“I say to the Minister that considerable thought needs to be given to these issues in Committee and possibly on Report, to ensure that the Government do not lay the burden of the failure of past Government policy making on the innocent shoulders of many of our constituents, who, as has rightly been said today, are providing essential services across a communities at a time when we desperately need them.”
“They are a matter of public concern and they have generated anger among many of our constituents at what they feel is the unjust way they are being treated. Members of this House should insist that these decisions are subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny and proper parliamentary decision making. Much of what we are debating in part 1 of the Bill will almost inevitably be the subject of further legal challenge by a large number of trade unions and possibly, we hear, even by the British Medical Association. I fear that, rather than remedying the Government’s errors and lack of judgment, the Bill will almost wilfully compound those past errors and possibly exacerbate the strong feelings of injustice felt by many of our constituents.”
“It is worrying to me that, as Bryn Davies—Lord Davies in the other place—highlighted, the key decisions on whether the remedy cost is a members’ cost or an employers’ cost, and on whether the cost of the remedy should be spread over four years as suggested by the Government, are neither on the face of the Bill nor being dealt with by delegated legislation. Instead, under section 12 of the Public Service Pensions Act 2013, these issues will be dealt with by “Treasury directions”. That means that financial obligations will be placed on scheme members without effective parliamentary decision making or scrutiny. These are not technical matters; they are matters of high policy and they affect many of our constituents.”
“Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East raised was the pensions trap, which has been highlighted by the police associations, particularly the Police Superintendents Association, and by the firefighters, in which the value of the contributions and the pension declines with additional years of service. That is a contradiction that needs to be resolved by the Government, and I hope that that will be undertaken as the Bill goes into Committee and comes back to this House. The discussion around pensions is as sensitive as the issue of pay, if not more so at times. These are always sensitive policy issues, and people naturally have strong feelings about them.”
“For many others, the measures will undermine the incentive to contribute to the pension schemes that are available to them. We have already seen more than 270,000 who are open to joining the scheme dropping out of it. This disincentivisation means that pensioners will be living in greater hardship and poverty and will therefore be reliant on state benefits, so there will be no saving to the Government overall. From the discussions I have had with my constituents and a range of trade union representatives and members, I know that there is a sense of betrayal among pension scheme members. Another issue that my right hon.”
“This kicks in the cost control mechanism, as in some schemes the cost will rise by more than 2%. This would usually have resulted in cuts in benefits or increased contributions, so at least the Government have introduced a waiver to prevent that from happening. However, this does not assist my constituents who rightly argue that they have been robbed by the Government and forced to pay over the odds in pension contributions but will receive no additional benefits. In fact, they feel they have been hit by a double whammy, having had their pay virtually frozen or cut but, as a result, still losing out on pension contribution savings. The impact for some will be the prospect of hardship in retirement as a result of not receiving the full benefits of their scheme as originally agreed.”
“This is critical because the cost of the schemes, as used for control purposes, has usually fallen, largely because pay rises have not been as high as expected or because life expectancy has not improved as was previously predicted. If we abide by the agreements that were legislated for in this House, pension scheme members should have received either improvements in benefits or reductions in contributions, or a combination of the two, because the cost of the schemes has fallen. Instead it appears that the Government are minded to treat the remedy costs of the McCloud judgment—the costs of remedying the Government’s illegal actions—as member costs. We have heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) that the cumulative cost could be £17 billion.”
“I remember the debate, and it was also agreed that things would stay as they were if the change was less than 2% in either direction. It was always agreed that some types of additional costs would be the responsibility of the Government—employer costs, as defined, as opposed to member costs. In 2012 the Treasury published a report that spelled out the difference. Employer costs were exemplified by changes in actuarial methodology or changes in the discount rate. The logical argument made by the unions is that the additional costs resulting from remedying the Government’s actions in this case, as exposed by the McCloud judgment determining that the Government’s actions were unlawful, are the responsibility of the Government, and therefore fall squarely into the category of employer costs, not member costs.”
“The key element of the cost control mechanism was that the cost to the employer of each of the public service schemes was fixed as a percentage of pay, which meant that if the cost of providing a scheme increased—I remember the debate and the predictions that were made—for instance due to some scheme members living longer than expected, it was agreed that either benefits would be reduced or members’ contributions would be increased. A number of us did not like it, but that was what the House agreed because it was seen by some as a fair process for the future. If the cost of providing a scheme fell, such as if pensionable pay did not increase at the expected rate, benefits would be increased or members’ contributions would be reduced. That was the equivalence that was agreed, and it was considered fair.”
“The aim, quite rightly, was to stabilise for the long term the funding of pension schemes to enable decent pension schemes to be provided, and to tackle, to be frank, the fact that some people who had provided a service throughout their career were finding, contrary to what the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) said, and contrary to what was being reported in a number of papers, that they were being provided with a pension on which they were hardly able to survive. In 2011, following those discussions, the coalition Government commissioned the Hutton report, which led to the Public Service Pensions Act 2013. That Act provided the basis of the existing system, including the cost control mechanism that we are addressing in this Bill.”
“I am grateful to Bryn Davies—Lord Davies of Brixton—a Member of the other place, our foremost pensions expert, formerly the TUC’s actuary and pensions adviser, and subsequently adviser to numerous trade unions and associations, for the explanatory notes that he has provided to a number of us and the issues that he has raised in the other place. Bryn Davies reminded me of the history of the pension reforms that have laid the path to this chaotic state that we are now trying to resolve. The mechanism for managing the future funding of public sector pensions stems originally from the discussions between the Labour Government and the trade unions in 2006. It was those discussions that resulted in a broad relationship agreement—the Warwick agreement—and also agreed a series of pension reforms.”
“As this mess was created by Government decisions, it follows that the cost and the burden of clearing up this Government-created mess should fall not on the pension scheme members themselves, but on the Government. Because I have received so many representations from constituents on this matter, I want to get some of the narrative clarified on the record. It is worth going back into the mists of time to fully understand the context and the genesis of this dog’s breakfast, as it was described in the other place.”
“I have to give it to the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) for his ability to describe possibly one of the most inflammatory amendments that we shall consider in this House as a modest technical amendment—but there you are. I am sure we will come back to that debate as part of a wider discussion of the issue. I want to focus briefly on part 1 of the Bill, which addresses the McCloud judgment. I think we have to acknowledge that what we are having to deal with is an absolute mess in the management of public sector pension schemes by the Government, exposed by the McCloud judgment. It was a mess created not by the members of the public schemes themselves, who have been congratulated across the House this evening on the public service commitment that they are demonstrating at the moment, but by Government decisions.”
“There has been a cumulative reduction of more than £100 billion in central Government funding for local councils over the last decade.”
“I looked at the detailed analysis of what the cost of levelling up would be. To bring every UK nation and region up to London’s level of funding would require an additional £30 billion in annual capital investment per year. Even to level up every nation and region to the current UK average, the capital spend required would be an additional £6 billion in funding. To be successful, levelling up has to be about more than capital spend. It has to be about more than just physical infrastructure, important though that is. We need a comprehensive and holistic approach to building both the physical and the social capital of an area, but that cannot be done when local government funding from central Government is about £16 billion lower than it was in 2010.”
“I speak as a London MP, because there are also grotesque levels of inequality within London and the south-east. Over-investment and the heat that it generates in an economy has a negative impact on the area, with exorbitant housing costs that leave many workers priced out of ever owning their own home and paying a disproportionate amount of their wages in rent. The other element, which I have drawn attention to in past debates, is the way that, just to keep a roof over their heads, families are working every hour God sends, which unfortunately undermines family life as well. The grotesque imbalances in our economy are not an accident, or even the invisible hand of the market. They are a deliberate, ongoing Government policy—one that has gone on for the last four decades, at least, regardless of the party in Government.”
“London receives about twice as much capital investment per person as the south-west of England and the north-west of England receives only two thirds of the level that London receives. Back then, I also used Department of Health statistics to demonstrate the consequences of inequality, and particularly the consequences of low incomes and poverty, with a difference in life expectancy of 20 years between Kensington in Liverpool and Kensington in London. The Minister may know that we have two Scousers in Westminster Hall today to evidence that. The harsh reality, which we have all accepted, is that this imbalance of investment has meant that too much priority has been given to investment in parts of London and the south-east, as well as too many of the best jobs in the country.”
“The Government have rightly put great emphasis on levelling up the country, so much so that we now have a new Department—the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. However, they have not yet defined what achieving levelling up would look like, what targets they have set themselves to achieve through that policy programme, or what the timescale for the programme will be. Hopefully, the White Paper will set out these things clearly when it is published in the new year. There is widespread agreement that there is a need for levelling up. Way back in 2016, at a conference that I convened in Liverpool, I launched a similar policy with the CBI, using its regional government investment analysis at that time. That demonstrated the stark inequalities that exist. The figures are stark.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the role of local councils in levelling up. The debate is about the role of local councils in the levelling-up strategy that the Government are pursuing. I applied for it because I had hoped that the Government’s White Paper would have been published either last week or this week. Unfortunately, it has been delayed until the new year. Nevertheless, at least the debate gives us an opportunity to feed some last thoughts into the pre-White Paper discussions in Government on the way forward, although the reality is that the most valuable dialogue will most probably come as the Government plan the detail of the roll-out and delivery of the policies set out in the White Paper.”
“Another is the establishment of government structures that bring local government representatives into government more effectively. Some ideas have been floated on all sides, such as a new Cabinet sub-committee that invites Mayors and other representatives to participate, or—as suggested by the Local Government Association—a national taskforce on levelling up that, again, rebalances some of the relationship between local and central Government. In conclusion, I hope that a central plank of the Government’s levelling-up White Paper and the subsequent policy direction will be the empowering of local government to show that councils can play their role in levelling up our nations and regions. The Minister and the Government will not find local councils lacking, either in enthusiasm or in commitment.”
“It may well be that the most responsible thing at the moment is for the Government to take over some of that debt, and even write some of it off through a debt jubilee for some local authorities. Finally, I am concerned that as the levelling-up policy programme is developed, it must be seen to be fair. We all have a responsibility on a cross-party basis to not allow even the perception of pork barrel politics to take hold in this country, which is why there must be the fullest openness, transparency, objectivity, and engagement in decision making about the distribution of resources. One proposal is to consider a Barnett formula-type approach, one that would be objectively based on population, to determine the distribution of capital investment alongside the local government finance formula.”
“I also want to raise the issue of debt, in the Liverpool context as well as that of other local authorities. We have a responsibility here: to be frank, central Government have encouraged local authorities to borrow, often heavily, to go into property deals in order to secure much-needed additional revenue income. The result is that the local government debt burden is now becoming crippling for some, which is why the Government should explore new mechanisms for debt relief for local authorities. I was here during the banking crash, and can remember when that whole exercise was undertaken and the bad debt bank was established to sort out the debts of the banks involved.”
“It is a similar story with business rate retention: councils with prosperous commercial centres can raise significant sums, whereas councils without such areas cannot. As such, alongside discussing the levelling-up agenda in investment terms, it is now time to have a serious discussion in Government about a more radical reform of local government finance to provide a stable, locally determined income stream from councils. There have been discussions in all our political parties about options for doing so, but we need to bring those options forward more rapidly. For example, I am interested—as are a number of Conservative MPs—in some version of land value taxation that might transfer both resources and, more effectively, power to the local level.”