Mr Clive Betts
MP for Sheffield South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“I wholeheartedly welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement, both its content and its tone. I would like to ask about his discussions with our colleagues and allies in other countries who are looking to implement similar sanctions.”
“I offer two congratulations: first, to my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour, the First Secretary, on her well-deserved promotion—I am sure she will do an excellent job. Secondly, I congratulate her and the Prime Minister for their real commitment to devolution, which I have wanted to see for an awfully long time.”
“I apologise for the fact that—as I have explained to you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will have to leave straight after my question to chair Westminster Hall. I thank my right hon. Friend for doing this very challenging piece of work. I think that the theme of fairness, for the people who need benefits and for taxpayers, is right.”
“On the other hand, so many constituents with really serious conditions get turned down for PIP, and can get it only if they struggle through the appeal system, sometimes without any help at all. So the system is not fair to anyone at present.”
“When the previous Government let the contract, we were in a situation in which procurement could not properly take account of the past record of companies, and I understand that the Government have now changed that.”
“I will dive very deeply into the question, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Chair of the Committee sends his apologies for his absence; he is presently in a Committee meeting.”
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“The drop in Sheffield is actually bigger than the drop in, say, Doncaster, because there are more offices in Sheffield. We can see the figures. One question for the Minister is, what happens in September? We are looking at another cliff edge. If the covid funding, which is welcome, disappears—it has been given only until September—what happens? Those numbers will not recover to 100% of what they were before covid, if at all—we do not know about office working and things—and certainly not by September. There are some really big challenges. Bus passenger numbers were declining prior to covid and now we have an even lower number of passengers, so what is the funding requirement?”
“I appreciate that covid has disrupted an awful lot, both at local and national level, and I say to the Minister that we welcome the Government support provided throughout that period. We would not have any bus services left without it, because at one point during the initial restrictions, passenger numbers dropped to 10% of what they were before covid. The support that has been provided, both for buses and for light rail, has been welcome. Even now, passenger numbers on bus and light rail in the Sheffield city region are only back to 75% of what they were before covid, so 25% is still missing. That fall in passenger numbers is mainly down to older people still being concerned about travelling and the change in office working, with fewer people travelling into the office.”
“We talk about levelling up, but figures show that Government spending on buses per head in London is £75, and in Sheffield it is £5. That is quite a big difference. Passenger numbers have changed over the past 10 years, with numbers in the Sheffield city region dropping from 150 million to 92 million—a 21% fall in 10 years. It is a spiral of cuts and inadequate funding to support buses. The Campaign for Better Transport has estimated that Government funding for buses in England fell by 43% in real terms over that 10-year period, so that is a big fall. A big difference between funding for London and for areas such as Sheffield creates major challenges with declining bus ridership, which, of course, means less income coming in to the operators, to which they respond with more cuts. The bus review set out what we should do, then covid hit.”
“I will not go into them all now, or I probably will be here for the next hour, but the essence of them was some quick wins, which the combined authority has brought in—such as a scheme of cheaper fares for young people to encourage them on to public transport and recognise the particular challenges for them over the last few years with covid and the effects of austerity beforehand—as well as the need to look ahead to enhanced partnership and a route through to franchising, if that was decided to be the best way forward. We appreciate the powers that Government have given to mayoral combined authorities, which we think should probably be extended automatically to other authorities to enable them to move to franchising if that is appropriate. We also looked at funding, which is a major problem.”
“It was a journey to the bottom, that is all. We had complaints about frequency, as services got less; about services being removed altogether at weekends and evenings; about lack of connectivity as people could get from A to B, but often had to go via C and D; and about frequent route changes. That takes us back to the problem of the elderly person in a care home or someone who has just got a job only to find six months later that the bus route that gets them there at 7 o’clock in the morning to start their shift disappears. Those are really frustrating things, and of course, reliability is a problem. As more people use their cars and there is more congestion, the reliability of public transport gets worse. We made a lot of recommendations.”
“The problem comes when the bus route changes and they cannot get there anymore—that is another challenge. There are also people who normally use a car but want to go out for a meal or drink and to do it safely. Public transport is important in all those cases. The Mayor of the Sheffield city region, Dan Jarvis—I pay credit to Dan, because he takes the issue particularly seriously and he will be stepping down in May—asked me to review bus services in Sheffield about three or four years ago. We set up a bus commission, and I got a number of local people, representatives of the public, the unions and the private sector, and national transport experts to look at the situation. We saw a bus service that was basically in decline. It was a spiral of decline: services got cut, so few people used them, so more services got cut.”
“Public transport is important for all sorts of journeys, such as getting to work—again, particularly for young people in lower-paid jobs—and for people trying to find a job. Another interesting figure is that 77% of job seekers do not have access to a car and 85% of job seekers in the 18-to-24 age group do not have access to a car. To get a job, people need a good public transport system to reach the right place for an interview or whatever. Public transport is important not just for work but for how people run their lives. Many people need transport to get to a shop, in which case they need it to be easily accessible, or to visit friends and family. I have talked to people about the fact that when a husband or wife goes into a care home after living together for years, they pick a care home on a bus route that they can get to.”
“An interesting figure, given that we sort of think that everyone has a car—these days, some families have several cars, looking at the parking challenges on some estates—is that, for those whose incomes are in the lowest quintile, 45% of families do not have access to a car. That is almost half of families in that quintile. Older people often do not drive anymore, and the concessionary fare scheme is important for them. The group that is sometimes forgotten about is young people. Young children can go with their parents, but when kids get into their teenage years, they want a bit of independence. They are either not old enough to drive or do not have a car, so public transport can be important for them as well. What sort of journeys are involved?”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the future funding of urban transport. This is an important subject, Mr Sharma, and there is an awful lot to say about it. Looking around the Chamber, it looks like I have about an hour to say it in, although I will not take that amount of time. I have been interested in the subject for an awfully long time. I will cover buses and light rail, in particular looking at the mayoral combined authority areas. I thank the Urban Transport Group and the mayoral authority in the South Yorkshire region for their briefings. Public transport is more important for certain groups in the population than for others, such as people on low incomes.”
“I thank the Minister for that invitation. I am very hopeful that I can come with her on the visit. To go back to the £3 billion in improvement funding, she has just said that £1.2 billion, I think, will be allocated shortly. A ministerial “shortly” does not always happen very quickly, but anyway, it will be shortly. Is she therefore saying that the rest of the £3 billion has not been spent on the covid measures, that £1.8 billion is left and that authorities will be able to bid for that in the course of this Parliament?”
“I appreciate this is not the Minister’s area, but the rail Minister has helpfully agreed to meet me specifically about the Barrow Hill scheme. I wondered whether at some point the Department is going to publish a review of the Tram Train pilot and indicate how it sees it being rolled out across the country in general.”
“I did not talk about electric vehicles, as this debate is about public transport, but as the owner of one myself, I know the frustration of not having enough charge points to go to and therefore having to work out a route. The Minister mentioned rapid charging. When I get to a charging point, often it is not that rapid because the grid does not deliver sufficient power. It is a point I have raised with the Transport Secretary before, which he accepted. Will the Government take that up with the grid? Until it gets that right, someone can turn up to a charging point and find that charging takes three or four times as long as it should, which is incredibly frustrating.”
“Resolved , That this House has considered the future funding of urban transport.”
“There is recognition that public transport in urban areas is an essential lifeline for so many people, but it is also vital for the wider public in all our communities because it helps us to tackle the problem of congestion, the challenge of climate change and the real dangers of pollution; all three can be tackled by getting more people on public transport, improving the quality of public transport and making it greener. I think there is general agreement on what the challenges are and on what, ideally, we would like to see done to meet them. The question that remains, as always, is: will the resources be made available to enable the necessary actions to be implemented? We have not addressed that challenge fully today, but I am sure it is one to which we will return in future debates. Question put and agreed to.”
“I thank all three contributors to the debate, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) and the Minister. It has been a good, wide-ranging debate that has gone further than my initial contribution, including a discussion of electric vehicles and active travel, which I did not mention but recognise the importance of. Of course, we also spoke about the rail challenges in Sheffield and the north in general, on which we could have several other debates if we had time.”
“Yesterday, the Prime Minister accepted that councils should have access to the database of sponsors so that they can be responsible for matching up refugees or homeless people with sponsors who want to house them. Can the Government just get on with it?”
“Secondly, the Local Government Association told the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee yesterday that 144 Ukrainian refugees have presented as homeless so far. They have come under a variety of schemes, with some under the sponsorship scheme, some through Ireland and other routes and some through the family scheme—that is because family members do not have to provide accommodation. The whole reason for the sponsorship scheme is that councils do not have enough affordable, readily available homes to house people. The choice is therefore to put these refugees into temporary accommodation—hotels—or to match them up with the generous offers that sponsors want to make in those communities.”
“I think the Minister is going to get asked these questions over and over again until we get some adequate answers from him. First, it cannot be justified that councils are, quite rightly, getting £10,500 per year per refugee when refugees come over on the sponsor scheme—councils have to provide wraparound services; it is all there, it is all understood—but when refugees come under the family scheme, for the most part, apart from the housing checks, the council has to do everything to support them. Why is there no money under that scheme and yet £10,500 under the other scheme? Will the Minister explain the difference in terms of the offers that councils have to make to those refugees?”
“The Minister has talked about one side of the budget. The other side of the budget is spending. Local authorities provide incredibly important services that are of particular benefit to the poorest in society. Local authorities have suffered more than any other part of the public sector from the austerity period. The Government claimed that local authorities would get an increase in their spending power this year, but will he now confirm that, with the predicted level of inflation, they face a significant real-terms cut to their spending that will affect all the services that they provide?”
“May I draw attention to two stories in the Sheffield Star today? Sheffield is still a city of steel. Ben McIvor, president of Forged Solutions Group, which employs 400 skilled workers in the steel industry, is begging for help with the rise in energy costs, because the company simply cannot pass on those costs to its customers. Workers at Liberty Steel are protesting about the Prime Minister’s broken promise that if we left the EU, he would cut energy bills for steel companies. Why has the Chancellor chosen to break the Prime Minister’s promise?”
“How is that accommodation going to be provided? What is the plan for that?”
“I think that it is accepted in principle there will be general support for a scheme that allows individuals to welcome refugees into their homes. In terms of detail, the Secretary of State accepted that there would be a cost to local authorities, which will be key to making this work, as I am sure he accepts. Has he agreed with the Local Government Association—I declare my interest as a vice-president of the LGA—the costs that local authorities will get to cover education and other wraparound support services? Will those costs apply to people who come over on the community sponsorship scheme and to those on the family scheme? What about individuals who come here as family members but then cannot be accommodated in their family’s home because of the number of refugees involved? What are we going to do to accommodate those people?”
“Will the Home Secretary update the House on what the arrangements are under both schemes, or will the DLUHC Secretary come to this House in the near future to update us?”
“Last week, I asked the Home Secretary about the arrangements for refugees when they come here. Many of them will need places for their children in schools and mental health support, and, under both schemes, many will want accommodation. She said that the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is responsible for these arrangements through the community sponsorship scheme, but is the Home Office then responsible for people under the family scheme? In the Select Committee on Monday, we asked the DLUHC permanent secretary, who confirmed that currently there are no arrangements in place, none have been agreed, and he could not give a timetable for when they would be agreed.”
“My hon. Friend has mentioned not taxing buy-to-let landlords who have a number of properties. I do not think she is aware that the permanent secretary for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities came to the Select Committee yesterday and confirmed that, where properties are let with council tax and rents being paid in the same bill, the council tax rebate of £150 will go not to the tenant, but the landlord. If the landlord owns multiple properties, as long as they are not owned by a corporate entity, they will get multiple amounts of £150. Some of the landlords are going to be extremely well off, and tenants will have to go and apply to the discretionary fund to get any help at all.”
“The Minister talks about health and social care, but will he confirm that there is not a single penny in this extra funding to enable local authorities to cover their social care costs in their budget, which they are struggling with, or to improve the level of the social care they are offering? This crisis has now been going on for years and years, and the Government have promised to fix it. Given that this is a permanent increase in funding, will he also confirm that we are not going to see a tax cut in the next couple of years, just before the election—up today, down tomorrow?”
“The hon. Member mentioned the 150,000 people who will benefit from the cap on care costs, and they are disproportionately people in more expensive homes. Where in that funding is the help for the 1.5 million people that Age Concern has assessed should be entitled to social care but have now been excluded from the provisions?”
“The Government should stand back and consider how we fund social care properly and fairly on a long-term basis, while at the same time addressing the problems of unfairness in council tax through revaluation and reconsidering the bands so that people in lower-value homes do not pay a disproportionate amount of council tax compared with people in higher-value properties. That would be fair. Let us see some fairness from the Government in addressing our future funding needs. They should not continue with the national insurance rise and the council tax increase this year, as they disproportionately hit the poorest families hardest.”
“Council tax is a disproportionately unfair tax for poorer families. Look at the relationship between the value of homes and the amount of council tax people pay. The Resolution Foundation did a very interesting analysis five years ago showing that the level of council tax paid by those at the top end was 3.3 times higher than those at the bottom end, but the value of homes was, on average, 6.8 times higher at the top end, and that gap has grown larger as the value of houses has grown over the years and there has not been a council tax revaluation since 1991. We have a double whammy. On top of the increases in food and fuel prices, which are disproportionately hitting poorer families, we have a disproportionate national insurance rise and disproportionate council tax increases, too.”
“As social care funding has gone up and council budgets have shrunk, the amount for other services has shrunk with cuts of up to 50%—the National Audit Office has done an excellent report on this—whether it be planning services, environmental services, bus services, libraries or road repairs. We are looking for a funding stream that will stop that happening. There is no more money for local authorities to provide social care to the 1.5 million people that Age UK believes would have been entitled to social care 15 years ago and do not get it now. At the same time, we will see a disproportionate rise in national insurance premiums hitting some of the poorest families hardest. What else will the Government do to fund local councils? They will make sure that councils have to put up council tax by around 3%.”
“I accept that people at the lower end—the people at the very bottom—on a £10,000 income will not pay, but beyond that, the hit to family incomes is going to be much greater for a family earning £30,000 than for a family earning £130,000. And at the end of the day, this does not deliver more money for social care. It should not be called a social care premium. It delivers the money through the disproportionate raising of the cap, which I have explained. It does not give any extra money for councils to fund the gap in social care funding, which has grown wider over the last 10 years.”
“The self-employed pay national insurance based on their profits but not on a whole range of self-employed income, which would be a very different tax—a very different premium indeed. The changes to the cap will disproportionately benefit people in the most expensive homes, who will pay less of their asset when they die than people with lower value homes. We said that, rather than deal with this convoluted arrangement with the cap, everyone above a certain threshold of home value should pay a percentage of that asset towards the social care premium on their death. That again would be a much fairer way to raise money. What we have here is a regressive form of taxation.”
“We said that the threshold at which people start paying national insurance should be higher, which this proposal does not do, and that the ceiling should be raised, which I think the Government now accept should be done. We also said that people on a high private pension should pay, but there is no proposal from the Government for that. The Government are saying that when the levy comes in formally next year, people of pensionable age who are working will pay, but for this next year, 2022-23, those of pensionable age will not pay anything at all for the national insurance rise, which seems particularly strange as the money that will be spent will disproportionately help older people. We also said that people who are getting unearned income should pay.”
“The idea of trying to raise a specific allocated funding source for social care came from a report in 2018 jointly done by then Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee—it has changed his name so many times, I have to think what it was called at the time—and the Health and Social Care Committee. We raised the idea of a national insurance increase but we were very specific about the caveats. We said that no one under 40 should pay it, because young people have been disproportionately hit by the impact of the banking crisis, the austerity measures and then covid. That is exactly the same way the Japanese raise their funding for social care.”
“The Government’s White Paper is rightly ambitious. I think there will be general support for that ambition across the House, and rightly so, because we have some of the most unequal economies and societies among any developed countries. Is the Secretary of State not slightly concerned, however, that the tools he has at his disposal to address this are actually a small number of separate spending pots, completely disjointed and unconnected, and distributed according to a completely inappropriate bidding process? Does the Secretary of State not really want to see a review of total Government spending, of where it is spent in the country, and then the allocation and more control over that to local councils and local mayors so that it can be spent in the interests of local communities?”
“Receiving refugees here is the first step; how we treat them once they get here is just as important. I appreciate that the Home Secretary has said that that becomes a responsibility for the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Will she ensure that in that role he is now having urgent discussions with local authorities, which will be key to providing accommodation, education for children, social services support and mental health support? It is crucial that local authorities get the resources to do that. Indeed, it might be good if the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities could come to the House and make a statement on those matters.”
“Welcome, everyone, to this morning’s sitting. I am still asked by the House of Commons Commission to remind hon. Members to observe social distancing and wear masks—that, apparently, is still the guidance and advice.”
“Slightly out of order, I call the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, who I know has to return to a Select Committee meeting.”
“Next to contribute is Anthony Mangnall. I remind Members again to limit speeches to seven minutes, or else the last speakers will not get as much time.”
“I call Luke Pollard to speak; I appreciate that he has not been here for all of the debate, but he apologised to me on arriving and gave me a very good reason why he was late.”
“I apologise for not having been here for the whole debate, as I have been speaking at a conference on private renting this afternoon. The Minister has just said that we know that only a minority of providers are operating in this unacceptable way. Given that the system is unregulated and the Government do not collect the information, how does he know that it is only a small minority doing this?”
“The simple truth is that whatever else Putin does in the next few days he has already invaded another sovereign country. The Prime Minister has spoken about this being a first round of sanctions with potentially more to follow. Can we be absolutely clear that that further round of sanctions is not dependent on Putin going into western Ukraine and attacking there, that it is simply a matter of trying to co-ordinate with our allies on this and that we can expect that further round of sanctions in the next few days?”
“I could recognise the valuable approach the coalition Government took under the then Secretary of State in removing ringfences, but we can contrast that with the number of pots that are being created that local authorities have to bid into, which seems like ringfencing by another name. The Secretary of State mentioned Councillor Jamieson, the chair of the LGA, who said at the Select Committee that we cannot sort out local government finance until we sort out social care funding. The LGA is looking for a big solution and it is disappointed that the levy highlighted as solving the problem actually gives no mainstream money to local councils to deliver important social care services.”
“Is that cut not therefore a complete mistake at a time when we need more prevention and more attempts to reduce those inequalities? In Sheffield, if I get on a bus in the west end of the city and go to the east end, life expectancy changes by 10 years. That simply cannot be right. Our public health director and his staff in that service, working with the health service, are key to addressing those problems. It is disappointing that their reward for all the work they did during the pandemic is to see a real-terms cut in their spending.”
“Everyone seems to think that we ought to have one, but we have not actually got one. I mentioned the level of council tax now—the amount out of the totality of council spending. Council tax is regressive. If we look at the amount people pay compared with the value of their houses as they go up, we see that it is completely disproportionate. So we need a council tax review reform as well as a business rates reform if we are going to deal with this for the future. Finally, I come to one regret. I look at the public health grant, where there is a 2.8% increase—if inflation is 5.4%, that means a reduction in real terms. The public health service has done a brilliant job, and I give credit to Greg Fell and his team for what they have done in Sheffield, but covid has shown us the health inequalities in our communities that need addressing.”
“They have done brilliantly well in Sheffield during the pandemic, with the clinical commissioning group, the director of public health and the director of social care working together. One of my worries is that in the reforms to the health system we do away with that place-based approach that a CCG gives. I welcome the letter that the Secretary of State has just sent and the offer to meet officials. It is really important that that place-based delivery of services—councils and the health service working together at a local level—is maintained. I hope that that is absolutely seen through. The other two issues are still waiting to be done: business rates reform; and protection for the high street as part of that, with some sort of digital sales tax. When are we going to get it?”
“I accept the challenge; one person’s fair funding is another person’s unfair funding. That is going to be an interesting challenge for the Secretary of State, but I would say that levelling up has to be part of a fair funding review. It cannot be about individual bits of money; levelling up has to be about mainstream core funding and getting the distribution of that right to reflect the need for levelling up. We have to get a new source of funding for social care. We have to get money from a levy or whatever source to come in. I welcome the attempt to integrate health and social care. I do not think it should be brought into one giant service; getting local councils and the health service to work together is right.”
“Councils have also done a remarkable job during covid, be it on food parcels for the elderly and people who are shielding, on working with the health service jointly to deliver effective services, or through directors of public health doing test and trace far more efficiently and effectively than the national system, at far less cost. We can be proud of what local government has done in those circumstances. There were one or two disappointments about the settlements, but to put it slightly more positively I will call them “challenges for the future”. First, this is a single-year settlement. Local councils want multi-year settlements; we can all agree on the reasons why, and that is important. Secondly, on fair funding, it cannot be right that we have a settlement here based on 2014 data, with some of it going back to 2000.”
“There is a real challenge to our whole democratic system if we allow that to continue. I think the Secretary of State probably recognises that and we need to address it. In the face of that, councils have done remarkably well. They have probably produced more efficiency savings than the rest of Government put together; if the rest of Government worked as well as councils have done, we would all be in a much better place. Most councils, like Sheffield’s, have used reserves very prudently; they are only able to get through the social services crisis we are in because of the reserves we have. Great credit must go to council officers and councils across the country, particularly to those in my city of Sheffield.”
“Many libraries across the country are shut; the services in parks have been reduced; cuts have been made to bus services right across the country—we have heard Conservative Members complaining about those; money has been cut from road safety schemes; and cuts have been made in terms of the availability of public health inspectors to go into food shops. One issue I know the Secretary of State is really concerned about is planning departments, where a significant cut has been made to resources. There is a real democratic issue here: most people do not receive services from social care, but the public do, as a whole, look at their street cleaning, parks, libraries, buses and other important services, and they are paying more council tax—I have just described the extra money that comes from council tax—and getting less for it.”