Hilary Benn
MP for Leeds South · Labour · United Kingdom
“As the right hon. Gentleman knows, the Irish Government published on 8 June their legislative outline, entitled “The General Scheme of the Legacy of the Troubles Bill 2026”. That is intended to fulfil the commitment that the Irish Government gave in the joint framework to co-operate to the fullest extent possible with the commission.”
“Northern Ireland is a society, as the hon. Gentleman knows better than most, that has been undergoing profound change since the signing of the Good Friday agreement 28 years ago. As the famous lines go, we have a shared history, but not necessarily a shared memory.”
“The right hon. Gentleman raises a really important point, and I am grateful to him for his question. We all have a responsibility—political leaders have a responsibility to call out what was witnessed for what it is and not mince our words, and as I have already indicated, social media companies have a responsibility to ensure that such m…”
“I hope the hon. Lady will recognise that the common travel area, which is more than a century old, is of great benefit to the citizens of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Many people in Northern Ireland live their lives across that border every single day.”
“I do agree with my hon. Friend. The attack on Mr Ogilvie was truly shocking, and there was no justification whatsoever for the racist thuggery we witnessed on the streets of Belfast in the days following.”
“That was, of course, an awful feature of what we saw. One of the things I learned in my discussions was that those from the far right had taken a list of houses in multiple occupation in Belfast—a list that, in the interests of openness, was properly available on the Belfast city council website; the council has now taken it down—and used…”
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Every one of 6,304 lines we hold for Hilary Benn, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 69 of 127.
“The House will recall that he claimed great things for the Bill, no doubt because the coalition agreement promised “a radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government”. The truth is, however, that as the Bill has progressed, it has failed to live up to that promise. I shall respond directly to the Minister’s point here. As we were reminded earlier today, it pays to try to get these things right. I say that because, with one exception, those sitting on the Government Front Bench have form. People remember that the last time wonderful words were said about a reform of local government finance, it was called the poll tax and the consequences included riots on the streets. The people would not have it and the Prime Minister lost her job.”
“I know that the Minister is an enthusiast, but those watching could be forgiven for thinking that the Bill was the answer to all the nation’s ills—at one count it was, with one thing and another, solving poverty and dealing with the deficit. Also, although I have a high regard for the Secretary of State, I am surprised that he did not make that speech, because after all, this is his flagship Bill. I know that we have a part-time Chancellor; I just hope that it is not proving contagious in the Cabinet. [ Interruption. ] I say that genuinely, as it would have been nice to hear from the Secretary of State, who has spoken only once on the Bill—on Second Reading.”
“Conservative councillors must have been very encouraged over the weekend to read the Secretary of State’s admission in The Sunday Times that lots of them are going to lose their jobs come Thursday. Families are struggling because of the failure of the Government’s economic policy, but at least they know that council tax is lower in areas with Labour councils than in Conservative ones. Would the Secretary of State like to congratulate Labour councils on their achievement?”
“I know that the Secretary of State does not really do detail, but I would have thought that even he could work out the figures for himself. The band D council tax rate is £81 lower in Labour areas than in Tory areas. He has made great play of trying to keep council tax down, but as we heard earlier, because of his legislation, his plan next year is to increase the council tax paid by a lot of people who are on low incomes. Does that not show that, far from us all being in it together, the Secretary of State is determined to dump some people in it more than others? Is that not the real reason why he has thrown in the towel before polling day?”
“The country needs a planning system that will help to produce the much-needed homes, businesses, jobs and transport connections of the future, but will also protect the green spaces and special places we value. However, this revised NPPF may end up doing neither. Far from giving us certainty, there is likely to be delay as developments are held up by appeals and by the courts having to rule on a new and untested approach. In other words, there is uncertainty and chaos—the worst of all worlds—instead of the best of planning.”
“Will he produce further guidance on how the transition is going to work in practice? Where councils do have plans, who will determine whether they are “silent”, “out of date”, or “indeterminate”? Those words remain in the final framework, so presumably the presumption in favour of sustainable development will apply—the opposite of localism. Who decides what is “in the public interest”—the phrase that the Minister has been using in his interviews today? In particular, who will decide when an application goes to appeal? Not only has Parliament not been given the chance to vote on the final version of the framework, but it is coming into force from today—before Members in the House have even had a chance to read it.”
“On town centres, will the Minister confirm that he has accepted our proposal that offices should remain in the sequential town centre test, given their importance to the economies of our towns and cities, including through the business generated by those who work in them,? What changes is he planning to make to use class orders? Will local authorities be given greater flexibility in determining those? On the crucial question of transition to the new arrangements—the point that Members raised more than any other in the debate that we had back in October—we know that about half of councils currently do not have development plans. While the Minister has talked about providing 12 months to produce up-to-date plans, annex 1 of the framework is rather less clear.”
“How will they be, in the rather menacing words of the Budget Red Book, “held to account” for delivering sustainable development? Will the Minister clarify the reported remarks by Professor Andrew McNaughton, the chief engineer of High Speed 2, about 100,000 new homes being built between Coventry and Wolverhampton, and about a “new docklands” to the west of London? Given the Government’s professed commitment to localism, will he tell us when the local authorities covering these areas first knew about this, and what will be the Government’s role in the development of new towns and cities to help us to build the homes that we need?”
“I welcome the U-turn on protection for playing fields and open spaces. Why on earth Ministers thought they could get away with removing it in the first place, I fail to understand. I welcome also the reference to the five principles of sustainable development, which we had called for. On brownfield land, why are the Government so against a national, as opposed to a local “brownfield first” policy, given that it is the best place to build the millions of homes that we urgently need, and the best way to protect the greenfield sites that so many Members are concerned about? Can the Minister explain exactly what the new requirements for statutory consultees such as the Environment Agency and English Heritage will involve?”
“It is no wonder they have been arguing fiercely among themselves, with one unnamed Cabinet Minister—I just wonder who that might be—quoted as accusing the Chancellor of behaving like the Taliban on planning: a very revealing comment if a pretty inappropriate one. There has also been a lack of transparency. Can the Minister before us confirm for the House whether any of the developers whom he and his colleagues have met since last June are donors to the Conservative party? We cannot find out for ourselves because the quarterly publication of Department for Communities and Local Government ministerial meetings is now nine months out of date—in clear contravention of the ministerial code. I have twice raised that issue with CLG Ministers in this Chamber, and on both occasions I have been promised that it was about to appear. It has not.”
“Councils were particularly concerned about the presumption in favour of “sustainable development”—ill defined—if they did not have up-to-date development plans, and, as we know, Ministers lashed out at those who had the temerity to express concern—such revolutionaries as the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, I remind the House—calling them “semi-hysterical”, “left-wing” and “nihilist”. Ministers claim that planning is the obstacle to building homes, when 300,000 dwellings that have already been given permission have not yet been built. Why is that? Because of the failure of the Government’s own economic policy.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for advance sight of his statement, although much of it has been leaked over the past few days. Planning helps us to get the right development in the right place—development which we need, and that is why it is so important to get the balance right in this, the most fundamental change in planning policy in more than two generations. It is therefore extraordinary that the Government managed to make such a mess of the process, which did nothing to inspire confidence in all of us who want an effective planning system and the right kind of sustainable development, but who are determined to conserve the intrinsic character and beauty of England’s green and pleasant land—something that successive Governments have supported.”
“Given the great public interest in the national planning policy framework, we would all like to know which construction and property companies the Secretary of State and Communities and Local Government Ministers have met in the past few months, especially as the Electoral Commission revealed that firms in the sector gave just over £500,000 to the Conservative party between July and December last year. The public unfortunately cannot find out that information because no details of meetings between CLG Ministers and others have been published since June 2011. May I ask the Secretary of State, who is responsible for publication, why that is?”
“That will not really do, and I am sorry that the Secretary of State has once again ducked answering a question, because he is very keen to lecture people on transparency but, it seems, not so keen on it himself. The Housing Minister promised the House a month ago that the information was about to appear, but as of midday today—nine months on from the previous disclosure—there was still no sign of it on the Department’s website, even though the ministerial code clearly states that such information must be published “at least quarterly”. When is the Secretary of State going to start practising what he preaches, especially on something as important as the future of our towns and countryside?”
“The right hon. Gentleman talks about transparency, and Nottingham city council should indeed publish that information, but does not he understand why local government gets a little cross when he and his colleagues lecture everyone on transparency but do not apply it to information on their ministerial hospitality and gifts? Can he explain why the latest such information published on his Department’s website, which I visited yesterday, is for eight months ago, even though it is meant to be published every three months?”
“Councils have been forced to absorb a reduction in formula grant of almost 19.3% over the two years of the spending review. The cuts have been front-loaded. What that means, as the Local Government Association has pointed out, is that local government has borne the brunt of the reductions in the spending review rather than the burden being shared equally with other parts of Government. Having heard the Minister’s contribution, it seems that he is still living on a completely different planet from the one on which communities and their councils have to exist. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirms, the total cuts to local government spending will outpace those of the public sector as a whole up to 2014-15.”
“I welcome this opportunity to debate local government finance. I am conscious that we are entering a world of strange language—gearing and damping, floors and ceilings—and the Minister did not disappoint. I was slightly surprised, however, to hear so much about Greece and Italy, Ireland and France. Unless I am very much mistaken, when I last checked, those countries were not part of the local government funding settlement, but I stand to be corrected. Local authorities provide services on which we all rely, and what they do has a huge effect on the quality of life of the citizens we represent and on the neighbourhoods in which they live. They are now having to deal, as every Member knows, with the biggest cut in resources that we have ever seen in our political lifetime.”
“My response to the right hon. Gentleman is that we would not cut so far and so fast, as he knows. We would certainly not have distributed the cuts in the fundamentally unfair way that this Government have done.”
“Every year it publishes the green budget before the real Budget, and the 2012 green budget shows that overall cuts in local government spending, excluding education, are largest in both absolute and proportional terms in London, the north-east and the north-west.”
“Basingstoke and Deane will gain—I stress, gain—£6 a person overall, while Knowsley will lose £227 per person. East Dorset gains £3 a resident, while Manchester loses £186. In Greater London, everyone loses, but some lose much more than others. The borough of Richmond is down by £2 a head, whereas Hackney is hit by a whacking great loss of £234 a head. Why is that? Those are the raw figures behind the hard-faced politics that prove that the Chancellor is trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. If Ministers do not like hearing the truth from Newcastle or from their own statistics, what about hearing it from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies? Its analysis by region shows that London and the north of England have been especially badly hit.”
“Despite the Secretary of State’s claim that what he has done is fair and sustainable, the House knows that the 10% most deprived upper-tier authorities are facing a reduction in their spending power that is nearly four times greater than that faced by the 10% least deprived authorities. That is why the Minister’s argument falls at the very first hurdle. It is also undermined by his Department’s figures. Newcastle city council has done us all a very great service by laying out the facts. It looked at data taken from the Department for Communities and Local Government showing the cuts in 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2012-13, taking account of transition and council tax freeze grants and the provisional new homes bonus allocations. What do the figures show when all that is taken into account?”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and he anticipates some of the figures I am going to give to the House. First, however, it is important to note that the Secretary of State lost out to the Treasury—assuming, of course, that he tried to protect local councils in the first place, and there many who would doubt whether he put up much of a fight, given the glee with which he regularly attacks councils for what they do. The consequences of all this are: one, that local government has to deal with cuts that are unfairly distributed; two, that residents are having to come face to face with the consequences of those cuts, as services they rely on change or go; and, three, looking to next year, that councils face nothing but uncertainty about their future financial position. Let me deal with each of those in turn.”
“My right hon. Friend argues the case for his constituents with great force and vigour, and he is absolutely right. This is fundamentally unfair. The reason it is happening—the Minister was remarkably reluctant to admit the truth—is that councils in deprived urban areas rely to a much greater extent than councils in more affluent areas on central grants from the Treasury, which have been cut significantly.”
“Of course there is a difference because there is much greater deprivation in Hackney than in Richmond. I should have thought even the hon. Gentleman would be able to work that out for himself.”
“My hon. Friend is right. It is quite shocking that the Government have done this knowing what it will do, but at no time have they apologised, as they should, for the unfair way in which they have allocated these cuts, but it is time they did, because it is now clear that far from all of us being in it together, some are much more in it than others. This is not just about local authorities, because the same is true of funding for the fire service, which we are also discussing.”
“They are all facing reductions in funding per head, whereas areas with a lower rate of incidence, thank goodness, such as Hampshire, Royal Berkshire, and Hereford and Worcester, will get increases in their funding per head for the fire service. What that means for the losers is that fire stations are closing, pumps are going and firefighters are losing their jobs.”
“The right hon. Gentleman obviously did not listen carefully enough to the point I made. If he has not seen the figures produced by Newcastle city council he should do so, because it has looked at the impact of the cuts over three years and has taken account of transition grant and the new homes bonus allocation. In other words, it has looked at the total effect on those authorities of all the decisions the Government have taken, and that is what the figures show. In relation to the fire service, there are brigade areas with a very high rate of incidents, such as Merseyside, Cleveland, Greater Manchester and West Midlands. What is happening to them?”
“In his letter, he described the local government settlement as “very disappointing”. A year ago, Liberal Democrat councillors published a letter in The Times in which they said that local government was “being let done by the Communities and Local Government Secretary”. Even a good friend of the Secretary of State and the Minister, the much respected Baroness Eaton, accused Ministers of being “detached from the reality councils are dealing with”.”
“Friend put this to him: “So the bottom line from your point of view, then, as a ministerial team, is that there is no need for any cuts in services in local government at all.” The Minister replied: “No, they shouldn’t be cutting the front-line services.” Only a group of Ministers who were completely divorced from what was going on in the real world in local government could say such a thing in public. We know, however, that in private some of them have said something rather different. Last year the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) wrote to fellow Liberal Democrats—[Hon. Members: “Where is he?”] He cannot be locked in the Division Lobby this time, but it would have been nice to see him here.”
“Last year the Local Government Association warned that the consequences of the cuts in local government finance would be felt in front-line services, although—the Minister made this point—many councils have rationalised back-office services and cut costs. The approach of the Secretary of State and the Minister is to blame councils for all this, claiming that front-line cuts are not necessary. I was interested to read what the Minister told the Select Committee back in 2010, when he was questioned by its Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts). My hon.”
“My hon. Friend is right. Certainly the West Yorkshire fire service does an extremely good job in meeting the needs of all our constituents. Worse is to come if Ministers insist on proceeding with the cuts that they have planned for years 3 and 4. As the Minister will know, the metropolitan fire chiefs have been so worried about the prospect that they have given Ministers a stark warning in their response to the review, in which they say: “The Mets have already shouldered 62% of the cuts in the English fire and rescue service outside London in the first two years…The cuts planned for years 3 and 4 are unsustainable and would lead to life threatening reductions in fire cover and national resilience capacity”. Unless the Minister has a very good answer to that, he ought to reconsider his plans for the cuts in years 3 and 4.”
“DCLG figures show that last year 93 out of 152 councils —61% of them—cut spending on providing meals on wheels for the elderly compared with their spend in 2009-10, and 55 authorities cut spending on adult social care, although all of us know our authorities face increasing pressures in that area. Also, 75 councils reduced spending on equipment and adaptations for disabled and elderly adults, and according to another survey, 88% of councils were increasing their care charges.”
“Sadly, when it comes to the Liberal Democrats, not much has changed at all. That is a pattern of behaviour with which many of us in the House are all too familiar. We have discussed the figures, now let us turn to the consequences of all this. Before the election, the Prime Minister promised that he would protect Sure Start. Members may recall that he took the former Prime Minister to task for suggesting that that might not happen. What has actually happened? A reply given by Ministers just before Christmas shows that there are now 124 fewer Sure Start centres than there were when the coalition was formed. So much for the Prime Minister’s pledge.”
“We cannot get much more front line than making sure old people have a hot meal every day or get their shopping done, or helping people to remain in their own home by building a ramp or putting a shower on the ground floor, so whatever the Minister of State was thinking when he answered an earlier question, or whatever the Secretary of State was thinking in December when he described the draft settlement as “enough to safeguard the most vulnerable, protect taxpayers’ interests and the front-line services they rely on”, I would gently say to them that they must recognise the damage that such comments do to the credibility of DCLG Ministers. Every time they say such things councillors, officers and people in local communities look at each other and ask, “Don’t they have any idea of what is actually going on in the world we have to live in?””
“My hon. Friend makes that point very forcefully. I wonder whether Hammersmith and Fulham will still be the Secretary of State’s favourite council once he becomes aware of what it has been doing, in marked contrast to what the Prime Minister of the party it supports said at the time of the election—but then that is sadly familiar, too.”
“I am reluctant to raise this point, but I shall: it is extraordinary that although the Minister stands up and says, “Money’s very tight,” his Secretary of State has found £0.25 billion to try to persuade councils to change their minds about how to collect their rubbish. The great localist thinks he knows better than they do how it should be done, even though household recycling rates have more than doubled since 1997, thus saving residents a lot of money in landfill levy, and the majority of councils whose minds he is trying to change with his cash are controlled by councillors from his own party. It is a very expensive family disagreement.”
“My hon. Friend makes an extremely powerful point about the impact of all this on the overall economy, and I shall say a few words about the effect on jobs shortly. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports on another area that has been affected. It says that significant reductions in expenditure on planning and economic development are being seen. Councils will need as much resource as possible to respond to the national planning policy framework, and in particular to draw up their new plans if they have not got them, or to revise the plans if they have got them, because if they do not do that, developers can come in and say, “We want to make use of the presumption in favour of sustainable development.” However, they will find that the resource they need to do that work will largely have disappeared.”
“Furthermore, on the council tax benefit, nobody knows exactly how the budget minus the 10% will be distributed, what the take-up will be, and how councils are meant to cope with a rise in unemployment and, therefore, with an increase in applications in their areas. I gently advise Government Members to have a very good look at what this will mean for their constituents, because many Government Members represent areas where the proportion of pensioners is higher than the average. The more that is true, the greater the cut in council tax benefit or, to put it another way, the bigger the council tax bill that will have to be paid by their voters on low incomes, who have absolutely no idea what the coalition Government have in store for them.”
“The third and last area I wish to turn to is uncertainty, particularly that created by the Local Government Finance Bill. Many councils have no idea, frankly, what their financial position will be next year because the Government’s policy is to localise uncertainty and volatility. As things stand, no council knows what its baseline will be next year under the legislation going through the House, what top-slice share the Government want to take, how the levy will work, how the safety net will operate or what impact, for example, the closure of a large employer in its area would have on business rate income. Nor do councils know, given the 1% average limit on pay increases, how much will be taken off them by the Treasury, although there are estimates of £200 million in 2013-14 and £400 million in 2014-15.”
“On academies funding, the Local Government Association’s view is that the £265 million that the Education Secretary has finally decided to top-slice—having at one point threatened to take even more—is too high a figure because it does not reflect the actual savings that will accrue to local education authorities. I agree with the LGA. Do Ministers share that view, have they argued local government’s case with the Education Secretary, and does the Minister think that will be enough to put off a resumption of the stalled judicial reviews on this matter? Secondly, on the business rates pooling account, I should be grateful if the Minister clarified whether the Government plan to run a surplus again this year, as they did last year, and if so how it complies with the law on the account’s operation.”
“In 2010, he boasted in his first Budget, “Never mind about the jobs that will be lost in the public sector, because they’re going to be replaced by jobs created in the private sector”, assuring us that that would be the case. What has actually happened? In the last quarter, for every 13 jobs that went in the public sector—all 67,000 of them—just one was created in the private sector. That is why the economy is not growing, the plan is not working and the Government are having to borrow more than they said they would. I have a couple of specific questions that I hope the Minister will respond to.”
“As we know, the Office for Budget Responsibility announced in November a dramatic revision of its projection of the total number of jobs that would be lost in the public sector, including in local government—up from 410,000 to 710,000 in the years ahead—in part because of what has been happening in local government, and in part because of the front-loading of the cuts. For England and Wales as a whole, the reduction in the number of workers employed by councils between the first quarter of 2010 and the second quarter of 2011 totalled 129,000, of which women accounted for two thirds. In other words, women are bearing the brunt of these reductions, and it is one of the reasons why the Chancellor’s economic plan is frankly in such a mess.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and it will be interesting to see in the end how many councils choose to take it up, not least because there is a knock-on consequence over the five years for which the Government are expecting them to change their system. Frankly, £250 million could have been better spent on social care, aid and adaptations, and meals on wheels. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) pointed out a moment ago, one consequence of all this has been huge job losses.”
“Instead, the legislation will provide that he will determine the benchmark—so he decides what is excessive. He will determine how the referendum is conducted, the question to be put, the publicity and expenditure levels to be permitted and how the votes are counted. He will even be able to direct that the referendum provisions do not apply and decree the council tax requirement that must actually operate. In effect, the Secretary of State will set the maximum level of council tax increase each year.”
“Friends have said, this year’s council tax freeze grant is a one-off, unlike last year’s, and that creates a dilemma for councils. The Tory leader of Surrey county council, which I understand is not proposing to take the freeze grant, said very simply: “The freeze would be a short-term gain for long-term pain.” Why has he said that? He has done so because the freeze could mean that residents face bigger council tax increases next year and subsequently. On the referendum proposal, capping powers have of course been in place since the Local Government Finance Act 1992 was passed by the previous Conservative Government. It is right that councils are accountable for the decisions they make, although if the Secretary of State were true to his “localist” principles, he would have allowed local residents to hold the trigger on any referendum.”
“What authorities actually do is build up reserves to guard against it, yet we know what the Secretary of State does to councils that have reserves—he attacks and vilifies them. That is a pattern of behaviour with which councillors of all political colours have become all too wearily familiar. I shall now deal with council tax and the other motion before us. Let us remember that average council tax bills are lower under Labour-run councils than Conservative ones. No council, especially in the current circumstances, wants to raise council tax if it does not have to do so. Councils will do their best to avoid doing so, unlike the Secretary of State, who says that he wants to protect people from increases in council tax and then the next moment introduces legislation that will impose council tax increases on people on low incomes. As my hon.”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and we are talking about a change that the Government are apparently determined to push through in a very short space of time. [Interruption.] On the council tax benefit localisation, it is not a change, with the 10% cut, that I agree with. Government Members ought to listen to what council treasurers and leaders up and down the country are saying, and they should make their views forcefully known to their Front-Bench team before they find their constituents asking them, “What is it you voted for? Why did you do this to me?” All this uncertainty has been created by the Secretary of State, because it is his Bill and his lack of clarity. What would a prudent authority do in these circumstances and faced with such uncertainty?”
“Indeed, with the powers having been put in place by the previous Conservative Government and having remained in place when we were in government. I was merely pointing out to the Minister the inconsistency in the Secretary of State’s argument: he says he is a great localiser but on bins and on referendums it appears that he knows better than everyone else.”
“The BBC reported what one officer, who, incidentally, works for a Conservative-controlled authority, said, and I want to quote him. He said, very simply: “This is the most unfair and unjust settlement I have ever seen”. I agree. It is unfair to councils and unfair to local residents, and that is why we will vote against this motion.”
“I have been very generous in giving way and I have given way to the hon. Gentleman once already, so I am going to conclude to allow others to speak. On the question of how the 3.5% is calculated, however, after the exchange we have just heard, I would say that I think councils would welcome absolute clarity about what kind of increase would trigger a referendum, not least because of the costs that would result. In conclusion, the settlement needs to be seen for what it is. The Minister referred to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and, as he might have read, last month it talked to a number of senior council officials about the impact that reductions in local authority budgets will have on the most deprived communities.”