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Cohabitation (Contract Enforcement)
3.33 pm
Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay) : I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision for the enforcement of contracts entered into between cohabiting partners ; and for connected purposes.
The Bill seeks to encourage people who share a home or property to make proper contractual arrangements about their joint possessions. It sets out the ownership rights to prevent family quarrels and bad feelings if the relationship breaks down, and gives guidance to the courts when dealing with such cases.
In recent times, there has been a considerable change of behaviour in society as many more people set up homes together without making any formal arrangements. They may be two friends who decide to share a house together. They may be elderly people who decide to give up their own homes to move in with younger relatives and who invest all their savings in that new home or they may be young couples. Nowadays, almost 1 million young couples aged between 18 and 40 live together without any formal arrangements about the property that they jointly use and enjoy. Those relationships are particularly important, as they may involve children who may not be protected if those relationships break down.
Friends can fall out, granny can die or a partnership may break up. In those circumstances, all hell often breaks loose, because there is a dispute about who owns what. There is no specific body of law to protect people in those circumstances, even if a contract between the parties exists. For historical reasons, the courts have been loth to recognise the intention behind such agreements even if they exist. That attitude harks back to the time when a man and woman who lived together without a formal marriage were deemed to be living in sin. Couples who live together may do so through choice, but sometimes they do so because one of them cannot obtain a divorce from a previous partner. Such relationships can break down, as do marriages, but whereas both partners are much better protected under matrimonial law and are usually entitled to equal shares in the joint property, there is no such protection for couples who are simply living together.
It is a commonly held belief that, after living together for some time, people acquire rights as the common-law wife or husband. That is true in Scotland, but it is not true of England and Wales, and has not been for the past 230 years. People do not automatically acquire rights to maintenance or, in the case of the death of one of the partners, to property that was held jointly during that relationship. A woman left in such circumstances often has no right even to remain in what is the family home to care for the children of the relationship. There is a case for the Government to introduce legislation to make matters clear.
In a recent case, a woman who had helped to build up a successful business in partnership with the man with whom she had lived for 10 years was told by a judge that she had no rights to the value of that business because, early on in the relationship, she had refused marriage. In those circumstances, the judge decided that she could not claim any ownership of the business that had been built up.
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Another couple lived together for 30 years without being married, because the man was married to a Catholic who would not divorce him. That couple had six children and they built up a home. On his death, however, the woman found that she had no rights to that home or to any other property. All the property was claimed by the man's wife. Such cases cause a great deal of unhappiness. People often seek the help of lawyers, but they are unable to give it, as there is no body of case law from which the lawyer can draw. He therefore has to fall back on the property rights involved. One is told that, if one has a receipt for the house, the three-piece suite, the kitchen cabinet or whatever, one can claim for it. Otherwise, it is usually deemed to be the property of one partner, and not necessarily the partner who paid for it.Three young women solicitors of Coventry have done a great deal of work on this subject. They have written an excellent book to explain the problem called "Living Together". Those who are interested may well obtain a copy. The authors outline many sad cases. There was a case in my constituency of two policemen who were killed while working as divers. One was married to his partner, so his wife had full rights to pensions and so on. In the other case, the relationship was not a formal marriage so the woman got nothing--no pension, no house, nothing of what she was entitled to.
Increasingly these days, elderly people give up their own homes and go to live with younger relatives. They may put a lot of money into these buildings--perhaps buying a new and larger house--but without a will or a contract, their estate can make no claim on the property that they brought into the relationship. That is another good reason for encouraging contracts of this sort.
In other cases, young people sell their homes and go to live with grandad or granny, but they find that they cannot get on together and that the money that they put into repairs or modernisation is completely lost to them, and they can get nothing of it back. All these events need regularisation by new legislation. The courts need guidance so that judges dealing with these cases know what Parliament expects of them. Young women especially go into these relationships starry-eyed and come out baggy-eyed and the worse for wear. It is time Parliament considered the matter seriously and introduced some sanity and guidance to the law. There is an urgent need for the Government to give such guidance to the public and the courts.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill ordered to be brought in by Mrs. Teresa Gorman, Mr. Bob Dunn, Mr. Barry Field, Mr. Ivan Lawrence, Mr. David Evans, Mr. Henry Bellingham, Mr. David Shaw, Mr. Andrew McKay and Mr. Jonathan Aitken.
Cohabitation (Contract Enforcement)
Mrs. Teresa Gorman accordingly presented a Bill to make provision for the enforcement of contracts entered into between cohabiting partners ; and for connected purposes : And the same was read the First time ; and ordered to be read a Second time upon 21 June and to be printed. [Bill 175.]
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Orders of the Day
Local Government Finance and Valuation Bill
Considered in Committee.
[ Mr. Harold Walker
in the Chair. ]
Clause 1
Repeal of section 101 of Local Government Finance Act 1988
3.46 pm
Mr. David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside) : I beg to move amendment No. 12, in page 1, line 6, at beginning insert--
( ) This section shall have effect for the period between Royal Assent and a date specified by an Order made by the Secretary of State, such date to be not later than the date of implementation of a scheme of local taxation which shall be based on the occupation of property.'.
The Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr. Harold Walker) : With this it will be convenient to discuss also the following amendments : No 15, in page 1, line 9, leave out from shall' to end and insert have no effect during the period specified in accordance with subsection ( ) above'.
No. 19, in page 1, line 11, leave out from also' to end and insert
have no effect during the period specified in accordance with subsection ( ) above'.
No. 20, in page 1, line 17, after subsections', insert ( ),'. No. 38, in page 1, line 19, leave out 1992' and insert 1993' No. 57, in clause 7, page 7, line 2, leave out two' and insert 12'.
Mr. Blunkett : First, with the indulgence of the Committee, I should like to add the thanks of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Mr. Michie) and of all elected Sheffield Members to the thanks offered to Helen Sharman by the Prime Minister earlier this afternoon for her presence in the House. All of us from Sheffield and across Britain wish her well and congratulate her on her tremendous feat on behalf of the country. [ Hon. Members :-- "Hear, hear."]
Today and tomorrow, spent in Committee, should and could have been used not to centralise power still further in the hands of the Government but to bring immediate relief to poll tax payers across Britain. We could have used this time to ensure that the poll tax disappeared by 1 April next year and that people who have suffered under it could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that a property tax would be reinstated. Instead, this afternoon, we have a petty little measure which, as can be seen from the Order Paper, seeks to cap all authorities in Britain irrespective of their size or spending power. The amendment seeks to limit the range of capping powers to ensure that the proposed future property tax--hopefully, our fair rates--is introduced as quickly as possible. If there is not a general election between now and this date 12 months hence we will have sat through the winter on the proposed council tax. If we are to see a future
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in which people are free to raise and spend money sensibly, it is clear that capping should go at the earliest opportunity. The Bill seeks to do the exact opposite--to spread capping to those authorities with budgets of less than £15 million per year, irrespective of their circumstances and the method by which those resources are raised and spent.It will be recalled that, originally, capping was not to apply at all under the poll tax. In its original draft, it was conceived to be unnecessary, because the poll tax would bring accountability to every local authority in Britain. It was said that the poll tax would bring accountability by ensuring that the individual paying a flat rate tax would be made aware of exactly what money was being raised and spent in the locality--that it would not be spread across the generality of electors, but would be concentrated on each individual. As a consequence, they would feel the pain --I use the word advisedly--that came from spending on public services, and they would remove elected representatives who were minded to raise and spend money on the very public services that Conservative Members praise one day and do their best to destroy the next.
When it was discovered that the Prime Minister of the day was minded to keep hold of the bureaucratic central controls which capping had brought from 1985, when it was realised that there were electors throughout the country of all shades of local authority political opinion who would want to spend money on services rather than destroy them, the Government had a change of heart.
The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), who now occupies the post of Secretary of State for unemployment, decided in a speech on 28 October 1987 that capping would be necessary. But, in introducing the idea that, after all, central controls and bureaucratic power would be needed, he said : "Let me make it clear that we are only taking such powers because of the appalling record of a dozen or so authorities in managing their affairs under the present system. I have every confidence that the pressures of accountability will in general deal with the problem of overspending by local councils."
He went on to say :
"The new system will be short, sharp and effective."
It has certainly been short and it has certainly been sharp, but no one in the Chamber would describe it as having been effective. The poll tax has not been effective either in its intentions or in terms of bringing to heel the desires of local people to have their own services.
Mr. Clive Soley (Hammersmith) : It got rid of the previous Prime Minister.
Mr. Blunkett : We must be grateful for small mercies.
On 17 March 1988, in Standing Committee E dealing with the Local Government Finance Bill--I remember it well, as will my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley), because we used to sit until 2 am listening to the verbiage that poured out in favour of the poll tax, and it came as a great relief to me shortly after 17 March to enter hospital with pneumonia and have the relief of being at death's doorstep take away the necessity of sitting through the proceedings on the poll tax Bill--the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe, who was one of a number of people who were responsible for the poll tax and all its works who are still in the Prime Minister's Cabinet, said :
"Its effect is to remove from the field of selection the large majority of authorities, whose total spending is relatively
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insignificant. The community charges levied by those authorities will generally make up only a fraction of total local community charge when the precept of other authorities is taken into account. From the point of view, therefore, of protecting local charge payers, it seems unnecessary to keep such authorities in the field of charge limitation."--[ Official Report, Standing Committee E, 17 March 1988 ; c. 1491.]That is about to be overturned by the Bill.
I realise that Ministers' statements are not worth the paper that they are written on, but it is opportune to remind the right hon. and hon. Gentlemen now seated on the Government Front Bench of what their colleagues said. The simple lesson for the British people is that they should not believe a word of what is said or written by Ministers, because shortly afterwards they will change their minds. As the then Secretary of State for the Environment said in 1985, when chided about the introduction of capping after it had been made clear in the early 1980s that it would never be introduced :
"That was then, and now is now."
On Report and Third Reading on 25 April 1988, the Government had an historic opportunity to pass amendments to banding, but they did not do so. Instead, the then Minister for Local Government said : "We have made it clear on more than one occasion that we see a capping power introduced in the clause as a reserve measure. It is not a measure to be used as a matter of course".--[ Official Report , 25 April 1988 ; Vol. 132, c. 47.]
Today, that power will be used as a matter of course. It will be applied to every authority, whatever its level of spending or circumstances.
I shall be interested to hear the Government's arguments, but there cannot be any economic justification for such a measure. Small authorities with budgets of less than £15 million do not make up a sufficient spending pattern to have any impact on the national economy, even if we accept that such local spending made a difference.
If we take all the 87 authorities spending £15 million or less that would have been affected by this year's capping criteria, the total sum involved would have reached £102 million. On 3 June 1991, the Secretary of State said that there might well be a de minimis regulation in respect of authorities that spent more than £26 above the standard spending assessment. Therefore, only 40 of those 87 authorities would have been affected. They include Conservative, Liberal and Labour-controlled authorities across the whole country that do not share attitudes of profligacy or unreasonableness or, as the Minister described it in 1988, a tendency towards irrational behaviour. Instead, they seek to provide services for their residents. They do not represent any economic disadvantage to the country as a whole.
Since 1970, the proportion of revenue spending by local government as a proportion of gross domestic product fell from 8.2 per cent. to 7.2 per cent. The capital figure is even more dramatic. Over the same 21 years, capital spending as a proportion of GDP fell from 3.6 per cent. to 1.8 per cent.--an enormous cut of 50 per cent. in the amount spent on repairing and improving our schools, housing, roads and environment. The Government can advance no economic or moral argument for their action, or justify it in other terms. It will only affect people detrimentally. Mr. Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley) : Does my hon. Friend agree with Mr. Roy Thomason, chairman of the Association of District Councils? Mr. Thomason has said :
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"We appear to have a Government that is being run by the Treasury for the sake of Treasury convenience."Mr. Blunkett : I think that the Conservative chairman of the ADC knows what he is talking about, given his experience of dealing not only with the Government but with the electorate in the area that he represents and in which he lives. [Interruption.] I think that the Conservative Whip is waiting for his list. "I've got a little list" : 87 names would have been on it this year. The Government believe that their own supporters and elected councillors have let them down. That has happened for one simple reason. Those councillors wanted to provide services, and they wanted to spend money to maintain them. 4 pm
The Government, not the local authorities, are primarily responsible for the size, and variation in size, of bills throughout the country, and there is no doubt that the way in which the proposed council tax would protect the rich would worsen the position dramatically. Over the next two days, we shall be debating the gearing effect. That will have a drastic impact on the amount that an authority must spend to raise a single extra pound to spend on services.
In Tower Hamlets, the ratio will be 11.3 : 1, while in affluent south Buckinghamshire it will be only 2 : 1. We have tabled this amendment because of the dramatic difference between the bills that people in different areas would have to pay. The poorer the area, the more money people living there would have to find to enable an extra £1 to be spent to meet their needs.
That is silly. In such circumstances, capping is not only absurd but positively immoral ; it places a much heavier burden on the most deprived areas than on the most affluent. People living in deprived inner-city areas will not only pay more but receive less. This is the new inner-city policy : take from those who have not, and ensure that the benefits go to those who have--unless, of course, the all-ages index of social need to be provided under the council tax arrangements shows Buckinghamshire to be more deprived than Tower Hamlets.
The distribution of the national business rate has also affected the position--as have the standard spending assessments, which were originally to have been varied and improved but which will now remain the same. My hon. Friends will say more about that when we discuss other amendments.
All in all, we are in a mess. The mess that the Government are making, and the Conservatives' decision to continue with capping, illustrates their bewilderment about how to deal with local government finance, their despair in not knowing which way to turn and their undoubted disdain for the need to provide decent services. The Conservatives want capping, but without pain ; centralism, but without the blame ; and cuts, but not in their own pet projects or their own areas. That was made clear in the debate that took place immediately before the spring recess. It is very simple : their measures are intended to show some people that they mean business in terms of undermining public services and public spending, while also ensuring that it is the local councillors who must implement the cuts in essential provision.
This is a petty, unnecessary and anti-democratic measure. Our amendment seeks to modify it, and, at the earliest opportunity, to remove it altogether. Nothing in
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this afternoon's debate will hide the fact that the Government wish to pass the buck, ignoring the consequences of their actions--the cuts, and the hurt that they intend to cause--and, once again, trying to blame local government for what is of their own making.Mr. David Bellotti (Eastbourne) : I shall speak to amendments Nos. 38 and 57, tabled by the Liberal Democrats.
The proposals before us attack the heart of local democracy. The Bill is before us because the poll tax failed. We are dealing with it after, rather than before, the local elections, because, the Government would have lost 2,000 seats rather than losing nearly 1, 000 at the local elections in May if these proposals had been before the local people then. We are dealing with the Bill as long as possible before a general election, because its provisions are so unpopular.
The Liberal Democrats oppose capping in principle--we want to make that clear. We want a grant equalisation system devised between the local authorities rather than devised here by central Government. Our long-term aim is to transfer the raising of local government finance to local government, with a consequent reduction in national taxation. Clearly, that cannot be done immediately, especially given that some local authorities, which are controlled by the left, would spend without limit, irrespective of people's ability to pay, while other local authorities would cut services and fail to provide the level and quality of service needed by deprived people in our communities.
The way round those problems is to make local government more accountable-- the Government have often talked about doing that, but they have never achieved it. Liberal Democrats believe that local government could be made accountable by ensuring that all local authorities were fully representative of their local communities. That could be achieved only by proportional representation, so that the Lambeths and the Hackneys, and the low-spending Conservative authorities, could no longer exist.
Our two amendments would delay the Bill for a year, to take it beyond the general election. We consider that only fair, because the Government have often said that they would not cap small authorities that spend less than £15 million. They have never gone before the people to ask for their endorsement of such a policy. Another reason for wanting 12 months' delay is to enable local authorities to consider the measure and begin to plan for a worst case scenario. If our amendments are not accepted, the worst case scenario would be that at least 88 districts would have to examine their services--refuse collection, leisure, street cleaning and so on--to see where they could considerably reduce their costs. It would be a difficult exercise because of Government policy on competitive tendering. Many local authorities have spent much of their money in giving contracts to private companies, and accepting some in-house tenders for many services. Such costs are tied up for periods of more than a year ; often they are tied up for three years, and some authorities have given options for longer periods.
By introducing the Bill immediately, the Government will force local authorities into a situation where they have no room for manoeuvre because of competitive tendering, yet they will be required to make cuts in refuse collection, leisure, street cleaning and so on.
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Perhaps more important is the fact that, during the next 12 months, when we are trying to get the economy of the country going, local authorities will be denied the spending opportunities that they had planned in order to create wealth in the local economy. For example, many tourist areas are trying to cater for people coming from overseas to spend money in this country, but that requires proactive marketing. The Bill will require local authorities that have planned to spend in that way to cut their proposals, thus cutting the improvements that would have benefited the local economy. The Bill is rushed, and has not been thought through. A long list of authorities throughout the country, of all political complexions, will suffer, and people in those communities will suffer too. The least the Government can do to lessen that suffering is to agree to our amendments to delay the Bill for a year. They have made a drastic U-turn. Therefore, it is only fair for them to give the people of the country an opportunity to comment on it. Our amendments would give them that opportunity.The Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities (Mr. Michael Portillo) : The hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett)and I served on the Committee that considered the Community Charges (Substitute Settings) Bill at Christmas. I enjoyed myself so much that it was with a heavy heart that I thought that that was the last Committee on which we would serve for some time. But in local government, one never knows how fortune will smile on one. Since then, we have had the good fortune to be on the Committee that considered the Community Charges (General Reduction) Bill. We thought that that would be the last time that we would serve on a Committee together this year, but here we are joyfully considering this Bill. The hon. Member for Brightside began by saying that the Government should have offered immediate relief to community charge payers. I remind him that, under the Community Charges (General Reduction) Bill, we offered immediate relief of £140 on the charges set by local authorities. As I recall it, the Opposition were rather scathing about that measure.
Mr. Bryan Gould (Dagenham) rose --
Mr. Portillo : The hon. Gentleman has entered the Chamber and wishes to intervene.
Mr. Gould : I left the Chamber briefly, but have returned to listen to the Minister's first speech. As he mentioned the £140 reduction, and as he must know that many people have discovered to their consternation that they will not receive the full reduction of £140, is he yet in a position to say how many of the 38 million poll tax payers will receive the full £140?
Mr. Portillo : The hon. Gentleman has been trying to whip up this storm, but it will not be whipped up. The public understand perfectly well that, if they are already receiving considerable help with their community charge, it would not be appropriate for everyone to receive the same reduction on their Bill. For example, many millions of people are paying only 20 per cent. of the community charge, yet the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) proposes that one should take £140 off the community charge bills of people who pay only £60 or £70. That seems to be an absolutely absurd point to make.
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Mr. Gould : The point that I seek to make, which is keenly felt by many millions of people, is that the Government's constant proclamation that bills have been reduced by £140 is wrong. True to form in the history of the poll tax, when we inquire who gets the full benefit it is not those at the lower end of the income scale but those at the top end. All I want to know--I am sure that many others would like to hear the answer from the Minister, who surely must have some idea of it--is how many people receive the benefit that he constantly proclaims is being made available to everybody.
Mr. Portillo : The hon. Gentleman's premise is incorrect. I have never claimed that everybody's bill would be reduced by £140. If the hon. Gentleman had entered the Chamber in time to hear what I was saying, he would be aware that I said £140 off the community charges that had been set by local authorities. That is a different matter. If people are not paying £140 in community charge--many people are not--it is absurd to think that they should get £140 off their community charge.
Mr. Blunkett rose--
Mr. Portillo : I shall not get far with this speech without interruption.
Mr. Blunkett : I cannot resist asking why that does not apply to the people of Wandsworth.
Mr. Portillo : The people of Wandsworth benefit from a Conservative administration, which set a community charge of £136. They have been uniquely disadvantaged among the people of Great Britain. Everybody else has enjoyed £140 off the community charge set by their local authority, but the people of Wandsworth have enjoyed only £136 off their community charge. The hon. Gentleman raised a delicate point--I do not know whether he intended to do so--because the people of Wandsworth have a complaint on that matter. It would be wrong to give them £4 each ; zero is the appropriate figure.
The hon. Member for Brightside went through a series of quotations from Ministers--he did not quote me, but he quoted many others--saying that we hoped that we should not have to have capping. I share his disappointment that we have not been able to get by without it. I should have preferred accountability to work its way through. However, we have experience to judge from and we have seen that where local authorities did not face immediate re-election or perhaps where there were two tiers of authority and people were confused about accountability, local authorities did not face the pressure of accountability to the point where they acted responsibly in setting their charges. There has been a vast increase of 14 per cent. in local authority spending in a single year, and community charges have caused great pain to some people.
Although the Labour party has been willing to proclaim examples of people who have suffered because of high community charges--usually set by Labour authorities--it has not been willing to provide the logical answer to the problem which is that there must be some restraint on local authorities that are imposing such a burden.
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4.15 pmMr. Ronnie Campbell : Will the Minister give way ?
Mr. Portillo : I shall give way in a moment.
I say to the hon. Member for Brightside that the difference between his party and mine is that we, with sadness, have learnt from experience, but the Labour party has not.
Mr. Campbell : My local authority in Blyth Valley has increased its budget since 1979 by 236 per cent. I cannot understand why on earth my authority, having not spent any more money in real terms since the Government came to power, will be capped for being a spendthrift authority. Will the Minister explain that ?
Mr. Portillo : I shall deal with the issue of how capping works in a moment, and I want to pick up a point made by the hon. member for Brightside, which is pertinent to the question asked by the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Campbell). The hon. Member for Brightside said that it was our aspiration to cap all local authorities, but that is not so. We are bringing all local authorities within the legislation that governs capping, and that is very different. This year we have set out in advance the criteria under which local authorities would be capped if they set excessive budgets absolutely or if they increased their budgets successively from year to year.
Mr. Harry Barnes (Derbyshire, North-East) : Will the Minister give way ?
Mr. Portillo : I shall give way in a moment.
The effect has been that all local authorities, with the exception of 14, have been able to set budgets that did not fall within those criteria. Of the 14 that exceeded the criteria and were therefore capped, six accepted without challenge the cap that we imposed. The remaining eight authorities challenged it. Therefore, although the legislation applied to a large number of local authorities, it was necessary to cap only a few because the others, with advance knowledge of the criteria, were able to bring their budgets into line. In the future, as we extend capping to local authorities with budgets of less than £15 million, I expect to see a similar effect. A large number of authorities could potentially be within the capping regime, but I expect that only a small number would cause us to take capping action.
Mr. Harry Barnes : Is not the Minister making a distinction without a difference? If a capping level is determined beforehand, clearly no district authority can go beyond that level because it would put itself into the most abysmal economic circumstances. In a sense, it is being asked to cap itself so the Government do not need to make use of the capping provisions. However, the authority is being capped whether it has done it itself in advance to avoid being capped or whether the Government have engaged the capping provision.
Mr. Portillo : It is true that the local authority has to exercise restraint and that it does so under the criteria that are set by the Government. However, it is extraordinary to say that it is a distinction without a difference. Most local authorities will say that the painfulness of having to make changes once a cap has been applied, and especially if they did not know the rules regarding capping in advance, is out of all comparison with the position whereby they have
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a year in which to adjust their budget. They know in advance what the criteria will be so they can make sensible plans to fit in with them. I remind the hon. Member for Derbyshire, North-East (Mr. Barnes) that we are not capping any local authority below its standard spending assessment. This year, we are allowing those who came in at the SSAs a 9 per cent. increase on their previous budget. We did not regard any budget as absolutely excessive, as opposed to applying the criteria from year to year, unless it was 12.5 per cent. above the SSA.Mr. William O'Brien (Normanton) : The Minister said that the Government are not capping authorities that budget within or below the SSA. Can we take it that that is an assurance that will be given for all time and that no authority that spends below its SSA will be capped, as decreed by the Government?
Mr. Portillo : I have no intention of capping authorities below the SSA.
The hon. Members for Brightside and for Eastbourne (Mr. Bellotti) seemed to find this extension to local authorities with budgets below £15 million puzzling. As the hon. Member for Brightside said, it is perfectly true that that does not make a huge difference in macro-economic terms. What local authorities with budgets below £15 million spend does not make much difference to the total level of public expenditure. However, I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman is so fixated on that point. Should not he be concerned, as I am, about the effect on individuals and on the bills that people have to pay?
One could be forgiven for thinking that the hon. Member for Eastbourne is a spokesman for local authorities and their concerns. Time and again, today and in his previous speech on the subject, he mentioned that local authorities were under attack. I never heard him talk for a moment about local people and about the need to defend local people from paying excesssive bills. That is where the Government's concern comes in. Derwentside, whose budget is below £15 million a year, has put £95 extra on people's community charge bills. That is £180 for a couple and progressively more for a larger household. Those are significant sums.
We often hear the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats complain about the burden that has been placed on people and which is difficult for them to afford. However, the burdens are caused by the authorities putting on extra amounts, such as £95 in the case of Derwentside. The crocodile tears shed by Opposition parties are not followed by a willingness to take action to protect people against having such burdens thrust on them.
We propose to introduce a council tax. The community charge, which was proposed to come in at levels that would have been broadly acceptable and which people thought were reasonable for individuals to pay, was forced up and up by a spree in local authority spending. The reason why the community charge turned out to be so much more than the Government had predicted was that local authorities chose the moment of its introduction to spend far more.
I am not prepared to see history repeat itself over the council tax. We have published the figures for what the council tax would have been for this year if it had been in operation. It is not a prediction for the future, but a statement of what would have happened this year. None
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the less, people will expect when we introduce the council tax that the figures that they are asked to pay will be recognisable and that they will resemble the figures for this year. This time we will oblige local authorities to increase their spending only reasonably. Those that already spend significantly above their SSAs will be obliged progressively to come down towards they so that we can deliver the council tax at figures that people will regard as reasonable and fair.The Labour party differs with us in the extreme on this matter. It has made a great deal of its own figures--miscalculated figures, I might say. It stands to reason that if we seek to collect the same amount of money from the same number of people-- [Interruption.] --I shall not give way to the hon. Member for Dagenham on this point because he misunderstands it again and again--the average amount will be the same. But I shall let that pass.
The important point that I want to make to the hon. Gentleman is that he has based his figures on a level of spending by local authorities which has been achieved by the Government only because we had capping powers available to us. We predicted total standard spending by local authorities this year of £39 billion and we have brought it in at £39.2 billion through the use of the threat to cap. The hon. Member for Dagenham cannot have it both ways. He resisted the policy that made the level of spending to which I referred possible, yet he now seems to take credit for tax proposals that are based on that level of spending. More particularly for the future, he is not prepared to allow any limitation of local authority spending. The amount that local authorities spend would rise massively if there were a Labour Government intent on not capping local authorities. The bills that the hon. Member for Dagenham believes could be delivered under his rating policy could not be delivered, because local authority spending would rise through the roof.
When the council tax is introduced under this Government, with the accompaniment of the capping criteria, we shall ensure that we deliver reasonable figures. They will be brought about by the restraint that capping imposes on local authorities. That is the greatest single difference between the Government and the Labour party. We can deliver figures like those which we have proposed to the general public. The Labour party could not deliver them, because it believes that we should return to an era in which local authority spending is allowed to rip.
What an extraordinary idea it is that we should delay the extension of capping to local authorities with budgets of below £15 million. The protection that we are talking about is needed now, for the coming year. Local authorities that might be capped will want to know well in advance what the criteria are so that they can avoid being brought into the capping net. For that reason, I believe that it is right not only to introduce the extension to budgets below £15 million but to do so as quickly as possible.
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