House of Commons Hansard Debates for 4 Feb 1992

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in mind. He could not, for example, carry all the House with him. There could easily have been filibustering by the Scottish nationalists or who knows what. He could not command a majority in another place and I had to take those issues into account, but I did not dismiss the possibility out of hand.

I was beginning to talk to the business managers about moving in that direction, which could have saved a fortnight of the House's time and would have been possible in the best of all possible worlds. However, I came to the House to find that a principal piece of Government legislation, the Education (Schools) Bill was being subjected to a filibuster. As a consequence, we lost a day's business.

That displays, as clearly as one can, the cynical disregard the Labour party has for proper relations between the Opposition and the Government. They had no intention of enabling us to get our legislative programme through with dispatch. It was done to try to cover up the embarrassment of the Labour party at the refusal of its own members to try to collect the community charge. Therefore, I was not prepared to deal with the matter in the way that the hon. Member for Dagenham suggested.

My Department has written to local authorities about how to proceed in the short period before the Bill which we are amending is enacted and about the position of existing liability orders. In the intervening period, authorities will wish to consult the clerks to the justices about how to proceed. We believe there is no obstacle to authorities continuing to apply for liability orders where they consider that their procedures for the presentation of cases meet the requirements of existing law. I understand that a number of authorities are continuing to do so.

In any event, it is our view that summonses for non-payment of the community charge, with return dates after new powers are in place, can continue to be issued. When cases have been or are adjourned, they can be considered under the new powers when they are in place. Our proposed amendments will not be retrospective, but they will apply in proceedings to enforce payment of the community charge whenever the liability arose, including cases in which a summons was issued before the Local Government Finance Bill takes effect. Our understanding in relation to liability orders, which have been made under existing powers, is as follows. The new provisions will not in themselves invalidate any order previously made. Local authorities can continue to act on orders which magistrates courts have granted. An individual may of course apply to challenge a liability order in a higher court--for instance, by applying for leave to seek judicial review if the order was granted within the past three months. Each case would need to be looked at separately on its merits. If the only ground on which an individual sought relief was the inadmissibility of computer evidence, and he had not raised the issue in a lower court, it seems unlikely that the court, in the exercise of its discretion, would entertain an application. I understand that, if it came to a hearing, it is equally unlikely that the court, in the exercise of its discretion, would quash a liability order solely on the grounds of procedural defect if no injustice had been done and the community charge remained unpaid. Let us be clear ; we would be dealing with individuals who have failed to pay a community charge properly due and who would be seeking to avoid or delay payment through a technicality.

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I hope that hon. Members will believe that, in addressing the legitimate interests of the crucial services provided by local government for the forthcoming year, and having regard to the current levels of inflation and the ability of the Government to afford whatever sum is appropriate, this settlement is one for which they can vote. We believe that it is coupled with a realistic capping regime to contain excessive levels of expenditure. The House will know of the regime that follows the determination by any authority that its budget comes within that capping regime.

The House would do well to support this set of proposals, which I commend. In so doing, it would urge local authorities not to seek to justify higher levels of expenditure, which can only put pressure on their community charge payers and others in the area affected by such charges, but to seek improvements in the output values that they can attain, which are being attained by many authorities of all political persuasions up and down the country.

The settlement that we are finalising today reflects the Government's continuing commitment to ensuring a proper level of funding for local authority expenditure. It provides sufficient resources for local authorities to provide a full range of services at a price that both their charge payers and the country as a whole can afford.

4.10 pm

Mr. Bryan Gould (Dagenham) : This debate brings us to wearisomely familiar territory, even if our only guide to that territory so far has been a typically rambling and shambling speech from the Secretary of State. It is territory littered with the wrecks of failed Government policies. It is a familiar catalogue of Government mistakes, which have dogged local government for more than a decade, undermined its morale, slashed its resources and virtually extinguished its independence.

Mr. Phillip Oppenheim (Amber Valley) : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Gould : The hon. Gentleman must be joking.

Last year the Secretary of State had an excuse of sorts. The more generous among us were inclined to say that, in the decade since his first stint at Marsham street, he appeared to have mellowed somewhat. While others pointed the accusing finger at him as the progenitor of the "Whitehall knows best" approach, we tended to point to his attack on the poll tax--the "Tory tax", as I think he called it--and to his robust opposition to universal capping. Even his commitment, at this time last year, to a manifestly inadequate RSG settlement could be excused on the ground that he had inherited the settlement from his predecessor and had had no chance to recast it. A year later, none of those excuses will wash any more.

This revenue support grant settlement is the Secretary of State's settlement ; the poll tax bills are his poll tax bills ; the capping is his capping ; the consequences for local government, disastrous as they are, are consequences that he has willed as a deliberate act of policy. The great centraliser of the early 1980s, the great hostile opponent of the whole concept of local government, is again alive and well in Marsham street. It is little wonder, therefore, that we heard only the merest token of any analysis or defence

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of the RSG settlement. The Secretary of State spent the bulk of his speech on a typically wild assault and denunciation of local government in general.

So it is that this RSG settlement shows all the flaws of its predecessors. It is, first of all, simply inadequate. It represents a full £2 billion less than local authorities--I refer not only to Labour authorities but to all local authority associations, including those under Tory control --calculated were needed to maintain services, to take account of inflation and to discharge the new obligations imposed by statute.

Mr. Oppenheim rose --

Mr. Gould : I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman very shortly.

Mrs. Mahon : Will my hon. Friend give way ?

Mr. Gould : I shall give way to my hon. Friend, too.

To justify the settlement, the Government persist in using figures based on calculations that are irrelevant and misleading. They point to a rate of increase over last year's settlement, when everyone knows that last year's settlement was itself inadequate, that the actual level of local government expenditure was much higher. They base themselves on a rate of inflation of 4.5 per cent., which is lower than the 7.3 per cent. which local government calculates it actually has to face and which is higher than the general rate because of the importance of wage settlements beyond the control of local government.

They fail to take account of demographic changes, of new service pressures, of the impact of recession or of the rise in homelessness. No wonder local government as a whole regards this RSG settlement as unsatisfactory.

Mr. Oppenheim rose --

Mr. Gould : I will give way to the hon. Gentleman shortly, but I give priority to my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Mrs. Mahon).

Mrs. Mahon : Probably because the Secretary of State anticipated the question that I wanted to ask him, he refused to give way to me. Labour- controlled Calderdale, recently named the second most efficient metropolitan council, has recently given official figures for the loss of rate support grant since 1979. More than £167 million has been lost as a result of RSG cuts under the Conservatives. That represents £13 million a year for each of the 13 unlucky years that the Conservatives have been in office. That is why the area is facing another massive round of cuts, which leaves it unable to build homes for the homeless and explains why we have crumbling schools and face the prospect of the closure of old people's homes. That has nothing to do with councillors but everything to do with the Conservatives removing £13 million a year in RSG in the way I have described.

Mr. Gould : The testimony of my hon. Friend is persuasive because what she tells us about the experience of Calderdale, important and damaging though that has been, is by no means limited to that authority, to Labour local authorities or to local authorities of particular categories. It has been the general experience of local government as a whole, and Conservative-controlled local

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authorities are almost as damning in their judgment of Conservative treatment of local government as are my hon. Friends and I.

Mr. Oppenheim : I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I understand his commitment to positive discrimination in giving way first to the hon. Lady the Member for Halifax (Mrs. Mahon). If the settlement is really so inadequate, may I ask the hon. Gentleman to give the House an unequivocal commitment significantly to increase funding for local government within two years? Yes or no?

Mr. Gould : I will gladly give the hon. Gentleman a commitment that we shall put an end to the £25 million of taxpayers' money wasted every day on maintaining the poll tax in being. That must be added to the £14 billion of taxpayers' money so far thrown at the poll tax. It is the most breathtaking cheek on the part of the Conservative Members to pretend that, in some way, they are the guardians of prudent management of the taxpayers' money-- [Interruption.] This deliberate self-delusion as to the true value of the RSG settlement may convince those who want to be misled, but it cannot alter the real consequences in the real world of reduced services and higher poll tax bills.

The size of the settlement is not the only problem. There is also the question of the distribution of the grant and the whole system of standard spending assessments, a system which even the Secretary of State's predecessor admitted was flawed and needed reform but which has remained unreformed and consequently open to fundamental objection.

Mr. Roger Knapman (Stroud) : Is the £4.2 billion of additional public expenditure that the hon. Gentleman is recommending within the £37 billion already promised, or is it a new and separate promise?

Mr. Gould : The hon. Gentleman must have been asleep at the time of the Budget and Finance Bill last year, when the House appoved that expenditure because it at least made some attempt to redress the short- changing of local government over a long period under the Conservatives.

I was speaking of the flaws of the standard spending assessments. Virtually no one has a good word to say for SSAs. Even the Audit Commission warned that the Government should not underestimate the lack of confidence in SSAs among local government politicians and professions.

Everyone knows that SSAs measure the wrong things. Why, for example, are needs measured but not resources, and why is this done in an arbitrary, capricious and over-complicated way? Why is it assumed that it costs £1,148 per adult to deliver a standard level of service in Manchester, but only £857 for the same standard level of service in Wigan? Why is it assumed that a 300-pupil secondary school in Sheffield needs £300,000 less than a similar school in Wandsworth? Why does Barnsley, with all the problems of a declining mining area, receive an SSA ranking it 251st out of 366 English authorities--below that of such supposedly deprived areas as Epsom, Sevenoaks and Bath? Why are so many well-run Labour authorities in the north--Wigan, Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham, and so on--victims of the capping axe on the basis of a manifestly inappropriate

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set of SSAs? Do Ministers dispute in public what they have admitted in private--that the SSA system discriminates against those authorities?

Mr. Eric Illsley (Barnsley, Central) : My hon. Friend has referred to Barnsley, which is 36th out of 36 metropolitan districts. What is his view of a settlement that puts Manchester's SSA 78 per cent. higher than Barnsley's for the provision of a standard level of service?

Mr. Gould : My hon. Friend chooses one more of a veritable myriad statistics which could be adduced. There is a huge range of statistics which show how ludicrous and irrational is the system of SSAs. I pointed out on 26 November that there must be something wrong with a system which concluded that Harrow, with 15.4 days of snow each year, had more snow than Cumbria, with only 12.6 days. At least that nonsense, we understand, has been partially remedied, with two days added to Cumbria's total. But that is only one of the many inconsistencies.

Can either the Secretary of State or the Minister tell us how many local authorities--is it dozens or is it scores?--have been so concerned about their treatment that they have been to see them to try to get their assessments changed?

Mr. Michael Carttiss (Great Yarmouth) : I agree with some of the hon. Gentleman's comments about the standard spending assessment ; he has made many points which I believe many Conservatives throughout the country would make. Nevertheless, will he find time this afternoon to spell out some of the alternatives which the Labour party might think it could find to improve the situation?

Mr. Gould : We are at least making some progress. I very much welcome the spirit in which the hon. Gentleman not only concedes that there is common ground between us in the criticisms that I am making of the SSAs, but also demonstrated a willingness to learn from the excellent policies that we have published. I will gladly send him a set of the policy documents, which I am glad to say are in great demand by letter writers from all over the country.

It is not just the capricious nature of the system that is unacceptable ; it is, I am sorry to say, the scope which the system offers to an unscrupulous Secretary of State to manipulate it for party advantage. It is not just the introduction of criteria, such as foreign visitor nights, which are plainly calculated to benefit Westminster ; it is the pattern of the increase in SSAs, with a plain divergence along party lines, that gives real cause for concern. The figures are quite startling in their implications.

For local government in England as a whole, SSAs increased by 21.6 per cent. more for Tory-controlled authorities than for Labour-controlled councils. The figure for shire districts, where the comparison is least affected by differences in the nature of the authorities, is even clearer. The SSA for Tory authorities increased by 24.6 per cent. more than for Labour authorities and the same pattern is found for counties. The only exceptions are metropolitan authorities, where the comparison is impossible because there is only one Tory metropolitan authority, and London, where the rate of increase shows little variation according to political control.

Mr. Heseltine : The House may wish to know that the average SSA for every class of Labour-controlled authority is higher than it is for Conservative-controlled

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authorities. The hon. Gentleman is talking about shire districts. Labour-controlled authorities have SSAs which, per adult, are 27 per cent. higher than the average for Conservative districts.

Mr. Gould : The Secretary of State uses a statistic that simply shows that need tends to be greater in inner-city areas served by Labour local authorities, as he pointed out earlier this afternoon. Significantly, he did not deal with the figure that I presented to him. We are not discussing the absolute level of SSAs. The charge that I level against him is that, between the current and the coming financial year, he has sanctioned an increase in SSAs that is nearly 25 per cent. faster for Tory authorities than for Labour authorities.

Mr. Brandon-Bravo : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Gould : I shall give way in a moment, once I have concluded this point.

The pattern revealed by those figures is too consistent and unmistakable to be accidental. The contrast is sometimes breathtaking.

Mr. Heseltine : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Gould : The Secretary of State wants a second bite at defending his indefensible position.

Mr. Heseltine : That allegation amazed me when the hon. Gentleman first uttered it, so I looked up the figures. The most startling discovery was that one of the largest improvements was made in the neighbouring constituency to mine--Labour-controlled Oxford, East--and one of the lowest improvements was made in my district authority.

Mr. Gould : I am delighted that I have at least induced the Secretary of State to look at the figures. I am prepared to concede that the figures that he has just quoted are exactly accurate. However, although that is the second time that he has come to the Dispatch Box allegedly to deal with the point, he has still not denied the basic charge that we level against him.

Sir Anthony Grant (Cambridgeshire, South-West) : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Gould : No, I am sorry, but I wish to complete the point before I give way.

Sir Anthony Grant rose--

Mr. Gould : I have not yet made the point, so the hon. Gentleman will perhaps sit down and listen to it for a change.

The conclusion must be that the Secretary of State has found a way, in election year, of providing an advantage to authorities of the right political colour. After all, we are operating in a highly charged, pre- election context and we are dealing with a Secretary of State who is, above all, a ruthless and unprincipled party politician. He could not tell someone the time without warning him that, under Labour, every hour would be reduced to 58 minutes. But even for him, it is a piece of breathtaking cheek that he should seek to link the Labour party with high local government taxation.

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What brought lawful citizens on to the streets? What induced Tory councillors to resign? What forced £14 billion-worth of taxpayers' expenditure to be thrown at it? What destroyed the former leader of the Conservative party, the right hon. Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher)? It was the poll tax. The poll tax forced up bills and was one of the most painful aspects of the Government's already pathetic record on personal taxation.

Mr. Heseltine : I suppose that all Members of Parliament are used to being accused of party political chicanery. What worries me is the hon. Gentleman's assault on my competence. He suggests that I have somehow tried to fix the revenue support grant to help the Conservative party. Again, my further inquiries into the matter, in which I am supposed to have been working for the benefit of the Tory party, show that I managed to arrange a situation in which the SSA for Barking and Dagenham is higher than the average for all the Conservative-controlled outer London boroughs.

Mr. Gould : I am glad to say that that is yet one further reason why no doubt I will be returned with an increased majority. Again, for the third time, the Secretary of State comes to the Dispatch Box and makes another irrelevant point, but he does not deal with the central charge, which remains on the table.

Sir Anthony Grant : I want to take up the hon. Gentleman on the point which he made about the shires. He said that my right hon. Friend has been generous to the shires. Cambridgeshire is the one part which I know ; the hon. Gentleman knows Cambridgeshire too, because he has been gadding about there quite a lot. Will he explain why, for months on end, the Labour and Liberal parties in Cambridgeshire have been bellyaching about the skinflint nature of my right hon. Friend? What does the hon. Gentleman say about that?

Mr. Gould : With every intention of being well meaning, the hon. Gentleman misunderstood the point that I was making. I was not saying that the Secretary of State had deliberately favoured shire districts. Let me reiterate the point. What I said was that, as between Labour-controlled shire districts and Tory-controlled shire districts, the increase in SSAs was 24.6 per cent. higher in the case of Tory-controlled authorities. We may have made a little progress and got that point across to the hon. Gentleman.

Several Hon. Members rose--

Mr. Gould : When I am confronted with a barrage of intending interveners, I am less likely to give way.

The significance of the SSA is that it determines the level of grant and therefore the size of the poll tax bill. It is also the basis for applying the cap on spending which will determine the cuts in services which will have to be made by each local authority. That is why the intricacies of the SSA system, which may seem arcane and remote from the concerns of most voters, are of great importance to those self-same voters.

The minds of voters will be concentrated wonderfully on local government finance by the arrival of poll tax bills at the beginning of April. We expect that the Secretary of State will try everything he can to shuffle off the blame for those high poll tax bills on to the local authorities, but we

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also know that the voters, by a huge majority, will agree with the Secretary of State in viewing the poll tax as a Tory tax.

Mr. James Paice (Cambridgeshire, South-East) rose

Mr. Gould : I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I ought to give notice that I do not intend to deliver the same unstructured mess of a speech as the Secretary of State.

Mr. Paice : I wanted to take up the hon. Gentleman on precisely the point about poll tax bills. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Mr. Oppenheim), the hon. Gentleman said that, if elected to office, he would immediately do away with what I think he referred to as the £25 million a day waste of the poll tax. Bearing in mind that the House has already passed the legislation to abolish the poll tax, and bearing in mind also that the poll tax bills will have gone out and that the financial year will probably have started by the time the general election takes place, is the hon. Gentleman saying that at that stage, with 10 or 11 months of the financial year and the poll tax still to run, he would abolish the poll tax? If so, will he tell the House how he would finance local government for the remaining months?

Mr. Gould : The hon. Gentleman's intervention simply shows how right we and most people are to regret the fact that the opportunity which the Government had to abolish the poll tax for this April was thrown away. I might add that that opportunity was aided by our offer of co-operation on the legislation required to do it, but that offer was turned down.

Many authorities, of whatever political control, will have to make substantial cuts to stay within the cap. That is the consequence of the universal capping which the Secretary of State now supports, in direct contradiction to his earlier and principled opposition to it. Many authorities which have hitherto escaped the threat of capping because their budgets fell below the £15 million threshold will be caught. No one should imagine that councils such as Derwentside or Elmbridge can make the huge cuts in their budgets now demanded of them without great damage being done to services.

Ms. Hilary Armstrong (Durham, North-West) : Is my hon. Friend aware that one of the major reasons that Derwentside's standard spending assessment is so far beyond the needs of that authority is the direct action of the Government in closing the Consett steelworks 10 years ago, which resulted in the local authority working to enable some industrial activity to continue? The chairman of the Tory party continues to say how well Consett is doing. He may like to know that male unemployment in the town is now about 20 per cent., and without the support of local government, the prospects of the town and its surrounding district are exceptionally bleak.

Mr. Gould : My hon. Friend speaks eloquently about the problems of a local authority that is the victim of the combination of capping and inappropriate SSAs in relation to the district's basic economic problems.

The significance of the SSA lies in its implications for the poll tax levels. The poll tax is a sort of residuum : the poll tax payer picks up the bill for whatever expenditure is not covered by another source of income. If central

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Government grant is set too low, the poll tax must rise. That has happened consistently throughout the short, unhappy history of the poll tax.

It was originally projected that the poll tax bills would be relatively low, but then the ideologues took charge. The great virtue of the poll tax was always said to be that it would increase accountability. Its impact was deliberately increased by cutting other sources of finance and loading the burden of any further spending on the hapless poll tax payer--the familiar problem of gearing.

Last year, even Ministers took fright at what they had done. They suddenly reversed gear and raised value added tax by 2.5p--a 16.6 per cent. increase --in order to reduce poll tax bills. However, Ministers have still not learnt the lesson that, if they short-change local government by way of grant, the inevitable consequence is higher poll tax bills.

Ministers have now taken such a grip on all aspects of local government finance that they can no longer escape the blame when things go wrong. The Secretary of State decides the amount of grant, central Government set the level of the business rate--and we have heard again today how damaging that has been for businesses, particularly small ones. The Secretary of State for Education and Science decides teachers' pay. The Home Secretary sets the pay for the police and firefighters. Through his capping powers, the Secretary of State for the Environment fixes the size of every authority's budget. As a result, every one of the 38 million poll tax bills to arrive in March and April will bear the fingerprints of the Secretary of State.

That proposition becomes even more apparent when one considers the size of the bill. The Government have already abandoned their prediction--they said so again today--that the average bill would be £257. Even Ministers seem to concede that their record on the issue is so lamentable and lacking in credibility that it is preferable to admit error early. It now seems inevitable that the bills will be closer to £300 on average than the Government's previous over-optimistic figure.

Mr. Frank Haynes (Ashfield) : It is even worse than that -- [Interruption.] I have been present, and I shall not take a crack like that from a Conservative Member.

A coal mine contributes towards a local authority's affairs. The recent Rothschild report suggested that there would be hardly any pits left in Nottinghamshire. My constituency will probably lose many pits, which will mean that the local authority will lose a lot of money. Where will the money come from to provide the necessary services ? It seems incredible that the Nottinghamshire Tory Members supported the Government's policy on pit closures.

Mr. Gould : My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. One of the most regrettable and astonishing aspects of the poll tax fiasco is that Tory Members have been so disloyal to the local authorities that have been lumbered with the problems of dealing with the tax and its associated effects. I cannot help but think that local communities will know what action to take when they get the chance to ascribe the blame.

The Government have no one but themselves to blame for poll tax bills that seem likely to lose them the general election. The study by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy published last week suggested that bills in England would include a non-collection surcharge of, on average, £21--sadly, even that figure seems likely to be an underestimate.

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Those problems could have been avoided if the Government had abolished the poll tax immediately instead of taking the Walter Mitty view that the wish was as good as the deed. Presumably, when the Secretary of State announced last year that the poll tax would go, he never thought that he would be held to account for that promise before a general election. As it is, local authorities face all the difficulties of collecting what the Prime Minister has described as a "virtually uncollectable" tax. Not only will the Prime Minister's assurance in October that the Government had "abolished the poll tax" be ringing in people's ears, but there will be two additional Government-created handicaps.

First, the 20 per cent. contribution rule remains in force, even though the Government have conceded the principle that it can no longer be supported. That rule means that local councils have to continue to try to squeeze blood out of stones while trying to collect the poll tax from people with literally no income. Even the Audit Commission found that the tax cost £15 in administration for every £6 of net revenue it raised. The problem is much worse in inner-city districts, where the Audit Commission found that up to 60 per cent. of the entries on a poll tax register were likely to change in the course of one year.

The second handicap is even more bizarre. The Labour party and local government in general have warned for some months that there is a legal difficulty in persuading magistrates courts to accept computer records as evidence. The Government, who were responsible for the oversight in the first place, have been remarkably complacent in dealing with the problem. Even now that they have been persuaded that action is needed, they propose a change that will take six weeks to have any effect. That is simply not good enough. It is hard to fathom what the Secretary of State is playing at, and even harder when he writes to me saying that he was prepared to consider a short Bill, but abandoned the idea because the passage of the schools legislation was delayed. That almost beggars belief. Either there is a need for a short Bill or there is not.

The Secretary of State is responsible for the poll tax mess and for getting local authorities out of it. It is his duty to act to resolve the problem, not to make silly party points while local authorities are forced to mark time and poll tax defaulters get a six-week holiday.

Mr. Ian McCartney (Makerfield) : The metropolitan borough of Wigan, represented by myself and my hon. Friends the Members for Wigan (Mr. Stott) and for Leigh (Mr. Cunliffe), contains three completely different situations. The magistrates in Leigh refuse to deal with the council's applications, Wigan magistrates courts implement them and in my constituency, Makerfield, the magistrates adjourn them. Local authorities have to attend court each day and, depending on which magistrates are in court, they may or may not be able to make an order. This is a shambles, which the Government know about and about which they do nothing.

Mr. Gould : I gladly adopt my hon. Friend's word : the position is a shambles. No local authority can be assured that it can successfully pursue poll tax defaulters in the courts. The Labour party's offer of co-operation on a short Bill still stands, and if the Government wish to plug the loophole they can do so in just one day. If the Government

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still ignore that offer, local government and poll tax payers will know who is to blame for the bills that will have to increase still further as defaulters are again let off the hook by this lazy and incompetent Government.

True to form, local government will be left by the Government to clear up the mess. They have already had to issue 10.5 million summonses--the biggest debt collection exercise in the history of the world. Local government has at least £1.5 billion of poll tax still outstanding. The Government do nothing to help, but make matters worse by their intransigence and stupidity. The Government have given up on local government. They have given up any hope of remedying their terrible mistakes. They have given up the intention of doing anything but hang on by their fingertips until a general election puts them out of their misery. When that finally happens, the loudest cheers will come from poll tax payers and local government as a whole.

4.49 pm

Mr. John Biffen (Shropshire, North) : For just over an hour, the House has been entertained by highly contentious exchanges between occupants of the Government and Opposition Front Benches, but I confess that my contribution will be extremely limited and considerably less exciting. I have no doubt that the moment I resume my seat, normal hostilities will be resumed.

I refer to the point made by the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) concerning the standard spending assessment and the difficulties that that system is encountering. Even in these somewhat excitable circumstances, the House ought to reflect on that aspect fairly calmly. Whatever may be the outcome of the general election that confronts us, it is clear that the future pattern of local government will again be disturbed.

There is no prospect of continuity. Nothing is more depressingly certain than a continuation of the provisional. Therefore, the SSA will be with us for quite a while. I see no prospect of root-and-branch reform, which makes all the more necessary detailed consideration of the system's application and a preparedness to make adjustments where it is manifestly inequitable in its operation. I have in mind in that respect the experience of the county of Shropshire in the recent past. Under the measure that we are debating this afternoon, Shropshire's SSA will increase by 5.9 per cent.-- the fifth lowest figure for shire counties. In the previous year, Shropshire had the lowest increase. I do not believe that anyone making a reasonably detached judgment of local authority affairs in Shropshire would conclude that it is a profligate county council, but on the SSA arithmetic, it is faced with a number of stark options that naturally fall predominantly on the educational sector of the council's spending.

One of the options that it demonstrated was to use its SSA resources to meet statutory but not non-statutory educational obligations--which of course meant the loss of nursery education in the county. Naturally and understandably, that brought a sharp reaction. I do not believe that anyone involved in the campaign which that decision prompted considered that there was any party political dimension to it. I say that because, in recent

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weeks, I have been associated with others of my hon. Friends representing Shropshire constituencies and with councillors across the political divide.

The county council resolved to use £4.6 million from its reserves to ensure that nursery education as currently conducted can be maintained for the year in prospect. In my view, that decision was wholly justifiable, although no one can relish the running down of balances on that scale. Above all, no one can have any faith in the certainty of nursery education in the county, knowing that there is no prospect of running down balances on that scale for another year. I return to the question of how SSAs will be calculated in future and the way in which the methodology can be applied in respect of nursery education in a county that has to meet the needs of sparsely populated rural communities. I ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and my hon. Friend the Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities to take account of the difficulties created by the current year's SSA settlement ; to take note of the considerable gesture represented by the running down of the county's balances ; to show proper sympathy with the problems that exist ; and to ensure that, when next year's settlement is considered, the sword of Damocles will not be held over the future of nursery education in Shropshire. The county council's behaviour has been exemplary, and I do not believe that it is the canons of good government that such a threat should exist.

4.54 pm

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