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Mr. Ron Davies: The hon. Gentleman will accept that the Labour party voted against the Budget that cut income tax last November.
Mr. Llwyd: A handful of Labour Members did, but officially Labour did not.
Mr. Davies: I want to make it absolutely clear that the Labour party officially voted against the Budget last year.
Mr. Llwyd: I beg to differ. The Labour party abstained on that vote--a few of the more principled Labour Members went through the same Lobby as I did. But I will leave it there for the time being.
Anglesey county council has had its planned spending capped at £61 million--a cut of £2 million on last year's budget. Again, there will be cuts. Carmarthenshire county council is facing a difficult future. The options being discussed include cutting the repair and maintenance of schools, increasing the cost of school meals, and shutting training centres. In addition, there is a real threat to teaching jobs. A 3.5 per cent. reduction, which is what they are facing, could mean cutting 68 teaching jobs. In Rhondda Cynon Taf, there is talk of increasing the cost of transport to schools and school meals, closing nursery schools, cutting the maintenance programme, closing small schools and reducing clothing and other grants.
So how can the Secretary of State honestly and sincerely state that his main priority has been to increase investment in schools? He says that Wales benefits from the success of our economic policy along with the rest of the UK, but how can that be, when the overall capital package for Welsh local government has been cut by £17.5 million, with cuts in housing, roads and transport, in strategic development schemes, and in personal, social and all other services? How can those cuts honestly relate to a so-called booming economy?
The paltry increase in the education budget will have no effect on the strangulation of local authority education. That disgraceful emaciation is made even worse by the fact that some £6.6 million is being allocated for the ideologically driven, elitist, popular schools initiative--in fact, £2 million more for that initiative, rather than an overall increase for the whole of the education budget.
That is where the Government's priorities lie. No doubt they will blame education standards on whichever political hue they target at the time. That the Government have set their face against local government is accepted by all. Surely the settlement is excellent evidence for that. I regret saying it, but I have no doubt that class sizes will
increase, teacher numbers will decrease, public transport will be cut, and social services will undoubtedly suffer a hefty cut. Libraries will close, leisure centres close or be run part-time, and even residential homes will close. Those evils, and many more, will follow this settlement, as night follows day.
In Aberconwy Colwyn, for example, the story is much the same. I received a plea from the Aberconwy and Colwyn women's aid group last week. Despite the amount of work it is doing, and the huge and regrettable increase in demand for its work, that work is in peril, and its very existence brought into question.
The imposed cuts by the Welsh Office will risk the lives of some people. What is even more sure, they will affect the quality of life for tens of thousands of people throughout the length and breadth of Wales. The Secretary of State says that he has thought carefully about the settlement. I say to him, "Think again," and the people of Wales say, "Think again."
Mr. Barry Field (Isle of Wight):
I cannot follow the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) and allow him to get away with that. I served on the all-party Select Committee on the Environment, and when we considered standard spending assessments, we found a degree of objectivity in them and that they were not slanted towards the political control of any authority. The hon. Gentleman knows as well as I do that, in the past20 years, local government has no longer been seen as being government locally, but as a method and vehicle for bashing central Government and, in many cases, as a device for entering this House. A look through the antecedents of many hon. Members will show that there has been a considerable rise in the past 20 years in the number who were councillors, including myself. Sadly, instead of serving their local communities as they used to do--they had a great and proud history--councils have become highly politicised branches of their local parties and are more interested in carping against central Government than in delivering high-quality services to their local council tax payers.
I am taking part in this debate because Welsh Members often argue that there should be so much lower council tax charges in Wales because of pay levels and the general gross domestic product in that area. I refer my hon. Friend the Minister to a written reply in column 118 in today's Hansard. The reply sets out--I do not know whether similar comparisons are available for Wales--the number of normal, basic rate and higher rate taxpayers in every county in England. He will not be surprised to learn that the Isle of Wight is at the bottom of that league.
Having had a lot to do with Wales, particularly when the Isle of Wight unfortunately lost a company which relocated there, I guess that the hon. Gentleman will find
that Wales is much higher up the list of averages than many areas in England. Indeed, we learn from the settlement tonight that there is almost a £200 difference for a band D property in Wales, compared with England. That is the subsidy that English taxpayers are putting into Wales. I do not think that that can be justified. Welsh Members regularly tell us that that reflects the lower price of property, to which I say again, make the comparison with the Isle of Wight. I do not think that that argument holds water either.
My hon. Friend the Minister who will reply to the debate may not know--it is probably a well-kept secret--that, until the advent of unitary authorities, the Isle of Wight used one of the Welsh authorities as a comparison, as a typical authority of a similar size for statistical purposes. In every case, we found that, by and large, the Welsh Office was doing better for Welsh authorities than we expected with our English settlement.
We have heard much from Opposition Members about capping, but Welsh Office expenditure on local government amounts to 45 per cent. of its total expenditure. That tells me that the Secretary of State for Wales is certainly not ignoring local government as the Opposition have suggested throughout the debate, but giving it a fair deal out of his total budget for Wales.
I hear the argument about capping propounded byhon. Members on both sides of the House these days, buthon. Members should remember that about a quarter of total expenditure in the United Kingdom goes on local government. There is no way that one could let that rip if one is serious about inflation and wants to keep it under control as this Government do.
With his experience of Wales, my hon. Friend the Minister made a very good case on the uniform business rate. Will my Front-Bench colleagues tell me why, when it was enshrined in the uniform business rate legislation that it was designed to help manufacturing industry and is required to do so, we do not continually stuff that fact down the throats of the Opposition? For years, all that we heard from the Opposition was, "What are the Government doing for manufacturing industry?" The uniform business rate has been one of our greatest successes, especially where, as around the borders of Wales, businesses in high-rate areas were often siphoned off into nearby lower-rate areas. That compounded unemployment. I know that from my experiences on the Isle of Wight.
One helpful thing about the uniform business rate is that it has created uniformity for businesses. More than that, it allows Welsh business men to plan ahead when they draw up their budgets. The sad fact is that rates are the one form of taxation that have to be paid whether the business is making a profit or a loss. That has always been the case. The other problem was that businesses always had to second guess what local councillors would do and could not properly plan their budgets. My right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced the business rate in his Budget. That is helpful, especially for small businesses that work on such tight margins these days because competition is so strong. They know precisely what their business rates will be and allow for them in their budgets.
The hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. Davies) has left the Chamber, but he touched on a point about roads that rang a chord with me. I say to the Government that, as
one gets to extremities of the kingdom, especially with local authorities that have no trunk roads and so do not get assistance from the Department of Transport, road surfaces tend not be as good as they are in other areas.
I bet any Welsh Member a tin of leek soup that he would find much poorer road surfaces on the Isle of Wight because of the way in which our transport supplementary grant has gone recently than he would find in probably any part of the kingdom. That is to some extent true as one goes from England to Wales. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will put forward in Cabinet the fact that we need to consider those authorities that find it difficult to maintain good road surfaces in sparsely populated areas.
Finally, I want to touch on allowances for councillors, a point which has been much vaunted in this debate. Can my hon. Friend the Minister tell the House--or place information in the Library about it--what precisely the allowances are for the new unitary authorities and what the councillors who have been elected to shadow bodies have fixed for themselves in allowances?
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