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Mr. Alison: My hon. Friend is prepared to advise me before I have completed the question.
Mr. Curry: I think that my right hon. Friend is asking whether it is possible for someone to get compensation for redundancy and a job with the successor authority and, in practice, walk out of one authority on, say, 31 March and into another on 1 April, pocketing the redundancy payment. I do not think that the regulations permit that, but to be sure, we are amending the staff regulations and are consulting on amendments to the redundancy compensation regulations. We shall lay them shortly.
Mr. Alison: I am obliged to the Minister for that reassuring answer. It shows that the Government have continued to keep their finger on the pulse of some of the sensitivities in this area of transferring from one employment to another. The problem is reflected in the disastrous situation in Selby. Within the coal mining industry, there is profound disenchantment because people working alongside each other are being treated differently.
I am glad that the Minister has pre-empted that recurring, because it would be deleterious for local
government if there were stresses and strains between people arriving from different backgrounds of employment and with different prior entitlements.It would not be desirable for them to have to work in the same environment under the same terms of reference and have entirely different conditions of service. I am obliged to my hon. Friend for pre-empting that problem and reassuring me about it.
The Minister is manifestly following the debate closely and is ready to concede even before a point has been fully developed. That is a most disarming attitude for a Minister to adopt. Will he refresh his memory about the fundamental purpose of the provision, which is to direct local government officers who are facing redeployment in the direction of continuing employment under a compensation scheme that the taxpayer will accept? Will he remember that, although the sheep may be on the right, some goats will have to go on the left? Those goats are the unfortunate local government officers--20 or 30 of them in the Selby district--who cannot get openings in, for example, the new York unitary authority and will have to take redundancy. Selby will have to pick up the cost of that redundancy, and it will be gigantic for the officers who will not be re-employed in local government.
A few days ago, I reminded my hon. Friend about an SSA revenue support grant from his Department of more than £4 million. But the cost of redundancy in the Selby district for those who cannot go down the preferred route will be £1.5 million.
Mr. Alison:
Once again my hon. Friend pre-empts my question.
Mr. Curry:
I remember the debate in which the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) urged liberality upon me and I said that I would take Selby's case seriously. I think that my right hon. Friend is speaking about SCAs, supplementary credit approvals for redundancy, rather than the normal revenue support grant payments. I think that I am right in saying that, up to the present, the only demand by Selby is for a small amount of, I think, £100,000, which is manifestly inadequate.My Department is waiting for Selby to formulate a realistic demand. It is unusual for a Minister to describe a realistic demand as one that is likely to be higher than the one that has been made.
Mr. Alison:
My hon. Friend has--very conveniently,I dare say--put his head into a little noose. In fact, the point at which redundancy liabilities become operative is crucial to Selby's problem. There are two years in question--1995-96 and 1996-97. In 1995-96--the year Selby's redundancy liabilities arose--the council put in a bid for £1.5 million to the Department of the Environment, and was offered £500,000.
My hon. Friend is suggesting that, for 1996-97, the council should make up the tally by putting in for what it did not succeed in getting in its first claim. But the chief finance officer of Selby district council has told me that in order not to falsify the claim--and thus be subject to the scrutiny of the district auditor--the council cannot
pretend that the liabilities arise in 1996-97, the year in which my hon. Friend is asking me to claim for more.If the council claimed for more, it would face the prospect of being faulted by the district auditor for falsifying a claim, as such claims can be made only in respect of the year in which a liability arises. It is no use my hon. Friend saying that, if the council increases the bid for the 1996-97 provision, it might get something. The council will not get it without falling foul of the district auditor.
I hope that my hon. Friend will focus his intensely perceptive and analytical mind on that relatively limited, specific problem, and decide whether he can provide a little retrospection for Selby, so that the offers that he makes of supplementary credit approvals can be unified with the council's liabilities. I do not want to bore my hon. Friend, who has been helpful. Perhaps he can bring the matter to a consummated and fruitful conclusion, so that we can get something for Selby that helps.
I remind the House that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said in a speech on 31 January that he
He also talked about the special help that might be available in, for example, North Lincolnshire. I hope very much that my hon. Friend the Minister will see whether he can allow Selby to dip its ladle into that pot of soup--limited though it may be--to get the special help that is needed.
Mr. David Rendel (Newbury):
I am delighted to have the chance to take part in the debate. It is a very suitable day for the debate to take place, following the announcement yesterday that much of the local government review has been postponed for a further year. Opposition Members have accepted for a long time that the local government review is a shambles, as it leaves us with an enormous number of different situations. Councils in some parts of the country have not yet been made unitary authorities but are expecting that to happen, while others have been made unitary authorities but have not yet had their elections. All sorts of different results have emerged, and many people have been left in uncertainty as a result.
I was disappointed by the Minister's answer to my intervention, because it seemed to show that, untilSir David Cooksey produced his report, he was worried about what the timetable might be. The timetable must have been obvious to the Minister from the middle of last December, at the very latest. Staff in the authorities that have had their unitary status put off for another year have been left unnecessarily in doubt about what will happen for at least two months beyond the moment the Minister could have made things entirely clear. I was disappointed by the hon. Gentleman's answer and by the shambles of the whole process.
We are beginning to know when authorities will finally gain unitary status. The difficulties that the review has caused mean that staff have been facing uncertainty for at least four years and, in some cases, rather longer. The possibility of redundancy and loss of earnings has been hanging over people all that time, and has left them in a worrying position.
It is not surprising that morale in local government has fallen a great deal, as it has in many different jobs. People have been left in an uncertain situation, particularly in areas where it is most likely that unitary authorities will be introduced. Sadly, the compensation package under review tonight will not do very much--if anything--to restore morale to the levels that existed before the review. That is due to the uncertainty of many councils, particularly those where the orders have not yet been laid but are likely. We now know that those orders probably will not be laid for some time.
Because of that uncertainty, many councils have been losing some of their best officers. Perhaps not surprisingly--one cannot blame them--many have felt it more sensible to take a job in an authority that they know will continue for the foreseeable future, rather than risk remaining in one which, at some time in the next two or three years, could move to unitary status; such a move might leave them either without a job at all, or in a job in which their pay, for one reason or another, was lower. This completely undermines the authorities which we ought to be strengthening in the run-up to unitary authority status, as they are losing some of their best staff.
The problems with these regulations are very much the same as the problems described to us by the Minister more than a year ago when we were discussing redundancy regulations. Those regulations failed entirely to match up to previous reorganisation packages for compensation, and the same is true of the current regulations. These regulations state that compensation for loss of earnings is available for three years; yet, in 1974, open-ended compensation was available. As we have heard, in 1986 compensation was available for six years, with reduced compensation again after that. The fact that aspects of previous schemes were less generous than aspects of the current scheme does not make up for the problems caused where the current scheme is less generous than previous schemes.
Other matters add to the view that there is a lack of generosity under this scheme compared with previous schemes. There is the fact that increments that people might have been expecting will not be included in the compensation package. Staff will lose the value of any assumed increments, at least, if they move to another less well-paid job. Someone who serves for less than a year is excluded from the package altogether. I see no reason to suppose that, just because someone has served less than a year, he should be excluded from the package.
That measure has one particular danger as well. Some people who are moving into authorities are taking over from other officers who wanted to leave to assure their future. It will be particularly difficult to recruit staff to fill the positions where good officers have left early to make their future more secure. If we are to say to those very people whom we are trying to recruit to fill those vital posts that they will not get the compensation package that other officers will get, it will be even more difficult to fill those posts before unitary status arrives.
If the increments are not to be taken into account--as has been made clear, despite what the Minister said earlier--there may still be a difficulty over pension payments, as people may lose out. The fact that reductions in leave entitlement will not be taken into account is another example of how the current compensation package is not as generous as it could and should have been.
"announced a scheme last November to damp unacceptable increases in council taxes directly attributable to local government reorganisation".--[Official Report, 31 January 1996; Vol. 270,c. 1026.]
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