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Mr. Jacques Arnold: My right hon. Friend mentioned the increase of 5.6 per cent. in the precept of Kent county council, which is now Labour-Liberal. As the Government gave a more than 4 per cent. increase in central Government finance, people in Kent object to the fact that the increase for the schools is very much less than either figure--only 3.4 per cent. That bears out the fact that Kent people under the Liberals and Labour are having to pay more to get less.
Mr. Gummer: Before I respond, I should like to offer the House an idea. There is a kind of meter in the House. When the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras, who sits for part of Camden, laughs or giggles, we know that he is on a weak point. If the House watches, it will notice that whenever he laughs it is because we are right and he is wrong. It is what I call the giggle factor for the hon. Gentleman and it is one well worth watching out for. It is almost infallible--not quite, but almost.
Kent is a very badly run council. It was a very well run council and I am sorry that Kent, with its particular system at the moment, should have made education so much less a priority than my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr. Arnold) would want and that the Government have sought to give it the means to do.
Of course, one has to remember that the views that I am putting forward are not only my own. They are independently supported. I was interested to see the article by Dido Sandler in yesterday's Independent on Sunday. She concluded, rather interestingly, on the question of the difference between a Labour and a Conservative council, that:
That is the difference. In Lambeth under Labour the council tax went on and on going up, even though the council received more money from the taxpayer than Wandsworth.
There is not even a scintilla of truth in the nonsense that the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras has been talking. If one compares Lambeth and Wandsworth, one discovers that Lambeth, with more money from the taxpayer, pushed its council tax up time after time while Labour was in control. Now that no one is in control, the council has been able to cut the council tax as it was never able to do when Labour ran it. So not only is Labour more expensive than Conservative, it is more expensive than having no one in control. It is more expensive to have a Labour council than to let it rip and let anyone run it--to let whatever collection of people turn up for a meeting run the council. It is a wonderful situation. Labour is worse than any coalition of anyone who happens to turn up on any day.
The Liberal Democrats are not as bad as Labour. People pay only 30 per cent. more on average with them. People pay 50 per cent. more with Labour. The gap between Conservative and Lib-Lab local government has been widening. It has got worse, not better. The only excuse that there could be is that the services are better for the higher price. That is the only argument and that is what Labour has said.
So I have looked carefully at the wealth of information produced by the Audit Commission comparing the performances of councils. Indicator after indicator shows that Labour councils provide a poorer service. People are less likely to get their housing benefit, council tax benefit or rent allowance paid on time if they live under a Labour council; less likely to have planning decisions made on time; and twice as likely to find a street light not working. They wait longer for vital equipment after a social services assessment. Labour councils have a higher proportion of their homes empty and available for letting, they take longer to re-let dwellings and they have a greater proportion of tenants in rent arrears.
So why do Labour councils cost so much more? First of all, they have to make up for the taxes that they fail to collect. My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles), who interrupted the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras, was right. In 1994-95, Labour councils failed to collect more than £250 million in council tax. That money could have been spent on teachers and new equipment in schools, on extra home helps or on other local services. It could even have been used to cut the council tax. But none of those things was done.
Mr. Sutcliffe:
Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr. Gummer:
I should like to give the second reason and give an example, and then I will give way.
Secondly, Labour councils do everything that they can to stifle competition and keep local services under the control of their trade union paymasters. As a result, they end up paying more for inadequate services run by trade unions that bankroll the Labour party. I shall give two examples of that. The first is from Brent.
Under Labour, Brent was a byword for shoddy services and high taxes. Even the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) accused Labour-run Brent of being "monumentally incompetent". He had all the experience of the Greater London council so he knew what incompetence was. If he said something was incompetent, he meant it, and monumentally incompetent must mean something absolutely unbelievable.
Under the Conservatives, Brent has the fourth lowest council tax in London. It is the only authority in England to have cut its taxes in each of the past six years. MORI polls show that overall customer satisfaction in that borough has increased by 18 per cent. since Labour was removed from office. The council has won a record seven charter marks. These remarkable achievements are not matched by any Labour council in the land. That is what happens under the same grant system when a council changes from Labour to Conservative.
Mr. Dobson:
Will the Secretary of State give way?
Mr. Gummer:
In one moment. I promised the hon. Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe) that I would give way to him and then I will certainly give way to the hon. Gentleman.
I ought to be perfectly fair and have a look at a council neighbouring Brent. Islington, the Leader of the Opposition's own authority, exemplifies the record of
Labour local government. Islington spends the third highest per head of population in the country yet its results are appalling. It is the slowest council in London, and the second slowest nationally, in deciding planning applications; it is the third worst council for the average time taken to re-let properties; it has just set the sixth highest council tax in the land.
There is a problem here because Islington does not quite know how it did it. The Audit Commission confirms what we already knew from the recent district auditor's report--that Islington cannot even measure how bad it is. Time and again the Commission expresses "doubts" about
Islington does not know the percentage of items of equipment provided within three weeks for those in desperate need. It cannot tell the percentage of over-75s helped to live at home. It is not sure of the percentage of adults going into residential care who are offered single rooms. It does not have the figures for the percentage of household waste recycled. No one is certain of the percentage of householder planning applications decided in eight weeks. It does not know, it cannot tell and it does not care. As long as the unions in Islington are happy, it does not care. That is the problem with Labour councils that charge people more and provide them less.
Mr. Sutcliffe:
I am a little confused. If the right hon. Gentleman follows the logic of his argument that Labour authorities are bad and Tory authorities good, why are there only 13 Tory authorities and 200 Labour councils?
Mr. Gummer:
That is something that will soon be remedied as people realise just what it is like to have a Labour council. I have no difficulties about that. We shall soon see.
Mr. Dobson:
The right hon. Gentleman claimed that it was simply to Brent council's credit that it had managed to reduce its council tax. Does he think that its ability to reduce that tax was enhanced by the letters that the leader of the council sent to the special Tory adviser at the Treasury, the local government desk officer at Tory central office and the special adviser at the Department of the Environment in July 1994, saying that he had had discussions with them and asking them to ensure that there would be
and expressing the hope that the Treasury would agree to provide enough funding. Does he think that that might have had a little to do with what the council tax turned out to be in Brent?
Mr. Gummer:
As the Treasury does not decide, the figures are done on exactly the same basis for each of the London boroughs and there was no change whatsoever in the way in which Brent was dealt with, the hon. Gentleman can answer his own question without any difficulty. The trouble with the hon. Gentleman is that he is keen on trying to spread any rumour he likes in any way in likes because he is trying to imply something that is manifestly not true and he ought to be a little more careful.
This year's settlement struck a fair balance between the needs of local government and of the economy as a whole. The total standard spending for England will be £44.93 billion--a huge amount and an increase of £1.42 billion or 3.3 per cent. That shows the importance that we attach to local government services. We have provided a 4.5 per cent. increase in provision for education and 6.9 per cent. for personal social services, including £418 million in transitional community care special grants.
The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras believes that this year's settlement is inadequate, but he never tells us by how much or what he would do. He never says what a Labour Government might do, could do, think of doing or might have to put off doing. The real and the only conclusion--after the hon. Gentleman's speech it is a simple conclusion--is that he neither understands the system nor knows what he would do if we were ever so stupid as to put him in power.
The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras believes that the settlement is wrong because local taxpayers are meeting slightly more of the cost of local services. I am surprised that he should say so because the Labour party's local government policy document, "Renewing Democracy, Rebuilding Communities" says that Labour
I emphasise the words "much higher proportion". It is not some small amount. That is what Labour wants.
I have heard Opposition Members mention the business rate. Oh yes, they would like to have that again because it does not make them responsible at all. The policy document cannot mean that, however, because it states that
but the business rate means that one can charge anyone anything one likes without it having an effect on local democracy.
Indeed, when local authorities administered the business rate, what happened? It meant that the John Lewis Partnership paid three times as much per square foot in Newcastle as it did in Westminster. That was under a Labour Government. Why did the centre of Newcastle almost close down? It was because Newcastle city council taxed people out of existence. When the friends of the hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) were in power in Sheffield, why could one not find a business that would not have moved out of the city if only it could have found someone to buy its premises?
That is what happened under the business rate, so it was not surprising that when the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors brought together business men of all kinds, including the Confederation of British Industry and all the other organisations, the one thing that they were all agreed about was that the business rate should continue to be centrally organised and protected so that it could not rise above the rise in the cost of living. Why? Because the Labour party can never be trusted not to put its hands into other people's pockets and the business people of Britain know that. They also know that the north of England has benefited enormously.
"one of the best ways of saving money on your council tax is to move. If you tot up what Band H taxpayers in the London borough of Lambeth have contributed over the past six years, compared with their peers in neighbouring Wandsworth, the difference is enough to buy a car.".
"the council's arrangements for producing the required information".
"no swingeing increases in the level of Council Tax set by the borough next year which could then lose us control of the borough"
"believe that it would be better for local people and make for a healthier democracy if councils were responsible for raising locally a much higher proportion of the money they invest and spend".
"it would be better for local . . . democracy",
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