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Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire): Madam Speaker, would you consider suspending the sitting for half an hour to allow hon. Members to study the figures?

Madam Speaker: I noticed that there was some unrest in the House, because hon. Members were obviously,

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and quite understandably, puzzled by the figures that were used without documentation. I have great sympathy for them.

Mr. Frank Dobson (Holborn and St. Pancras): The somewhat lengthy and complicated statement that we have just heard, combined with the Budget statement yesterday, forms a prime example of this Tory Government giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

Will the Secretary of State confirm that the figures issued by his Department show that the Government plan to force council tax payers to cough up an extra £4 billion in the next three years, a figure equal to 2p on the standard rate of income tax or £200 extra council tax per family? Will he confirm that the official Government documents make it clear that the council tax will go up next year by an average of 6 per cent. or more in England, equal to £40 extra council tax per household? Will he confirm that, despite these council tax increases, the Government's target for council spending next year is nearly £2 billion short of what the councils are actually spending this year?

Will the Secretary of State confirm that his figures make no allowance for inflation, the cost of pay increases or the cost of providing extra services for the growing number of old people and of children at school? Will he confirm that the Government have not provided £633 million extra for education but have simply told councils that they can spend more? They have not given them the money, despite the need to educate 54,000 extra school children in the coming year.

Will the Secretary of State confirm that education authorities are already spending £750 million more than the Government think they should? Is it not true that, if education authorities were to limit their spending next year to the level set by the Government, schools would have to reduce their spending by £41 per pupil? Will he confirm that the capping levels that he has announced today will bear most heavily on education authorities, especially metropolitan districts and unitary authorities, including Bury, Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Calderdale, Bristol, Stockton-on-Tees, North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire, and that they will also bear heavily on counties? How does he expect that to improve educational standards?

Yesterday, the Government announced massive cuts in the housing investment programme, having denied them on Monday. How much will that decision add to councils' costs, as more and more families have to be housed in expensive, unsatisfactory, temporary bed-and-breakfast accommodation instead of being housed more cheaply in permanent, purpose-built, decent homes?

Will the Secretary of State confirm that, when he talks about "other sources of income" he means that he intends to force councils to force parents to pay more for school meals, to force disabled people to pay more for home helps and pensioners to pay more for meals on wheels, so that local people will once again have to pay more and get less?

Will the Secretary of State confirm that that is all part of the Government's long-term strategy, as stated by the head of local government finance in his Department, who said that council tax payers would have to

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"take more of the strain of paying for local services"

and added:

"the downside is that your taxes go up sharply"?

Will the Secretary of State now abandon the Government's rigging of the grants system to give extra help to Tory Westminster council, which is being allowed to spend an extra 16 per cent. this year, compared with a national average in comparable districts of about 2 per cent., at a time when council tax payers in Westminster already meet only 4 per cent. of the cost of their council services, compared with the 25 per cent. met by council tax payers in the rest of the country? Does he genuinely expect Conservative Members to continue to vote for that gross inequity in the run-up to the general election?

Mr. Gummer: That was such a farrago of misconceptions, misrepresentations and plain failure to listen to what I said, that it is difficult to respond. I know that there are complexities, Madam Speaker, and I remind you that this was a simplified version of exactly the sort of statement that we have had before, because I acknowledge that it is a complicated matter and I want to make it as easy as possible. You are perfectly right, Madam Speaker, to point to the complexity of the system.

The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) said that there would necessarily be increases in council taxes that would be equivalent to 2p on income tax and cost the average family about £5 a week. That is not what Sir Jeremy Beecham said; he said that there would be a 6 per cent. increase, amounting to 75p a week. The previous time that Sir Jeremy Beecham made a prediction, his figures were almost double the actual rise.

The Labour party has it in its hands to decide what the rise or non-rise will be, because it runs most of the local authorities, which decide the level of council tax. The Labour party is busy trying to predict rises of enormous size, because it wants to hide the council tax rises that it hopes to be able to get away with. The fact that people in the Labour party cannot decide between them whether they mean £5 a week or 75p a week shows just how impossible even they find it to predict what their authorities will do.

That is why I have no intention of forecasting what Labour councils will do about council tax. I forecast that if places had Conservative councils, they would do better. When we get the budgets, I will make it absolutely clear how much they have risen, why they have risen and which councils have managed to push council tax up the most. That is the most sensible forecast.

The hon. Gentleman asked about other sources of income. Last year, local authorities budgeted for £2.5 billion more than the TSS because they had additional sources of income. If he had listened, he would have heard me give a series of examples of such sources. This year, authorities will have a new source if they attract voucher money for pre-primary schools. Many will expect to be able to do that. [Interruption.]

Madam Speaker: Order. I made a serious statement late last week about discussions with civil servants in the Box. The hon. Gentleman should resume his seat. Perhaps he will look at my statement.

Mr. Gummer: The fact is that the money is there. Resources include fees and charges for car parking and

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such like. There are all sorts of other resources. Many local authorities get considerable money from the interest payments on their capital receipts, which gives them the opportunity to keep council taxes down. When the Labour party says that authorities should spend as much of that money as they like, I hope that it realises that the public will want to know why their council taxes would thereby go up.

The hon. Gentleman said that we set levels. We do not; local authorities decide at what level they should spend. I am merely giving them additional elbow room to spend up to 3.6 per cent. more on education. That is because we make education a priority.

On housing spending, we are considerably extending the opportunities for large-scale voluntary transfers and introducing a system that will enable authorities that do not like traditional LSVTs to use housing companies. I hope that we shall find significant sums by tapping those resources.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned capping levels. Of course there are capping levels; if there were not, many Labour local authorities would push up the council tax again and again and again. Labour is committed to abolishing capping.

Labour also used the old canard of Westminster. I repeat this simple fact: when Labour was in power, Westminster did proportionately better than other authorities.

Mr. Dobson: On a point of order, Madam Speaker. The Secretary of State is in severe danger of misleading the House. He has made that point in the past and we have tabled parliamentary questions. The Library has made inquiries to the Department of the Environment, which has denied what he has just said.

Madam Speaker: I have no evidence of that but I have to take what the hon. Gentleman says. I remind the House that we have important business before us. Practically every hon. Member in the Chamber is rising. We will get nowhere with this statement with such long responses. I hope that the Secretary of State will make brisk responses because many hon. Members want to question him.

Mr. Gummer: I am replying to only a quarter of the questions asked by the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson). If I may finish with this question, I shall refuse to answer the other three quarters.

Under Labour, Westminster did proportionately better, compared with other authorities, than it does under the Conservatives. If that is to rig, it is the rigging that Labour did under its system to help Westminster.

Sir Patrick Cormack: Is my right hon. Friend aware that I am most anxious to thank and congratulate him but, unfortunately, the sparsity of the information with which we are supplied and the density of the formula on which the various figures are based make it impossible to ask sensible questions? Could he just tell me what it means for Staffordshire's educational expenditure?

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