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Mr. Hendry: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Gentleman has referred to my constituency twice. Is it not the convention in the House that, if that happens, the hon. Member who represents that constituency should be heard?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Conventions are not the responsibility of the Chair.
Mr. Dobson: I was trying to speed things up, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Hon. Members who vote for the
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settlement tonight will be held responsible for their decisions by the voters at the general election and that election cannot come a minute too soon.5.7 pm
Mr. David Sumberg (Bury, South): I make no apologies for devoting all my speech to the serious situation faced by my constituents in Bury because of the threat by the Labour council to cut vital public services drastically.
The council has put forward proposals for consideration that will reduce spending on primary, secondary and community education and cut out three public libraries in my constituency. There is much anger and fear in the community at those proposals, as they would severely damage the excellent quality of education in Bury--the ratings and examination results have been among the highest in the country. If the measures are implemented when the council sets its budget in a few weeks' time, it will be an outrageous attack on the education system that operates in my community and it will be entirely unacceptable.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the Labour council has threatened those vital public services. It is almost an annual exercise--an exercise that causes great distress and anger among the children and parents whom I represent. Last year, the council threatened to close every public library. In previous years, it threatened to close nursery education in its entirety and old people's homes and to cut adult education severely. Year by year, such threats have been made at this time. On each occasion, the council has been forced to decide where its priorities lie. It was forced to do so by public protest and outrage, and those important community services were all saved and they still operate effectively to this very day.
That record of threats followed by the withdrawal of threats leads to a certain amount of scepticism. If the threats were genuine in those previous years, when those council services were faced with extinction, I have to ask why action was not taken year on year--perhaps in a more modest way--to avert the serious situation that we face today.
It is convenient that that situation has arisen just before a general election. We all know from our experience of life and business and our professions that, if one fails to deal with a financial problem when it first arises, achieving the eventual solution becomes all the more difficult.
Bearing in mind the sorry chapter of events over several years, there can be only two verdicts on the way in which the council has behaved: either it was working year by year on the Micawber principle that something would eventually turn up to solve the problems, or it was deliberately misleading the public each year about the severity of the cuts to vital services so that, when they were saved, as I have explained they all were, the Labour council could pose as the white knight in shining armour coming to the rescue of parents, children and the community in general. Either verdict would be a sorry one: financially incompetent or morally unacceptable.
If, unlike in previous years, the financial crisis in Bury today is real--I think that there is indeed a real threat to the primary and secondary schools and colleges--two factors must be taken into account. One is extremely old, and the other new.
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The old factor is a unifying point for the council--whatever its politics--for my constituents, for me and for my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Burt): the formula that is used to decide how much each local authority is to receive from central Government and, in particular, the area cost adjustment. It has not worked well for Bury and the unfairness has persisted over many years; it does not take account of the borough's special position as a small authority with no economies of scale which is neither overwhelmingly rich nor especially poor.
I accept 100 per cent. the difficulty in changing a formula for anything, as consensus must be reached with other authorities. As has been vividly demonstrated in this debate by remarks from the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) and others, there is a great difficulty in getting that consensus from all concerned. It is an obvious difficulty, because those who gain from a formula do not want to give up their advantage, while those who lose press them to do so.
It is misleading to say, as the Opposition have said, that the only gainer from the formula is Westminster city council. It may well be that many other Labour and Liberal councils also gain. That is why the metropolitan authorities are incapable of coming to my right hon. Friend or to any future Secretary of State for the Environment with a united voice, presenting a formula to deal with the matter differently.
Mr. Robert Ainsworth:
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there will never be a consensus about changes across the whole of local government, that his authority is losing out massively from the current formula, and that the Secretary of State could change it if he wanted? Why then does the hon. Gentleman continue to support him?
Mr. Sumberg:
I entirely accept that my local authority is losing out massively as a result of the formula, but the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras know that there is no large bank of money sitting in Whitehall that could do something about it. Nor can--nor should--my right hon. Friend make changes without consensus. The formula applies not to one authority alone but to all of local government.
Having said that, I must tell my right hon. Friend that my hon. Friend for Bury, North and I have urged a change in the formula that would apply throughout the system. I wish it were possible for the change to apply only to Bury, but it is not. We have long urged the Department to do something, because the current position is not fair and cannot continue. I understand the difficulties, but I am sick and tired of making this point, which I have made before in the Chamber and in delegations. I say to whomever will be Secretary of State for the Environment after the general election that something will have to be done.
I referred to an old and to a new factor. The new factor will require hon. Members to use a little bit of imagination and believe the Labour party's promises. Unlike in previous years, when I have faced criticism in Bury for the amount of local government expenditure, that criticism has this year been followed by a demand for more public money to be spent on local government.
This year, and next, we face a Labour commitment that, if Labour were in government, it would not increase by a single penny the amount decided by the Government for
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Labour Members know the truth: if they come to power, there will be no alteration in the formula or in the amount of money that will be allocated to local government. That has been made absolutely clear by the right hon. Member for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown).
Mr. Dobson:
There can be no change in the formula this year, because councils have to set their budgets by 11 March, but I can assure the hon. Gentleman that, if there is a Labour Government, there will certainly be changes in the allocation next year.
Mr. Sumberg:
We shall wait and see. I do not believe it, because none of the hon. Gentleman's friends in local government, as I said before, has proposed any change whatever in the formula. On the whole--although some of them lose out as we do in Bury--they are satisfied with it. In the unlikely scenario that the hon. Gentleman posits, he will face exactly the situation currently faced by my right hon. Friend.
Mr. Robert G. Hughes:
This debate has been revealing about Labour policy--or not even policy, but merely tactics. The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) read out great lists of councils that he alleges would receive more money under a Labour party allocations scheme. In other words, Labour is promising any part of the country, any town, city or county, that a change in the allocation would give it more money. Is that not profoundly dishonest?
Mr. Sumberg:
It is profoundly dishonest for the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras to refuse to make a commitment, today or ever, that there will be more money for local government. I cannot tell the people of Bury that, in the unlikely event of a Labour Government, they will have more money. They will not.
The hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras tells me that there will be a review of the formula, and I am sure that, if there is a Labour Government, we shall have reviews coming out of our ears; but can he give a commitment that the people of Bury will benefit from the change in formula after that review? I very much doubt it.
Mr. Dobson:
In case the hon. Gentleman misheard, I said not that there would be a review of the formula but that there would be a change in the way in which the money was allocated.
Mr. Sumberg:
The hon. Gentleman will not speak again in this debate, but perhaps the hon. Member for North-West Durham (Ms Armstrong) will set out in detail the way in which the formula will be changed rather than regaling us at length with what Westminster council gets or does not get. If she is prepared to do that, the House and the country may be prepared to listen.
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