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Mr. Illsley: My hon. Friend knows that, if the capital funding for the supertram project this year is not met by some Government allowance--either in terms of SSA or funding--council tax in Barnsley could increase by about £150. Will he press the Minister to say what action the Government will take to prevent supertram funding from falling on the four local authorities, including Barnsley?
Mr. Clapham: I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I have asked the Minister to respond to that issue. Perhaps he will tell us what assistance we can expect from the Government.
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cirencester and Tewkesbury): I thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to catch your eye. As I have only about 10 minutes in which to speak, I shall not accept any interventions.
The local authority in my constituency, Gloucester county council, is Liberal dominated and nearly 100 per cent. supported by the Labour party. Every year, the Liberals and Labour say that they wish to have a budget of so many millions of pounds more than the previous budget so that existing services might be maintained. That figure is usually entirely unrealistic. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State gives them a more "realistic" budget, they claim that they face a cut of so many per cent. That is a bogus way of representing the real financial position.
Gloucester's standard spending assessment this year is £323 million. There is an increase on general services of 2.5 per cent., while the specific increase in spending on education is 3.6 per cent. Any company that could not find some efficiency savings in a budget of £323 million should not be in business. The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy has calculated that labour costs account for about 60 per cent. of most local authority costs, and that if each local authority could make a saving on such costs of 5 per cent. the total saving countrywide would be more than £500 million.
I am certain that if a clever firm of management consultants examined Gloucester county council's huge budget it would find savings. Indeed, I know that it would find savings. I am almost certain that it would find many areas in which the council has increased staff.
In the short time that is available to me, I make the plea that the 3.6 per cent. that my right hon. Friend is making available to Gloucester county council for education should go directly to the schools. It would be a disgrace--it would be short-changing our children and their
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Top slicing is the amount that each local authority withholds for central administration before moneys are made available to schools. I should like Gloucestershire's top slicing to be drastically reduced so that we might push as much money as possible directly into schools.
I spend much time visiting schools in my constituency, where I see a huge amount of dedicated work being undertaken by teachers and by parents helping those teachers. At the same time, I have seen some remarkable new building projects. The other day I visited a brand-new school in Tewkesbury, which had cost £1.5 million. That must be set against the nonsense that we hear from Opposition Members who claim that North sea oil revenue has been squandered. That assertion cannot be true when we have seen new schools, new additions to schools, new hospitals and new additions to hospitals over the past 18 years. It is a misrepresentation of the facts to say that the assets of North sea oil have been squandered.
I return to the issue of increases in council tax. As I said to the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Mr. Dobson) in an intervention, he cannot have it both ways. Will he allow local authorities discretion in deciding by how much they should be able to raise their council tax? It is clear that they will do so if they have that discretion. The Sunday Times recently conducted a survey of 180 Labour authorities. Of 80 council leaders questioned--all 180 authorities were up against current capping limits--49 said that they wished to increase their spending over and above the Government's capping limits. It is clear that as much as Ministers relax capping limits, Labour-controlled authorities will spend up to those limits ad infinitum.
Yesterday, I was sitting next to a senior member of the Bristol chamber of trade. He wanted the uniform business rate repatriated to local authorities. I believe that that is the Labour party's policy, if not the policy of the Liberals. I had to remind him--he had entirely forgotten--that when we had local control of business rates we had Labour local authorities pricing businesses out of business. I do not want that to happen again. That is why I am delighted that in the settlement my right hon. Friend has been able to provide help for all businesses. No business should face an increase in UBR over and above the rate of inflation.
Much more important than that, the UBR of many hundreds of thousands of small businesses will be pegged to the same rate as last year. In other words, they will experience a real reduction in their UBR.
Oxfordshire receives the area cost adjustment whereas Gloucestershire does not. That puts Oxfordshire at an advantage of some £20 million. I have suggested that there should be a better tapering of the ACA. There should not be a line on a map that means that one authority gets something and the next-door authority, which faces broadly similar costs, gets nothing.
In answer to a question tabled by the hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras--the answer appeared in column 85 of Hansard on 27 January--we learnt that teachers' labour costs for Gloucestershire amounted to £178 million whereas those same costs for Oxfordshire were £187 million. That goes to prove that labour costs in
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I make special pleading on the ACA but I am delighted that the sparsity factor has not been altered. It is clear that we cannot have something in one hand and gain something with the other. It is right that the sparsity factor should be carefully applied to rural constituencies such as my own where it is more expensive to deliver local services.
There are many good provisions in the settlement which time prevents me from mentioning. I merely say that I have every sympathy with the deprived areas that are represented by Labour Members--for example, Barnsley and Newcastle, Central, in the context of the debate--but it is probably true that spending per pupil in Newcastle, Central is about double, if not treble, the spending of Gloucestershire. I am well aware that Gloucestershire has one of the lowest expenditure per head figures of any local authority in the country, yet it still manages to provide a reasonable level of services.
We have heard much from Labour Members about paucity of provision, but many of the constituencies that they represent receive help that is not extended to Gloucestershire. They receive city challenge, sector challenge, the single regeneration budget and European funding in the form of 5b and 2b, for example.
I guess that Labour-controlled authorities are similar to Liberal-controlled Gloucestershire county council when it comes to indebtedness. Nine of the most indebted local authorities are Labour controlled. The same can be said of Liberal-controlled authorities and their indebtedness. When Conservatives last had control of Gloucestershire county council in 1985, it had a debt of £25 million. When I inquired last year what its debt was, I was told that it had risen over the past 10 years to a staggering £135 million. I guess that it now stands at almost £150 million.
Mr. Jack Thompson (Wansbeck):
Conservative Members' contributions have been intriguing. I have heard all but one of their speeches. They have made many criticisms--the Secretary of State was no exception--of Labour and Liberal-controlled councils. Conservative Members have not asked why there are Labour and
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The hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel), the Liberal spokesman, referred to the county council in the area that I represent. We are very sensitive about that, because when he talked about the £10 million cut, he referred to us as Northumbria. The county is called Northumberland. I hope that he accepts that correction. Northumbria is a mythical area: at one time, it was a kingdom that stretched from the Humber to Edinburgh. It is reduced to a county in the north of England, which reflects a thousand years of boundary changes.
Like all right hon. and hon. Members, I have an interest to declare--I have not heard anyone make this declaration yet. We are all council tax payers and users of local authority services in one form or another. As such, we should have a keen interest in the on-going effects of the revenue support grant settlement, which have followed reduction after reduction in expenditure in previous years. We have now reached the point of no return.
Three local authorities provide services in my constituency--Northumberland county council, Wansbeck district council, which are controlled by Labour, and Castle Morpeth borough council, which has a mixture of independent, Conservative and Liberal councillors, although I am never sure which is which. They have all made representations to the Secretary of State with little hope of success. From the figures that the Secretary of State presented, I imagine that most of the other local authorities in England have also made representations with the same amount of success.
Reference was made to local council associations. The Secretary of State specifically said that he had not received representations from local authorities, but he did not say that they were not prepared to make them. Given the Government's life expectancy, there is no point in making representations to them.
Criticism of the Government's policies on funding is universal, and relates to councils with all forms of political control. The Government, in effect, set council tax levels, and leave the local administration to be little more than agents of Whitehall, with front-line responsibility for trying to explain to the residents why they are being asked to pay more for poorer services.
Local authorities have attempted, year on year, to maintain a reasonable level of service--I include all authorities, whatever the political control, in that comment. The long-term effects of the reduction in funding in previous years are now beginning to show through in a range of areas in my constituency, at both county and district level.
Given the time constraints, I shall concentrate on the problems facing my county council, although the limitations are felt in both district authorities in my constituency. One of the biggest problems that Northumberland county council faces is the determination of the sparsity factor. The county is the most sparsely populated shire county in England, yet it is recognised as being only eighth in the sparsity factor element of the SSA. That issue cuts across all the services that the authority provides. The huge rural areas in the north and west of the county create costs in the provision of adequate education, highways, fire and library services, economic development and social services.
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The council has tried to maintain good schools in those areas. It is estimated that the cost of educating a child in a rural school is five times higher than in the urban parts of the county, such as my constituency. Although rural schools have small class sizes, the council is determined to keep them open. However, that is at the expense of class sizes in urban areas. Statistics show that the average class size in primary schools is 27 and in secondary schools it is 22, but those figures are distorted by some extremely small class sizes in rural areas, especially in first and middle schools.
I refer to a letter from the chairman of governors of one of the schools in my constituency, to the leader of the county council. It says:
The council faces problems in other areas. A problem arises from the sparsity factor as it affects the fire service. We have more fire stations than one would expect in a county of its size, but that is necessary because of its large rural areas. If a there is a fire on a rural farm, it may take the fire engine a long time to get there on difficult roads. We are supposed to be classified as a remote rural area under the fire risk categorisation. We spend 25 per cent. above the fire SSA to provide sufficient cover.
The mobile library service is beneficial to rural areas, but it is a high-cost facility. It does not seem to be recognised that a county with a population of about 300,000 and a land area of more than 500,000 hectares requires 4,500 miles of road, because it receives no SSA for highways on the basis of usage and population. Although it has 3 per cent. of national vehicular users on its roads, road users in my area suffer because of that unfair provision.
My county council has genuinely attempted to comply with the reduced expenditure that has been thrust on it. The youth and community service has been cut in the past five years by 48 per cent., road maintenance by 36 per cent., winter road maintenance by 27 per cent., and book provision by 41 per cent.; and in the same period, pupil:teacher ratios have risen by 15 per cent. The reserve
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I and my council claim that not only are the overall revenue support grant arrangements unsatisfactory, but the distribution is out of all proportion to local authorities' needs and responsibilities. The whole system should be radically reviewed.
Conservative Members referred to the area cost adjustment. That also affects my authority. Local government associations strongly advocate that Professor Elliott's recommendations should be closely followed. Professor Elliott made a statement with which I totally agree:
"Dear Mr Swithenbank
that is a strong statement to make in the first place--
I know it saddens you to preside over the end of education in Northumberland"--
"but that will be the impact of the cuts being considered. It is true you will still have a schools system, albeit an underfunded one, but education is more than schools. There are many other opportunities being denied to children just because they live in Northumberland, whether these be in Music and Drama, Outdoor Education or from a lack of practical activities in overcrowded classrooms.
There is a high price to be paid by schools in the south-east urban part of the county, to maintain schools in the rural areas. As a socialist, I do not disagree with that. We should provide the best education we can for our children, but the price to be paid is becoming too high. [Interruption.] Does someone want to intervene? Apparently not.
There is no equality of service within Northumberland as long as rural children are educated in a class of 6 while urban pupils are with over 40 others and each is demanding the attention of one teacher. Five years ago, when asked about the closure of small schools, you said the savings were not significant. Last night you said it would require fifty to close--well the saving from 10 closed schools over 5 years is more than that from fifty closures in one year. This may be the price to be paid for living in a rural area but it should not be at the cost to children in urban South East Northumberland."
"whilst most discontent has been directed at the ACA, it should be focused more appropriately on the SSA system as a whole."
The present arrangements for the council tax are only a marginal improvement on those for the almost entirely forgotten poll tax. The introduction of the poll tax was a mess, and it looks as if we are heading for the same problems with the present system.
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