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Revenue Support Grant (Suffolk)
11 am
Mr. Richard Spring (Bury St. Edmunds): Four Suffolk Members of Parliament applied to introduce this important debate. On behalf of all of us, I express my gratitude to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing the debate to be initiated. Around me are my hon. Friends the Members for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) for Central Suffolk (Mr. Lord) and for Waveney (Mr. Porter). I particularly welcome the Secretary of State for the Environment, my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer), who will reply to the debate.
In the past 20 years, Suffolk has changed more than most counties, helped by increased trade with the continent of Europe. The population has grown appreciably, and so has the county's accessibility and prosperity. There has been a long-standing willingness for individuals of different political persuasions in local government to work together. The people of Suffolk have every expectation and every right to demand that their parliamentary and local government representatives work together on issues of importance to the county.
That viewpoint held sway until May 1993, when a Labour administration, with Liberal Democrat help, took control of county hall. Since then, the council has not only been the most incompetently led in the history of Suffolk, but has had as its hallmarks distortion, propaganda and arrogance, which have brought shame to the good name of Suffolk and have regrettably turned the administration into a laughing stock in Westminster and Whitehall.
I shall give the House a flavour of that by quoting an exchange of correspondence that I had with the leader of the council, Chris Mole. In a parliamentary written answer of 21 February 1995, my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Squire), on behalf of the Department for Education, said that local education authority expenditure on administration in Suffolk was 5 per cent., compared with a national figure of 4.5 per cent. The figure was well above that of any of the surrounding counties: 4.2 per cent. for Norfolk; 3.9 per cent. for Essex; and 3.7 per cent. for Cambridgeshire.
When challenged on that, Councillor Mole aggressively informed me that I was wrong and that, in my figure, I had included the cost of inspectors, education welfare officers, educational psychologists, special needs staff and many others. However, my view was confirmed by my hon. Friend the Minister in a letter on 19 April 1995. Sadly, but typically, no comment or apology was received from Councillor Mole.
Councillor Mole wrote to me:
What are the facts? Has Suffolk been starved of Government resources? Has Suffolk been shortchanged by the taxpayer? Has the revenue support grant been cut? Not at all. As the House of Commons Library has confirmed, since 1992-93, Suffolk's overall standard spending assessment has risen by 11.7 per cent.--one third higher than the national figure.
I fully accept that local government, like central Government, has been required to show restraint. We cannot bequeath to our children an unsustainable debt burden. One has only to look across the channel to see what is happening to economies and employment prospects there. However, that is no basis for the propaganda outpourings from county hall and the distortions in the revenue support grant.
I shall give the House a flavour of what I mean. A banner headline in the Ipswich Evening Star of 25 January 1995 read, "Cuts Cuts Cuts". The article began:
On 14 February, a headline elsewhere read "Time to strike back at cuts". The article said:
The council produced a so-called information document entitled, "The Government's Funding Failure: Suffolk Schools and Suffolk Children. Their Bleak Future". It catalogued a sort of educational Armageddon, concluding with the sentence:
I shall not disguise the real anxieties of parents, teachers and governors in response to this. We have all had constituents in our surgeries in a state of shock,
fearing--as was the intention--that schools would close, teachers would be sacked and their children's education would suffer as services in the county imploded. The propaganda barrage continued unabated throughout the year.
What happened in practice? In the local government settlement of 1995-96, the county council received no cut in resourcing, but an increase of 3.5 per cent. Most crucially, however, the education SSA for 1995-96 was upped by 5.7 per cent.--£11.7 million. That was two and a half times the rate of inflation and nearly 20 per cent. more than the average SSA increase for English county councils.
I fully accept that, historically, Suffolk county council has spent above its education SSA. However, it is incomprehensible that the council spent only £8 million of the £11 million increase in its 1995-96 settlement. It chose to spend the money elsewhere. No proper or rational explanation has been forthcoming for that decision. As we have discovered, no matter what taxpayer-supported settlement is provided for Suffolk, it is branded as "inadequate". That has become a mantra.
By September 1996, the flagrantly disingenuous county council was at it again. Headlines screamed about cuts of £18 million. Shockingly, the county council invited school head teachers to prepare for a 5 per cent. cut in their budgets. Understandably, they were aghast. In west Suffolk, 134 teachers and head teachers publicly sent a fax of protest to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education and Employment. The accompanying newspaper headlines were cataclysmic. Hook, line and sinker, the stream of misinformation had been taken on board.
My hon. Friends and I repeatedly asked how the council had reached the figure of £18 million. We pressed for information, but not one shred of concrete evidence was produced. The figure was a total travesty. With exactly the same information, no other county council had been reckless enough to make such ludicrous projections.
Inevitably, bad news grabs the headlines. The barrage of mendacity continued, as reflected in the headline in the East Anglian Daily Times of 7 November 1996--
How many trees were uselessly felled? How much airtime was wasted by the county council? Its shroud waving was once again been exposed for all to see. As the East Anglian Daily Times summed up in its leader on 28 November 1996:
"Dear Mr. Spring
He helpfully continued:
Your incredulity at my factual responses to your misleading electioneering is only matched by my concern at your ignorance of the work of Suffolk County Council."
"You may not have bothered to check your source, or you may believe that those staff fall into your pejorative definition of 'bureaucrats'."
He was, of course, wrong. The mind-boggling arrogance of the council leader was brought out when he further wrote:
"Your reference to reductions in 'educational bureaucracy' making up for the shortfall in school's reserves reveals such a gross misunderstanding of the local management and financing of schools that I would prefer to assist you with a personal tutorial".
19 Feb 1997 : Column 861
That offensive offer was the nearest we have come to a serious offer from the county council of dialogue on financing or other matters.
The blunt truth is that the incoming Labour-Liberal administration made a clear, cynical decision to cut off all constructive contact with Suffolk's Conservative Members of Parliament and to use taxpayers' money to pursue, with an avalanche of press releases, a wholly unjustified vendetta against central Government and Suffolk's parliamentary representatives. The past four years have been a disgrace and a parody of fair and effective local government. By deliberate intent, fear and alarm has been spread among the residents of our county.
"Hundreds of jobs throughout Suffolk are under threat as officials struggle to come to terms with Government cash cuts."
On 10 February, the Evening Star reported Councillor Duncan Macpherson, chairman of the county council education committee, speaking of teaching job losses, bigger class sizes and woefully inadequate money from central Government. That was a foretaste of what was to come.
"and what it means is that many of our most important services could be pared to the bone in 1995."
On 22 February, we had a headline "Jobs at risk as cuts bite", with Councillor Chris Mole talking about
"the comprehensive emasculation of local authorities inflicted by the Tories"
and alleging that 110 teachers' jobs were to go. None of that was worth the paper that it was written on.
"A good education is at risk."
Never mind that, in every year since 1979, schools' budgets have grown in real terms. Do not let the truth get in the way of the argument.
"Tax warning on education cash".
The county council was spreading fear like a forest fire. Later in November, we had the local government settlement. Did we get £18 million worth of cuts? Surprise, surprise, we did not. We saw an increased settlement of just under £10 million. What happened to the projected education cut of £10.9 million? The education SSA was increased by 4.2 per cent., or nearly £9 million.
"Suffolk appears to have been one of the very few councils to have jumped in with both feet and prematurely warned of cuts in jobs and services on the basis of what seems to have been pure guesswork from preliminary figures being bandied around in Whitehall."
The editorial concluded:
"Politics can be a messy business. If this time next year there is still a Labour/Liberal Democrat controlled Suffolk County Council and a Tory Government, the Council Leaders would do well not to cry wolf for a third time. The public and their own staff will not stand for it again."
19 Feb 1997 : Column 863
What has the county council done with the increased education SSA of £9 million? The shocking truth is that the council has decided to spend only £5 million. In addition to the £11 million in school reserves, the general LEA reserve fund is estimated at £5 million from 1 April 1997. There is also approximately £2 million of earmarked balances. Some £5 million that the Government intended for education in Suffolk has not been spent to that purpose.
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