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Mr. Yeo: My right hon. Friend makes an important point, to which we would return if there were time.
It is not only transport policy that discriminates against the rural areas: charges have been introduced for school transport for over-16-year-olds, which is not a problem for residents in the middle of Ipswich but, my goodness, is a big issue in the rural heartlands where traditional Suffolk families are brought up.
My third and final theme is the sheer incompetence of Suffolk county council. It is not surprising, perhaps, that a council as doctrinaire as this--with such a highly political agenda--should also be incompetent, because such councils nearly always are. But it is worth emphasising just how taxpayers' money is being thrown away. Charitably, I shall select an example of when a project was chosen in a rural area--in Brantham, a small village in my constituency that is close to my home in East Bergholt.
The village was the site of a bizarre traffic experiment, introduced at a cost of £36,000, whereby the road was subject to barriers. They created a dangerous traffic flow, and near-misses and minor accidents became an almost daily occurrence. Pollution increased dramatically as cars slowed down, and my constituents could not get in and out of their driveways. The experiment was an unmitigated disaster from the day it was introduced, and everyone except the county council recognised it. The council did not recognise it because, with its typically arrogant disregard for public opinion and the merits of argument, it refused even to come and see the system in operation. A further £5,000 was wasted tinkering with the scheme, and finally--after almost two years--it was abandoned. The cost of removal amounted to a further £10,000, so over £50,000 in total was involved.
Mr. David Rendel (Newbury):
I am grateful for the chance to take part in today's debate. You will be aware, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that, unfortunately, there are no
I wish to start by referring to some of the points made by the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds (Mr. Spring), including his declaration that he wished dialogue to take place between himself and the county council. He flashed before the House this morning a headline from his local paper, and among my papers this morning is a headline that says:
Mr. Rendel:
That in no way answers the point I was making, which is that the hon. Gentleman's approach was no way to start dialogue. He mentioned, as did the hon. Member for South Suffolk, that there had been "scaremongering" by the county council. It is worth drawing the House's attention to three points. First, before the planning figures for what might happen to the council tax this year were produced by the county council, all the figures on which the council based its assumptions were checked with the Secretary of State and agreed by him. Secondly, the local auditors, Coopers and Lybrand, confirmed in a management letter that working out what the costs might be was a prudent and sensible way to plan the local council budget.
Mr. Lord:
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there is an enormous difference between paid officers doing their homework behind the scenes and looking at the various permutations that may exist, depending on the money that the council receives, and whipping up a huge amount of emotion and terrifying the whole education establishment of Suffolk?
Mr. Rendel:
That intervention illustrates once again the way in which Conservatives like to plan--in back rooms, behind the scenes and without consulting the public. What a terrible way to perform. What a dereliction of their duty that they should try to hide from the public what might happen. They are trying not to give the public any right to take part in discussions about the future. It is absurd that they should try to plan in that way without involving the public, and it is quite the wrong way to act in government--whether it be at central or local level.
The third, and perhaps most telling, point--which concerns the so-called "scaremongering"--was that Conservative members of the council agreed with what was happening and that it was a prudent way to plan. Those members thought that this was the right way to look at what might happen to the budget in the year ahead. Are
Conservative Members saying that their party colleagues on the county council were--to quote the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds--"crying wolf" and "scaremongering"? Conservative members of the council agreed to the plan.
The hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds was not pleased that some of his local papers were turning against the Conservatives, which shows that the papers have been forced to conclude that what the county council was saying had a lot of sense behind it. All I can say is that, if he is worried about his local papers turning against the Conservatives for once, he should try being a Liberal Democrat. We know what it is like to have Tory-supporting newspapers saying the most awful nonsense about us, time after time. If he is worried that a Conservative-run paper--as I have no doubt it is--in his area has suddenly found that the truth is so clear that it has to complain about what is happening to local people under a Conservative Government, he should experience what is happening elsewhere.
I have one point of agreement with Conservative Members. It is true that Labour is promising no more, and shame on it for that. It is also true that, although Conservative party members may not want more money for local government, they do want--they have, as I have said before in the House, made it their official policy--the cap to be lifted. They are right, and it is to the shame of this Government that they have not gone along with their own members' requirement in the motion that was passed by the Conservative party conference.
I wish to refer to the council's efficiency, or lack of it. Since the new administration took over in Suffolk three or four years ago, there have been no less than £40 million-worth of cuts. Some of those, sadly and inevitably, have been real cuts in services, but a large proportion have been efficiency savings. There always will be some efficiency savings that any large organisation can make, year on year, and that has been done effectively by this administration.
If Conservative Members are now saying that the present county council is inefficient, how much more inefficient must the previous Conservative administration have been before those £40 million-worth of cuts were made? The Conservatives controlled Suffolk for more than 100 years, yet at the end of that period the new Liberal and Labour administration has been able to make massive efficiency savings over the short four years that it has been in power. I am delighted that Conservative Members are saying that the new administration is still inefficient, in so far as that must mean that they condemn out of hand the previous Conservative administration, which was rightly thrown out of office four years ago.
"Tory MPs declare war on council".
If the hon. Gentleman feels that that is the right way to start a dialogue, his electors may have a different idea.
Mr. Spring:
The hon. Gentleman completely misses the point. There has been no dialogue for four years, and we--as Suffolk Members of Parliament--have had to put up with that. To criticise Suffolk Members a matter of weeks before the county council elections for rightly reacting with anger to what has gone on reflects an attitude of mind that is wholly inappropriate, and shows the hon. Gentleman's complete lack of understanding of the circumstances in Suffolk.
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