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Mr. Burstow: I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Every single council tax payer faces that dilemma because accountability is even more blurred now than under the previous Government. Labour councils implement Labour Government council tax increases and cut services to try to keep council tax down a bit. Of course, individual councils have to set priorities, but in my hon. Friend's area a Labour council is making decisions that cut local services.
I have a final quotation:
The Minister for Local Government and Housing (Ms Hilary Armstrong):
I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
Jackie Ballard (Taunton):
He is a party activist.
Ms Armstrong:
Perhaps the hon. Lady has given us the truth.
The interests of Liberal Democrat Members are not the same as the interests of the general public. Liberal councillors want higher taxes from local people, while local people want best value for their money. The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam knows that he cannot take a responsible and grown-up attitude to local government policy and please both--so he has chosen to put party before people. Because the hon. Gentleman cannot reconcile the interests of his councillors with the interests of the electorate, he has this afternoon tried to shift the blame for council tax rises, many of which have been the direct decision of his party, away from councils and on to the Government.
Liberal policy is muddled: the Liberal Democrats say that they want the Government to grant more money to local councils, but councils to raise more of their money for themselves. The Liberal Democrats say they want lower council tax rises, but want to abandon all controls on local government spending. They say they support public services, but want to do nothing to ensure best value for local people. Much of local government has moved on from the old politics of spend and blame; it seems that the Liberals have not. They have become apologists for old-style municipal tax and spend, high taxation and low efficiency.
Jackie Ballard:
If the Minister thinks that Liberal Democrat councillors and activists are so out of touch with the wishes of local people, will she explain why the Labour party--especially in the north-west of England--has lost council seat after council seat to the Liberal Democrats over the past year or two?
Ms Armstrong:
If the hon. Lady revealed the turnout at those by-elections, she might not be so gung-ho. The Tories craved too much control over councils, but the Liberals propose out-of-control councils--with taxes as high as they like, spending as much as they want, service standards as low as they get--with the Government taking no responsibility for improving public services or protecting local taxpayers. The Government reject both those approaches.
Mr. Burstow:
The Minister asserts that our policy is to release local government from central Government control, and she is right. However, much of what Liberal Democrats have said for many years is also the policy of the Local Government Association, including returning business rate control to local councils and a local income tax. The LGA has long campaigned for those policies.
Ms Armstrong:
The hon. Gentleman will wish to retract that statement, because I have never known the LGA to propose a local income tax. I hope that the hon. Gentleman's enthusiasm will take him down the right road. The LGA has argued for the return of business rates to local control, but it also accepts that redistribution would be needed if that were to happen, from those authorities--
Ms Armstrong:
The hon. Gentleman did not make that point clear. Such redistribution moves away from the
It is in the national interest that local communities should take more decisions for themselves; that local councils should be more responsible to local people than to central Government; and that responsible councils should set their own levels of taxation. It is also in the national interest that central Government should ensure that national standards of public service are set and met, and major failures in service delivery are halted and reversed. It is the responsibility of central Government to make resources available to local councils to provide and enable the provision of modern public services, at a price people are prepared to pay, and it is right for the Government to ensure that those resources are spent wisely and well.
The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam tried to pretend in his peroration that the Government had not been generous to local government. In fact, in the five years of the previous Parliament, standard spending assessments fell by 3 per cent. in real terms, while the Labour Government have already increased SSAs by 2.6 per cent. During the first four years of the Government, SSAs will increase by 6.9 per cent.
When the Conservatives exercised central control through crude and universal council tax capping and pre-announced spending limits for every council in the country, it could fairly be claimed that they took responsibility for every council tax rise. The capping threshold ceased to be a maximum spending limit and increasingly became the norm. Conservative Governments enjoyed the right to limit every budget increase, and they must therefore take responsibility for every council tax rise. As we said we would in our manifesto, we have ended crude and universal council tax capping. This year, there have been no pre-announced capping limits.
Mr. Simon Burns (West Chelmsford):
The hon. Lady said during her flight of fantasy that it was the responsibility of central Government to provide money for local authorities to provide local services. [Interruption.] She now says that she did not say that, but that was certainly the impression that she gave in her speech. How, then, would she respond to the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone), who said that, as a result of the Government's settlement, £2.4 million would have to be cut from education in Brent? In addition, the hon. Gentleman said that provision of care for the elderly would be cut, that libraries would close and that children and the disabled in care would suffer. What would the hon. Lady say to her hon. Friend?
Ms Armstrong:
It is not my job to account for the meanderings of my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, East. I am not responding to his electioneering; I am here to deal with the electioneering of the Liberal Democrats, and with the feeble attempts of the Tories.
"It is no good the Government complaining that councils blame central Government. Central Government have so constructed the system of local government finance that they tell it how much it can have, what it can spend it on and how to spend it. The country has rumbled that and knows that central Government are taking decisions and deciding how those decisions will impact in every area."--[Official Report, 3 February 1997; Vol. 289, c. 760.]
How very true were those words, spoken by the current Minister for Local Government and Housing; and they are truer today than when she first spoke them. The Conservatives may have engineered the local government finance system, but Labour has fine-tuned it to give Ministers even more power to direct what councils can or cannot do. The Government, more than local councils, have taken the decisions that have determined council tax increases, because so much of the money comes from the centre.
"notes that the 1999-2000 local government settlement was the most generous since the introduction of the council tax; further notes the Government's commitment of an extra £40 billion for schools and hospitals; and welcomes the introduction of Best Value, the abolition of crude and universal capping, the reform of political management structures and the new ethical framework, set out in the local government White Paper."
This debate is interesting. Hon. Members may already know that it is little more than a fig leaf to cover the embarrassment caused by the Liberal Democrats' confused and contradictory local government policies. The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Burstow) is a prisoner of his own party activists. He knows that the interests of Liberal councillors are not the same as the interests of local people.
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