Urban Aid (Hansard, 23 December 1976)

§ 2. Mr. Anthony Grant
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if the will make a statement about the future of the urban aid programme.

§ 3. Mr. Eyre
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the urban aid programme.

§ 4. Mr. Steen
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the urban aid programme.

§ 8. Mr. Baker
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the urban aid programme.

§ 13. Sir W. Elliott
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the urban aid programme.

§ The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Brynmor John)
There is public expenditure provision for continuing grantaid on existing urban programme projects and on some limited amounts of new expenditure.

§ Mr. Speaker
I remind the House that when Questions are grouped together, I call first of all those Members whose Questions are being answered.

§ Mr. Grant
Is the Minister aware that no matter how he or the Government juggle the figures, the plain fact is that aid for urban areas is cut in real terms? 884 Is he aware that his deplorable answer goes against everything that the Government have been saying over the last two years about these matters? Do the Government now really care a hoot about the grave problems of our cities?

§ Mr. John
The hon. Gentleman speaks with great heat, but as usual he succeeds in throwing very little light on the subject. All of us recognise—not least, I should have thought, Opposition Members—the grave limitations on public expenditure at present. There is a Ministerial Committee, under my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for the Environment, one of whose tasks is to examine the future of urban aid. We recognise its importance, but the constraints on public expenditure mean that careful consideration must be given to the nature and type of aid and the areas to which it is devoted.

§ Mr. Eyre
Does the Minister realise that the first requirement is that the Government should speak truthfully about the catastrophic situation now developing in large towns and cities as a consequence of the failure of the Government's economic policy? Will he acknowledge that in talking of the problems of the inner areas it is also necessary to take account of the situation in the outer wards of large towns and cities? Because of the transfer of population and other factors, many of the problems spill over into those areas. Will the Minister assure the House that the working group will take account of that development?

§ Mr. John
If the hon. Gentleman imagines that the problems of inner cities have arisen only in the last three years he is grossly mistaken, and shows a complete lack of understanding not only of the problem in general but of its application to his own city of Birmingham. No one pretends that problems of deprivation are geographically linked, to the exclusion of all other areas. What the Committee is considering is the problem of the inner cities and the problems of all other deprived areas, and it is trying to devise a future for the programme which takes account of the problems and of our resources, and best fashions future policy to deal with the problems.

§ Mr. Steen
Will the Minister persuade local authorities not to take the lion's 885 share of the urban aid programme but to look more sympathetically upon the voluntary organisations and community groups in urban areas which are being deprived of urban aid funds because local authorities are putting their own requests first? If he cannot do that, will he persuade the Voluntary Service Unit to give some of its £1 million that has been unspent this year to small local community groups and not go on financing national voluntary organisations?

§ Mr. John
No doubt at a suitable time the hon. Gentleman, speaking on behalf of national voluntary organisations, will explain to the Government why the Voluntary Service Unit ought to spend some of its money for their purposes. We believe that local initiative and a local sieving process, such as local authorities give, is necessary to see what projects should be supported in an area. I am not unmindful, nor am I critical, of the work of the voluntary organisations in this effort. In fact, they get about one-third of the total number of projects under urban aid. Voluntary efforts form a very great and useful part of the urban aid programme.

§ Mr. Baker
There are many areas of great social deprivation in inner London in which unemployment is now as high as it is on Tyneside and Merseyside. Will the Minister ensure that a proper coordination exists between his Department, the Secretary of State for the Environment and the Secretary of State for Employment to deal with these problems? Interdepartmental committees of civil servants of junior Ministers are not adequate to deal with them.

§ Mr. John
Co-ordination is vital, as the hon. Gentleman says. He will know, from his experience in Government, of the departmental problems that exist and that need to be minimised, where that is possible. He certainly does not need to urge upon me an awareness of the scale of problems in the inner cities. It is perhaps the scale of the problems rather than the nature of the deprivation that marks out the inner cities from other deprived areas in Britain.

§ Mr. George Rodgers
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is difficult to define urban areas and that many of the older and smaller towns, particularly in Lancashire, 886 need assistance just as much as the major cities?

§ Mr. John
As I tried to say earlier, I accept that a purely geographical concept of deprivation does not assist us greatly in tackling these problems. That is why the ministerial committee is meeting to look at these matters carefully.

§ Mr. Whitelaw
Will the Minister pay particular regard to what my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Mr. Steen) said? Is he aware that many small voluntary organisations feel strongly that they are hamstrung by a long bureaucratic process before they can get any of the grants—in some cases comparatively small ones which would do a great deal of good? I hope that the Home Office will carefully consider the possibility of giving grants straight to voluntary organisations, particularly small ones, rather than making them go through the long process of many of the local authority social service departments.

§ Mr. John
The right hon. Gentleman will know that the Local Government Grants (Social Need) Act of 1969 ties such aid to local authorities, so that legislative amendment would be needed before his suggestion could be adopted. We are conscious of the value of the voluntary organisations, as I hope I have shown. The numbers of urban aid projects supported by local authorities represent a significant fraction of the total urban aid projects. But the value of the urban aid programme is its flexibility—its ability to support local authority projects at one stage and those of voluntary organisations at another. It is because that flexibility would be lacking if a set percentage were given to voluntary organisations that I do not think that that would be valuable.

§ Mr. Grant
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the unsatisfactory nature of that reply, I beg to give notice that I shall seek to raise the matter on another occasion.

§ Mr. Speaker
I can tell the hon. Gentleman that it will be raised again on Question No. 15.

§ 15. Mr. Lawrence
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the Urban Aid Programme.

§ 17. Mr. Peter Bottomley
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the Urban Aid Programme.

§ 18. Mr. Hodgson
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the Urban Aid Programme.

§ 19. Mr. Cockcroft
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the Urban Aid Programme.

§ 21. Mr. Silvester
asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement about the future of the Urban Aid Programme.

§ Mr. John
I refer to the reply I gave earlier to Questions by the hon. Member for Harrow, Central (Mr. Grant) and others.

§ Mr. Lawrence
Is the Minister aware that the reply which he gave earlier to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. Eyre) was astonishingly inadequate and showed an appalling ignorance of the developing nature of this problem? In recent years the inner city area problem has been moving out to the fringes of the areas, and those areas and the new council housing estates are taking the strain. Will the hon. Gentleman think about this matter again? In particular, will he give more consideration to giving specific help to those voluntary organisations that have been very effective?

§ Mr. John
All that the hon. Gentleman succeeds in doing is to show me that he has not understood the place of the urban programme within the total Government programme to overcome the problem of deprivation. The main thrust of the programme against urban deprivation and deprivation generally must be for the main spending programmes of the Government Departments. The urban programme is designed to produce a variety of measures that will help to alleviate the situation, but nobody pretends that in isolation they form a total strategy against this sort of decay.

§ Mr. Hodgson
The hon. Gentleman has referred to the existence of the inner city working party. In view of the serious 888 nature of the problems that the cities face, will he say, first, what the working party is looking into, secondly, when it will report, and, thirdly, how long thereafter the Government will take to implement its recommendations?

§ Mr. John
The timetable of my right hon. Friend's group is not a matter for me. All I can say is that it will consider the matter carefully and with as much expedition as possible.

§ Mr. Lipton
To get this matter into proper perspective, will my hon. Friend consider publishing, in the Official Report or in some other way, the number of urban aid programmes already in operation? We in Lambeth have been treated quite generously. It would help to clear the air if we knew how much was going on.

§ Mr. John
I should be happy to respond to my hon. Friend's question. I echo his tribute in respect of what is being done. It does us no good to be seen to be denigrating the urban aid programme when in many parts of the country it has brought projects of benefit to people living in the most deprived areas.