REPRESENTATIONS TO THE SECRETARY OF STATE (Hansard, 27 March 1984)

§ Mr. Allan Roberts
The new clause relates to consultation and the right of local authorities to make representations to the Secretary of State about expenditure and services that have been rate-capped during the year in which a local authority has been rate-capped. It requires the Secretary of State to listen to arguments from the local authority about the consequences of rate-capping and how the capping exercise is affecting the services and the people who live in the area.
The new clause would improve the Bill by enabling the Government to demonstrate that their mind was not closed to representations from local authorities. In Committee, every amendment seeking more consultation or the right to make representations was rejected by the Government. In the light of the feeling in the House—the only speech that supported the Bill on the last new clause came from the Government Front Bench — and the weight of opinion in the Conservative party and in the country, in both Conservative-controlled and Labour-controlled areas, I hope that the Government will accept the new clause.
The Government are getting themselves into difficulties with this legislation. I described the Bill earlier as a bunker. They are in the bunker of this rate-capping Bill — or, as it has been described by Conservative Members, this knee-capping Bill—and they are under siege from all quarters, including their own supporters and Conservative-controlled local authority associations. As they refuse to accept the reasonable amendments asking for consultation and discussion in a democratic manner, they get deeper and deeper into the bunker.
180 If the Government do not accept this new clause, they will be taking on power without responsibility. In this legislation, particularly in the general powers, they are virtually usurping local government democracy and the democratic functions of local authorities to determine their own expenditure, rates and services. If they take those draconian powers, they should at least have the safeguard of allowing local authorities, which know their own areas and the views of the people who live there about the cuts in services, to make representations. Unless the Government believe in power without responsibility, they will accept the new clause.
With the rate-capping Bill now going through Parliament, the Government and the Conservative party are getting into a unique position. They are being blamed for the cuts in services and the rate increases that local authorities are having to impose. In the past, when the Government have imposed cuts or restrictions or reductions in rate support grant on local authorities, they have managed somehow to get many electors to blame their own local authorities for those increases and cuts. Now it is becoming clear who is responsible, and the Government have brought that on themselves.
6.15 pm
The hon. Member for Crosby (Mr. Thornton) appeared on a television programme with me and argued in favour of Liverpool city council making people redundant, cutting services and increasing rates. It was delightful to hear a Conservative Member arguing in favour of rate increases instead of allowing the rate increases that his Government are imposing on local authorities such as Liverpool to be passed on through the local authority in the hope that it will be blamed for them.
Do the Government intend to tell local authorities the exact amount of services that should be provided in each area of concern? Do they intend to detail the cuts and closures that should be made, and the posts that should be made redundant? The rate-capping exercises require the local authority to do that, and the Government should be required to consult on the matter and say, as the new clause requests, exactly where and how the rate-capped local authorities should make the cuts. The Government will be imposing the cuts, not the local authorities, although those local authorities will be required to carry them out. Will the Government say to local authorities, "We think your priorities for this year should be cuts in social services instead of in education. Do not close the learner swimming pools that the Sefton metropolitan district council closed because of cuts in rate support grant"? Will the Government go into detail in that way? If they rate-cap a local authority, on assessments that they have carried out on the services that should be applicable to that area to meet the area's needs in social services, housing, education, and so on, they should surely spell out the details of what they require. If they are just and fair, the Government will have done detailed analyses before they impose expenditure limits on a local authority through the rate-capping procedure.
The Government claim that by rate-capping a few limited overspenders—they claim that they are Labour overspenders — they will make significant savings in public expenditure. We and the Government Back Benchers do not believe that that is possible, as is borne out by what has happened up to now under other legislation introduced by the Government to control local 181 government expenditure. A local authority such as Sefton, parts of which I and the hon. Member for Crosby represent, and which is a paragon of underspending virtue, is to lose £1.9 million this year in rate support grant, although the leader of that council is a supporter of the Prime Minister and her Government and claims that rate-capping the profligate authorities will provide more rate support grant in future for Sefton. He does not understand the Government's public expenditure White Paper, or the fact that the Treasury is forcing the Department of the Environment to save £1.5 billion. He does not understand that this legislation will apply to the whole of local government.
In the name of democracy, we ask that Labour-controlled and Conservative-controlled authorities alike, all of which I predict will be rate-capped in future under this Bill, may have the right to be heard and to go to the Secretary of State to bring home to him the consequences of his actions. In that way, he will know exactly what is happening, how the services are being destroyed or cut, and the harm that is being done by this draconian legislation.

§ Mr. Waldegrave
The new clause seeks to provide additional procedures for consultation on aspects of the limitation process. It would seek to provide for a designated authority to make representations at any time to the Secretary of State. However, the authority would be free to do so anyway. If it made representations, it would be the normal practice, now and in the future, for the Secretary of State—or, if not the Secretary of State, one of his Ministers—to reply to those representations.
The hon. Member for Bootle (Mr. Roberts) will agree —this was the structure of his speech—that the sting of the new clause is in its tail. In the latter part he and his hon. Friends are trying to tempt us on to the hook of taking control in detail of the decisions within local authorities. He rather weakened his argument about the dangers that we face by putting the case—it is true and I would not wish to disagree with it — that that is largely the situation now. It has been the case for some time, whenever there have been, under any Government, cuts in local authority spending.
In the old days it was done more by a process of consensus. When Mr. Crosland and others asked for cuts, I have no doubt that the good Tory councils which cut back, because they thought it right in the national interest so to do, blamed Mr. Crosland roundly as they were doing that. I have noticed in my present job that there is a deal of that going on, and I have had representations from Labour authorities making the very point that the hon. Member for Bootle says the Bill will initiate.

§ Mr. Allan Roberts
The point is not that Labour or Conservative local authorities blame the Government of the day for cuts that they impose on them. It is whether the electorate perceives that the Government, rather than the council, are responsible for those cuts and for the rent and rate increases. In the past, Conservative Governments hve been successful in having many of their actions blamed on Labour-controlled councils. The time has arrived when the electorate has seen through that.

§ Mr. Waldegrave
I suppose that it is a question of the skill of the local authority in being able to transfer the 182 blame. I am accepting the hon. Gentleman's argument that there is no difference of principle in terms of what happens at present. We discussed the issue at length in Committee.
Opposition Members have argued that rate limitation necessarily involves the most detailed scrutiny by the Secretary of State of all aspects of an authority's affairs. They have strenuously sought to make a reality of that prediction by trying to compel us to come out with detailed statements about how particular councils should run their affairs.
The line that the Government have taken on this issue, in Committee and elsewhere, is the one to which I urge my hon. Friends to remain supportive. Rate limitation is about controlling the total of rate income and, indirectly, the total of net expenditure. It is not our business to interfere with local priorities or to dictate local policies in detail. That must remain for local decision-taking.
I am happy to accept that it would be unrealistic and wrong to replace local decisions on the local resource allocation by resource allocation from Whitehall. The Bill is not about that but about giving more powers, on which the House has voted for many years, to make effective the capacity of the House to allocate resources to the state sector as a whole.
As the House is, in terms of attendance, down almost to those who were so faithful to these discussions in Committee, I can mention my book, about which I was rightly teased in Committee. I accept that any hon. Member who writes a book should be teased. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Critchley) once said that it was unwise to be seen reading a book in the House and that to write one was the end of any hope of preferment. I am sure that the evidence of the Committee will go to confirm what he said.
The point which I try to make time and again in the book — hon. Members seem to have missed that by teasing me about it—is that local authorities are part of the state. In so far as I wrote a book about the difficulties of controlling the expansion of the state, controlling that part of the leviathan which happens to fall, for historical reasons, to be controlled not by this House but by local authorities, is just as much part of the state as are those matters which are controlled directly from this House.

§ Mr. Straw
Is that what the Minister had in mind in his book when, at page 149, he wrote: Conservative governments must seek to bring back the role of the state within its proper limits and assist in every way the nurture of necessary communities in which alienated individuals can live.

§ Mr. Waldegrave
Absolutely. I am tempted to go on at tedious length about this issue because the high spending local authorities which have knocked out the centres of cities by high local taxation are exactly the aspects that have done so much to destroy communities, not only with their planning policies and buildings, which people now hate to live in, but with their high taxation policies which drive employment away.
It is important to remember that the Bill is not about involving us in the details of the local resource allocation but about giving some reality to overall decisions on what resources are to be taken by the state in the wider sense, including allocations to local authorities. The votes that have taken place for many years in the House about the levels of public expenditure have, in that respect, always been something of a sham, because that part of public 183 expenditure which falls to local authorities to control has always been to some extent a bluff. The control of that is what the Bill is about, not about the detailed allocation of resources or priorities within the services which fall to local authorities.
We shall be asking for reasonable economies. It must be a matter for the local authority concerned to decide whether it wishes to make the necessary savings by greater efficiency or by bringing service spending to a more normal level because, by definition, in the selective scheme we are talking about authorities which are spending much more on services than are other authorities.

§ Mr. Michael Meadowcroft (Leeds, West)
Is the Minister not contradicting himself? Earlier he said that it was not the object of the Bill to encourage detailed scrutiny by the Secretary of State of individual local authorities. Now he is saying that the selective scheme is designed to look at the overspending on services of local authorities. Which is it to be? Is it to be a general spending curtailment or a scrutiny of the services of individual authorities?

§ Mr. Waldegrave
There has been no contradiction. The Secretary of State will select those authorities which, by broad indicators, are spending much more on services than are others so that the totals add up to much more than is spent elsewhere. But it is then up to local people to set the priorities within the limits that are set. In a sense, the fact that the new clause has been tabled — to try to involve us in local decision-taking—only reminds us that the key decisions on priorities will remain to be taken locally under the Bill as drafted.
The expenditure reductions that we shall be seeking will themselves be reasonable. If they are not thought to be reasonable, the authority concerned will be able to make its case in as much detail as it wishes and, if he is convinced, the Secretary of State will be able to re-determine the expenditure level at a higher figure. While, therefore, I understand the political purpose of the new clause, I have little hesitation in urging the House to reject it.