Clause 11 - Use of capital receipts
Local Government Bill
5:00 pm
Mr Paul Goodman (Wycombe, Conservative)
I have a particular inquiry to put to the Minister, which he will perhaps allow me to put in this way. The Minister's leitmotiv has been that one of the main aims of the Bill is to decentralise—to allow local councils more flexibility, more freedom and more discretion. As my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge has pointed out from the Front Bench and the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, has also pointed out, it is impossible to reconcile that objective with clause 11, because the clause appears to represent an attempt to transfer money from well-run councils in the south-east to other councils that are less well run. I note in passing, as my hon. Friend pointed out, that the clause contains no reference to pooling. Subsection (2)(b), a key part of the clause, simply says baldly that provision can be made
''requiring an amount equal to the whole or any part of a capital receipt to be paid to the Secretary of State.''
What is truly significant about the Minister's proposal is that it is clear that many local authorities are willing to meet him more than halfway. A few moments ago, my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) made a valid and powerful point about the obligations that local authorities necessarily have to meet. He argued strongly that housing is only one of their obligations.
The submissions that members of the Committee will have received, and the Minister will have read, reveal that some councils are willing to be bound. For example, the Capital Receipts Group, to which the hon. Member for Guildford has alluded, said that
''Most members of the group''—
of which Wycombe district council is one—
''already ring-fence their housing capital receipts for housing investment and would be prepared to accept a statutory requirement for them to do so''.
The Minister will presumably be aware that Wycombe district council has stated:
''We therefore propose an alternative system where authorities should retain their capital receipts and be given control of their own resources, based on a commitment to deliver.''
It is not as though local authorities, including mine in Wycombe, are not willing to meet him halfway, and I should like him to make it clear to the Committee whether he is willing to meet them.
What possible sense can there be in a proposal that, as far as I can see, would transfer money from, for example, my area in High Wycombe, where it is badly needed for housing for public sector workers on low wages or for poorer people, many of whom are members of particularly poor ethnic-minority groups? I want the Minister to explain why money should be transferred from those relatively deprived groups of people, who are poor albeit that they live in better-off areas, to other groups of people elsewhere in the country, who may either be equally poor, in which case I do not see the element of social justice, or be richer than them.
The point has been well made in Committee by the hon. Members for Guildford and for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas) that not everyone in a relatively well-off area is well off. There are poor people in well-off areas who will be hit particularly hard by the draconian clause. I hope that the Minister can satisfy my hon. Friends and me on the matter.