Business of the House

Part of Civil Disturbances – in the House of Commons at 11:30 pm on 16 July 1981.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr Michael Heseltine Mr Michael Heseltine Secretary of State for Environment 11:30, 16 July 1981

This has been a long debate and, I would say, one of the most remarkable debates that I have ever sat through in this place. It has achieved as high a degree of unanimity and lack of party political points as I can remember. Some right hon. and hon. Members opposite who are no longer in their places have made some of the most remarkable speeches that I can recall hearing in this Chamber.

Needless to say, I had given thought to what the right hon. Member for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman) might say. Sadly, I find that I judged rightly. It would have been helpful if he had been able to continue with the tenor of the debate which had prevailed until he spoke. But in the light of his speech I have no choice but to spend a minute or two with some figures which I brought with me because I thought it likely that he would press me.

I had not intended to use those figures, because all that is achieved is to confuse people with statistics which they will not remember and which the House has been given many times before. The generalisation that I want to put to the House—and this is the fact—is that this country, across a wide range of its provision, has consumed wildly beyond its productive capacity. We have had to pay for that in a number of ways.

We have had to pay for it, first, by allowing the investment levels in British industry to be lower than they ought to have been because we did not allow industry to make the profits that were necessary. When it came to public investment and public consumption in local authorities, we watched the relentless appetites of local government for larger expenditure programmes grow without let or hindrance over a period of some 25 years from the mid-1950s up to the present day.

When the country was faced with the economic traumas of the early 1970s we as a nation, unlike almost any other Western country, quite failed to face up to the fact that we could no longer go on consuming at the levels we had before the oil price increases.

But the Labour Government allowed local government to increase its consumption, and they paid for it in two ways—by massive increases in Government borrowing, with all the devasting effects that that had on the ability of the private sector to compete, and by halving the local authority capital programmes. This is a very important thing for the House to understand in coming to grips with the problems of the inner cities.

It is perfectly true that the local authorities in those inner cities employ more people probably than at any time in their history. But their investment programmes, the things that speaker after speaker in the debate, until the right hon. Member for Ardwick got going, has been arguing about and pleading for, were slaughtered to pay for the extra jobs that were being created in the public provisions of local government.

I will give one or two figures and then go on to what I wanted to say. I will show what has happened under this Government also, so that we shall get the whole picture, with no selectivity or anything of that sort. I will show the nature of the awfulness of the crisis that faces our economy.

Let us take the point I was making about revenue expenditure and quote the example of Liverpool, which, after all, as anyone would agree, has as acute a set of problems as any city in this country. In 1974–75, the figure for revenue expenditure at constant November 1980 prices was £214 million. By 1978–79—the last year of the Labour Government—it had gone down to £202 million.

In the first year of this Government, the figure went up to £207 million, and the revised budget for 1980–81 is £207 million. By no stretch of the imagination can that be called a decimation of local government services, because the figure is higher than it was in the last year of the Labour Government and it is only £7 million less than it was in 1974–75. Broadly speaking, in the nature of things, it is within a percentage point or two of the highest figure, which was in 1974–75.

Let us consider Liverpool's capital programmes—the matters about which hon. Members have spoken in the debate. What happened under the Labour Government? In 1974–75 the figure was £128 million. By the time that they were about to go out of office, that figure had become £67 million.

I do not understand how the right hon. Member for Ardwick, in debate after debate, can come back to the House and accuse me of doing something rather special and different. He either did not know what was happening when he was in office, or he is misleading the House and trying to pretend that something has changed since he left office.