Rate Limitation (Prescribed Maximum)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:43 pm on 25 February 1985.

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Photo of Mr John Cartwright Mr John Cartwright , Woolwich 8:43, 25 February 1985

I congratulate the hon. Member for Harlow (Mr. Hayes) on an entertaining although not terribly persuasive performance.

It has been an odd debate because we have been trying to fix the rates for 13 individual councils. Like other hon. Members, I have considerable experience of rate fixing. I thought that we had left that behind us when we gave up our seats on local authorities to come into this House.

My recollections of trying to fix a rate for the London borough of Greenwich, when I was its leader over 10 years ago, was that it was an extremely difficult operation. One had to choose between competing claims for very scarce resources, and try to balance the needs of the consumers of the service against the ability of the ratepayers to meet the cost. One was surrounded by masses of information. One cannot complain about that tonight. We have an impossible task, with no information provided to us other than one piece of paper which gives us, in one case in handwritten form, the Secretary of State's decisions as to what the rate limits shall be.

There is a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about the approach that I find singularly unattractive. We are fixing the rates of 13 individual authorities in a sort of conveyor belt, mass production, cheaper-by-the-dozen operation which, with all respect to the hon. Member for Harlow, makes it an absolute pretence to suggest that the House of Commons is exercising any judgment here tonight. We have no information on which to make a balanced judgment.

The hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) reminded us that during the long Committee stage of the Rates Bill we had firm assurances from the Government Front Bench that parliamentary scrutiny would be an effective safeguard against the unreasonable use of the Secretary of State's powers to designate authorities and fix their rates. As we have seen tonight, effective scrutiny is impossible. We have just the one set of figures before us.

The Secretary of State said earlier in the debate that it did not matter how we got the figures; that how they are arrived at is not for the House of Commons to know. The important question is: are they reasonable? With all respect to the Secretary of State, it is important to know how the figures were arrived at. In trying to fix a rate, the elements that go into it are a very important part of the calculation. Are the rate limits reasonable? It is impossible for hon. Members to answer that question. We have not the information to enable us to make that sort of judgment.

I have some information, knowledge and experience of the position in Greenwich, my own local authority, but I know nothing whatever about the situation in the other 12 authorities. I agree with the hon. Member for Peckham (Ms. Harman). It is not my business to fix rates in Sheffield, Southwark, Haringey and other parts of the country. I did not come here to fix rates for other local authorities or, indeed, for my own.

What we are engaged in tonight is not parliamentary scrutiny; it is a rubber-stamping charade. That sort of thing brings Parliament into disrepute. That is ample ground, if there were no other, for voting against the order.

I have some information about the London borough of Greenwich. It came to me in the shape of a rather large tome, running to 300 pages, dealing with the council's spending plans for 1985–86. I thought that the compliments slip at the front was revealing. It came not with the compliments of the chief executive or of the borough treasurer but with the compliments of the campaign manager. That tells us something about who is important in local authorities these days.

The document starts from a position of total unreality. It tells us that this year the council spent an estimated £68 million. We are told that under the Rates Act the council has been given a maximum spending limit for 1985–86 of £66·5 million. I concede, without any question at all, that it would have been difficult for Greenwich, allowing for inflation, to get down from spending in the current financial year to £66·5 million next year.

The statement goes on to say that the draft budget agreed by the policy and resources committee is £78·3 million. So Greenwich is budgeting to spend an extra £10 million—an increase of 15 per cent. in one year. Some of us with experience of local government know that it is not easy to increase spending at that speed. One has the feeling that Greenwich was determined to make a difficult position absolutely impossible by increasing spending to that extraordinary figure.

I understand the reaction that I get from many of my constituents about the council's sense of priorities, because I note that the police adviser and his department will absorb £33,000 next year; the women's department another £39,000; and that the press and public relations department, which provides ever more free newspapers to jam our letter boxes, will absorb £151,000. There is something called the campaign unit. In my days, the political parties ran campaigns, yet Greenwich ratepayers must next year provide £139,000 for campaigns. We all know who will benefit from that sort of campaigning. Grants administration next year—the giving away of the money — will cost £25,000. Grants as a whole are budgeted at £848,000—an increase over the current year of £330,000. Therefore, I find it hard to believe that Greenwich cannot make cuts in spending.

I understand the point made by the council and Labour Members that if all the Socialist candyfloss could be removed it would still not be possible to get down to the rate set by the Government. However, it should be possible for Greenwich not to make matters as difficult as it is by spending on a number of services that ordinary people do not regard as having a high priority in this difficult economic climate.

Greenwich and other Labour authorities are threatening not to levy a rate. Greenwich has a ceremonial meeting on 7 March. I believe that to be a suicidal policy. If the rate is not levied, sooner or later—no doubt sooner—the money will run out and the jobs and the services that we are told the argument is about will be at risk.

If there is no money, people in local authorities cannot be paid and services cannot be provided. Refusing to levy a rate is a recipe for chaos and confusion on a grand scale. Worse than that, it is a gamble — and when Labour Members are honest, they must agree with that. The gamble is that that somehow, magically, the Government will be persuaded to back down because of the threat of confusion and chaos in the rate-capped authorities. That is an extremely dangerous gamble. Those at risk will not be the councillors but the council employees. Their jobs will be on the line because they depend on council services. If councillors want to gamble, let them gamble with their futures — they should not gamble with the futures of others who elected them to look after and administer local services. That is why I regard the decision not to levy a rate as wholly nonsensical. It lets down those who elected the councillors.

It has been argued on the Government Benches that rate capping provides protection for local people. I suspect that that may not he the position. At least some of the rate-capped authorities will be tempted to cut absolutely essential services rather than the Socialist flim-flam and candyfloss. They will cut the essential services for ordinary people and seek to put the blame on the Government. The long list of possible economies that we have heard read out time and again tonight suggest that that will be the tactic. The cuts will hit not the police advisers, the nuclear-free zone co-ordinators and so on, but the home helps and the essential social services. That is why I believe rate capping to be politically inept, constitutionally absurd and a bureaucratic nightmare.