Orders of the Day — Community Charge

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 5:18 pm on 12 July 1990.

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Photo of Mr Stanley Crowther Mr Stanley Crowther , Rotherham 5:18, 12 July 1990

Rotherham metropolitan borough council is not a high-spending authority, but even if it were I should be here to defend it because I believe profoundly in the right of every elected authority to determine the level of expenditure required to meet the needs of the people whom it represents and to answer for that decision to the electorate, not to the Secretary of State. My constituents did not elect the Secretary of State to control the affairs of Rotherham council. They elected councillors whom they can remove at the next election if they do not perform their functions satifactorily.

The Secretary of State said yesterday that Parliament creates local authorities, but it is fair to remind him that democracy in this country began at a local level, because there was democratic local government, admittedly in a primitive form, centuries before the first Parliament was established in Britain. We should keep that in mind.

Even in the exercise of the draconian powers that his misguided hon. Friends have given him, the Secretary of State has managed to get it wrong according to the standards that he claims to have set himself. He alleges that the order is intended to protect charge payers against high-spending authorities. That is manifest nonsense. Rotherham borough council set a poll tax of £334, far below the national average. That was far below the level set by many Conservative authorities and my reaction was that it was too low and would not raise enough money to provide the services that were needed. Nevertheless, I thought, "It's the council's decision; it's not for me to decide and not for the Secretary of State to decide." Far from being a profligate authority, Rotherham borough council—and I say this without wishing to offend—is a tight-fisted authority from time to time, partly because it has been robbed of millions of pounds over the past 10 years by successive reductions in the Government grant.

When I have a 97-year-old woman constituent who cannot get a home help to help out with the cleaning, I do not want any Conservative Member telling me that my authority spends too much money. That is a hopelessly ridiculous position and I hope that the Secretary of State will make an effort to find a proper explanation for his crazy decision.

I do not intend to repeat the statistical analysis that my hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth (Mr. Hardy) gave to the House in his excellent speech last night. However, it needs to be emphasised that the so-called "standard" spending assessment is absolute nonsense. It is an absurdity. It is even worse than the old grant-related expenditure system—which was pretty awful—but at least the GRE system included unemployment as an indicator of social deprivation. The SSA does not, which is absurd.

When a system arrives at the conclusion that there is less social deprivation in Rotherham than there is in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Cheltenham, in Kent, in Hampshire or in the Isle of Wight, we do not need to go further to demonstrate the nonsense of the system. In the case of Rotherham borough council, the changeover from GRE to SSA has made a difference of £5.3 million. which is equivalent to £26 per head on the poll tax.

Can the Secretary of State explain how the same Government can decide that this year, my authority needed to spend £5.3 million less than they decided that it needed to spend last year? How on earth can that be explained? That is how the Secretary of State has introduced his capping exercise. If that difference of £5.3 million had not been made, the council would have escaped his net. I should like a proper explanation of that at some stage. I do not suppose that I shall get it, but it is fair to ask for it.

The service that will suffer most is, necessarily, education because it is the service that takes the most money. I wrote to the Secretary of State for Education and Science some time back and asked whether he could personally justify the capping of Rotherham when the education authority covering his constituency spends more per pupil than mine, yet his authority has not been capped. My constituents' children will suffer under this arrangement, but the children in the constituency of the Secretary of State for Education and Science will not. I asked for a personal explanation, but he did not bother to write to me. He got the Minister of State to write a nonsense letter, which did not help.

The same Secretary of State is prepared to use the taxpayers' money under his assisted places scheme to send youngsters to private schools, such as St. Peter's school in York, where the fee is £4,872. My authority already spends less than £1,900 per pupil on secondary education and the Government tell me that it must cut that amount. How on earth can that be justified? It is disgraceful that the children of my constituents will have their educational resources reduced below the level that the parents' representatives on the council decided was necessary to meet the proper educational standard. It is absolutely wrong that Secretaries of State should have the power to override a decision made by the elected representatives. That is a gross abuse of power by a power-mad Government. Any Conservative Member who has a real regard for democracy must vote against the orders.