Local Spending Reports

Part of Opposition Day — [20th Allotted Day] – in the House of Commons at 1:49 pm on 28 October 2009.

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Photo of John Denham John Denham The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government 1:49, 28 October 2009

If the right hon. Gentleman had waited for just a moment longer, he would have heard me explain that these are serious and practical issues that are worthy of a proper debate. Given the experience of right hon. and hon. Members who will speak later, I hope that they will also address them.

First, there is the question of how we characterise the spending that takes place physically in one area but serves a much wider area. Universities and prisons would be two contrasting examples. In one sense, leaving them out of the picture entirely is unsatisfactory, but pretending that the universities of Southampton and Southampton Solent are properly to be included only in Southampton's local spending report would be equally unsatisfactory. Some very significant areas of public spending do not fit neatly into local spending reports. It would be useful to hear in our debate-I am genuinely interested in this point-whether the mood of the House is that it would be better for this to appear as expenditure on two major universities in Southampton's spending report and nowhere else in the country, or whether it should be shared.

The hon. Member for Meriden referred several times to quangos. One quango that has had its expenditure doubled in real terms under this Government is the Higher Education Funding Council; I used to be responsible for it. I was once, for my sins, a member of Hampshire county council's education committee in the 1980s when the then Portsmouth polytechnic and the Southampton institute of higher education were funded by local government. One of the best things that the previous Conservative Government ever did in education policy was to move those significant higher education institutions out of local government control in order to fund them centrally. We now have two significant additional universities in Hampshire that did not exist then, and they are much more successful because of the autonomy that they have gained.

I make that point because an argument running through this debate is that quango expenditure is by nature illegitimate, funds nothing of any great value and should simply be included in local public spending reports. [Interruption.] That was the gist of what the hon. Member for Meriden had to say. I do not accept that. When people outside hear the Conservative party attacking quangos in this way- [Interruption.] One of the reasons why the amount of money spent has gone up is because the Government have invested a lot extra in areas such as higher education. Of course the expenditure has gone up, but it is not a bad thing; this is what enables our constituents' children to go to university and benefit from it. I raise this as a serious issue for discussion: why should Winchester prison, or Southampton and Southampton Solent universities, for example, feature in a local spending report? I shall come on to some other examples in a few moments.