[David Amess in the Chair] — Public Sector Funding

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 9:48 am on 23 March 2011.

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Photo of Tony Baldry Tony Baldry The Second Church Estates Commissioner, The Second Church Estates Commissioner 9:48, 23 March 2011

I think, Mr Amess, that coming in, making an intervention and disappearing is known as doing a Spink, is it not?

It is a great pleasure to follow the very thoughtful speech made by Barbara Keeley. She and I are involved as officers of the all-party group on carers. I think there is no one in this Chamber who does not support the work of volunteers and we would all like to see the maximum amount of volunteering. We all have to accept, however, that we start from a position of having to manage an enormous budget deficit. Each and every day, the Government have to spend £120 million, just on interest, to service the deficit. I did a calculation the other day. I added up all the money that the Government give to my constituency through the local district council, the money it gives in grants to Cherwell district council, Oxfordshire county council, the Oxfordshire primary care trust and Thames Valley police for the whole of Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire. The total equates to just 11 days’ interest on the budget deficit. We all have to put this in some sort of context.

I want to make some general comments about local government. I have come to the conclusion that the way it operates will have to change radically and fundamentally, and I shall give the House examples of that. We have had a system under which we all pay our taxes, the taxes go to the Treasury, the Treasury allocates money to local government, and local governments, from their largesse, allocate money to voluntary groups in their area, as they see fit. Voluntary groups have very much been rentiers, dependent on the largesse of local government and what it has chosen to give them. That needs to change considerably.

First, there needs to be a commitment by local government to allow much greater community scrutiny. May I give the House an example of why that is the case? On Saturday, I met with campaigners in Deddington in my constituency who want to retain their library. As we discussed the situation, it became apparent that we have in Oxfordshire a public library service, but also a schools library service, which is operated completely separately. That prompts the question, why do we need two services? What happens with back office costs? As we discussed the matter further and began talking about the mobile library, we realised that it was going to villages to which, at the same time, the GP surgery—in the village that has the library—sends transport to collect people to come into the surgery.

As the discussion continued, it struck me that, under that system, the risk is that the greatest cuts will be made at the front end—that is, at the service end—yet no one has had an opportunity to understand the full central costs of running the services. The local authority has not been subjected to complete scrutiny so that people may make proper value judgments about whether it is ensuring that any spending reductions it has to make are fairly distributed between it and the services that it might hitherto have supported.

There is a danger that local authorities will simply retrench to their statutory obligations and duties, and say, “If we don’t have a statutory duty to do this, we won’t do it.” However, as we all know, the reality is that, for a long time, part of the fabric of society has been local authorities funding all sorts of organisations and operations that are not necessarily part of their statutory obligations.

There needs to be a new obligation on local authorities to subject themselves to much greater community scrutiny, and that would happen in part if they had to put all their expenditure online and be much more transparent about how they spend their money. Transparency is one thing, but we also need to ensure that they subject themselves to much greater scrutiny so that people can ask questions about how money is spent.