Localism Bill

I shall heed your words, Mr Deputy Speaker. I must tell the Secretary of State that I really welcome this Bill, which has been a long time coming. I listened to the shadow Secretary of State, and I must say that she has had a convenient memory loss—about 13 years of it. She must recall that the major part of this Bill results from what her Government did to local government from 1997—they smothered it. Under her Government local authorities suffered: a constant flow of directives; a flowing river of statutory requirements; and expensive and time-consuming audits that looked at processes, rather than outcomes. Local authorities' staffing levels increased, but the jobs were non-jobs or non-productive jobs created merely to meet the heavy strictures of the Labour Government. Those all added to costs; they did not add to service provision. Related to that was the cynical manipulation of grant funding, as grant was moved from London and the south-east to Labour areas in the north. As I said to the shadow Secretary of State on a previous occasion, in a third big change the local grant assessment meant that Surrey lost £36 million year on year. The shadow Secretary of State said in response that the grant had risen year on year under Labour. She was right, but that was the national grant, not the grants that were subject to the selective manoeuvring up and down the country. In addition, the grant percentage increase for many local authorities had a very low base, particularly in London and the south-east. Increases in council tax or grant were generally swallowed by local authorities' being required to meet Government demands—demands based on centralised policies, not on local needs and not on needs as seen by locally elected councillors. I am delighted that the Bill, once enacted, will go a long way towards freeing councils to think and act for themselves according to local needs. I remind those who were Communities and Local Government Ministers in the last Government of the string of reports from the Select Committee advising and almost pleading with the Labour Government to remove layers of bureaucracy, hundreds upon hundreds of targets and the control of minutiae. Those Ministers paid homage to the reports but did nothing.