Excellent. I am sure that those rousing words will be followed by action. That might even be the last we hear from the hon. Gentleman today.
I do not want to labour the point, but we should have been able to get through the Bill in less time, notwithstanding the fact that it is an important and, for a private Member’s Bill, quite long Bill. It is considerably longer than the Bill that we will debate next week, although I suspect our consideration of that one will take rather longer.
It is regrettable that this Bill spent so long in Committee, but we know why it did: the Government were filibustering in order to keep the parliamentary boundaries Bill, which is promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), out of Committee. I am not saying that we do not all play these tricks from time to time; I am just saying that we should not start pointing the finger over who is to blame for delaying the Bill, and instead get on with this now.
I want to deal with the point about money. Right at the beginning of our Committee stage, the Minister said, “I hope to tell you before the end of Committee how much money there will be.” The Government gave a welcome commitment to fund the additional costs fully—there will be substantial additional costs on local authorities, and under the new burdens doctrine, the money has to come from central Government—but we waited week after week with bated breath to find out what money there would be. He kept his promise—just—and at the last moment, some money came forward. It was not a negligible sum: about £48 million over two years. However, that amount must be compared with the sensible estimates from individual local authorities and their collective bodies, such as the Local Government Association and London Councils. For example, while £37 million or £38 million has been set aside for the first year of the Bill’s implementation, London Councils estimates that the cost will be about £160 million. There is therefore a massive disparity in the figures.
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The Bill takes us into new territory, and no one really knows what the full cost will be, so the solution alighted upon is to have an early review of whether the amounts allocated for those two years are sufficient and—perhaps more controversially—of the truth of the Government’s assertion that no additional funding will be necessary after two years because the Bill will be self-financing. There is huge scepticism about that.
I disagree with another thing the promoter said in his article. He said that there was no support for our new clauses, but there is total support for them. There is, however, an issue about timing and ensuring that the Bill completes its stages here and in the other place. The scepticism about the financing of the Bill is shared not just by local government, but by the charities that support the Bill.
It is only fair, reasonable and right that local government is properly funded, as the new burdens doctrine says, but the crucial point is that if there is not enough money, the Bill will not work—it will simply be words on a piece of paper. If that is the case, we will not see the necessary sea change in how we address homelessness or, in particular, the extension of duties around prevention and cure, which apply to those in priority need, to single homeless people and everybody else who presents as homeless. If we are sincere about the Bill, that is what we should all want.
New clause 1 would simply set out in the Bill that the review must be held. It provides that, following the Bill’s implementation, we must judge whether there is sufficient money—the Government say there is; everybody else says there is not—for the purposes set out in it. The Minister has raised one or two procedural points about when the Bill’s provisions will take effect and the appropriate time for an review. I am open to debating those matters but, on the principle of the review, I hope to hear him say that it must take place in a reasonable time while money is still available to local authorities, and, in particular, that it will cover not just whether the Bill is succeeding, but whether the money available is sufficient to cover the full costs. I suspect that all Members on both sides of the House would want that, because they will not want their local authorities to be the ones that fail. Against a background of local authorities experiencing
cuts to their budgets of 40% or 50% over the past few years, it would not just be unfair to expect local authorities to cover those substantial costs; it would be impossible for them to do so.
The Minister says that, apart from clause 13, the substantive clauses in the Bill will not take effect until regulations have passed—I appreciate that. Indeed, that is entirely reasonable, given that local authorities will need a substantial period in which to gear up to their new responsibilities, as they will need to recruit and train staff, and to put procedures in place. As is often the case, however, the devil will be in the detail of the guidance. The Minister can speak for himself, but I think that his view is that full implementation could take up to a year.
Clearly, until it is implemented, we do not know what the costs are likely to be. It is a question of what is a reasonable period, and new clause 1 suggests that a reasonable period is between one and two years. I propose that we should go to the end of the two-year period, but that we should also ensure that we are then in a position to establish whether the money has been sufficient, because that is when the money will run out.
There is a slight disconnect between the funding announcement in last week’s written statement, which dealt with the financial years 2017-18 and 2018-19, and what the Minister is now saying, which is that the Bill is unlikely to be implemented until 2018. Either the Government are giving local authorities money upfront, which would be slightly unusual in my experience, or that needs to be corrected. In any event, it is clear that there is only two years’ worth of money, that the money may be insufficient, and that at the end of that two-year period it will run out.