I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) for securing the debate. My constituency covers both the Conservative-controlled East Riding of Yorkshire Council and the Labour-controlled Hull City Council, and the messages coming out of both councils are very similar. This is not fake news. Instead, it is the hard truth and reality of the cuts faced by both councils.
Hull City Council’s social care spend for equates to 60% of its entire budget, and it is rising as a proportion of its total spend by 4% to 5% every year. It told me that it spends 37% of its total budget just on adult social care. It spends 23% of its total budget on children’s services. Yet since 2010 the council’s budget has been reduced by a staggering £126 million. This year it received £5.3 million less than it did the year before. Is it any wonder that it does not have the money to repair the potholes in the roads, or to invest in many other needed services?
Recently we had a situation in which Hull City Council was desperately trying to move money around to fund the rising demand and cost of adult social care and children’s services. One of the things it was looking at having to cut was its peer-to-peer support for breastfeeding mothers. In the end, it was able to find some money, but that means money coming from elsewhere. When I talked to the council about that, it was not because it wanted to take support away from breastfeeding mothers, but because every choice is an impossible choice. Either it takes money away from supporting breastfeeding mothers, or it cannot give it to support homeless projects in the constituency, to repair the play equipment in the parks or to deal with the increasing pothole problem. Every choice the council makes is an impossible choice.
Hull West and Hessle is a wonderful place to live, with great people. I am particularly delighted to see two of my constituents sitting in the Gallery and delighted that they can be here today. We are very proud of where we live, but we would be lying if we said that it did not have some significant problems. It is the third most deprived local authority in the whole country. A report by End Child Poverty has revealed that more than 20,000 children in Hull are living below the poverty line. That is one third of all the children in Hull living in poverty. In East Yorkshire, over 20% of children live in poverty.
As austerity continues to bite, the demand for social care continues to grow and Hull City Council simply does not have the council tax base from which to fund it. Some 68% of properties in Hull are in band A. We would be hard pushed, looking around our surroundings here in Westminster, to find a single property that is anything below band C. The number of people over 65
in Hull is forecast to increase by 6% by 2020, which of course will increase demand, but only 7% of people needing adult social care can self-fund it; everybody else is reliant on the council. Two thirds more residents in Hull require social care compared with the national average.
The picture I am trying to paint for hon. Members is of a city that simply does not have the ability to raise its own money to fund a problem that is greater, and growing more quickly, than in many other parts of the country. Hull City Council will get the lowest amount per head from the social care precept of any Yorkshire and Humber council. It has a very low tax base. If people want to raise the precept by 1%, fine, but in Hull that will raise £2.90 per head, compared with £7.08 per head in the City of London. They simply cannot be compared. Hull City Council is 81% reliant on the revenue grant from Government. It does not have the ability to self-fund, but still, even with all these problems so clearly laid out, it will have to cut another £16 million from its social care budget, or find cuts in all the other budgets.
It angers me that there are Liberal Democrat councillors in Hull criticising the council for making those cuts and for the consequences. I wonder how long their memories are. I wonder whether they remember that they were part of the coalition Government who in 2010 voted through all those cuts. When they stand there and criticise Hull City Council for not being able to repair the parks or the potholes, I wonder whether they could cast their minds back to being the people who took away that money in the first place.
Conservative-controlled East Riding of Yorkshire Council has said that the additional £2 billion for adult social care announced in the 2017 spring Budget was welcome, but said,
“if it is the Government’s wish to continue to safeguard some of the most vulnerable people, this scheme needs more investment and the human cost of failure in such an essential service is huge.”
That is a quote from the Conservative-controlled East Riding of Yorkshire Council. Even that council says that it does not have the funds needed. I know it has already spent all the reserves it has. Where is it going to find the money from in the future? It wants the Government to look at extending the additional £2 billion beyond 2019-20.
Cities such as Hull, with high needs, significant deprivation and a very low tax base, have limited ability to generate income. It is therefore essential that the Government’s future financial settlement calculations recognise and make allowances for those differences, challenges and variations. It is positive that the National Audit Office recommendations seem to be informed by a realistic understanding of the national position facing local authorities. If the recommendations were implemented in full, there would hopefully be some potential improvement.
While councils and their partners are making and continue to make strenuous local efforts to protect statutory services and to cope with the great pressures affecting children’s services and adult services in particular, it is simply the Government who must ensure that the national system is fit for purpose. People in Hull West and Hessle are tired of “make do and mend.” They are tired of tough and impossible choices. As East Riding of Yorkshire Council put it, “Salami slicing from other grant streams is not sustainable.”
We want our roads fixed, we want our parks to have new equipment and I know how much Friends of Pickering Park want their aviary back, but none of that can happen with the year-on-year cuts at the same time as the rising demand. My constituents deserve so much more. There is no justification for the continued underfunding, and the previous Liberal-Tory coalition’s mantra, “We’re all in this together,” just rings empty. It is time to end austerity, implement the National Audit Office’s recommendations and fund our local councils properly.
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