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Local and Regional Government

: That is the reported figure. Perhaps the Minister will give the new burdens figure when he winds up; we look to having the whole of that incorporated into the local government settlement. That settlement will be difficult not only because of council tax, but because we will be hammered in Oxfordshire on the supporting people budget. It is wholly unsatisfactory that councils should regularly have to plead for one-off cash handouts, rather than having a stable and predictable source of income from the Government. What is also particularly distressing about the ever-increasing hikes in the council tax bill—which are, of course, a very effective stealth tax because they result from the Government's shifting of burdens from central Government to local government without proper funding—is that the people who get really hammered are those on fixed incomes such as pensioners. Council tax has risen and continues to rise by far more than prices and the state pension rise. We have seen the council tax go up by nearly three times the inflation rate. There is another particularly stupid aspect of the proposals for reorganising, merging or scrapping Oxfordshire county council or other tiers of local government. In its reports, the Audit Commission shows that in the south of the country, for example, local authorities—many of which are Conservative-controlled—are better than any other part of the public sector in delivering efficiency savings and are persistently among the best performers in the Audit Commission league tables. If parts of central Government were as effective as local authorities such as Oxfordshire county council and Cherwell district council at delivering efficiency savings and doing more for less, public finances would be a lot better and there would not be that sizeable black hole in the Government's finances. The whole debate about the reorganisation of local government is a deliberate distraction on the part of the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministers. They want to attract attention away from the substantial hikes in council tax that we will see as a consequence of this year's local government settlement, which always comes up just before Christmas in the hope that the Christmas break will also somehow distract people's attention. They want to distract people's attention also from the devastating local government results that will occur quite rightly next May.