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Public Accounts

The purpose of my rather protracted walk through these statistics is to come to the issue of public service allocation, and public policy issues such as housing. We have seen a tripling of the number of people on the housing allocation and transfer lists as the population has expanded, which puts huge pressures on public services and deserves an adequate public policy response. The far-right activity to which I referred is one of the barometers of the pressures that are building up, and housing is one of the critical issues in that regard, as are health inequalities. Every issue relating to public policy investment needs an adequate public response, in order to make sense of the dynamic and extraordinary movements of population 10 miles down the road. That is why I want to come back to the workings of the Public Accounts Committee. The Chairman has talked about seven issues relating to the relative merits of public sector activity. I would like the Committee to add another. I would like it to develop an adequate analysis of the relative ability of the state to deal with the demography at work in our urban communities that is creating such pressure points in urban areas of Britain. My urban community is extraordinary, because of the sheer scale of the population movement into it and the qualitative changes within it. As I said earlier, the epiphenomenon of the far right is materially grounded in such dynamics. I want to return to some of the issues of public policy-making that lie behind that. I know that my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary is interested in the subject. Indeed, next week he will visit my constituency to examine some of those issues. There is a collision between a long-term legacy of poorly performing public services and poverty, and the extraordinary change that has created the scene on which the far right is operating. Some of its activities are grounded in issues of distribution that are geared by that extraordinary movement of people. The situation puts enormous pressures on the state, both nationally and locally. The Government have an incremental strategy to refinance public services; the question is, can they tread water, let alone tackle a moving target in the form of growing populations that are not captured in the headline head count on which public policy is based? All the change has occurred since the last census, and the population figures on which public policy is based assume that the population is falling. None of that includes unauthorised migrant workers. According to some estimates, this city has a population of 7.4 million and could contain 100,000 extra people somewhere, over and above the formal head count. I realise that all that raises huge issues of public policy, but I ask the Chairman and the Committee to bear it in mind when considering their future programme.