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Local Government Finance

I invite the Secretary of State to come to my constituency any day of his choosing. We will walk around and talk to local people, and we will ask them about the record of local government under a Labour Government and under previous Conservative Governments. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles said, when the Labour Government came into power in 1997, Manchester had seen services consistently destroyed. They were fragile and vulnerable. Under a Labour Government there was an improvement in standards in education, health—a much more difficult task—housing and crime and disorder. All those improvements strengthened our communities and put the cement back into our society. That Secretary of State, who chunters away to his friends, is putting all that at risk and he is doing so deliberately. There was choice. There was choice in the Budget process that he lost with his friends in Cabinet. There was choice when he decided to put money into local authorities such as Somerset, and not to put money into local authorities such as Manchester. That is a particularly cruel cycle of choice and a cruel deception. The Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box earlier today and told the House that he was guaranteeing that Sure Start centres would continue to operate. Let us talk about the reality in a city such as Manchester, which is having to cut children's services by some 25%. It has had to say that it will give up control of those Sure Start centres, and it hopes that the running of them will be taken over by the voluntary sector or possibly schools. There is no guarantee for the young people in Manchester that the Sure Start centres, which are praised by everyone on the Government Benches, will continue to operate. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith says the political choice of the Tory council is to cut the Sure Start centres. In Manchester, a Labour council has to put those Sure Start centres at risk because of the actions of the Secretary of State and his friends.