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Local Government Finance

Let me try to bring the hon. Gentleman forward a little in his thinking. Manchester would love to have done that. Manchester has not made compulsory redundancies—possibly it is true to say—in my lifetime. Manchester is now having to do that because the pace of the cuts that his Secretary of State is making is so rapid that it has no choice. For an authority such as Manchester, 25% of the budget cannot be taken out of the pot without that resulting in compulsory redundancies.