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Local Government Finance

It must have been an incredible experience to stand at this Dispatch Box for the local government finance settlement in any of the past few years and announce on a whim yet more money being piled up and sent around the country in various directions. Unfortunately, we do not live in that kind of world today, and the sad thing is that we did not live in that kind of world even then. The previous Government thought that they had money to spend, but the truth was that it had long since been spent. A year ago, all they were doing was standing here and spending money that had never been raised, that was not available and that would actually have to come from the children of every Member of the House and of all our constituents for many years to come. At the election, people had a choice, and their decision was to elect a Government who were primarily going to get on with cutting the deficit. Today, however, there has been not a word of apology from the Opposition for getting us into that enormous financial mess that meant that this country had the highest deficit of any country in the western world—of any OECD top 20 country. Do they recognise that as a fact? Do they understand where things went wrong? Are they here today to apologise and to show that they are going to set a new path? Absolutely not, because as we saw at lunchtime the policy vacuum on the Opposition Benches is quite literally a booklet with empty blank pages inside. There has been no response and no sense of where those cuts would fall. The Opposition do say that there would be some cuts; it is just that we are not allowed to know where they would fall. The Opposition accept that local government spends a quarter of all government money, but it seems that none of those cuts would be in any way painful under their budget, which, they say, would halve the deficit over this Parliament. Halving the deficit, however, is not enough. I believe there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this country's accounts work. Indeed, perhaps that was the problem over 13 years: the previous Government did not understand that, if we only halve the deficit, we will still pile up debt. The figure of £44 billion, which we are currently spending at record interest rates just on repaying the interest alone, would have gone up to £70 billion and more, yet the Opposition have not a single answer—not a single penny—to offer up to this debate. Therefore, their contribution has been all but pointless.