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Local Government Finance

I welcome this opportunity to debate local government finance. I am conscious that we are entering a world of strange language—gearing and damping, floors and ceilings—and the Minister did not disappoint. I was slightly surprised, however, to hear so much about Greece and Italy, Ireland and France. Unless I am very much mistaken, when I last checked, those countries were not part of the local government funding settlement, but I stand to be corrected. Local authorities provide services on which we all rely, and what they do has a huge effect on the quality of life of the citizens we represent and on the neighbourhoods in which they live. They are now having to deal, as every Member knows, with the biggest cut in resources that we have ever seen in our political lifetime. Councils have been forced to absorb a reduction in formula grant of almost 19.3% over the two years of the spending review. The cuts have been front-loaded. What that means, as the Local Government Association has pointed out, is that local government has borne the brunt of the reductions in the spending review rather than the burden being shared equally with other parts of Government. Having heard the Minister's contribution, it seems that he is still living on a completely different planet from the one on which communities and their councils have to exist. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirms, the total cuts to local government spending will outpace those of the public sector as a whole up to 2014-15.