I was delighted by the
Dr Who Christmas episode.
The Sontaran reminded me of Eric Pickles, the Secretary of
State for Communities and Local Government. I’m not referring to his appearance
– it’s the way he responds to questions.
A Sontaran's weak
spot is the "probic vent"
at the back of the neck, through which they draw nutrition. Mr Pickles’s
behaviour seems to be driven by a similar weak spot - he doesn’t want facts to
get in the way of the story. However, no-one should under-estimate how he can
whip up the tabloid media to believe that, if only council officers travelled 2nd
class on the train, there would be no need for any service cuts.
When the Secretary of State, and his Ministers, appeared in
front of the CLG Select Committee recently, I asked him ‘How many [councils] actually are moving back from an alternate weekly
collection of general household refuse to a weekly collection?’
He took us on a long journey through his views on the issue
without answering the question. It took a series of supplementaries before we
got to the answer. From a fund of £250m, removed from the revenue support grant
for all authorities, just one council is moving back from alternate collection to the
weekly collection of general household refuse.
So, not only is there a complete failure in his stated policy objective – ‘it’s everyone’s human right to have their
bin collected weekly’ - but it will be at the expense of local services
which are valued much higher.
When I asked him whether he joined ‘with your Permanent Secretary in being what the Local Government
Chronicle called a "doom denier"?’, his response was to suggest
that ‘given that you are quoting
from the Local
Government Chronicle, that is almost like quoting from a Labour
press release and that
the ‘graph of doom’ was a ‘Malthusian fantasy.’
All good
knock-about stuff – conveniently ignoring the fact that ‘doom-denier’ was coined by a Liberal Democrat and the ‘graph of gloom’ came from a Conservative
London Borough. More worrying, of course, was his view that his ‘modest changes’ will have little impact
upon local government services and local communities.
Perhaps it’s that
disregard for the facts which allowed him to assert, in his statement on the
Local Government Settlement, that ‘councils’
spending power would be cut by 1.7%’ * when the reality is that council
funding will be cut 4% next year ands 9% in 2014/15, and that local government
will be cut by more than 33% in the current spending review compared to the promised
28%.
Unfortunately, Mr Pickles’ approach has also been adopted by
his Ministers. Last year, the then Minister of Housing, Grant Shapps, told us
that this government should be judged by whether it achieved building 200,000+
homes a year.
As the number of new housing starts has fallen again, the
new Housing Minister, Mark Prisk, simply recast the 200,000+ homes as an
aspiration, saying that ‘we have no
intention of having the old Soviet-style central targets.’
I’m now totally
lost as to whether this government is in favour of targets or not, and I rather
suspect that it doesn’t know either.
Targets still appear in different ways. On homelessness, David
Cameron had said "I think that it is simply a disgrace that in the
fifth-biggest economy in the world that we have people homeless, people
sleeping on the streets, sofa-surfers, people in hospitals" in 2008.
But, homelessness has risen relentlessly since 2010.
Statutory homelessness, where families without a roof over their head are
accepted by their local council as homeless, has risen by nearly a third since
the general election. There are now more than 75,000 children living in
temporary accommodation. There has been a near 200% increase in the number of
families in bed and breakfast accommodation for more than 6 weeks.
Yet when asked the direct question ‘can you assure the Committee that these
figures are going to start to fall’, Mr Pickles told us that ‘Nobody in modern-day Britain should sleep
on the roads or under the arches, and nobody should find themselves exploited
in someone’s back-garden potting shed’.
I agree. But I’ve no more confidence that
homelessness will fall than I have in promises to ensure that everyone will
have their bin collected weekly or that we will see 200,000 homes a year being
built by 2015.
The Sontarans are with us.
This article first
appeared in the Local Government Chronicle at:
* Since I wrote the article, it has been confirmed that the
‘average 1.7% cut in councils’ spending
power in 2013/14’ asserted by Eric Pickles, both in Parliament and in the
media, considerably understates the cuts because the Department for Communities
and Local Government had double-counted some elements of the Local Government
Financial Settlement.
