Marie Goldman

As we now know, local government is being reorganised, and the Labour Government have cancelled local elections while affected councils work out how on earth they will reorganise themselves. Like many residents in these areas, I would have hoped that that plan would have been in place before the elections were cancelled; many issues are very much up in the air, and the public deserve to know what they are in for. In Woking, for example, successive Conservative administrations at the council racked up £2 billion of debt with absolutely no plan for how to pay it off. In Greater Essex, Conservative-run Thurrock ran up debts of around £1.5 billion largely due to investments in a solar farm that did not exist. With both Essex and Surrey now on the fast track for local government reorganisation, what will happen to those debts? Last week, the Minister for Local Government and English Devolution, the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon), wrote a letter to all the leaders of the two-tier councils and unitary authorities in Essex, in which he said: “there is no proposal for council debt to be addressed centrally or written off as part of reorganisation…proposals should reflect the extent to which the implications of this can be managed locally.” Will the Leader of the House ask the Minister to come forward with a statement to confirm that what he really means is that residents across places such as Essex and Surrey will be forced to pay for the incompetence of previous Tory administrations of other councils, and that they are likely to see reduced services and higher council tax bills simply because this Labour Government are determined to press ahead with local government reorganisation but not prepared to offer any financial support to alleviate that?