Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve with you chairing, Mrs Harris. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris) on securing this hugely important debate. This is an important subject to talk about, and there have been really good contributions from multiple Members. I declare an interest in Northumberland, as it is where I got married, in Wooler near Rothbury, which has already been mentioned. I have a great appreciation for Northumberland as a county. If I am not in the constituencies of the hon. Members for Hexham or for North Northumberland (David Smith) in the summer, I am normally in the constituency of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), so they are all places for which I have a lot of love.
I will recap the story a little. Last year, we announced an extra £500 million of funding for local government for adult and children’s social care, particularly to reduce the pressure on other areas of children’s services, such as home-to-school transport. It was part of our wider strategy for children’s social care reform and allocated to things such as expanding family help, targeted early intervention and all those things. It was part of a wider settlement for local government last year, which was another above-inflation settlement. Local government absolutely was squeezed in the coalition years, when we were clearing up the large deficit after the financial crisis, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has pointed out, but funding per person in 2024-25 is set to be 10% higher in real terms per person than in 2019-20, with bigger increases for the most deprived councils. It is worth recognising that what happened over the last Parliament is not the same as what happened in the period 2010-2015, when there were real-terms increases per person for local government.
I mention that because the local government financial settlement for next year is now looming; I guess that we should expect it some time in the next month. Perhaps the Minister will tell us when it is coming. I have a couple of specific questions that I hope she will be able to answer, as they are relevant to this debate. What will the total cost to local government be of the national insurance increase announced in the Budget? What will the cost of the national insurance increase be specifically to home school transport? Will local authorities be compensated for those costs?
We know that one of the recurring issues with the national insurance increase is who will be compensated. Public services that are not part of the public sector are not included in the protection. For example, GPs are up in arms about the enormous bills that they all face, and there are similar issues for nurseries, which are extremely concerned. The university sector has already learned that the entirety of the increase paid for by the breaking of the tuition fees promise will pay for the breaking of the promise on national insurance, so one broken promise will pay for another. All the gains that it thought it was going to get from the tuition fees increase are being entirely wiped out and eaten up by the cost of the national insurance increase, so real-terms funding for universities will go down. Those issues very much apply to home-to-school transport, a public service provided by people outside the public sector. Will the Minister tell us whether they will be fully compensated for that? I hope she will be able to give us that assurance.
We have touched on some of the wider issues in which this issue is situated. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale has mentioned this, but I was really sad to see the end of the “get around for £2” scheme, which we introduced and extended to the end of 2024. I know from my own community that it has particularly benefited people in rural areas, so I am sad to see that it has gone and there is effectively a 50% increase in the cost of a lot of journeys on buses. That is a real shame, because I felt we were making progress on buses. I was involved in the Bus Services Act 2017, which gave mayoral combined authorities the power to introduce into other areas of the country the kind of franchising that London has enjoyed for a long time.
It was sad to see the scrapping of the dualling of the A1 through Northumberland. Land and houses had been bought up to allow for the work, which makes it even worse. I was astonished to see that in the Budget, although there was lots of capital for other things, including the different things that the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Ed Miliband) wants to do on net zero, there was an overall reduction in capital transport spending. I was really surprised by that. I do not really understand what the logic was.