Ms Marie Rimmer

Life in my constituency is tough for many families. Too many live with the daily consequences of poverty, ill health and insecurity. Many people are vulnerable, and the impact can be soul-destroying. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Anneliese Midgley) for her work at Christmas time. She was the one who really started our campaign, and I pay tribute to her. Healthy life expectancy in Knowsley is 50, and in St Helens, which is most of my constituency, it is 57, for both men and women—it was a shock when I read those figures. The call for significant healthcare support is tremendous, and starts much earlier than in some other places, but in St Helens housing and social care is integrated, which has helped with that increasing demand. Many children do not benefit from the excitement of dance classes, gymnastics, trips out or holidays. Sadly, many are lured into county lines and drug taking. Many of our children need special educational provision, and some wait for a special and unique service. The cost can be enormous, and provision is rare and very often not local. Those children lose out, and their families watch and worry while they wait for the solution to arrive. Revenue support grants are always complex, mysterious and hard to nail down. Added to that, 14 years of austerity did not help. St Helens borough council lost £127 million. We were capped in the poll tax, and we had to put the rates up by 2%—I was the leader of the council at the time. We were one of 21 areas that were capped. We had to deliver over £10 million overnight or we would have been surcharged. We had three months to deliver a new plan. We were very poor in St Helens. Our councils are struggling to meet statutory responsibility in social care and SEND provision, not because of inefficiency in the councils but because the funding bears no resemblance to the actual needs of the people on the ground and the lives that they have to put up with. There are ever-growing numbers of people with complex needs, higher costs and a lack of provision. Two thirds of council funding in St Helens is spent on adult social care and children. We lost £127 million from Government, so we have either £9 million or £11 million left—that is what we have. I have always said that we need a settlement that addresses the real pressures on health and disability, and provides care, attention, safeguarding and protection for the vulnerable, the aged, the abused and children in need. The council gets very little income from the Government now, so money has to be raised from council tax. More and more efficiencies have had to be made, but we could not get more efficient councils than those in Knowsley and St Helens. I go to the council meetings—I have been a councillor at St Helens for 39 years and I praise what I see in Knowsley. Those councils are so efficient and so focused on the people of the area. They are good employers, but they are not focused on the people who work for the councils but on how they can serve and care for local people. Due to the deprivation of our area and the lack of assets that can be sold, which other councils have, we can raise only a fraction of the amount that councils in the south-east, London and the cities can raise. There is very little we can raise, so everything depends on council tax and our ability to be more efficient in new and different ways—what the council manages to do is ingenious. The settlement that we were first presented with, which we consulted on, seemed fair and good, but I have to say that when the provisional announcement was made just before Christmas, I was horrified. Housing had been included in the index of multiple deprivation, but we are not suffering from that deprivation in Knowsley and St Helens. I am not saying that it should not be there, but it should certainly not be there with the weighting that it has. That is where our money went; it went down from the first figure that we were consulted on just like that. St Helens would have been high and dry, but I will not go into the details. I have got the figures on what the impact would be for Knowsley, which are the same figures as those of my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley. I knew that St Helens would be bad, but I could not get the figures. My hon. Friend went off and started the work, and we did what we could to get this going. Although this is called “fair funding”, it is not fair funding, because we are all different. I have listened to what Members said about people living in rural districts, and I have sympathy. We need to have a system that really looks at what costs are the highest and what is needed. No one can criticise the people who have this extra funding now, but it will not be there forever. Following sustained lobbying, we have 90% off our high-needs deficit. That is the deficit that we have on SEND provision. Knowsley’s high-needs deficit is tremendous—far greater than that of St Helens—so that will and does help. What goes on is just wonderful. We will get £14.7 million through the recovery grant over the three years, but that does not resolve the problem, because it is not part of the formula. We will have to commence straight away looking at what we are going to do, because we would have been much worse off than we were already. That is just one council; I know that there will be others like it, so we need to look at that issue. I pay tribute to Ministers for the work that has gone on, as well as local authorities, chambers and finance departments. I also pay tribute to MPs and councillors for the work that they have done. It cannot have been pleasant for them to see what they saw. Having looked at this matter, I know that they have recognised things, but we will need to look again at fair funding in the future. I sincerely thank all those who have been involved in coming to help for some of the worst affected boroughs in the country. I can assure hon. Members that this has not been party political. We do not think like that—I certainly do not, and I know that my hon. Friends the Members for Knowsley and for Bootle (Peter Dowd) do not either. Our Benches are full of former council leaders from our area who have done this for many years. I have been in local government and Parliament for 48 years, so I know what I am talking about—I see what I am talking about—and it is not made up. I will support this measure tonight, but that does not mean an end to the lobbying; we will obviously start again. I am sure that Ministers will listen to what other people have said. Maybe there needs to be flexing here and there, but we need to recognise the needs of each area. We cannot leave them to deprivation and deny their needs.