As you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I have long been a strong advocate of the city of Liverpool, and tonight will be no exception. Even though I take issue with the conduct and procedures of Liverpool city council, I wish to place on the record the fact that Liverpool as a city is making tremendous progress in its regeneration, which is due in no small measure to initiatives emanating from this House and the present Government. That is to its credit. I also give credit—[Interruption.]
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but will all hon. Members who are not taking part in the debate please leave the Chamber now, quickly and quietly? We must listen to the debate.
I pay credit to the many local businesses and organisations that have taken advantage of the opportunities presented by Government initiatives and our status as an objective 1 area to reinvent themselves and turn the city's image and substance around over the past 20 years so that it is now a 21st-century city that, to use a cliché, is meeting all the challenges of a modern economy. The House may therefore wish to know why I have taken issue with the city council. I have many reasons for doing so, but I am particularly concerned about the way in which it conducts itself. While it is doing very good work in some areas—no one can take that away from it—it is manifestly failing the people of Liverpool in other areas. I shall give a few examples, focusing on people who most need the city council's help, including the poor, the homeless, council tenants, and voluntary sector organisations that depend on the council's assistance.
There is a litany of mismanagement so that, in local eyes, the city has changed from a city of culture—a role that Liverpool will officially play under the present Administration in 2008—into a city about which the council could not care less. That tendency is particularly marked in the areas that I have the privilege to represent. I wish to put it on the record that two of the most deprived SOAs—super output areas—in the matrix of indices of deprivation produced by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister are in my constituency. The whole constituency is in the top 1 per cent. of combined deprivation indicators, and it relies extremely heavily on council intervention and Government initiatives to ensure that the people there can share in the opportunities enjoyed by many people in Liverpool and on Merseyside as a whole.
The council continues to treat shabbily the people who most need its help. I shall give a few categories of people it ought to target, and pick out one or two recent examples to demonstrate the way in which they have been treated. This week, we learned of the classic case of Mrs. Janet Whalley, a badly disabled lady who dropped off her severely disabled son outside an after-school club—an initiative that the Government are rightly promoting. Because of a technical dispute over her blue-badge entitlement to disabled parking she was hauled before the courts. The magistrates were outraged, and threw the case out, saying that it should never have been brought. Mrs. Whalley was awarded £500 costs. That was not good enough for the council, which sacked her for gross misconduct—behaviour which no one in their right mind would attribute to a fair-minded employer.
I came across the even better example of Nicola Foster, whose case falls into the homeless category. The homeless are always under pressure, but they are under particular pressure in Liverpool because of the city's regeneration, including new build and the Pathfinder project. The city is going through a period of transition, so we need to deal sensitively with cases at the margins or at the extremes that deserve help. Nicola Foster, unbelievably in modern times, has nine children. For two and a half years, she lived in a hostel near Sefton park. The council offered to rehouse the family in a hostel in Inverness. It wanted to deport a father, a mother and nine children to Inverness, because for two and a half years it had failed miserably to fulfil its duty of care towards those children. By the way, one of the children was offered a place at a local school where my wife used to teach, St. Finbar's, but because of the domestic situation the child has not been to school for two years. We should not be surprised at the indifference of Liverpool city council towards the child's schooling.
Another area in which the council abuses the sensible procedures set up by central Government is in the statementing of children with special needs. Each Liverpool MP has a caseload that would stretch from one side of the Chamber to the other concerning people who cannot get a statement of their child's special needs. What makes the situation even more pernicious is that the council argues that there is no demand for special needs places in special schools, and closes down special schools so that it can realise the capital assets. The Government's policy has always been that children with special needs ought to be catered for in a setting appropriate to them. If inclusion is appropriate, that option should be chosen and we would not dissent from it. But if a special needs place in a special school is the appropriate setting, that is what should be offered.
Many of our children are not getting that. I am dealing with the case of the child of a drug addict brought up by the grandmother, who got him into a secondary school. Because of his special needs, the school could not handle him—not that he was a bad kid, but he was hyperactive. That kid is now in a pupil referral unit for two hours a day, so not only is he not getting help from the very people to whom he ought to look for help, but his condition is being worsened daily by their neglect.
I mentioned council tenants when I referred to Nicola Foster's case. Sometimes I despair of a city council that fails lamentably to look after its own stock and fiddles its figures by transferring the stock out and then claiming great success in upgrading the homes in its council stock. Government policies were designed to encourage more tenant involvement. No doubt the Minister would agree that we all want tenants to have—metaphorically, if not literally—a sense of ownership of the changes going on around them. We had a longstanding Liverpool Federation of Council Tenants and Residents Associations, which sent out a letter—I assume to my colleagues, as well as to me—on
"This is a serious decision taken by our tenant members and tenant management board as it considered that tenant participation is currently so gravely undervalued by our city council that it severely impacts upon the wellbeing and functioning of a vibrant, independent tenant federation."
The letter goes on to list the manifold problems that the federation has faced. It continues:
"A strong, vibrant, informed and independent tenants movement is an asset to any city"—
I say amen to that. However, the letter goes on:
"The climate in this city does not foster a spirit of empowerment but relies upon a culture of repeated rhetoric of 'intentions' without ever considering the means by which 'intentions' are merely the first step of the organic process of change".
That is eloquently put. That ought to be the case but, sadly, it is not so under Liverpool city council.
The council has done some good things and there have been some good investments. There have also been some terrible failures, from the millennium centre on Chavasse park to the King's dock project to the Fourth Grace. Everywhere that the dead hand of the Liberal Democrat city council rests itself, one can guarantee that there will be confusion leading to failure. My great fear, which is shared by people in Liverpool, including business leaders, is that that will bring about the stagnation of ongoing projects.
Indeed, only today, a newspaper headline read "Paradise 'Delayed'". It refers to the Paradise street project, which is the biggest of its kind in the country. It is a regeneration scheme into which Grosvenor—no mean operator in its own right—is putting £920 million. However, the man in charge of Grosvenor is now asking, "How can you deal with a council that repeatedly obfuscates and delays?" Those are the sentiments of a developer who has put a massive amount of money into the city.
To show how far the city has come, I say in passing that I recall the Duke of Westminster commenting that he was happy for his daughters to go on a night out in Liverpool because he felt that they were safe there. That is another nail in the coffin of the myths about Liverpool that prevailed for many years. Happily, we have disposed of them. Liverpool is a relatively safe city. It is a good city for business to invest in and it is a prosperous city, which is evolving rapidly. However, the council is acting as a brake on such progress.
That brake is felt most keenly in the areas where the good citizens of Liverpool who are least able to look after themselves could, in the past, turn to the council for succour. I wanted to be objective about the matter and I examined Liverpool city council's document "Improving performance—leading to excellence". It is subtitled "Achievements in 2004/05 against the corporate plan published in June 2004".
I do not want to say that none of the objectives was met. Many of the council's objectives—not mine or the Government's—have been achieved. However, I have been through page after page headed "Well services, safe and sustainable neighbourhoods with optimum local accountability and influence over service management". That is the interface between council services and an efficient, well run council.
The first example reads:
"We did not achieve our target."
The second example states:
"We did not achieve our target."
The third example contains a little bit of spin:
"We have shown significant improvements in delays and narrowly missed our target."
The fourth example reads:
"We did not achieve our target".
The fifth example states:
"We marginally failed our target".
The sixth example also involves spin:
"Although we have significantly improved the actual numbers of carers who received a carer's assessment . . . the improvement has not been as pronounced."
In other words, they failed. The final example reads:
"We have not increased the take-up in the short-term break schemes."
Social services had damning reports on the sort of social provision that they should make as opposed to the provision that they make.
Alone, that might simply be another record of a poor council, whose position should be resolved at the ballot box. The citizens of Liverpool will have the opportunity to turn those people out—as they undoubtedly will—for their ineptitude in many aspects of their alleged competence. However, there is another phenomenon, on which the Minister, I hope, can throw some light.
There was an extraordinary turn of events, involving the publication of a dossier, which the chief executive compiled on the manoeuvrings of the leader of the council and one of his spin doctors to force out the chief executive. It is an extraordinary document. In all my long time in politics, I have never known such an obvious conspiracy to force somebody out. The leader of the council made a de facto admission by reporting to the Standards Board. His actions were completely out of order.
In the past week, the chief executive and the leader of the council have publicly kissed and made up. However, anyone who thinks that that is more than an Elastoplast on a rupture at the top of the council is much mistaken. My concern is not about those two people falling out but about the outcomes for the people and city of Liverpool. How can the matter be resolved? How can we ensure that the city council is operating according to the rules, and according to expectations, not only of the people as citizens, but those that the Government rightly hold of a council?
I am mindful of the fact that, more than 20 years ago—I never thought I would hear myself say this—49 councillors were debarred and surcharged for the notional loss of £106,000. That became something of a cause célèbre at the time. Yet here we have a council wasting money by the bucketload on a daily basis, and whose two leading lights cannot agree on anything in the public arena. This is letting down the people of Liverpool, and I want to find out from the Minister what redress we have, through central Government, to ensure that it stops.
Listening to this sad catalogue of events in Liverpool city council reminds me of the problems that I have with my council in the Vale of Glamorgan, where we are seeing not only a deterioration in services but the inability of the citizens of my constituency to make proper representations to the council. The problem has reached such an extent that hon. Members' correspondence to the chief executive of the Vale of Glamorgan council, containing sensitive information given to them in writing by their constituents, is routinely passed on to local councillors. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is totally unacceptable that such sensitive, personal, confidential information should be divulged in that way?
It is totally unacceptable. However, in Liverpool's case, I would love there to be an ability for issues to be referred on. MPs' inquiries to the Lib Dems in the city of Liverpool go into a veritable black hole, and if they reappear, they do so in transmuted form either in the legal services department or on the outer limits of the chief executive's department. I can guarantee that no one ever gets a straight answer to a straight question.
Will the Minister tell me what, if anything, can be done about this? What powers do Ministers have to ensure that people at the very top of local government do not inhibit what is otherwise a record of success? How, if at all, can Ministers intervene—and are they willing to do so?—to ensure not only that the city council is properly run in an open, transparent and accountable way but that Government moneys on which policies are predicated are being spent for the purposes that they were set out, on a value-for-money basis?
7:32 pm
May I start by congratulating
It is true that the city has the highest concentration of deprivation of any local authority in the country, with 26 of its 33 wards in the worst 10 per cent. nationally. However, regeneration schemes—particularly those involving European objective 1 funding—are helping to revive the economy and to bring a new optimism for the future. That is evident to anyone who has visited the city recently. Tourism, in particular, is now a major industry on Merseyside and has grown by 5 per cent. a year since the mid-1990s. It now supports some 22,000 jobs in the city.
Most recently, in addition to the neighbourhood regeneration funds and other money that central Government have made available, Liverpool's successful European capital of culture bid for 2008 will add further impetus to the regeneration process. Indeed, it is already doing so. It is expected to generate some 14,000 jobs and lever in an additional £200 million in tourism in the run-up to the European capital of culture year. There is therefore a success story in Liverpool, as my hon. Friend rightly said.
In December 2004, the Audit Commission—which is of course independent of Government, and rightly so—awarded a grading of good on its comprehensive performance assessment rating, which was no change from the 2003 rating. The Audit Commission acknowledged, as my hon. Friend has done, that the council had made some improvements, which it identified in education, libraries and the use of resources. Other improvements are expected in those areas, based on the Audit Commission assessment, in the next 12 months.
In other areas, however, such as social care services—which my hon. Friend has highlighted—housing and the environment, the council's performance is much more mixed. A number of underperforming areas remain, such as housing, recycling, highways, supporting people and social care. Investments in services are showing some signs of improved outcomes, however. The Audit Commission's assessment is that the council should be well placed to continue to improve in those areas, in the way it works and in the services that it provides to local people—generally, that backs up the points made by my hon. Friend.
Let me briefly indicate to the House how far Liverpool has to go in its regeneration strategy by examining the floor targets for neighbourhood renewal funding that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister makes available. On education targets—the percentage of pupils achieving five or more GCSEs or GNVQs at grades A to C—Liverpool's most recent figure is 41.4 per cent., whereas the figure for the north-west as a whole is 49.4 per cent. and for the UK overall it is 52.9 per cent. Liverpool is therefore some 10 per cent. behind. If we compare the health floor targets, the life expectancy of the male population of Liverpool is 72.5 years, whereas the national average is 75.9 years. By accident of birth, therefore, the people of Liverpool have a shorter life expectancy from the outset. Those are statistics and real-life facts that we cannot afford to ignore.
The crime figures show, for example, that burglary dwelling offences per 1,000 households in Liverpool in 2003–04 were at around 30, as opposed to the national average of 18.5. Those are the sorts of problems that we are addressing through neighbourhood renewal and regeneration. Perhaps most tellingly, my hon. Friends who represent the city of Liverpool have constantly referred over the last few years to the target of achieving full employment. The 2002–03 overall employment rate in Liverpool was 59.7 per cent., compared with 74.5 per cent. for the UK as a whole. On education, health, crime and employment, Liverpool's performance was below the neighbourhood renewal fund floor targets. The situation is therefore serious, and the Government are right to monitor it, as my hon. Friend has asked us to do.
Let me address directly the question that my hon. Friend has asked me in correspondence and in this debate relating to the reports of the dispute between the council leader and the chief executive of the city council. Two key factors can be considered: either it is an employment matter in which the Government have no jurisdiction and which should be dealt with internally by the council as part of its responsibility for staff management issues, or it is an issue of political ethics and conduct for which the local government Standards Board for England is responsible. It was with such situations in mind that the Government established the board in the first place. As my hon. Friend will know, we are still trying to ensure that it works as effectively as possible. We are working closely with the Graham committee and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister Committee, which has reported on the matter.
I understand my hon. Friend's concern and his desire for Government to be seen to intervene in what is a worrying situation for him, for other Members with an interest in Liverpool and, no doubt, for the people of his city. I must tell him, however, that the Government do not intervene in the affairs of democratically elected councils lightly. The intervention powers that we have are under the best-value regime. They are a weapon of last resort, to be used in the worst cases of performance failure when problems are deep-seated and endemic. As my hon. Friend will know, in the six years for which the powers have been in the statute book, we have used them only twice: in Hackney and, more recently, in Hull. When we do use them, we do so in accordance with a protocol that we have agreed with the Local Government Association.
In the two cases in which the powers were used, there was strong evidence of failure in service quality and governance. Even then, the Government explored a number of options before using their legislative powers. When they use the powers, they must be certain that they have strong evidence to support intervention and that they are behaving reasonably; otherwise, they are at risk of judicial challenge.
The Liverpool case now throws itself into the limelight. As I have said, the Audit Commission has rated the council as good. Although its services are not uniformly excellent—far from it, as I hope my statistics have made clear and as we have heard from my hon. Friend—they have achieved a good rating in some respects, and the Audit Commission's latest statements about its overall direction have been positive. There are currently no performance grounds on which any reasonable Minister could act under the legislation.
That is not to say that we will not be taking a close interest in how Liverpool fares. My officials and their colleagues from the Government office for the north-west have been monitoring the situation to determine what effect, if any, it has had on the council and in the city. In the immediate future, we will keep a close eye on the council's performance on key services and the governance that it offers local people.
There is no doubt that the events that precipitated the debate are worrying. As has been said, they may well damage the council's image—the way that it is seen by its partners and potential investors in Liverpool. Like my hon. Friend, I greatly regret what has happened, but it seems to me that the most sensible thing for the Government to do in the short term is give the key players a chance to sort out the problems. I welcome the appointment of Sir Michael Lyons to facilitate arbitration between the leader and chief executive of the council, but we must watch the situation carefully.
As I have said, our powers of intervention rest on best-value legislation. The Minister can insist on some relatively minor procedures, but the four main powers are to direct the council to take specified action in respect of specified functions, to direct that specified functions be exercised on behalf of the council by the Secretary of State or his nominee, to hold a local inquiry into the way in which a council is carrying out its functions—I think that my hon. Friend referred to that in the correspondence—and to allow the Secretary of State to direct the Audit Commission to carry out a best-value inspection.
As the main issues highlighted recently appear to be related to leadership generally, and to relationships within the council leadership, I doubt at this stage whether a satisfactory case could be made for use of either of the first two powers. The third—
The motion having been made after Seven o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. Deputy Speaker adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Adjourned at sixteen minutes to Eight o'clock.
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