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Bob Neill
Until recently I’d never heard of Bob Neill. He turned out to be the author of a recent piece in the Guardian which responded to an earlier article by Polly Toynbee – ‘The poll tax is back from the dead’ – in which, with customary precision, she deconstructed the coalition government’s local government finance bill coming into effect from next April.
In fact Bob Neill is a Conservative MP, and the local government minister. His response to the Toynbee critique reveals just out of touch with economic reality the government has become, and how linguistic vagueness and obscurity replace any form of convincing answers to serious criticism.
Inevitably Mr Neill begins by repeating the tired old coalition mantra that it’s all the fault of the previous government. Under Labour ‘council tax benefit bills doubled, fostering a culture of welfare dependency, and public debt spiralled out of control’. Is it not possible that benefit bills ‘doubled’ (whatever that means) because there were more people genuinely in need?
In any event, we are told the new government was formed with three aims: getting the public finances ‘under control again’ (what does that ‘again’ refer to? the Major government?); ‘giving people more power’ (which people? what power?); ‘and creating new conditions for growth’. Choosing somehow to shut his eyes to the fact of the double-dip recession, this government minister insists that the new local government finance bill achieves all three of these aims.
Polly Toynbee drew attention to the fact that from next April the benefits budget handed over to local authorities has been cut by 10%. Mr Neill cannot deny this but, needless to say, blames the need for the cut on the previous government. As he puts it, ‘we’ve had to ask councils to make a small 10% saving when they take charge’. His ‘small 10% saving’ will of course strike beneficiaries as a ‘huge 10% cut’.
Ms Toynbee had also made the point that under the new legislation, local councils will have to decide who is ‘vulnerable’ – in need of benefits – and that as a result in areas where there are a higher percentage of pensioners and other ‘vulnerables’, the actual cuts in benefits could rise as high as 30%. Mr Neill fails to answer this specific criticism, simply insisting that because benefits will now be administered locally, they will automatically be allocated more fairly.
‘We know’, writes the minister, that ‘councils are much better at finding efficiency savings than Whitehall’. The use of ‘we’ here is typically deceptive. It tries to transform political rhetoric into a universal truth. And a similar ideological bias characterises the rest of his attempt to persuade us that local councils will have no trouble finding the necessary money. That money is ‘available from £60bn spent on procurement’ – who knows what this actually means, but if savings are to be made presumably something – local services perhaps – will no longer be ‘procured’ – or from ‘the £2bn lost to fraud’. So local authorities are going to have to develop, and pay for, the legal expertise to outwit the same kind of fraudsters whom HMRC finds it so difficult to prosecute. Or, suggests Mr Neill, from ‘even the £10bn kept as reserves’, which sounds fine until one wonders what happens when reserves are exhausted.
Mr Neill ends by insisting that the local government finance bill will ‘restore the confidence of hardworking taxpayers in the council tax support system’. (Only lazy taxpayers can feel differently!) And there follows a linguistically tired and all too familiar list of the government’s ideological clichés: the new order will make the tax support system ‘a fairer one, a local-run (sic) one, and a more affordable one – one where residents get local help to find employment and where work pays’.
Next April and thereafter we shall see whether Polly Toynbee’s criticism or Mr Neill’s defence is the more accurate. What is most striking about that defence is its emphasis on the benefits of the new system to taxpayers. One wonders whether that is because for the current recipients of benefits there will be none?
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University
