Speeches by Davies.

“I am grateful to close this debate on behalf of His Majesty’s Official Opposition. Let me start by thanking all those who contributed and from all sides of the House, but particularly my right hon. and hon. Friends, who have highlighted so clearly the devastating impact that job losses and business closures have on fam…”

“Sacha Lord, Labour’s former night-time economy adviser, says that it is tougher for the hospitality industry today than it was even during the pandemic, but the Chancellor is ignoring his advice and pushing ahead with a cocktail of costs that the Night Time Industries Association has called a death sentence for our pub…”

“It is a great pleasure to be here, Mrs Harris. This is a relatively straightforward instrument, and I am grateful to the Minister for setting out its detail. Tackling the tax gap is critical, and I am pleased that, between 2010 and 2024—just to pick two years at random —the tax gap reduced from 6.2% to 4.8%. It is vita…”

“Not with 42 authorities involved, no.”

“It is clearly in regulations rather than in primary legislation. For many decades, that system worked perfectly fine, so I do not think it is the lack of a stronger date in legislation that is the issue; it is getting more robust arrangements in place in the way that is now intended. For many years, you could count the…”

“Shall I kick off with some headlines and then maybe bring in Vicky and Abdool? Our recent report where we take stock of the changes to local government finance in the last six or seven years shows that the situation has become more strained over that time. In contrast with the previous period, funding has increased but…”

“That is a forward-looking policy question that we are not able to give a view on. Clearly, we will audit the outcome of the new system and provide the same sort of evidence as we have in this report on how it plays out in practice. The key thing here is growth, which of course is the national challenge as well for fund…”

“I was very careful not to say it is extra funding; it is certainly not our job to recommend that to Government because where do you stop? There are challenges and spending pressures across every Department. I suppose what I was getting at is not leaving local government with an insoluble problem is the issue, and only …”

“First, as Abdool mentioned earlier on, it requires a policy solution to unsustainable areas of financial demand on local authorities. SEND is one where we have reported separately, and the Public Accounts Committee held an inquiry on that report. Our conclusion was that this is just a financially unsustainable regime t…”

“These things should not happen, and it is extremely unusual that we have had such a cluster of these across several authorities in a few years. But once they have happened, people are going to have to just recognise reality with this. There is a moral hazard here essentially of councillors spending money they do not ha…”

“It depends on the source of demand; some predates the pandemic very significantly, but Vicky, you might want to say more about that.”

“The overall capital picture set out in our report is flat and has actually been going down slightly in real terms over the last few years. Given the demand for not just housing but other infrastructure, that available capital resource has been under real strain in recent years.”

“It has been the long-standing practice of all Governments to use capital essentially to solve what is really a revenue problem. It is very poor accounting practice, but you can understand why, practically, that appears to be the easiest solution for a Government with limited resources. Successive Governments have used …”

“I do not want to comment on individual cases. I referred earlier to an independent review in Woking. In some cases, it looks like there have been building concerns, and you can tell that from the way in which things are being reported, but there is a question there about why things were not then escalated faster. In ot…”

“Good morning. I am Gareth Davies, the Comptroller and Auditor General at the NAO.”

“In our report, one recommendation in arriving at this better approach for the future is that, first, there is a cross-government element to this. Abdool has already mentioned that a lot of the solutions lie with individual Government Departments, not just MHCLG, so any solution to this needs to be a cross-government so…”

“As Abdool said, we do not give policy advice to Government; we audit the value for money of the results of policies, essentially. That is our role. You are right; I am not suggesting that there is an easy answer that is always correct for every circumstance, but I would say that we have definitely seen too much use of …”

“In the previous couple of Parliaments, local government showed the way on delivering costs reductions while trying to minimise the impact on services, very significant headcount and funding reductions over a long period in the 2010s. There is still a lot of expertise in local government on how to close these gaps. Of c…”

“To your second question, definitely; that is a principle of public audits, that the auditor should be appointed independently of the body being audited. That is how everybody has confidence that this is a properly robust audit, and if the auditor is looking over their shoulder at whether they are going to be reappointe…”

“Obviously, it is not the fault of local residents that their council has got into this situation and that it has unaudited or disclaimed accounts, so I guess I would say it is not fair to take it out on local residents. Clearly, in some cases, people are paying additional rates of council tax, for example, because of f…”