28/04/2013 Sunday Politics South West

to Thursday's elections. And MPs grill the bosses of Cornwall's

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 2303 seconds

Politics. Two years ago, the age of 's territory hit Cornwall and as the

Council prepares to go to the polls, the arguments are as fierce as

ever, will more be needed and who will pay for Cornwall's vital

services? I am joined by Sherryl Murray the Conservative MP for South

East Cornwall, Dan Rogerson, that the pro-Democrat MP for North

Cornwall and by Labour MP Ben Bradshaw. Just two months remain for

the government to negotiate a new deal with the insurance industry to

protect flood victims, if the present agreement is not replaced by

the end of June, people could be left with no insurance cover at all.

One specialist company in Cornwall has suggested a private sector

solution to protect insurers against the financial loss as they face.

think this can be done by setting up a centralised fund that all UK

property insurance Company 's pay into. Those companies who are

covering high flood risk would be able to draw from this pool when

claims happen. The important bit is that we feel this should be a mutual

fund and managed and invested for the benefit of the policyholders who

are paying in. Over time, the fund could become self-sufficient and we

may not even require the levy at all. You have had huge flooding

problems in your constituency, this is a big problem. It is a bit of a

shambles. We do have to get something together before the

current agreement runs out. Is that viable? We have to look at all

options. I know the Minister is working hard on this. We have got to

do something for those people. I have got people in my constituency

who were told they could not be insured unless they had been flood

free for ten years. They were in their attempt year and home was

flooded again. We have to do something, because I have been round

to various houses and I have seen the devastation that floodwater

wreaks on a home and it is not just the standard possessions like

carpets and things, it is the very personal irreplaceable possessions

like photographs and that sort of thing that cannot be replaced. I am

talking to the minister constantly about it. You know about this in

North Cornwall as well. The government is saying progress is

being made. It is positive that we have a contribution from industry

saying that they believe... You would expect us to say, from the

government side, will be talk about the pressures on public spending, if

we could have a solution that draws on funding from industry, that is

the solution. One of the other key questions is insurers taking note of

things that people have done in their own homes to improve the

situation. Isolated properties cannot expect their own flood

defence scheme, but they can do things like raise the plug socket

and make their homes less vulnerable, yet insurers will not

recognise that. There is a lot more the industry could do. Ben knows all

about flooding. When this agreement was brought in under the Labour

government, it was temporarily. government has had three years to

sort this out. I have warned about this. Almost every opportunity I

have had, I have urged them to get a move on. I am sure the department

ministers are doing their best, but unless the Treasury unlock some

money, there is no country on the world which relies solely on the

market for house insurance. Even the United States does not. Without some

government underwriting of the risk, the costs will all fall, even

under the scheme at you have outlined, because in the end it is

the consumer who will have to pay for that mutual funding. It is the

Chancellor who needs to sort this out. We were left with a massive

deficit. That is a general point. There was huge controversy in the

run-up to the first elections to Cornwall's Unitarian authorities in

2009. Four years on and with elections due next Thursday, in a

sense nothing much has changed, though now the rows are about

different things. The biggest is over how much money is needed to

provide the county's essential services. Posterity hit Cornwall in

December 2010. Councillors ignored this protest and voted to cut the

budget by 10% over four years. Some have lost their jobs, bus routes and

library services have been slimmed down, but many say the most painful

cuts are yet to come. Yellow macro we are reaching the point where the

great debate will have to take place. The general public are more

understanding that we cannot do everything and that some services

will have to be seriously looked at. In January, the Conservative leader

of the council told this programme Cornwall had reached a point were it

could not cope with any more cuts, so he had no choice but to put up

council tax. The risks that we have with our budget are quite off the

scale at the moment. Not all Conservatives agreed. Council tax

was frozen this year. No party won overall control of Cornwall last

time, it has been run by Tories and independence. With the Tory split on

council tax, Liberal Democrat support for a freeze was crucial.

Two years ago, they spent �750,000 per month and we said go back to

that level of two years ago which can easily be achieved and then you

can spend the money on things like making parking charges cheaper and

fixing potholes. That budget bitterly divided the Conservatives

and three of their Cabinet members left the party, one of them saying

the drive to save ratepayers approximately 45p per week had put

services at serious risk. Jim Currie is not standing for election in May

and the woman leading the Conservatives does not share the

concern of her former colleagues. think we did the right thing. You

cannot put yourself in a position where you turn down �5 million for

Cornwall and say they should pay instead. It is the right thing. We

may need to make adjustments later, but we have achieved the freeze and

we will sort the rest out. The 5 million was from government, our

reward for not increasing tax, but it is not worth as much and the man

who leads the smallest group on the council says those who voted for the

freeze were thinking only of their election leaflets. The coalition

government has actually cut our funding over four years by �546

million. We are struggling to fund public services and I think it was

disgusting that the main political groups on the council voted to make

further cuts rather than to put through a modest council tax

increase to try and stop some of the damage being done. This Labour

councillor agrees. Both the Conservatives and the Liberal

Democrats are vying with each other to blame each other for cuts but it

is their government doing it. They are almost trying to pretend that it

is not necessary to cut anything, but it is, it is going to have to

be. The decisions are going to have to be made. The UK Independence

Party favours low taxes and thinks there is probably more fat to be

cut, but even they are not sure whether councillors were right to

freeze tax this year. I cannot say they were right or wrong, because I

do not have as much information as they do. Conservative and

Independent councillors who have seen the figures plan to ask the

people of Cornwall to pay an extra 5% next year, but the Conservative

and Liberal Democrat leaders fighting Thursday's election remain

adamant they could and would avoid that. It is rather confusing, which

of these Tory factions do you agree with? There is only one Conservative

group that people can vote for, because those people who wanted to

put the council tax up or not standing as Conservatives. I have to

make it very clear that when you have overspent on a budget, by �4

million per year, and I have had people come to me saying why is one

van delivering my crutches and another van with another man comes

along and collect my used wheelchair? You can see where there

is money to be saved. You believe more can be cut? You will know that

a lot of people have said that the Liberal Democrats had their eyes on

next week, a good headline that would play well to the electorate

and did not think it through and now it is going to land the council with

a lot of financial problems? That is not true at all. There will be a lot

of people on low incomes being asked to pay more. She has outlined some

savings which she things could be made and that is after her party

have been controlling it for a number of years, they have not made

the savings. I think the Liberal Democrats would be looking at some

of those issues. It is not easy, but I think it is possible to do more.

want to come back to that, but I will bring in Ben Bradshaw. Your

constituency is a bit further away. But you take an interest. I defer to

Jude Robinson, the only Labour councillor there and I hope she is

joined by a lot more after the election. This is more of the same

shambles we have seen from successive Conservative and Liberal

Democrat and Independent led councils in Cornwall. Cornish people

deserve better, they need a competent counsel, they need

councillors who know what they are doing, who can make the cuts but who

are honest with people. You cannot keep council tax down and not make

any cuts. Is there more fat to be cut? The macro I do not know enough

about the details. I have enough on my hands dealing with my own

constituency. It is not honest to say to people that you can freeze

council tax, absorb the huge cuts in government funding and not cut any

service, that is dishonest. I think it is very simple and the message

should go back to them, yes it is, because if you stopped the Labour

implemented things that are unnecessary, that they heaped onto

local authorities, there is a lot of waste to be cut. Liberal Democrat

and Conservative MPs in areas like this are lining up to say that the

local government finance settlement was unfair and if I were Eric

Pickles, the next time you came to me saying you could not cope, I

would say you could afford to freed council tax and cannot be that bad.

We have looked at ways in which we can cut at the waist. So have we.

There is a wider issue. It is about funding for a role issues

generally. How bad is it?What more could we do if we had a fair share

of money. We are doing the best that we can. Another point is that you

have had an Independent candidate and is a question in Cornwall

because there is so many Independents, you have a group

leader, are they really Independent? You know what my position is, if you

vote for an Independent, what are you getting? I find it horrendous

that in this time of austerity, the simple answer is to allow a budget

to overspent. The portfolio holder is Independent. He did not manage

and keep control of the budget. I do not believe it is right when people

are finding it hard to have money to go and buy the same shopping every

way, it is not right to expect them to go and ask them to foot the bill

of that thing. I will come back to them. They made some representation

saying Cornwall should have more money from central government. They

voted for that. Labour MPs were saying they should be more money for

cities in the North of England! Yellow marker there is less money

for everyone. . Your point is correct, how can you complain to the

government and then not accepted that there needs to be cut if you

freeze the council tax. All I can say is here in Exeter, we have a

good Labour Council, one of the lowest council tax is in the

country, and the city council are managing to protect services in the

city and I think the people of Cornwall would like to see a council

doing that. The education budget is very clear under Labour, because of

the way they dealt with it, Cornwall is at the bottom of the league. At

the end of the day, the government now have to reverse that. They are

trying to do that, but unfortunately when you see the cities in the North

getting more per pupil than they are in Cornwall, when it is costing

more... You say all of this, but it is getting close to the next General

Election and none of this has been fixed. You will have to wait and

see. We are staying in Cornwall where the trouble provider of out of

hours GP services was summoned to Westminster to give an account of

its failings. Senior managers at Serco were unable to explain why two

of its former employees had fiddled figures and it became clear the

company is still not meeting at least some of that service

commitments. Serco gets �32 million for running the out of hours GP

service in Cornwall. It has had the contract for around seven years. But

recently there have been concerns raised about its performance and

some of these problems appear to be ongoing, according to these patients

in North Cornwall. You ring them up and they say they will get back to

you in two hours. They should have sent a doctor out straightaway. They

always send a doctor first. This week Serco and the commissioners who

hired them to provide the service came under fire from the Public

Accounts Committee. Everything is someone else's fault. It is never

the three of you. The group of MPs were looking into three key issues

highlighted by whistleblowers about two years ago and investigated by

the National Audit Office. The first was that Serco regularly had trouble

filling shifts with appropriately qualified staff. The second was that

some staff were altering performance data to give a better impression of

the company's services. And finally, there was concern that

whistleblowers were not given enough protection. The company said the

findings were out of date and it has gone far to implement changes. One

example is that it has increased the number of doctors fourfold since the

first critical report by the Care Quality Commission. But it emerged

during this week's hearing that the service is still facing challenges

and managers admitted it was only meeting ten out of 13 quality

standards. How many unfilled shifts in January? Unfilled shifts? In

terms of that, I can tell you the stats from last Saturday. I want to

know January, February and March. is important to recognise... Answer

the question! In terms of clinical, nonclinical, we have a range of

staff. Answer the question!Unfilled shifts, which was recently

highlighted in the media, is not an accurate way to measure care

delivery in and out of hours service. And MPs were baffled as to

why Serco had not faced any financial penalty for breaching its

contract. Does that not give a signal that the moment a company

wins a contract they do not deliver? They sorted out the issues. It was

not last year. There was repeated failure to comply, and ultimately

the contract could be terminated. On what basis did you take the decision

not to? It is about taking a proportionate approach. It is a

judgement call, not just for me, but for the board of the primary care

trust. This retired GP used to run Kernow Doc, the service that

preceded Serco before they lost the contract to them. He shares the

Select Committee's concerned that the only mechanism to Pina lies

Serco appears to be to terminate the contract. You have got to have

graduated response, depending on the severity of the bridge. If the

breach is very serious, then the contract should be terminated. If it

is a minor breach, perhaps a financial penalty, but it depends on

the level of the bridge. He think the problem lies with the regular

monitoring of the contract and he says the process needs to be more

transparent. I personally believe that the nature of the contract and

the terms of the contract should be in the public domain. People have a

right to know, patients have a right though, they pay for the service,

they want to be safe, they have a right to know what has been

negotiated on their behalf. Serco's problems in Cornwall first came to

light because members of staff decided to speak out. Serco says it

has good and robust whistleblowing processes in place, but a National

Audit report published last month found that staff were still fearful

raise concerns. There seems to be a fair amount of agreement in the

studio, there is a problem with accountability, this is a system the

coalition is running with but it was introduced by the Labour government.

The prime responsibility for making sure that the service provided to

the Cornish people is meeting the requirements is the primary care

trust and what worries me is that they do not appear to have picked

this problem up in the first place, it had to go to the Independent

regulator, and they still appear to be having a softly, softly

approach. I agree with Margaret Hodge and the other members of the

committee. They are asking why they have not been fined or had the

contract terminated if they are not delivering. They have the power to

do it, they hold the contract, it is their responsibility. What about the

point, you can terminate the contract, but there are no other

sanctions? There are financial penalties. If a company that is

contracted by the National Health Service, if they are not delivering,

then the Commissioner can issue a penalty or terminate the contract.

It is not doing nothing or termination, there are other things

that can be done. They can make sure that they are delivering. I think

that this goes back to the new GP contract, because GPs were given the

opportunity to opt out of providing art -- Michael out of our services

and when you had some of the older GPs, they still carried on to do it

but now they have retired, a lot of the newer GPs... What about the

management of the system? One of the main things was they could not

provide enough qualified staff and that is why, because of the new GP

contract is. Say we have more doctors, how does that add up?

are a big company, they do not want this, so they would add to the

resources. The government comes under criticism for looking at

making changes, all this happened under the original system,

completely unaccountable, these Independent bodies that were looking

at things. Now, we have boards who set the strategy and this is the

sort of thing they can call into question. You have the GPs as well