Nicholas Soames: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government if he will make it his policy to use Labour Force Survey data rather than the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings when calculating the labour costs adjustment component of the area cost adjustment. [123528]

Brandon Lewis, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government: Data used in calculating the area costs adjustment will be set out in the provisional Local Government Finance Settlement for 2013-14.

Nicholas Soames: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government what recent assessment he has made of the ability of those local authorities with lower grant dependency to continue to raise resources locally in the current economic climate prior to the introduction of four block model dampening arrangements. [123532]

Brandon Lewis, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government: Proposals for approaches to floor damping were set out in the recent technical consultation on business rates retention, and we are currently considering responses. A copy of the consultation can be found on our website at:

http://www.local.odpm.gov.uk/finance/brr/sumcon/index.htm

From April 2013 we will be replacing the current complex formula grant regime with a business rates retention scheme. Our reforms to local government finance are fundamentally about encouraging local authorities to promote local growth. By contrast the local government finance system encouraged a sense of dependency; councils have competed with themselves in a race to the bottom—to present themselves as more deprived than their neighbours in order to get more handouts from Whitehall.

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