Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I should like to thank hon. Members remaining in the House for their interest in the Sustainable Communities Act 2007. I will begin by explaining why the Act is so important. A successful first round of proposals has been made under the Act, but delays with implementing the 2010 amendment to it are creating unacceptable delays for future proposals, and I want to focus on that as well.
The Act is important essentially because, in so many ways, our communities are unsustainable. In the past decade, Britain has lost a quarter of all its post offices, a quarter of all its independent newsagents and a fifth of all its bank branches. In my constituency, thankfully, there is still a thriving local economy with local traders and businesses fighting off incursions on to the high street by the big chain stores and supermarkets, but we are unusual in being successful thus far, and there are certainly many battles still ahead. In particular, we need more powers to restrict the number of large chain stores that pose a threat to the unique character of our city of Brighton—for example, powers to stop the expansion of supermarkets given that we already have about 56 major ones.
Our city is home to about 10,000 small and medium-sized enterprises, which form the backbone of our economy as well as being a major element in Brighton’s attractiveness to holidaymakers in terms of the services that they provide, such as bars and clubs, and the retail experience that they create. In fact, the city remains home to the largest concentration of independent traders on the south coast. Of course, we also have the well-established reputation of Brighton’s leisure and tourism industry, which attracts more than 8 million visitors a year and has remained a large source of employment in Brighton and Hove despite the recession.
As I said, however, we are bucking the trend, and the relentless march of the high street clones is taking its toll, as are the prevalence of out-of-town shopping centres, the push to run public services such as our post offices for private profit, and the legacy of gaping social inequality. Increasingly, there are signs of disengagement from the political system. Evidence such as the POWER inquiry shows that people want to be engaged and to get involved, but that they do not bother because they perceive that they cannot really change anything.
The Sustainable Communities Act 2007 aims to reverse those interconnected problems. It recognises that community decline is an ongoing national problem. Evidence such as the New Economics Foundation’s “Ghost Town Britain” research demonstrates that and shows that it will get worse if nothing is done. The best efforts of local citizens and communities are not enough to reverse this overwhelming national trend. The Prime Minister has placed enormous faith in what he calls the big society, but without adequate resources it is unreasonable to expect that people will have the capacity, skills, time and wherewithal either to plug the gap left by cuts to public services or to provide the intensive input required to facilitate genuine community development. Of course, we all know of inspiring individuals who make a difference in their neighbourhoods and of projects that turn lives around, but that is not the same as the kind of infrastructure that allows for long-term, community-controlled sustainable engagement in the transformation of our society.
Government should help and Government can help, but communities are the experts on local problems and the solutions to them. The actions that Government take to help them should therefore be decided by communities, not by those in Westminster and Whitehall. A mechanism is needed whereby local people can drive Government action to reverse community decline and create local sustainability. The 2007 Act creates precisely that mechanism and enshrines it in statute. Putting local people in the driving seat is a crucial aspect of the Act. For the first time, it sets up in law a bottom-up process. Communities and councils are invited to make proposals for Government action to reverse community decline and promote local sustainability. Central Government then have a duty not only to consult, but to co-operate and reach agreement with an independent selector body on which of the proposals will be implemented.
The Act became law in 2007 as a result of a long and widespread grass-roots mobilisation campaign organised by Local Works, a coalition of more than 120 national organisations. The campaign inspired tens of thousands of citizens to urge their MPs to back the Sustainable Communities Bill. It struck a chord with communities who were fed up with seeing the decline of the places where they lived and worked, but who felt powerless to do anything about it.
I spoke at a large public meeting in Brighton in 2004, when the Bill had only just entered Parliament. Local Works organised more than 100 such constituency public meetings across the country. The turnout stunned MPs. The meetings drew average crowds of 250 people, with some attracting as many as 300 or 500 members of the public. In 2006, another huge meeting was held in Brighton, to which more than 250 people came to urge the city’s three MPs of the time formally to back the Bill in Parliament. A year later, when the Bill was in its final parliamentary stages, London’s Green MEP, Jean Lambert, spoke before 1,000 people at a public meeting that the campaign had organised in Westminster. I give these examples because they give a clear sense of the level of public support for this campaign and this Act.
The Green party was the first political party to back the Bill formally, and the campaign continued to call for cross-party support. That was eventually achieved and the Act became law in 2007 with the support of all parties across the House. In early 2010, Local Works successfully campaigned for the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Act 2010. The 2010 Act ensured that the process would be ongoing, and allowed parish and town councils to submit proposals to central Government directly.
It is important to look back to see what has happened since. Have the opportunities promised by this groundbreaking legislation been realised? Back in October 2008, the Government of the day launched the first invitation for proposals under the 2007 Act. Local Works held many more public meetings across the country, where communities lobbied their councillors to resolve to use the Act. A hundred local authorities responded. Together with their communities, they drew up 300 proposals for Government action and submitted them to the Local Government Association, in the role of selector, by 31 July 2009.
The proposals were wide ranging and included measures to protect local post offices, shops and trade, and pubs; measures to increase the production and sale of local food; measures to promote local renewable energy, microgeneration and energy efficiency; measures to protect local public services; and measures to increase democratic participation.
The people of Brighton and Hove successfully urged the council to opt into the Act, and then many got involved in coming up with the proposals that would help the area become a more sustainable place. Of those proposals, eight were shortlisted by the LGA. Examples include allowing food grown in allotments to be sold locally, introducing feed-in tariffs for local renewable energy and empowering councils to have more flexible business rates to encourage local trade and jobs.
The LGA’s selector panel shortlisted 199 proposals in total and submitted them to the Government in January 2010. On 15 December 2010, the Government announced that they had reached agreement with the LGA’s selector panel on all the shortlisted proposals, and they published the results. Some proposals were to be implemented and some were rejected, with reasons given, while others were compromised on or deemed unnecessary because powers already existed.
I am pleased that as a result of that process, the Government will make it easier to introduce renewable energy schemes by bringing in permitted development rights for small-scale renewable and microgenerational energy. They have also agreed to legislate to establish a community right of purchase, which will allow communities to bid to take over local assets. A moratorium on the sale of listed assets will give community groups time to prepare a bid. The planning rules are due to be amended to exclude gardens from the classification of “previously developed land”, and the Government have backed community calls for a ban on the sale of alcohol below cost price, preventing supermarkets from selling alcohol below a certain price floor.
Those are positive outcomes, with local communities having a direct say in shaping their futures. But what happens next? The Government have set up a barrier-busting website as the portal for submitting future proposals under the Act. They have also invited community groups and councils to submit proposals directly through the website. Local Works has welcomed that, and I do too. However, the 2010 Act requires that the Government introduce regulations that will govern the process of making proposals and deciding on them in future. The consultation that they must run before finalising those regulations has not yet been published.
Following repeated requests for information, officials at the Department for Communities and Local Government initially advised that the consultation would be published in the summer of last year. Since then the date has been continually revised, first to the end of 2010, then to the end of January 2011 and then to before the mid-term recess in February, and now we are not being given any time frame at all. Parliamentary questions tabled by the hon. Member for Gower (Martin Caton) and me asking when it would be published both met with similar responses, stating that it would be soon and that a statement would be made “shortly”.
Community groups and organisations, councillors and officers who want to get involved in the Act are now all asking what on earth is going on. To them, this looks like deliberate stalling by the Government. I have to say, I am minded to agree. The fact that the early-day motion on the subject currently has the second highest number of signatures, with 236 hon. Members supporting it, suggests that people in the House are also very concerned about the future of the Act. That is true not just of people here in the House but many people outside, too. I shall give just a sample of what is being said.
Ruth Bond, chair of the women’s institute, has stated:
“The Women’s Institute is looking forward to encouraging our members and others in our communities to be involved in the Sustainable Communities Act and to use it to help and protect the vibrancy of our villages and towns. However, the delay in the consultation on the future regulations for the Act is holding us all back. This delay has been ongoing since early January this year and still we have no date for when the consultation will be published. We therefore hope the government will make an announcement urgently.”
John Walker, the national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, has made a similar point, stating:
“We are looking forward to seeing the consultation on the new Sustainable Communities Act regulations. The long delay in seeing this consultation has been frustrating as it is holding back our members and branches on the ground from engaging in the Act to help keep trade local and promote and protect local businesses and jobs in their communities.”
I have a whole stack of further quotations from many organisations, including the Campaign for Real Ale, Age UK, Sustrans, the Public and Commercial Services Union, the Woodland Trust and others. All of them make the very same point—that extensive delay to the consultation is extremely frustrating and, worse, risks local people becoming disillusioned with the whole process.
The Sustainable Communities Act has enormous potential, and its emphasis on community control and empowerment should surely be in keeping with the Government’s professed support for localism. I therefore hope very much that the Minister can tell my constituents, me and the many others who are still waiting to hear about why progress has stalled, what his plans are to get it back on track and when we can look forward to action. I hope he will also take this opportunity to reiterate his full support for the Act and its processes.
The Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Greg Clark)
I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing this debate. I am happy to give her my full commitment to the Sustainable Communities Act 2007, which is one of the most important Acts that this House has passed. The fact that it was passed with cross-party support underlines its continuing significance to how we govern ourselves in future.
For my money, the Act is one of the most important Acts of the past decade, because it contains, as the hon. Lady knows, two important principles: first, that communities should have the right to know what is done by public bodies in their area on their behalf; and secondly, that communities, armed with that information, have the right to suggest alternative, better ways that might enable them to thrive, as she described. The Act is a seminal piece of legislation, and I congratulate our predecessors who campaigned long and hard for it, and the coalition led by Local Works, which did so much in the community.
The hon. Lady describes her long association with the campaign. When I was selected as a parliamentary candidate in 2004 and first went canvassing on the doorstep, almost the first question I was asked—from Mr Philip Clarkson Webb, a constituent whom I have come to know—was whether, if elected, I would support the Sustainable Communities Bill. I told him that I did not know but that I would find out, and it is a thrill to speak at the Dispatch Box now in support of the Act.
I hope to reassure the hon. Lady on some of her points. The Act is seminal in other ways, because of its impact on other legislation. Its principles of dialogue, collaboration, and genuine, bottom-up democracy are a recurring theme in the coalition agreement, and unite both parties to the coalition. Those principles wholly permeate, and to a significant degree have inspired, the Localism Bill, to which she drew attention, which completed its Committee stage earlier this month.
The principles of dialogue, collaboration and bottom-up democracy also underpin our consultation on the new regulations to govern the Act’s implementation. I can tell the hon. Lady that we will launch that consultation tomorrow. I also welcome the opportunity of informing her and the House of how we intend to proceed. First, we are keeping the essential character of the previous approach, but trying to make it more streamlined and effective, and easier for communities to take up. The Act is about inspiring ideas from local communities and engaging with them in open, honest dialogue; it is not just for councils. It is not about councils saying to their communities, “We want to do this, do you agree?” but rather about councils asking their communities, “How would you like us to improve our area?”
As the hon. Lady said, the Communities and Local Government Secretary invited councils to begin that process on 15 December 2010, which was the second invitation under the Act. The first invitation was made back in 2008, which generated a range of ideas from around the country on how best to put power where it belongs, and how to put control into the hands of local people.
Many of those ideas—getting rid of the regional spatial strategies and giving local councils much more discretion on spending public money—were reflected in the actions that the Government took in our first months in office. The hon. Lady mentioned three examples from Brighton, which as one would expect contributed some of the more lively, ambitious and creative proposals. There was a recommendation to introduce feed-in tariffs, for which she and many constituents in Brighton have campaigned for many years, and now we have them, and it is possible to introduce business rate discounts under the Localism Bill. We looked very carefully at the possibility of allotments selling surplus food, and we have clarified—I hope to her constituents’ satisfaction—that those powers exist. If she finds any frustrations in exercising them, she has only to come to me, and we will make sure that anyone who doubts them is told what the reality is. I want the second invitation under the Act to be even more successful in provoking local debate, energy and imagination. It is a good opportunity to reinvigorate local democratic discussion between councils, community representatives and individual members of communities, and to bring forward great ideas and translate them into practice wherever possible.
I have always been clear that the best ideas are not to be found cooked up by Ministers and officials in Whitehall. They come from people in communities who have practical ambitions to make their communities better than they could otherwise be. One of the great things about the Act is that it sets a challenge for government to open itself up to ideas from communities in a way that in the past it has been too reluctant to do, and in that sense to turn government upside down, so that it can truthfully serve the interests of the people and follow their initiative, rather than governing them in the traditional way. The Act introduced the important concept that local and central Government should try to reach an agreement on what local people want. We are keeping this fundamental principle. We made it the centrepiece of the December invitation, and we will make it the centrepiece of the regulations when they are published in draft tomorrow.
The core principles behind the Act and our intentions remain the same. However, the difference I have set out is the first of several differences between the first invitation and the second, all of which are designed to improve the process. I have been grateful for the helpful suggestion that the Local Works coalition has made in helping us to frame these changes. There was some frustration, as reflected by the hon. Lady, about the fact that some of the processes were rather slow, bureaucratic and cumbersome. In the second invitation, we are seeking to be much more open, responsive and bureaucracy free. More action and less paper is what people want from us.
We want the second invitation to put people firmly in the driving seat. As the hon. Lady knows, under the first invitation, we saw only a fraction of the ideas that people put forward—those put forward by the selector for the Government to try to implement. This time, we have made a commitment to consider everything. We guarantee that we will try to help with any genuine problem raised. We do not want to filter out good ideas just for the sake of having a smaller number. Anyone can now e-mail one of the barrier-busters we have established in my Department with an example of how red tape or some other regulation or practice is preventing people from improving their area, and we will do our level best to resolve it.
Under the first invitation, people submitted their idea, but then, as the hon. Lady pointed out, had to wait a year or more for a decision to be taken, with no way of keeping track of progress. If people were concerned because they did not know where their idea was, they wondered whether it had been forgotten about altogether. This time, anyone who submits a request through the barrier-busting site will have a tracking number, like with an internet order, so that the person can tell where it is in the system, and they will have a dedicated person to call to check on progress.
The first invitation was time limited and burdensome on councils, but this time there is no deadline. Councils can ask for people’s ideas at any time and in any way they want. We will not presume to know better than them how they should talk to their local communities and whom to involve. The first invitation also set out a rather restrictive role for the selector—the body tasked to keep the Government honest in their handling of the Act. The selector was asked to reduce the number of suggestions and to prepare a pared down list. This time, however, we will give the selector as well as the people proposing the ideas more freedom than ever before. They will be able to choose which ideas to champion and will get involved only when they feel the need to. People will have the right directly to address the Government. They will also have help from an advisory panel to assist them. I am pleased to announce that it is our intention that Local Works and the National Association of Local Councils, both of which have been vital, will join the Local Government Association in providing a really top-notch advisory panel to the selector.
Because there might be times when, despite our best efforts, it will not be possible to reach agreement between Whitehall and councils on the way ahead, councils that go the extra mile—those that want to champion people’s ideas under the 2007 Act, but are told that we cannot remove the barrier stopping them—will get an extra route of appeal. We will reform the role of the selector, so that it can resubmit that request for help and require us to discuss that request with it before we come to a decision.
Finally, let me mention another difference that I regard as an improvement, and which I hope the hon. Lady will too. The first invitation, before the amendment, excluded parish councils. We are very keen indeed for parish and town councils, which represent their communities so successfully, to submit suggestions and proposals under the 2007 Act. That is one of the reasons why we are keen for the National Association of Local Councils to be included in the work of the selector. We will ensure that the duty to “try to reach agreement” with the selector will apply to requests from parish councils, not just higher or upper-tier authorities, as they are referred to.
All in all, the changes are designed to make the process easier, more open, less bureaucratic and more effective at making change happen—and, I hope, more inviting for people in communities up and down the country. With the barrier-busting services, the support and advice to which Ministers have access will now be increasingly available to people in communities. If we regard people in communities as having good ideas, it is incumbent on us to give them help and support in turning those ideas into reality, just as Ministers count on officials to help them turn their ideas into legislation. It has been my ambition in proposing these changes to turbo-charge the 2007 Act.
My final point is that, through the consultation, the Government are listening for further suggestions and changes that might be made, which we know are most likely to come from people in communities. The consultation on the regulations is a genuine consultation. If there are things that we have missed out or if suggestions are made during the consultation, we will do our level best to take them into account. The operation of the 2007 Act should go along with the spirit of the Act, and should be driven by communities.
I hope that those points will have brought the hon. Lady up to date on our intentions for the 2007 Act. I hope that she will welcome the fact that the publication that she was hoping for will happen tomorrow, in a written statement to the House. I would welcome the chance in future to discuss with her and hon. Members from up and down the country how we can put real power into the hands of local communities, and in so doing make our country and those communities better.
Question put and agreed to.