Queen’s Speech

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest in the register as leader of a unitary authority. It is a great privilege to be speaking for the first time in a debate on the humble Address, especially in this year of Her Majesty the Queen’s 90th birthday. The gracious Speech included many issues that will be delivered or influenced by local government. The adoption Bill is welcome to ensure that any delays in the adoption process are minimised. Too many children have been denied timely, secure and permanent homes for too long because the system has failed them, often having long-term effects on their lives. But we need to look at and challenge the whole system, not just local government. Many times it is from the legal system that these delays occur.

I also welcome the aspiration of the Government that looked-after children deserve support for a longer period of time. If you are a parent, you will know that your own children often require a significant amount of help in their late teens as well as more advice and guidance as they begin to fly the nest—and so it should be for our looked-after children.

Local government plays a key role in working closely with developers and house builders to deliver the much-needed housing that we promised in the Conservative manifesto, and to play its role in ensuring the best possible life chances for young people by working in partnership with schools and colleges, and by enabling the supply of good-quality jobs in local areas.

Much of what a local authority does is work in partnership with the other public, private and voluntary sectors in their area to deliver services locally—none more so than health. They work with our local health providers to ensure, particularly for the elderly, that they have the ability to be treated in the right place at the right time. Often secondary care is not necessarily the right solution and care in the community is more appropriate. Local authorities, with their public health responsibilities and their health and well-being boards, are in a unique position to assist their local NHS colleagues to minimise inappropriate admissions to the acute sector and to help to ensure timely discharge into the community.

Legislation to allow councils to retain business rates is welcome and something for which local government has pressed for many years. But the message from the Government needs to be clear—100% retained by local councils may be the fact but it is confusing for local people when their council retains maybe only 50% because of redistribution.

I will finish on an issue that is dear to my heart: devolution, and, particularly, the reorganisation of local government. Devolution is to be welcomed and I am pleased to see that the northern powerhouse is again mentioned in the gracious Speech. I look forward to seeing our other great cities getting similar freedoms and flexibilities in future. But surely we need also to be looking at the future of local government in the rest of England. Allowing a thousand flowers to bloom in different forms of devolution is confusing for our residents, partners and businesses. They want—and I have asked the question of them many times over the years—simple, strategic authorities with strong leaders delivering efficient and effective services, with no layers and certainly no new layers.

We also surely have a duty to use public money in the most effective way. The latest piece of work by county treasurers show savings of at least £5 billion over the life of a Parliament if England were reorganised into county unitaries—money that could be spent on children’s services, adult care services, libraries, buses, or even to fill more potholes.

I therefore ask the Government to take a serious look at how our great cities and our great counties could work with government in a way that simplifies local government and is able to be more efficient and more effective, and to seriously devolve powers to local communities and to local people who feel close to their historic connections in their local governance.