Draft Dorset (Structural Changes) (Modification Of The Local Government And Public Involvement In Health Act 2007) Regulations 2018 Draft Bournemouth, Dorset And Poole (Structural Changes) Order 2018

Debate between Christopher Chope and Oliver Letwin

Wednesday 16th May 2018 General Committees

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

That is absolutely true. The sad irony is that what I am saying is as important for the citizens of Christchurch as for the rest of us. I am sure that what my hon. Friend says about the need for accommodation is absolutely right. Bournemouth and Poole have been in the lead on the number of elderly people migrating to those parts for many decades, long before he came to occupy his distinguished position. His predecessor in that seat—I am long in the tooth, so I remember him well, as you will, Sir Henry—complained about the large number of frail, elderly people who had to be supported and the lack of money to do so. That is not a sudden development—it has just got much, much worse over the years. Finally, I will say something about the other kind of efficiency to which the Minister referred.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the courteous way in which he has dealt with these issues throughout. Would that that had been the situation with all my colleagues!

Putting that to one side, he has referred to the financial pressures. One of the consequences of what is being debated today is that Dorset County Council will no longer have the resources coming to it from Christchurch council tax payers, because Christchurch will be moved out of the county council area. That will reduce the income of the county council. From figures we have received, Dorset County Council receives more income from Christchurch than it spends on services in Christchurch. Therefore, can my right hon. Friend explain why the Government have rejected any suggestion that Christchurch could be part of a rural unitary? Can he also explain in answer to our hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West why, if both Bournemouth and Poole have those pressures, they refuse to merge together to save about £10 million a year, and insist that they will not merge unless they can also have Christchurch?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I think it would be right, in the spirit of this discussion, if I were to answer that set of points fully and then move back to the remainder of my intended speech.

In the first place, what my hon. Friend says is absolutely right. It is a matter of undeniable statistics that, although costs reduce when Christchurch moves out of the county area, so revenues reduce slightly more. That is certainly true. Those figures have been taken fully into account in the calculation of the net effect on the rural county, as it will be in the unitary form. It is true that, from our point of view in the rural county, we would have been yet better off if Christchurch had been part of that. Speaking for myself, I would have seen no objection to that whatsoever from our point of view. I do not think any of my hon. Friends representing other constituencies in what will be the rural county would have had any objection either.

While we are at it, I regret that my hon. Friend decided to pursue the fantasy of joining up with Hampshire rather than trying at an early stage to join up with the rural county with some financial settlement, which would have made this much simpler. But that is past history, alas. I cannot answer in detail why the two unitaries in the conurbation believe it so essential to have the revenues from Christchurch as part of the overall transformation, but I suspect it has a great deal to do with what my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West mentioned just a moment or two ago: that the financial pressures on the two unitaries are also very great, for similar reasons.

Anyway, we are where we are, and the options we face are to have either no reorganisation or to have the reorganisation proposed before us. None of us can deny that those are the two available alternatives, which brings me to my last point—it is an important one and I hope Opposition Members consider it. It is critical to recognise that, although this reorganisation is, very importantly, about saving money by administrative overhead-cutting, it is not just about that. When there is one chief executive instead of many, one set of directors instead of many and one set of councillors instead of many, a lot of money is saved, but it is not about just that in the long run—it is not even primarily about that.

The biggest problem we face in dealing with the social care crisis in Dorset and with the interactions between social care and the health service, which is very typical in many parts of the country, is integration between social care, housing and the health service. Unless it can be so arranged that the individuals who are frail and elderly preponderantly live in places where it is affordable to look after them, rather than in far-flung distant villages where it is incredibly expensive to service them at the level of care they need and deserve, and unless absolute integration is arranged between the operations of social services and of the health service, we will not cure the underlying demographic pressures and problems for our health and social care service.

At the moment, the county council has no influence on social housing policy. It is very difficult for the health service to know with whom it is meant to be negotiating because the many different councils have different relationships with those frail and elderly people and are involved in some way or another in looking after them. Various Labour and Liberal Democrat Members and I have joined together in an effort to cure this problem eventually at a national level, by seeking to persuade Her Majesty’s Treasury to create a hypothecated national fund to look after both health and social care. That proposition was adopted by all the Select Committees of the House in the Liaison Committee, and is being considered by the Prime Minister. I very strongly hope that, as a nation, we will move in that direction, but it will not happen tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we in Dorset desperately need to be able to create that level of integration if we are to tackle at the root a problem that is causing human misery as well as great strain on those operating in both our social care and our health service system as professionals. On those grounds alone, if there were no other, if there were not large local support and if it had not been the case that this came from the bottom up, we would still need to do this. Those are enormously important supportive things.

The problem social care and we need to tackle it. The only way we will do so is by carrying through this integration, so I very much hope the Minister will have his way in doing the right thing.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset. I agree with many of the more general comments that he makes about the need to ensure that we get more rationality in the operation of services at local government level, and better integration of social services and the health service.

It was interesting that my right hon. Friend said that he was not in favour of top-down solutions, and then referred to the fact that Christchurch going in with Hampshire would be a fantasy. Christchurch was in Hampshire until 1974 when, in such a top-down proposal, it was forced out of Hampshire into Dorset.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

My hon. Friend’s history is impeccable, but does he recognise that the problem is that Hampshire does not want to have Christchurch back?

[Sir Christopher Chope]

My right hon. Friend is wrong about that. In the discussions with Christchurch, Hampshire said that it needed assurance that it would be a net beneficiary of the resources from Christchurch in Hampshire rather than in Dorset. Christchurch tried to persuade Dorset County Council to make that information publicly available so that Hampshire could be reassured that it would benefit financially from having Christchurch transferred back into Hampshire.

Unfortunately, even as we speak, Dorset County Council has not finalised the desegregation costs of splitting Christchurch at the borough council and upper tier levels from the rest of Dorset. We are told that those figures will not be available until the middle of June.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Christopher Chope]

If the hon. Gentleman looks at the whole context of this debate and the whole Hansard report, I think that he will reach the conclusion that a clear undertaking was given by the Government.

Perhaps I can pray in aid the written opinion—it was referred to earlier—from Nathalie Lieven QC at Blackstone Chambers in response to a request from Christchurch Borough Council. In it, she says:

“I was shown…various passages from the Hansard debates where the Minister appeared to assure Sir Christopher and another concerned MP, Edward Leigh, that the power would be used to persuade Councils to have a conversation about merger rather than to force them to merge against their will.”

Nathalie Lieven QC goes on to say:

“Debates in Parliament are only admissible”—

that is, in a court of law—

“where the meaning of the statute is unclear and ambiguous. In this case s.15 is perfectly clear on its face, so what the Minister said is not admissible to seek to prevent him from acting under s.15. The correct forum for holding the Minister to account, for arguably giving an assurance that he is now reneging on, is in Parliament itself. The courts will not enforce an assurance given to Parliament, and will be clear that this is a matter which should be raised in Parliament. On the face of it there does seem to be an inconsistency between what the junior Minister was telling Parliament”—

that was in November last year—

“and the decision of the SoS in this case, but this is a matter…to raise politically, rather than giving rise to a legal argument.”

So we have a situation where leading counsel takes the same view as I take, and took, and indeed relied upon during the consultation period in the autumn of 2016.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I think my hon. Friend’s answer to the Opposition spokesman was a very long way of saying no. I want to get it on the record that the rest of us—I think I speak for all my other colleagues in Dorset—do not see this whole process in the way that my hon. Friend does.

First of all, as my hon. Friend has just quoted his own legal counsel as saying, the Act is perfectly clear in the powers that it gives the Secretary of State. Secondly, there is a world of difference, as the Opposition spokesman said, between this situation and the Government getting through Parliament a top-down reorganisation that is resisted by the people and local governments in an area. That may or may not be a good thing to do in some cases; it is not what is going on here.

The assurance that my hon. Friend hopes he got from the Secretary of State, but which the Secretary of State never gave, was that Christchurch would have a veto on the whole reorganisation, even though the reorganisation is earnestly desired by and desperately needed by the rest of the county. It is perfectly proper that the Act should give the Secretary of State the power, as my hon. Friend’s legal counsel admits it manifestly does, to accept a plea from almost all—94%—of the people of Dorset for reorganisation, even if 6% of them, or the majority of 6% of them, do not like it.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

My right hon. Friend has made a long intervention, but he misunderstands my point about leading counsel. Leading counsel is saying that it seems quite clear that my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough and I were given an assurance that has now been reneged upon by the Government, and that redress is to be had not through the courts, but politically. That is why I am raising the matter in this Committee. There may be quite a lot of people in this Committee who regard it as very poor form for the Government to go back on their word in terms of an assurance that has been given to Parliament. Indeed, I raised the issue with Mr Speaker on a point of order in March 2017. Mr Speaker said it was not right to think that just because there had been a change of Minister or Government, the word given to the House could be reneged upon.

The first time I had any inkling that the Government were minded to renege on that undertaking was in March 2017. That is when I raised the point of order on the Floor of the House. I also wrote to the Prime Minister expressing my concern. As a result of that letter, she intervened. In the end, although it was expected that the Government would announce a “minded to” decision on the application in March 2017, they did not do so. There was then a period of purdah, as my right hon. Friend will remember, for the local elections. That was then closely followed by the general election, which amazingly was only just short of one year ago.

After the general election, all the Conservative councillors who had been re-elected in my constituency wrote to the Prime Minister asking her to intervene in this matter to ensure that Christchurch Borough Council was not abolished against the consent of the people. The Prime Minister wrote back in October 2017. In her letter of 9 October, she said:

“I understand that conversations are now continuing between the affected councils and interested parties to see if, and how, an agreement can be reached that is supported by all of the councils.”

The clear implication of that was that the Prime Minister accepted that there had been an undertaking that all councils should reach an agreement, with the emphasis on the need for councils reasonably to participate in this rather than just saying, “We are not talking to you.” That was the concern expressed in that debate. If a council had an absolute veto, it could say, “I am not prepared to parley with you. I am not prepared to have any discussion.” The Government perfectly reasonably said, “We want to encourage councils to enter into discussions and debate to try to move forward with consensus or consent.”