Localism Bill

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, legally, town councils are parish councils. I think that is the answer the Minister will give. It is true, anyway. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, is poised to come in again. A town council is a parish council that has passed a resolution under about three lines of the Local Government Act 1972 to call itself a town council. It can have a town mayor if it wishes, but it does not have to. I think that is all there is to say about it, but the noble Earl might have other things to say.

I strongly support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. It is ridiculous if a parish council can put in a lot of time and effort to consider taking over local services, has to do it through the expression of interest procedure and can then be outbid by other people. There is no sense in that. The Minister might say that it is unnecessary because if the district, unitary, county or whatever council agrees to it, it can happen anyway. My experience is of a borough council that tries to offload things to the parishes such as public conveniences when the parishes do not want to take them on, but that is a different matter. Throughout local government, there is a culture of conservatism and fear of taking on and doing more things. Changing that culture is the most important thing that we have to do. The amendment would be a very useful addition to the Bill.

[The Earl of Lytton]

My Lords, there is nothing like the words “parish council” to get me out of my seat. Noble Lords will know of my interest in parish and town councils. To answer the first question, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is right: fundamentally, structurally, parish and town councils are effectively synonymous. The differences are in the way in which they operate, but structurally in their clerks, membership and rules of engagement with which they have to comply, you can more or less say that the term is synonymous one with the other, except that one happens to apply to a town. It is an area where we have great difficulty with what we might call the family of parish and town councils, because town councils such as Weston-super-Mare have huge budgets and are on a principal authority scale, whereas many tiny rural parishes, although they may have quality parish council status, are extremely small. That lack of consistency makes it very difficult to deal with parishes as a cohesive whole.

I say straight away that I have not conferred with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I am very pleased that he has moved this amendment. There are some extremely good examples of where principal authorities have felt that they had the confidence to pass on to a parish or town council a function that they knew could be dealt with readily, cost-effectively and which was well within the capacity of the town or parish council concerned. But I am bound to say that nationally, the track record of passing things down to the lower tier has been fairly poor, taking things as a whole. That is one of the issues that lies behind localism. We need to get that straight.

What the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, suggested was a sort of localism-light in the sense of trying to avoid a bureaucratic and procedurally-driven process. On the whole I would welcome that as well. At Second Reading, I said that these things have to be rendered down to a localism scale—a community scale, not based on the sort of procedures and checks and balances that perhaps apply to the much more senior aspects that must be rightly dealt with by principal authorities.

I give one example. In my own parish council in Shipley in West Sussex, which is one of the largest geographically but has one of the smallest populations in the whole of West Sussex, a parish councillor commented some time ago on the problem the parish council was having with verges. People were encroaching on road-side verges by extending their gardens, filling-in road-side ditches, and doing all sorts of things that might include impairing forward visibility along the road. They were planting things, and so on and so forth. The verges, in so far as they were part of the highway, would have been vested in the highway authority, which in that instance is the county council. We know that all county councils are subject to cost constraints, and certainly West Sussex where I live is no stranger to that and has introduced some commendable measures to try to square the circle, so to speak. But it cannot be in all places at all times and it cannot police those verges. Such things should be preserved in the generality of the public interest—they are assets of community value in many cases but they are often orphan pieces of land. They may historically have been part of an enclosure plan or something like that which attached them to a particular estate or riparian owner, but over time, and with the process of land registration, that link has been lost. The boundary may have been drawn to an ordnance survey boundary that was set back from the hard edge of the road, so you end up with orphan strips.

Parish and town councils in some instances—I am not saying in every instance as they may not have the facility to do it—would like to get hold of those to manage them properly and make sure, in particular, that they are not filched by neighbouring householders or have things dumped on them where nobody seems to be responsible. They may get driven over because it happens to be a convenient place to pull off for dog walking, as happens in my part of the parish. That is just one example of something that could be of benefit.

In general, I support the amendment but there is a caveat. The words,

“net additional expenditure or net reduced revenue”

is a proviso that the noble Lord wants to insert under subsection (3)(a). There is a problem with activities, services and things being passed to parish councils shorn of any resource to deal with it. That is the classic thing that we refer to in parish and town council circles as double taxation. The parish then has to raise by precept a means of funding that expenditure because the principal authority has said, “Yes, you can have this but there is no funding to go with it”. I therefore enter a caveat on that. On subsection (4), I would flag up that it might be extremely difficult to verify, knowing what little I know about local government finance, to deal with the matters that the noble Lord is trying to cover there. I well understand his reasons for putting them in, but I do not know how you would prove it. However, in general I support the direction of travel of the amendment.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I knew it was a mistake to mix with these experts. I had better apologise for not understanding the point about parish and town councils and indeed for stirring up the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, with his well-informed speech.

I want to make two observations, one of which builds on that. Town councils, in terms of their size and perception of themselves, can be, as in his example of Weston-super-Mare, completely different animals from most of the parish councils that I know. My constituency contained two main towns—the towns have not changed but the constituencies have—one of which was the main town, Braintree, and the other was Witham, which was almost the same size, with 30,000 people in those days and possibly more now, which had a town council. If I had tried telling them that it was just a jumped-up parish council, I would have expected to lose the odd vote at the following election. The Government appear to be saying that all these bodies, which are not insignificant, are just jumped-up parish councils. I do not think that that is very sensible. Whatever parliamentary draftsmen may say, it might be sensible to incorporate town councils in the wording of the Bill. I leave that thought with my noble friends.

Beyond that, there was one other thing that I wanted to say. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that district and borough councils are not always great at wanting to devolve downwards. Presumably one of the objects here is that they might be encouraged to do that in appropriate circumstances. The only thing I ask, having endlessly declared that my wife is a district councillor, is that nobody tells her what I have said.