Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 2nd February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, these amendments are broadly welcome—I think. The devil will be in what the regulations say, of course, but if they are not as benevolent as the Minister is suggesting, we will have a row then. Otherwise I think they are all right.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for enlightening me, if not other members of the Committee, as to the otherwise completely incomprehensible terms of Amendments 21 and 22. Not having been given a crystal ball to look into, I could not really understand what they were about, but he has partially explained them, for which I am grateful.

However, on Amendment 23, we are again in the business of secondary legislation. I do not know whether the Government have yet consulted at all on the regulations and whether there is any chance of seeing any draft regulations before Report, but it would be interesting to know whether they had embarked on a consultation with the Local Government Association, for example, about the contents of any such regulations. Again, it looks like the Government imposing a particular way of proceeding on local government, possibly without any real exchange of views about how that might best be achieved. As we know, other Committees in your Lordships’ House have expressed great concern about the increasing reliance on secondary legislation that all too often emerges without any real evidence of effective consultation about what it should contain.

Neighbourhood Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 31st January 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his constructive response. I was rather taken with his notion that the Government have a rigorous policy towards meeting new burdens. I would have thought “rigor mortis” might be a more appropriate description of their performance in that area but he is clearly well intentioned and we hope to see some evidence of that as the legislation goes forward.

Significantly, the figures he quoted on the community infrastructure levy were quite alarming in many ways. From what he said, authorities are not necessarily taking full advantage of what is currently available. Has the Minister considered talking to the Local Government Association about that? This matter should be taken forward in that way. I will certainly ensure that the points he made today are heard. I hope that process can be tackled. It is for the noble Baroness to comment more specifically on that subject since she raised it but there seems to be an issue here. One way or another, the system does not seem to be working adequately, yet apparently the goodwill is there on the government side to ensure it does. Perhaps after the event we could look at ways to promote the use of what should be a helpful instrument for both local authorities and the communities they represent.

[Lord Greaves]

We have had this discussion on previous Bills. In my authority, for example, it is not through lack of willingness or knowledge of CIL that we do not impose it. It is simply that if we impose it, it will make particular brownfield sites even less viable. On brownfield sites, we have to subsidise housing development to get it going and apply a kind of negative CIL, paid for by the council. That is the only way to do it. There is a mismatch here between different parts of the country.

[Lord Beecham]

I am not suggesting that all local authorities are able or would wish to impose the levy, for the very reasons that the noble Lord has just given. The question is whether there are authorities that could do so without the kind of impact the noble Lord described on his authority but have not yet taken advantage of it. It is pointless to speculate on the nature of those authorities but I suspect that some district councils, for example, might not have the officer resource to deal with what ought to be something that would benefit them. That matter should be looked at by the Government and the LGA together. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I submitted some of the amendments in this group before I got further information by reading the technical consultation and implementation, which I will come to. I shall speak also to the other amendments in my name in this group. These amendments are mainly about timescales and time limitations, which is why they have been grouped. There is a very helpful Labour amendment in the middle of the group.

Amendments 90A, 95C and two others refer to the prescribed period. Amendment 90A is a probing amendment to find the Government’s idea of what the prescribed period should be for after permission in principle is given on a piece of land but before technical details have to be given, otherwise the permission in principle may lapse. I have suggested three years, which is the present position for outline planning permission and reserved matters. Since I tabled the amendment, I have been able to see the technical consultation which talks about a different timescale, and I hope noble Lords will let me raise this as it is important.

The maximum determination period for permission in principle on application and technical details consent is how long the local authority has to process and determine applications. At the moment, it is essentially eight weeks for ordinary applications and 13 weeks for major applications. The proposed determination periods that are being consulted on are five weeks for permission in principle for minor applications, five weeks for technical details consent for minor sites and 10 weeks for technical details consent for major sites. There is considerable concern about these proposals and these timescales. I apologise to the Minister, who will not have answers on these specific things, but I want to put them on the record.

I have a comment from my planning manager in Pendle. He says:

“If there is to be meaningful consultation the timescales involved are unworkable and will lead to many applications being rejected. A significant number of applications need amending or further clarifying information needs to be prepared. This requirement often comes from the comments of consultees who normally take the full 21 days to respond”.

Consultees are Highways England, the Environment Agency, the Coal Authority and the rest of them.

“The processing of an application and registration takes two days and letters sent out to consultees. They will get the letters in the first week. There are then three weeks for consultation. That leaves 1 week to deal with all the issues that are brought up. If there are outstanding matters”—

and my experience is that there usually are—

“which there will inevitably be, LPAs will refuse consent rather than allow something that is potentially unacceptable.

Timescales need to be more realistic or the process will fall down with impossible to achieve timescales”.

The Minister said that our comments will be fed into the consultation, so I hope those comments will be fed in.

Amendment 93A states that PIP cannot be retrospective, and I think the Government agree that that is the case, so perhaps I will not pursue it. Amendment 92N probes the circumstances in which the Secretary of State can grant PIP instead of the LPA. Amendment 93A also states:

“The procedure to be followed for the readoption or revision of a qualifying document in a way that affects the granting of permission in principle to any land is the same as that which applies to the original adoption of the document”.

The purpose of that provision is to probe whether, after the document has been adopted with all the public consultation and processes which it appears are being promised, it could then be changed in some way on the sly without all that process taking place again.

Amendment 93B is about whether permission in principle will cease to have effect on land. If planning permission is given for a different use, does the housing PIP then lapse or does it stand alongside a new permission for, say, a supermarket? If land is allocated for a different use or has the allocation for housing removed in the local development plan, does the planning in principle lapse if the local development plan is changed? If land is removed from the list of land suitable for housing development or the register of brownfield land, does that mean that the planning in principle is also removed at the same time?

Amendment 93C is about how applications for planning permission will work on land which already has planning in principle for housing. If it has permission in principle for housing, and somebody puts in a planning application for a supermarket, a garage site or whatever, will that simply operate on the same lines as it would if that permission in principle did not exist? If the permission in principle for the supermarket, the garage site or whatever is then granted, does the planning in principle for housing lapse or does it continue to exist alongside? I beg to move.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I rise with, I promise, uncharacteristic brevity to speak to Amendments 93 and 96, which are tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Kennedy. These amendments relate to time. Amendment 93 relates to new Section 59A(4), which states:

“Permission in principle … takes effect when the qualifying document is adopted”,

and, critically, goes on to say in new paragraph (b) that it,

“is not brought to an end by the qualifying document ceasing to have effect or being revised, unless the order provides otherwise”,

which strikes me as somewhat peculiar provision. My amendment would ensure that the provision in principle expired when the plan was no longer relevant or had been replaced. It limits the time to circumstances when it remains relevant or has not been replaced.

Amendment 96 again relates to the time factor, because the somewhat convoluted proposed new subsection (2ZZC) says:

“Subsection (2ZZA) does not apply where … the permission in principle has been in force for longer than a prescribed period”.

That is what the Bill currently says. The amendment seeks to put a limit on that period of five years, so there would have to be development within a five-year period. That seems perfectly reasonable given what we already know about the vast number of outstanding permissions which are not acted on, and which therefore of course do not contribute to meeting housing or indeed any other needs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, Amendment 98B is about the viability of brownfield sites and what happens to brownfield sites which local people and the local authority wish to see developed for housing but which are not viable. The amendment then goes on in a rather cheeky way to suggest that the Secretary of State should cough up some money to make them viable.

There are a lot of genuine brownfield sites in areas such as Lancashire and Yorkshire. They may still have structures on them, or they may have been removed. In some cases, they may have been remediated, or they may be perfectly good flattened sites ready for development. The problem is that nobody will develop them because there is no profit to be made from building houses on them. There is an old works in the ward I represent on the council in Colne. The outside walls of the mill are still there. We have been trying to get it developed for housing for 10 or 15 years now. We nearly got there before the credit crunch in 2008 and the collapse of house prices. We got the owner to apply for full planning permission, and he got permission for about 20 houses in three blocks. The area is surrounded by terraced houses. It was a nice little development. He was proposing to sell the site on to a local builder who was going to develop it. The local builder is not there any more. The council’s joint venture development company has done a viability assessment of the site and, even with a subsidy from the council, it is not viable. The total cost of developing it is around £130,000 per house, but the sale price for new terraced three-bedroom houses in that area is £100,000. It is simply not viable.

Another site in the same town was cleared under housing market renewal about 10 years ago, but the problem is that it is on quite a steep slope. It is remediated and perfectly ready to develop for perhaps a dozen houses. It is possibly just viable with some help from the council on the basis that the council owns the land and will put the land into the scheme for free. This is the kind of thing we are talking about. There must be dozens of brownfield sites in east Lancashire of this nature which simply cannot or will not be developed—although everybody wants to see them developed for housing. That is the obvious use for those sites and it would benefit the area, help to regenerate it and provide much-needed local housing for people. Nevertheless, because of the local housing market, they are not viable.

I have two questions apart from the question of what the Government or the Secretary of State will do about this to help us fill the gap. It is no good doing what they have been doing so far, saying that they will provide loans. You provide loans to get a scheme going, but if over a period of 30 years of selling the properties or renting them out in the short run the scheme does not add up, the loan is no use because you cannot repay it. It needs gap funding. The council itself has money to help with gap funding of sites like this, and we hope to move ahead with one very soon, but this is typical of a lot of places in the north of England—perhaps in smaller towns, away from the big cities—where brownfield sites like this are simply not viable.

First, therefore, the question is: do such sites go on the brownfield register—the big register, with all the sites on? Do they go on that register to get planning in principle, and what is the point of getting that when any scheme on them will get planning tomorrow? Therefore, what use is the brownfield register to these types of sites? Secondly, we keep reading that the Government have lots of money for brownfield sites: the Chancellor in his Budget announced £1.2 billion or £1.3 billion—I think it was the same £1.2 billion that had been announced some months previously, but that does not matter. This money keeps being announced, but whenever we look at it we find that it is for remediation schemes, and we do not need remediation money; we need pure, simple gap funding.

That is a plea from the heart, from the heart of the Pennines, because we want to develop these sites and we cannot, because they are not viable. Gap funding is needed, and we need some help from central government as well as from local funds. However, my questions were also about the brownfield register and how non-viable sites like that would fit in with the register and its purpose. I beg to move.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I am slightly puzzled by the tenor of the noble Lord’s argument. I quite understand his point that no profit can be made by building for sale on these sites. However, that raises the question of why he is looking only at building for sale. Why cannot a site like that be used for social housing? That seems to be the obvious answer in many ways. Of course it is slightly subverted by two things, which affect the potential for local authority or housing association housebuilding. One is the right to buy, which will ultimately accrue, and the second is of course the reduction in rents that will be charged by housing authorities, which will reduce their capacity to invest in either their current stock or in new building. To look at such sites as sites for social housing provision is a better way of dealing with them than to seek some sort of subsidy for private sale, which will ultimately result in people making a gain out of what would probably be better as social housing. Therefore the noble Lord might want to reconsider the whole nature of his approach.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, it is very simple. Housing associations are organisations which have to run commercially. They therefore judge the viability of their new-build schemes on the basis of contributions that they get from the Housing and Communities Agency, contributions they put into it themselves, the cost of managing and repairing the properties over 30 years and the rents they will get in during that period.

We are an area which has not only low house prices but low rents, so there is a limit to what we can charge. These sites have been looked at in great detail. Some of them have been developed by the council in co-operation with the main housing association, which is the Stock Transfer Housing Association. The sites I am talking about, however, are simply not viable for social housing, just as they are not viable for anything else. The numbers do not add up, whether you are building for rent, for sale or for partial schemes. In some sites they do. For example, the council has developed some sites in Briarfield, where a majority of the houses have been sold, and in order to make the scheme viable and for other good reasons, some of them have been sold to the housing association. We are working together wherever possible, but the fact is that building new houses on a lot of the brownfield sites in a lot of these places, and certainly in Lancashire and neighbouring parts of Yorkshire, simply is not viable. Therefore, there has to be gap funding and some sort of subsidy—not a huge one, but it has to be there to make it possible.

[Lord Beecham]

I can see the argument for housing association provision, but I would not have thought it would run to the same extent, or at all, for the local authority itself doing the building because it would have a housing stock and a housing revenue account. It certainly has to balance that housing revenue account, but those costs can be spread, I would have thought, in a way that a housing association might find difficult. I still think there is a difficulty.

[Lord Greaves]

Some local authorities were sensible enough, or foolish enough, according to your view—I was against what we did in our local authority, but we did it—to get rid of all their council housing. In our case, it was as a result of a quite disgraceful bribe from the previous Labour Government which people felt they simply could not turn down. It really was shocking, the amount of money that was thrown into it—not shocking for the tenants and the houses, because a lot of money went into those houses as a result of the stock transfer, and the local authority had all its debt written off as a result. The whole thing was a public scandal, but very good for the housing estates in Pendle. However, we do not have a housing revenue account, so we cannot do it. What we do is build properties through our development company, a half-owned council development company, highly successful, but, again, it has to be done. We do it on the basis of a 5% or 8% mark-up, profit, compared to the commercial people, who want 15% or even 20% on such sites.

[Lord Beecham]

I stand corrected on the experience of Pendle, but that is not necessarily typical, one hopes. I look to the Minister to take the point that I made in respect of other authorities, which are perhaps not in quite the vulnerable position that Pendle appears to be. That means, again, looking at local authorities building houses, whether on brownfield sites or elsewhere. There is no incentive in the Bill for that to happen, so I ask the Minister to consider, again, the role of local authorities in providing housing, not just on brownfield sites but more generally.

Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

He came very close. We had our times together.

Then I heard the noble Lord talk about unintended consequences, and it seems to me that this proposal is full of the threat of unintended consequences. I go back to the point I made previously, which was picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Best, that this Bill is trying to fit everybody into the same pot. It is one size fits all, when what we need is a series of different answers to the problems of the housing market in different parts of the country.

When I spoke previously, I said that there are lots of different housing markets—perhaps 100—around the country. The person who first gave me that idea is now in his place and is my noble friend Lord Stunell, who gave us a talk when he was a Minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government in which he kept hammering home the point that you cannot have one rule for everybody. That means that there have to be local mechanisms for finding solutions. The only people who can legitimately do that and set out to find those mechanisms and policies are the elected local authority.

Having said that, I will ask the Minister the following three questions. One relates to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Horam. In 2001, owner-occupation in this country reached a peak of 69%. By 2011, it had gone down to 64%, and it is now somewhere in the low 60s. I suggest that that is an unintended consequence of a number of different policies. I believe that owner-occupation is the best form of tenure, although there are people for whom it is not appropriate and people who would not want it. I first got involved in politics at the end of the 1950s, joining the Liberal Party when “Ownership for all” was a Liberal slogan. It is still a good slogan, if a little on the extreme side. My question for the Minister is: do the Government have a target of what they think is a reasonable level of owner-occupation in this country? Are they content for the level to continue to slip until it gets down to perhaps 50%, or do they want to boost it again, and if so, how far do they think we can reasonably get the level to?

The second question is totally unrelated to that and is just a question I realised I did not know the answer to. Is a person or a young couple who buy a house which is a starter home, and therefore get the 20% discount on the market price, also entitled to the 20% Help to Buy discount if they qualify for that? That is just a straight question, because if that were the case it would have an interesting impact.

My final question goes back to the kind of area which I know best, which covers a lot of the north of England outside the most rural areas and the big cities—and perhaps some of the big cities, too—as well as a lot of the rest of the country as well. What is a local authority supposed to do if it cannot find anybody who wants to build starter homes? That may seem a ludicrous question in some parts of the country, but it is not a ludicrous question in the part of the country where I live. It is quite possible that local or big housebuilding companies will not want to build any starter homes, for a whole series of reasons.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. I have to say that I rather struggled, as, I suspect, other Members of your Lordships’ House may have done, with the huge number of amendments in this group and the following group, which are in many ways connected. It has not made preparing for the debate—or, I suspect, replying to the debate, for the Ministers—a very easy job. However, we have heard some extremely interesting contributions, and I hope the Government will listen very carefully to the views not just of members of different political parties but particularly of the Cross-Bench Members, who have brought their experience and independence of mind to bear on these very important problems.

In the first instance, I will speak to Amendment 48, which relates to the provision of starter homes and which relates particularly to Clause 3, under which the Bill lays down:

“An English planning authority must carry out its relevant planning functions with a view to promoting the supply of starter homes in England”.

So far, so good. Subsection (2) continues:

“A local planning authority … must have regard to any guidance given by the Secretary of State in carrying out that duty”.

Amendment 48 would add to that subsection (2) something of a restriction so that it would continue,

“except where the local authority considers that providing starter homes would prevent other types of affordable housing being built”.

In other words, it introduces into the Bill the notions that there has to be a balance between the provision of starter homes and other affordable homes, and that the Secretary of State should not be able simply to prescribe that the one—starter homes—must always prevail over any other considerations. That seems a sensible way forward.

It is interesting to read the policy fact sheet on starter homes published by the department, which lays down the general nature of the Bill. It asks what the Bill hopes to achieve and answers,

“a general duty on English planning authorities to promote the supply of starter homes when carrying out their planning functions”.

So far, that is quite acceptable. However, it continues with,

“allowing the Secretary of State to make regulations to create a starter homes requirement, so that English planning authorities may only grant planning permission if the starter homes requirement is met. This will ensure that starter homes are delivered on suitable, reasonably sized sites”.

That is not necessarily a logical conclusion, but the important thing is that it makes an absolute duty, which will ultimately be fleshed out in regulations and which, needless to say, we will not have sight of before the Bill is enacted, if it is enacted in its present form. Moreover, nothing is said either here or in any other area about the salient fact that the requirement will not necessarily be confined to providing such starter homes for residents within the locality. They could come from far away or perhaps from adjoining authorities, but there is no indication that the planning requirement will address the needs of people within the very authority that will have to carry out these proposals.

Interestingly, the fact sheet says that the Government are consulting until 22 February. Admittedly, that is only a week or so ago; given the time we have to consider the Bill, I agree that that is rather a limited period, but we do not know quite when the consultation started. They are consulting,

“on changes to national planning policy to complement these legislative reforms”,

which seems somewhat akin to the old Alice in Wonderland trope of “Sentence first—verdict afterwards”. We do not know what the consultation will produce, but the Government are in any event determined to impose their view. The noble Lord, Lord Horam, who is in some danger of being accused of political recidivism on the basis of his extremely sensible contributions to the debates on the Bill, has indicated, rightly, that we are proceeding in the dark. Of course, we have been stumbling in the dark over many Bills, given the way the Government decide to conduct their business, particularly with reference to pending secondary legislation or regulations. However, the noble Lord is also right to identify that there are no available financial data within the information that is before the Committee or, presumably, that is likely to be before it. These are surely major considerations.

Reference has been made to some of the issues which are clearly of concern, in particular the position on who will be eligible for, and capable of benefiting from, the starter home concept. In particular, we have heard of the Shelter report, which makes it clear that for a majority of people who are not on high wages or without dual salaries, the starter home project will not help them get on the ladder at all; they simply will not be able to afford it.

My noble friend Lady Royall referred to the very small percentage of authorities—I think it was 2% of authorities—in which people on the national living wage would be capable of buying a starter home; even those on average earnings are likely to be able to buy in only 42% of local authorities. That is not a particularly impressive extension of what is meant to be an important right.

Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

Liverpool was in many minds at that time. The noble Lord and I perhaps shared a view about Liverpool, but we were not alone in that.

The principle of looking across government departments and local authority functions embodied in a small way in those arrangements was returned to under the previous Government with the concept of Total Place. As I think I have said before in debates in your Lordships’ House, that has, I believe, been rebranded as community budgets, but it is consistently compatible with the thrust of the Government’s policy on city deals and the thrust of the amendments, which, of course, I support. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, was quite right to refer to the powers and resources that are required to invigorate local economies. That involves, by definition, a wide range of public organisations, including government departments. One thinks of BIS, the Department for Transport, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Education, the DCLG, Defra and the Department of Energy and Climate Change. All potentially have a role to play with not only their policies but sometimes with their resources in individual areas. I hope that the Government can look at reinforcing the concept of the city deal by connecting it to the concept of community budgeting or Total Place, so that one looks at the sum of government-directed public expenditure in an area and sees how it can fit into and be applied to the issues of economic growth and regeneration.

Of course, the city deals that have been announced are welcome. Newcastle has benefited; I think that the figure is roughly £80 million. Liverpool got a little more at £110 million. That is not necessarily cash coming from the Government. It is the value of some of the freedoms that have been given, including, for example, tax-increment financing. Tax-increment financing is the permission effectively to borrow against the anticipated business rate income, which will generated by development. It has been deployed effectively for some years in the United States. There is reason to hope that it will help us here.

It is not, then, a question of the Government passing resources to the local authority, but of borrowing. Useful and impressive though those schemes and those amounts of money to invest will be, however derived, they have to be contrasted with the loss of financial resources to the very same authorities as a result of the local government finance settlement, exceeding on an annual basis in the cases of both Liverpool and Newcastle—and perhaps the others, I cannot say for certain—the value of the city deal and its financial implications. That is ultimately money taken out of the local economy, which is likely to have a deleterious effect on that local economy, employment and business. It is a curious inconsistency, which the Government have to address. They have to align their local government finance policies with the ambitions, which we share in local government, across the parties, of the city deal programme.

Finally, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and my noble friend Lord Smith on the need for local authorities to co-operate and not to be seen to be competing with one another, at least in the same sort of area. There will no doubt be competition —healthy, I hope—between different parts of the country, offering different attractions for investment from within this country or overseas; that is a healthy process. However, it would be a great mistake if, within regions—or, to use the current governmental phrase, sub-national areas—there were to be cut-throat competition between more-or-less neighbouring authorities.

It was striking in those dark days of the 1980s—which the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, did his best to brighten in Newcastle—that the region of the north-east came together in two ways. First, it came together—I have to say, at my suggestion—to create a Northern Regional Councils Association, which included Cumbria in those days, as it rather looked to the east than to the south. It also came together to facilitate the hugely important Nissan development in Sunderland. There was no competition between authorities as to who should get that. We came together and worked with business in the region and the Government of the day on behalf of the region as a whole. It is effectively a functional economic area, to use the jargon. That spirit of co-operation certainly needs to be driven, and I hope that the Government will incentivise it as these proposals go forward. I hope that—with the slightly cautionary words of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, about not conferring significant powers and functions on unviably small groups of authorities on their own terms, with which I agree—

Have I misunderstood the noble Lord?

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, that was not my point at all. My point is that people who live in big cities think that these places are functionally unviable because they are smaller than where they come from. My point is that they are not necessary functionally unviable just because they are smaller. They are big towns, small cities and areas with an urban nucleus which can actually do the job themselves, even though their population might be only 500,000 rather than 8 million.

Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 28th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, the Minister has taken the opportunity to mention in your Lordships’ House a decision recently announced by the Secretary of State. The latest ukase from the tsar of Eland House goes even further in eroding the position of local authorities. The proposal that he has just announced would allow the Secretary of State to grant permitted development status—as I understand it, for a year—during which a planning application would be processed. That seems to be an extraordinary pre-emptive procedure. I cannot think of a precedent for something of that kind. It would be bad enough if it were a final decision. It is ludicrous to pretend that it is a temporary decision because it is almost inconceivable that the Secretary of State, having granted that permitted development, would not end up approving an application even if it had been turned down by the local authority and the matter went to appeal.

It is another example of the Government interfering and intervening in local decision-making, and in this case in a quite unprecedented way. I invite the Minister to indicate the basis on which this change is happening. I know in my own city a sort of school has been established in what are effectively domestic premises. I do not know how big the school is intended to be, but it is certainly not complying with a number of regulations, including of course the planning regulations. While I would not expect there to be many examples of wholly unsatisfactory buildings being used in this way, there clearly is a risk that schools will be encouraged by the order from the Secretary of State to proceed willy-nilly with their proposals, potentially excluding the local authority entirely. If that is what is envisaged in this context, in how many other areas will the Government seek to assume these powers, and with what effect on the local planning system?

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I saw this only a few minutes ago when I was alerted to it by an e-mail from the Bill team. I congratulate them on doing that, since, along with the Minister’s comments, it gives us the opportunity to debate this under a rather different and less dramatic amendment from that of the noble Lord on the Labour Front Bench.

Having now read the Statement while the discussion was taking place, the proposal that is being put forward seems quite extraordinary. Anything that is announced as a new state-funded school and has the support of the Secretary of State for Education goes ahead outside the normal planning system. That is, I understand, exactly what is being proposed at least for the first year. Presumably it will apply to all of them and not just to those which are said to have had problems opening on time because of delays in the planning system. Once again, we find that if there is a problem with planning—which is presumably caused by something real and is not invented by the planning authority—it is the planning system that is to blame. As the Prime Minister said quite recently, the planners should be removed from the scene. Those were not his exact words, but he said that they should be swept away—that they should get out of the way and let growth commence.

If that is what parts of the Government want, they should be fairly clear and overt about it and we can have debates about it. However, what is happening is that bits are being chipped away here and there. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said that it is eroding the power of local authorities. I would say it severely undermines the whole reason for and purpose of the planning system. If it is to be undermined for somebody who wants to run a small business that does not really affect anybody else, and that person wishes to run that business in very unsatisfactory circumstances—in a condition of squalor—I suppose that is their business. However, we are talking here about schools, children in schools and the people who live in the neighbourhood around schools. Even if it is a small free school, it will inevitably have some impact on the people who live around it.

I read that these changes will be subject to a prior approval process to mitigate any adverse transport and noise impacts. I am not quite sure how that will work. Presumably, if there are adverse noise impacts, they will come under environmental health legislation anyway, but I am not sure how the prior approval process will mitigate any adverse transport impacts and what that means. Perhaps the Minister can explain exactly how that will work.

For everything else that might result from a change of use to a school, not necessarily with changes of any sort to the building, presumably you just close down whatever it was previously and move in. It could have been offices, hotels, residential institutions, secure residential institutions—perhaps they are appropriate for some schools, but I will not comment further on that—or used for assembly and leisure. These uses can be converted overnight to a school without so much as a by-your-leave other than prior approval to mitigate any transport and noise impacts. Surely this is fundamentally wrong. It is stated that in a small number of cases free schools have had to delay their opening because there were planning problems; that may be the case. If there were problems, whatever they were, that suggests that that opening should have been delayed and those problems should have been sorted out, just as with any other change of use that would take place.

The Minister’s Statement, headed “Planning and Schools”, says that the Government believe,

“that the creation and development of state-funded schools is strongly in the national interest”—

—we all agree with that; it is a question of how you create and develop them—

“and that planning decision makers can and should support that objective, in a manner consistent with their statutory obligations”.

I think that is referring to the planning decision-makers, but this proposal would abolish their statutory obligations, at least for 12 months. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said, a free school supported by the Secretary of State for Education which opens without planning permission in the first year has to spend that year getting planning permission. If that planning permission is turned down because the premises are obviously unsuitable to be turned into a school, for whatever reasons, the idea that that will go to appeal and the inspectorate will uphold the decision of the local planning authority is not likely. The inspectorate will get its firm instructions. It is quite clear that the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government are in cahoots over this. The planning system is being pushed to one side.

Yet the Statement goes on to say:

“Experience to date has demonstrated that with the assistance of the Education Funding Agency new state-funded schools, and free schools in particular, have been successful in identifying sites that have gone on to secure planning permission”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/1/13; col. 25WS.]

Presumably we can discuss this further on Report, but since we are discussing it now, it seems that at the very least the Minister needs to be clear and tell us how many instances there have been, out of all the free schools which have been set up, of them having their opening delayed because of planning problems? Where is the evidence that this is happening? What is the scale of the evidence, and what were the circumstances in each of those cases? I suspect that there are not very many of them.

This is a shambles. It is a Secretary of State for Education and a Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, as I said, in cahoots, driving a coach and horses through the normal planning system. The problem is that if government policy always trumps good planning, where will it end? It will not end with free schools, it will end with anything that any Secretary of State thinks is a good idea and pushes through, regardless of the effects on the people using the premises and on the local community.

--- Later in debate ---

Lord Beecham: Can the Minister confirm whether the proposals apply only to free schools or whether, as I read them, they apply to any state schools, which could be academies or local authority schools? A county education authority could go into an urban district that has planning powers and put in a local authority school on the same basis. This is not just for free schools, is it?

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I thought about that and then thought that the present Secretary of State will not give permission if it is a local authority school. He will say, “No, you’ve got to do it properly and get planning permission”.

I am grateful that the Minister emphasised that the period will be only one year, and I think that we understood that. However, he also said that, to the best of his knowledge, no free school has so far been refused planning permission—those were his words—and, therefore, at least half the answer to the question on how many have been delayed is “none”, at least at one end of the spectrum of being refused. It would be helpful if, when he writes, he can tell us how many free schools—and where they are—it is claimed have been delayed because of what he calls bureaucracy in the planning system. We can then look at them and make our own assessment of whether this extremely draconian measure is in any way justified.

Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 28th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have Amendment 55CB in this group, which has the same effect as that of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, so I will not repeat what he said.

Viability is increasingly important, and not just in relation to Section 106 and the removal of obligations to make things viable. It is inherent in planning applications and local plans, in which pieces of land should be developed before others and in whether it is any longer possible, in old industrial towns such as in the area in which I live, to prioritise brownfield, formerly developed and regeneration sites over and above greenfield sites. That is fundamental. The definitions which the Government, Planning Inspectorate and local authorities will use for viability on particular sites will also be fundamental. I look forward to future discussion on this.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, can the Minister enlighten us on the robustness of the attribution to affordable housing allocations in terms of the 75,000 houses affected by this lack of viability? The information was given in a Written Statement last September by Mark Prisk MP, the relevant Minister. It did not distinguish between general viability issues and those that might have been occasioned by the inclusion within the affordable housing provisions, which have not been acted on.

Mention has been made of the £300 million the Government are making available to compensate for losses under Section 106. Has any of that been used to reduce this number of 75,000 and, if so, upon what basis? Can the Minister enlighten us on that—if not tonight, then subsequently? Viability can of course be called into question. There is a variety of problems, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has just mentioned. They might particularly relate to buying at the top of the market and finding that land and other values have fallen since. That makes the problem of viability clear, but there could be other factors as well. If we are moving towards a position where guidance is to be given on viability after the consultation that has already been referred to, it would be sensible to distinguish between the different factors that contribute to the viability problems that are perceived to occur.

Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 28th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, made what Ministers are apt to call some interesting points, which usually presages a disinclination to approve them. However, he did make some interesting points, not least the thought that perhaps the Treasury should revisit the issue of how significant housing projects and more generally the construction industry, to take up the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, might be supported. However, the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was too limited in some ways.

The assumption throughout the noble Lord’s speech was that we are talking exclusively about housing, but Section 106 agreements are not, of course, confined only to housing matters. Secondly, he assumed that affordable housing schemes are for owner occupation. Of course that is true of a greater proportion, but they are not necessarily confined to owner occupation. There is also a need—which is one of the reasons for these agreements in any event, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, implied—for a mix of tenure which would potentially ensure that there is a social mix within the development. In addition, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, implied that we are talking only about first-time buyers. I do not know what the evidence is for that assertion. When new estates are built, wherever that is, there are certainly a number of first-time buyers, but equally there are people who are, as it were, trading up and who are not necessarily first-time buyers. The position is not quite as stark as he suggested.

It follows that we need to be very clear about what the policy objectives are. First, as everyone in this Committee and in the House generally would confirm, we need to build more houses. Secondly, they should be accessible, through one form of tenure or another, to a wide range of people, not least in order to meet the desirable aim of having the kind of social mix that would help avoid a divided society. There are different ways of doing this. Clearly, Section 106 agreements can facilitate matters, and we will debate that issue in greater detail later. However, I recall in the 1970s, when there was a collapse in the property market, that my local authority stepped in to buy up unsold new private housing developments. That may have happened in other places as well but I cannot say whether it did. They were taken into the municipal stock. Subsequently, of course, under right-to-buy, they virtually all left local authority ownership. However, this might be a way of freeing up the industry; if not properties that are currently built and standing empty, then at least local authorities or social housing organisations taking a share of a development, thereby providing initial purchases and helping to ensure that kind of social mix.

[Lord Greaves]

The noble Lord reminds me of what Pendle Council did when I was chairman of the housing committee, back in those days when we were all young. As the noble Lord may recall, it was possible because it was a central government initiative that provided the funding, by some means or other, whereby the councils could do that.

[Lord Beecham]

Precisely. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Deben, would agree but that might be one of the lines of inquiry that the Treasury could pursue and the Government could adopt. The position is not quite as stark as the noble Lord was suggesting and I certainly support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Best.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

The noble Lord makes some good points. I will put a slightly different scenario to him and ask what he thinks. In an area where development is difficult to get under way because it is not a growing or economically buoyant area—I am obviously talking about my own area—clearance took place under the old housing market renewal scheme, so there are small brownfield sites. The council will provide those brownfield sites for free to the main local social housing landlord, the RSL which deals with the former council stock. The intention was to build mixed developments of affordable housing on there, some of which would be for sale and some for rent. However, when you take into account free land, the cost of developing the site and the rents which can be charged in a low-rent area over the next 30 years, as against the costs of developing and management during that period or the price that would have to be charged for affordable housing for sale, the figures just do not add up. Those sites remain undeveloped because they are not affordable to the RSL under the existing rules and regulations. Does the noble Lord have a solution?

[Lord Beecham]

If I did, it would not necessarily be one that has as yet been reached by my colleagues at the other end of the building. I cannot be writing Labour’s housing policy, much as I would like to.

We need to go back and consider the point which I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was implying: the Treasury and the Government have to look at the extent to which public investment is required to meet the housing crisis that we are facing, if only because that will have wider impacts upon the economy as a whole. It is as good and necessary a time for that kind of investment to take place, given low rates of interest in borrowing and the need on the construction and housing sides. I think an element of public subsidy would be desirable, but I emphasise that I am not authorised to make any such pronouncements.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

Of course, they were originally going to stack up because the relatively small gap funding required there was going to come through the housing market renewal scheme. Unfortunately, the coalition’s abolition of that scheme now makes it impossible.

[Lord Beecham]

There is, of course, also £300 million in the Government’s programme for affordable housing. I have today tabled a Question for Written Answer, which might be anticipated by the Minister, as to where that is going.

Growth and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, this is the first day of Committee and a new stage; according to the rules, I therefore need to repeat the declarations of interests that I made at Second Reading. I remind the House of my membership of a local planning authority and of two development management committees. I am also a vice-president of the LGA.

I have tabled Amendment 32, to which my noble friend Lord Tope was good enough to put his name, whereby if the Government wish to designate an authority they should set out a notice of intention to do so. There is agreement across the amendments in the group that this is a good idea. I have tried to flesh out the broad principle set out in the lead amendment and some others. My amendment states:

“Before designating an authority under this section, the Secretary of State must serve a notice of intention to designate … The notice must … specify the reasons for serving the notice, all of which must have regard to the criteria that the Secretary of State has published”.

It should,

“specify those actions by the authority which the Secretary of State believes are necessary to satisfy the reasons for serving the notice; and … give the authority a period of twelve months in which to take the specified actions”.

Whether the period should be 12 months is debatable but I took the view that the Government would not want it to be too long. The amendment continues:

“At the end of the twelve month period, the Secretary of State must publish a report which sets out the extent to which the reasons for serving the notice still apply or no longer apply”.

At that stage, the Secretary of State may confirm the designation and take over relevant planning applications or withdraw the designation because, in his opinion, the authority has pulled its socks up, or he may give the authority another six months in which to do so.

It seems to me that this whole process, for the first time, takes away planning powers from local planning authorities and vests them in the person of the Secretary of State on the basis of alleged or perceived poor performance by a local planning authority. This is quite new and the process needs to be absolutely transparent. People need to understand why the decision is being made and how the situation can be remedied.

Like other noble Lords, I would much prefer this provision to be taken out of the Bill. However, if it is going to be there, there needs to be a clear choice between a degree of perhaps heavy-handed, detailed intervention in the running of an authority to sort out the problem and the draconian and complex process of an almost immediate central takeover of some of the development management functions of that authority. Surely the first of those must be the way forward. However few of these authorities there may be, the Government are proposing to nationalise some of their planning functions. It is interesting that a Government with a majority of Conservatives are sometimes so interested in nationalising things which up until now have taken place at a local level.

The amendment puts forward a gentle nutcracker, not a sledgehammer, if there is a nut to be cracked, and I hope that something along these lines will find favour with the Government. In particular, even if they do not want to put something on the face of the Bill, I hope that they will give very clear commitments along the lines of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, so as at least to give authorities the right to defend themselves and to explain what they can do, and also to give them a period of time in which to improve their performance so that we do not have to go through this rather draconian and undesirable rigmarole of the Planning Inspectorate—bless them—taking over detailed local planning functions.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I also declare interests as an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association and a member of Newcastle City Council. During my service on that local authority, I was leader of the council for some 17 years and was heavily involved in major development decisions. Subsequently, I was chair of the development committee and, after that, I served as a member of the development control sub-committee. Therefore, I have some working knowledge of the role of the local authority in planning.

I join my noble friend Lord McKenzie in broadly supporting this group of amendments as a way of ameliorating what seems to me a very badly drafted Bill. It would be preferable if the Government would abandon this whole proposal. I say that because there are many questions around the reasoning behind the Bill.

In the impact assessment there is reference to the financing costs to the development industry of the present planning system, which one Professor Ball estimates at £1 billion a year in respect of delays in planning permission and another £1 billion for, as he puts it, holding assets for which at the moment development does not seem to be possible. That seems to ignore completely the outstanding permissions—as I recall, some 400,000—which have not been activated by that industry. Therefore, it seems that the professor has a somewhat skewed view. Even if he were right, would the Minister be able to indicate what the impact of these proposals would be on the figures that the professor has produced, on which the Government seek to rely in the impact assessment? What would be the reduction from the £1 billion figure, or indeed the £2 billion figure, if one takes into account land which developers do not seem able to bring forward?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, is 20 years a reasonable period? The point has already been made in debate that there is an issue with the effectiveness of local plans. If we are going back as long as that, it could be argued that that is not really a sufficient incentive to authorities to bring their plans up to date. They cannot be done annually but two decades is an extremely long time.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I apologise that I missed the speech by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie. He was moving an amendment that is very similar to my Amendments 7 and 26, which are in this group. I am sure that I agree with everything that he said about Amendment 3, since in effect it says almost the same thing as my Amendment 7, so I will say no more about that.

I want to say something briefly about national parks. There are two issues here. One concerns planning applications that may not become relevant applications and are therefore referred to the Secretary of State, as in the noble Lord’s amendment and my Amendment 7. My Amendment 26 says that authorities that may not be designated should include,

“a national park authority or the Broads Authority”.

The helpful information that we got about the number of major applications in the past year shows clearly that there are not very many in national parks. I think that the Minister referred to this; in some cases, the figure is as low as two. The statistics there could very easily be distorted.

However, there is more than that. National parks are very special places that have been designated for very special reasons. The national park planning authorities are already different from ordinary local planning authorities. They are not the ordinary district councils; they are the national park authority, which is a planning authority in its own right. A substantial proportion of the members of national park authorities are already nominated and appointed by the Secretary of State; I think it is the Defra Secretary of State, but is definitely a Secretary of State.

To take functions such as major planning applications away from the national park authority, in these very special places with their very special landscapes, and put them in the hands of a different Secretary of State —the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government—with a quite different agenda risks the balance of decision-making on these applications in national parks, shifting away from the importance of nature and landscape and towards development. Clearly, there always has to be a balance in every sort of area and national parks have to have development, but the criteria on which planning applications in national parks are assessed and decided are materially different from the criteria in much of the rest of the country. That is why they have been designated as national parks. The national park authorities have the responsibility for looking after those parks and for ensuring that those criteria are applied, in the interests not just of the landscape but of the people who live there. To take that away from them on technical operational grounds, based on the proportion of planning applications that were dealt with and determined within a two-year period or on other similar criteria, would be quite wrong.

This proposal is causing great alarm among the people who care for and about national parks, and I hope that the Minister will make it clear that they are not to be designated under any circumstances—and, preferably, will do so in the Bill.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Wednesday 16th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, with Amendments 73 and 75, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has correctly identified the importance to public health of collaboration and co-operation between agencies. The noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Greaves, come from somewhat different perspectives with regard to local government, perhaps based on their relevant or not relevant experience in this regard. I am, as ever, very grateful when my noble friend Lord Greaves offers me help, and we certainly can have discussions. Noble Lords, as these debates have shown, can offer experience across a wide area of knowledge and we would be remiss not to tap into that.

[Lord Greaves]

I thank my noble friend very much indeed for that. While the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and I may come from different ends of the spectrum, we end up in the middle agreeing on a way forward.

[Lord Beecham]

And so do I.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 14th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, these are probing amendments: as the debate has shown, there is a great deal to probe. I hope that when the Minister replies, he will be able to answer some of the questions and give more details of the thinking that underlies the Bill as it stands, and how it might be carried out in practice.

The body that we are talking about will have—as the noble Lord, Lord Harris has pointed out—an enormous budget and enormous responsibilities, both nationally and extending to localities. It will be responsible not just—just!—for commissioning general practice throughout the country, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt reminded us, but also for a range of other services which will effectively be delivered locally. Yet in terms of the structure, composition and governance of the board, this Bill is about as skeletal as I imagine is the specimen that will greet first-year medical students at their first anatomy lecture. It needs flesh on the bones. There are a number of suggestions here; I have rather too many suggestions and I plead guilty to having advanced only some of them, but we clearly need a view about how the board will work and who will serve on it. I concur with the views of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, in relation to the appointment of the chair of HealthWatch England as proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, as a member of the board. That person is likely to be conflicted: part of the job of HealthWatch will be to look at the operation of the board in an objective way. It may be that an attendance, as he suggests, would suffice.

Although I put down the amendment about the Chief Medical Officer being a member of the board, I can see the logic of the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that the Chief Medical Officer should attend without necessarily being a member of the board. I am temperamentally averse to mixtures of executive and non-executive directors. In the local government sphere, I never felt very comfortable with chief officers voting alongside elected members, but I suppose that members of this board are not going to be elected: they are going to be selected. I therefore think that it is sensible to have the best advice possible available to the board in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, has described.

In terms of public health specialism, I think there needs to be a public health specialist—but not necessarily a serving public health specialist. I see the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, has tabled an amendment calling for the appointment of a former director of children’s services. Without necessarily agreeing that that particular post should be designated, the concept of somebody with that experience—not necessarily being a serving member and therefore not conflicted—might well appeal. It is crucial—given that we are now going to have public health delivered in a very different way from what we had before, and basically rightly so, though in a complex structure that will involve the Secretary of State, the Commissioning Board and local government as well—that there should be a public health specialist of some kind serving on the board. I hope that the Minister may indicate a degree of sympathy with that.

As to the total size, I am a bit ambivalent about that, too. It clearly needs to be a working board and therefore cannot be too large; it cannot possibly reflect every conceivable interest. I agree with noble Lords who said perhaps it would be a mistake to prescribe the number in the legislation. That is a matter that could well be discussed later by the Secretary of State, no doubt having taken views and not least the views of the Health Select Committee in another place.

I hope that we can make some progress tonight in identifying issues which the Government will look at sympathetically and bring back on Report. If they do not, then at least those of us who want to press points will have an opportunity of doing so.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have for most of this Committee so far been listening to and reading what people have said and have been astonished, as I always am, by the immense amount of expertise and distinction there is in this House. There are all the professionals, and there seem to be more former Health Ministers in this House than in any other place that could be gathered together. Most of the debate so far has been about high-level, national-level principles and structures, and we are now moving on to the area that I have been trying to get my mind around since I first obtained a copy of this extraordinarily huge Bill. That is the new structures that are being set up at all levels and how they are all going to work together.

At Second Reading, I laid some claim for my party for some of the improvements that were made to this Bill after the pause in the House of Commons, but one thing that certainly happened to the Bill after that pause is that it became more complex as the number of different organisations and bodies became greater. The need for this House is to sort out how this new galaxy, or kaleidoscope, of new bodies within the health service are going to relate to each other and how it is going to work—I use the word “work” in a neutral sort of way—how it is going to happen in practice and how they are going to relate to those bodies which continue to exist, such as the hospital trusts, the PCTs, the strange clusters of PCTs that will stagger on for a certain amount of time and then disappear by some means that is not completely understood yet and, of course, local authorities and the whole of the voluntary and private sector involved in healthcare.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 14th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

I am not saying that there are no counties where that might be the appropriate arrangement. I am saying that in very large counties which, first, have a large population and, secondly, cover a large geographical area it would be excessive. Indeed, the situation in those counties which I just referred to is that the primary care trusts do not cover the whole county. All I am asking for is a degree of flexibility to allow appropriately sized clinical commissioning groups where the counties themselves would be too large. I declare that my own county is one such example. Indeed, as I said earlier, the areas that people are looking at as being appropriate for CCGs in Lancashire do not cover the whole county but the principle is absolutely right.

More important is Amendment 60, which is linked with Amendment 92ZZA, which my noble friend spoke to. Amendment 60 is about the code of conduct and was spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, and the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who I am pleased to see in his place again to hear what I have to say. As far as I am concerned, there is a real sense of déjà vu here, since in debating the recent Localism Bill—I do not know whether it is now the Localism Act—we spent many hours agonising over codes and standards of conduct for members of local authorities. I assume that when the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, talks about a code of conduct applying to clinical commissioning groups he actually means that it applies to the members of those groups.

I do not want to say a great deal more about this now, because if I start I will be difficult to put down. However, there was a great deal discussed during the Localism Bill since the Government started off with the position that they wanted to sweep away the existing regime in local government for local authority members, which is based on the Standards Boards for England and which they thought—and I agreed with them—was highly bureaucratic and expensive, very legalistic and over the top. They wanted effectively to remove the standards regime altogether. As a result of intensive discussions in your Lordships’ House in Committee, on Report and at Third Reading, a compromise was arrived at—a lighter touch regime, which regrettably does not involve a national code of conduct but requires local authorities to have a standards regime, to adopt a code of conduct based on the Nolan principles and a published system which is transparent and applies to local authority members in their area. The two noble Lords putting this amendment forward might profitably spend an hour or two reading Hansard from the Localism Bill—I am sure they will enjoy doing so—and looking at the way it might be applied to clinical commissioning groups, different bodies but with the same principles. If they come back on Report to say what regime would be appropriate I am sure those of us who have been involved in the Localism Bill would be pleased to discuss it.

Amendment 175CA is the first of what I believe to be extremely important amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath. It refers to representatives of district councils in two-tier areas. This is important because district councils in two-tier areas have actually been written out of this Bill and not included under the various definitions of local authorities, despite having a very important role to play in public health; they are housing authorities, housing standards authorities and environmental health authorities, and they provide all sorts of public health facilities such as leisure services. At present they often work closely with their primary care trusts on local projects to improve public health. It is an important issue in this Bill that will come up again later so I will not say any more now.

Direct representation on CCGs is not necessarily the most important issue here. If you have five or six district authorities in one CCG, as it looks like we will have, the representation would not be very direct anyhow. It is a crucial issue and one which casts its shadow over discussions we shall have in coming days. The really important parts of the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, are about the governance structures, how many independent members there may be on the CCGs and what role they will have. This is absolutely fundamental and links with local accountability. Should local accountability be to the patients in the area? Should it be through GPs? Should there be an understanding of some kind of accountability to everybody who lives in the area covered by the CCG? It is becoming very clear indeed that they are going to be area-based organisations responsible for the health of people in their area, despite the fact that some of the GPs will have patients who cross boundaries.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who said that if it is simply left to the groups themselves to appoint their members and successors they will run into trouble. There are going to be many countervailing forces within this new complex system that we are to have at local level. Bringing those countervailing forces together might result in integration, but if there is not sufficient integration and accountability built into the system it will result in conflict. There will be all sorts of different bodies involved. People will be out on the streets campaigning and collecting petitions, and the general culture within the local NHS will too easily become one of conflict rather than of people working together for the best of the area. The composition of the commissioning groups, the way in which they work and their accountability are going to be absolutely fundamental to this. If, with the assistance of this House, the Government get it right, it could be very successful. If they get it wrong, we will all be back in two or three years trying to get a new system, and we really do not want to see that happen.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, when I spoke to the amendments concerning the NHS Commissioning Board, I said that the arrangements for governance, membership and the like were skeletal. In the absence of the most reverend Primate, I am probably safe to say that these arrangements for clinical commissioning groups are, by comparison, words made flesh. There is currently virtually nothing in the Bill that indicates how these commissioning groups would be constructed, what their membership would be and indeed what they should do.

Clause 22 contains provisions to make changes to the 2006 Act to provide for regulations as to the governing bodies of clinical commissioning groups. It is disappointing that nearly a year after the Bill was first produced we are debating the formation of clinical commissioning groups without any clarity at all—for example, in the form of draft regulations, if they are to be prescribed by regulation rather than the Bill itself—about how these groups should be composed. It is quite unsatisfactory. Clearly tonight we are not going to be voting on anything—these are probing amendments—but I hope that before we get to Report we can have sight of draft regulations to see what is in the Government’s mind and what changes might be necessary for the composition of these bodies. I have some sympathy with Amendment 101A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, but that assumes that it would be the function of the NHS Commissioning Board to ensure the composition of the commissioning groups. That does not necessarily follow and presumably we will not know until we see what the draft regulations contain.

A number of your Lordships have referred to the issue of coterminosity. In principle, it sounds fairly straightforward although in practice it looks a little less straightforward. There are different types of coterminosity. As I have said before, in my home town of Newcastle we have two clinical commissioning groups. In one sense they are coterminous because they are within the boundary, but on the other hand there are two of them. What if they do not agree? What if there are competing, conflicting ideas about what should be commissioned from the service in Newcastle? That assumes that you can treat the services within the city as confined to the city, but of course that is not the case. There are facilities in the city that are widely used across the region. Some of them are specifically regional centres. It may be that some of these services would be commissioned by the NHS Commissioning Board, but others would not. In this era of patient choice and the like—and one understands and supports that—there will be interest from other commissioning groups around the region in what goes on in the city, so coterminosity takes on a different flavour in that respect. In some parts of the country geography could make it difficult to envisage coterminosity. In a county like Cornwall or Devon, commissioning groups based primarily on general practitioners would be less likely to find it easy to work on the basis of coterminosity across the county area.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 10th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

I take it that that was not the Minister’s reply to the debate. I have three brief points to make. We are moving on to the community right to challenge, and some of us have found it quite difficult to understand how it will work and how some of the problems which might result will be overcome. I thank the Bill team for their time and patience in explaining exactly how they see it working and being fairly honest about some of the difficulties which might exist. This is a difficult part of the Bill and it is one which, when it is enacted, as no doubt it will be, will need a careful eye kept on it. I cannot say that we have not had an immense amount of co-operation in trying to thrash it out.

I very much support Amendments 197B and 197E to 197G on the timing issues. Those are clearly a result of responding to the public consultation, but also to the discussions in Committee. I do not share the worries of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about the timing issues. The way in which the timing issues are now presented in the Bill is much better and leaves a great deal of initiative to local authorities. It is much better than the existing wording which leaves it all to the Secretary of State to lay down rules and regulations. I wish that the Government had been more flexible on similar matters in the 100 or so areas in the Bill that we can point to as giving excessive powers to the Secretary of State. In this instance, the Government have listened and we welcome that.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, the Minister referred to the extension to Ministers of the definition of agencies which might be subject to the right to challenge. That is the burden of Amendment 197B. Perhaps in his reply the Minister might indicate whether that could also include next-step agencies of government, which might carry out functions. More particularly, when one looks at Amendment 197D in conjunction with Amendment 197B, it seems to me that something of an anomaly is being created. There would be a community right to challenge Ministers under Amendment 197B, and that would extend to parish councils, but it would not, by virtue of Amendment 197D, extend to other local authorities, assuming one defines parish councils as local authorities. So we could have the anomalous situation of a parish council being able to exercise a right to challenge a government department or Minister about a provision of a service, but not the principal authority in which it is situated.

I do not imagine that that has been deliberately constructed in that way, but I should be grateful if the Minister would undertake to look at that anomaly before Third Reading. Parish councils can be quite substantial bodies—there can be 40,000 or 50,000 people in a parish area—and they might bid for a government service, whereas the county or district in which they are situated could not. That strikes me as a situation which would be difficult to explain. Perhaps it has not been envisaged as a possibility, but it seems to arise from these amendments. Perhaps the Minister could indicate a willingness to look at that point before we get to Third Reading.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Thursday 7th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I almost feel the need to apologise for not being a refugee from the dark satanic mills of Bradford, unlike so many other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate.

[Lord Greaves]

All Bradford’s problems stem from the fact that the mills all closed down quite a long time ago.

[Lord Beecham]

That is presumably why there are refugees in your Lordships' House.

My amendments are designed slightly to strengthen and clarify the position in respect of those who should be included in the list. The first relates to Clause 76(2)(b)(iii), which speaks of “a person specified”. I simply suggest that we make that “person or persons”, because it is clear that an individual is not the only, or indeed the likeliest, source of a nomination. Amendment 136BZB would then add a qualification to make that person or persons,

“resident and eligible to vote in local elections of the relevant authority”.

Again, it is necessary to tie in the individual making a nomination to the local community.

Amendment 136BZC would give “the local authority” the right to make a nomination as well. That seems sensible and should be no problem to the Government.

However, an issue arises in that respect, and in other respects in this part of the Bill, about the definition of a local authority. There is a clause in the Bill which sets out the hierarchy of local authorities, counties and so on. There is also, I believe—I cannot for the moment identify it—a provision in the Bill which requires local authorities to co-operate on issues across the Bill. That leaves the question, with which the Minister might help us, of which authority in a two-tier area has the duty to compile the lists or whether it is both. Both levels of authority might have an interest, or one might have an interest and another not, in the particular function for which a nomination is made. For example, there might be some functions—recreation and so on—where a district councillor would have an interest; there might be others, in the realm, let us say, of social services, where a county authority would be more likely to have an interest. There seems to be nothing in the Bill to dictate, or even indicate, which of the two authorities should make the list, whether there should be a combined list or how it might operate in practice. It would be unfortunate, to pick up the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord True, about the cost, if both authorities were obliged to maintain lists and staff up accordingly.

I do not expect the Minister to be able to deal with these matters immediately, but could they be looked at, clarified and worked through, perhaps in consultation with the Local Government Association? The vague “duty to co-operate”, a phrase to which we will return when we come on to the planning section of the Bill, does not really take us very far.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, this amendment reverts to the issue that I raised previously about districts within counties and who is to be the appropriate authority. It suggests a framework whereby there may be a shared interest that might be disposed of between the two tiers within county areas. I am not asking for a decision on that today but perhaps it is something that we might look at. The views of the Local Government Association might be taken on how best to deal with these matters. I suspect there may well be cases where at county level there is an interest—at district level, possibly not—and it would be invidious if there was a refusal by a district council when the county council might wish to accede to a request. It is worth exploring that grey area further. If the noble Baroness will indicate that discussions can take place, I would be very happy. I beg to move.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have tabled Amendments 147FA and 147FB in this group. I do not wish to pursue the technicalities of what they say but they are a means of probing the role of national park authorities in all this—whether the proposed system would be any different in national parks, and whether the special nature of national parks might mean that the system will have to be tweaked or be quite different in those areas. I shall be interested in what the Minister says.

In relation to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and with my district council hat on, I have to say that if this job is to be done—and, as I have already demonstrated, I am sceptical about whether it will have any real value—this really is a matter of local knowledge. Whether a particular pub in a remote area in the Forest of Bowland is an appropriate community asset to be stuck onto this register, or whether it is the kind of pub that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, was talking about—which is nothing to do with the local community—are local judgments. I cannot see the county barons who sit in their fastness in county hall having much of an idea about it. If they were to set up a system, they would have to decentralise it and set up systems at local and district levels. If county council functions can be operated at those levels, they should be operated by district councils. That seems to be common sense, but we discussed that earlier.

[Lord Beecham]

Would the noble Lord concede that in children’s or adult services there might be a need and a demand for buildings or other facilities to be made available whereby the actual funding and support would probably come from the county council, rather than the district, and that there would be no need for the county to be involved? That is the sort of issue that I suggested we needed to discuss. Given the costs of all this, might not some very small district councils find it difficult to operate this scheme? Is there not a case for flexibility here between the two levels—obviously while promoting co-operation between them—in the interests of the community that we would all seek to be fulfilled?

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, the last point might apply in some places. If it does, the basic power should rest with the district council, and if there is to be an agreement, it should be devolved upwards from the district to the county, rather than the other way round, which the noble Lord’s amendment suggests.

His other point about children’s services or other care services may be valid, but it is clearly different from funding a service—for example, totally or partly funding a voluntary or community-based service—where funding might well come from the county council. However, as to the question of who maintains the asset register, which is the narrow point we are talking about, it seems to me that if this job is to be done it ought to be done by the more competent people who, in this case, are probably the more local people.

While I am on my feet, I think that I need to declare another interest, given that I am talking again about councils. I am informed that in this past week I have been added to the long list of vice-presidents of the Local Government Association. I am not sure that it was the thing that I most wanted in life, but if it is an honour, it is an honour. I am sure that it is nothing like as big an honour as being a freeman of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, but we all pick up these crumbs where we can. So I declare that interest.

[Lord Beecham]

Did the noble Lord by any chance replace the Secretary of State as a vice-president of the Local Government Association?

[Lord Greaves]

I would like to replace the Secretary of State, but I do not think that there is much possibility of that happening. I do not know whether I would do a better job, but I might have better ideas—in some areas. I had better be careful what I say or the Whips will be after me again. We have been talking about Bradfordians a lot. There are about half a dozen Bradfordians in the Committee. The Secretary of State pretends to be a Bradfordian, but he is not really, he comes from the posh part of Keighley.

[Earl Cathcart]

The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has twice raised an interesting point about county councils having care homes within a district and whether they should be involved. Could not the county council nominate that asset as an asset of community value? Then it would be registered with the district and, if something happened to it, the county council could make an offer to bid, or whatever it wanted to do. Would that not be the answer?

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

The noble Baroness is, unusually, wrong. It is not a new form of coalition Government; it is how most coalitions work. Different parties bring different proposals to the table, compromises and trade-offs are reached and, one hopes, the best ideas from each of the parties come through. All I am saying is that it is no secret that the community right to challenge, as it is now called, and indeed the community assets that we will move on to discuss after this, came from the Conservative Party. I am not criticising that party for that or saying that I do not support it.

When I opened my remarks I said clearly that what we have to do with a new, untried, untested idea is ensure that it is going to work. If it does not, one of two things will happen. A lot of difficulties will be caused on the ground because the idea has not been thought through properly or, alternatively, it will be realised that it has not been thought through properly before these myriad regulations are produced and it will never happen, the regulations will never happen and perhaps the chapter will never be commenced. What I and the Liberal Democrats are trying to do is to be satisfied that the proposals are workable before they leave us so that they are actually a great success when they go out there.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, the amendments in my name start with Amendment 130ZBA. In estate agents’ parlance, the key to property is always described as “location, location, location”. When it comes to this legislation and the work of the Civil Service in advising Ministers, the phrase seems to be “regulation, regulation, regulation”, and it is to that that this amendment is addressed. The purpose of Amendment 130ZBA is to require the Secretary of State, before making regulations prescribing which services may be tendered and which not after an expression of interest, to consult with the Local Government Association or any public bodies to which the relevant section would apply. That echoes pleas that fell on unsurprisingly deaf ears last night in this Chamber on the police reform Bill where similar requirements were sought that the Home Secretary would require that police commissioners consulted with local authorities in respect of various matters. That did not appeal to Ministers but I rather hope that on this occasion Ministers will acknowledge that it would be sensible and right for the Secretary of State, before making regulations around this issue and indeed others in the Bill, to consult with a representative body for local government.

The second amendment would simply take out Clause 68(9). It is similarly designed to reduce the regulatory function to which other noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord Jenkin and Lord Greaves—have referred. I hope the Government will acknowledge that no harm will be done to them, and indeed the general tenor of the legislation will be improved, if they were to accept these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

The noble Lord may recall that I have an amendment dealing with precisely that matter, which we will discuss later.

[Lord Greaves]

My noble friends Lady Hamwee and the Minister are straying on to matters covered by future amendments. I remind my noble friend that she might have suggested some of those amendments. As for the idea that this is all about letting 1,000 flowers bloom, I invite my noble friend the Minister to come on over the tops and have a look at Colne at the moment. It is in an absolutely beautiful condition thanks to Colne in Bloom. There is a massive display of flowers; far more than 1,000. On the other hand, letting 1,000 flowers bloom did not do much good for Mao Tse-Tung. It has different connotations.

The Minister referred to recent consultations. Can he give us an assurance that the Government will publish a pretty full account of the results of those consultations and the evidence that they got? Will it be possible to access them?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

If there are not to be clear structures which are recognised as appropriate, how do you prevent the situation in which two employees make a right to challenge when they have absolutely no support from the rest of the employees, but because they have made the right to challenge, the process has to take place?

[Lord Beecham]

Before the noble Lord replies, may I point out that I have an amendment dealing with precisely that matter as well?

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 133ZC and 133ZE. They are all about the maximum and minimum periods by which local authorities have to deal with expressions of interest and the rules and regulations that the Secretary of State will be able to make in relation to those. I can only underline what my noble friend Lord Shipley has just said.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I also have an amendment in this group. First, I endorse what the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Greaves, have said in speaking to their amendments. My Amendment 133ZEA is effectively to replace the Secretary of State’s regulatory function—again we come across the Secretary of State’s regulations—with the relevant authority being allowed to determine and publicise the relevant periods between accepting an expression of interest and beginning the procurement exercise. That really ought to be a matter for local circumstances and local decision and not something prescribed nationally.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, we now move on to Chapter 4 of Part 4 of the Bill, which relates to assets of community value and the compilation of lists of assets of community value by local authorities, the definition of community land, the procedures for including the land in the list, and so on. This is an important chapter. It is entirely new legislation, with new ideas and a new procedure. As with the right of community challenge, this House has, I believe, a duty to ensure that the legislation is workable.

I shall speak also to six other amendments in the group, which are in my name, and there are many other amendments in the names of other noble Lords. Amendment 133D, which leads the group, seeks to change the definition of what is to be in the list which the local authority maintains. Clause 74(1) states:

“A local authority must maintain a list of land in its area that is land of community value”.

We seek to change that to,

“a list of businesses in its area that are businesses of community value”.

This is a probing amendment to probe the meaning of “land”, “businesses” and “buildings”, which are all referred to in this part of the Bill. There is also something more fundamental behind it, which is the question of what, in a community, is of value to people. As far as this proposal is concerned, is it land, or is it what people do with the land; in other words, the businesses? There is a fundamental distinction and it is worth debating. There is also the matter of whether land, as such, should be maintained on the register or whether it should be dealt with in some other way. We will come to those amendments in due course.

Amendment 136ZAB—

[Lord Beecham]

Does the noble Lord have a view on the utility of Clause 74(2) which reads:

“The list maintained under subsection (1)”—

with which the noble Lord has just dealt—

“by a local authority is to be known as its list of assets of community value”.

Does he think that is useful or would he have in mind a further amendment about that?

[Lord Greaves]

I do not know. If the local authority is maintaining a list of land or businesses of community value, it will no doubt be known as the list of assets of community value. Whether the words are required in legislation is something I have long since stopped wondering about. I am sure that some of us could get round a table and reduce the size of this Bill considerably just by omitting stuff that appears to add nothing. I am not sure that that is our job. I would love to go through deleting stuff, but the Government would not accept it. When I do, they do not accept it. I have no real comment on that.

The Bill refers to a building or land specified in regulations, as a definition of the buildings and land which perhaps ought to be in the list of community assets. Again, it refers to a building or land, and appears to refer to a particular building or particular land, but it seems to me that it ought to refer to a class of building or land or a category of building or land.

Amendments 136ZB and 136ZC go together and are rather more specialist. Amendment 136ZB is quite long. It states:

“For the purposes of this section “land of community value” does not include … an allotment, common, open space, nature reserve or playing field in the ownership or management of a national or local authority or a charity whose purpose includes the management or conservation of that land for the public benefit … access land, or … land governed by an approved estate management scheme under section 19 of the Leasehold Reform Act 1967 or section 69 of the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development act 1993”.

Amendment 136ZC defines the terms. As defined in the amendment, access land is land defined as such under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. It covers very large areas. For example, the whole of the Lake District is access land, either because it is urban common or because it has been described as access land. Very large areas of the uplands of this country are access land, and many places have commons that are access land. Clearly this is land of community value, which is why it has been defined as access land on which people can engage in what I believe is termed “recreation on foot”. However, it would be ludicrous if all that land were to be included in this legislation. These amendments exclude it.

The list of allotments, commons, open spaces and so on removes from the Part 4 procedure land already reasonably protected by statute, and land where the present owners should not be encouraged to believe that they can offload it on other people or perhaps on public authorities. It is also desirable to simplify the creation of the lists. Many areas, large and small, are defined in this way and might be included. However, if they were it would be likely to lead to a large number of disputes that would be difficult to resolve.

The definitions of allotment, common and open space are similar to those in Clauses 163(3) and 183(10) in the London sections, which repeat definitions from previous legislation over the years. It should be noted that the definition of “allotment” does not include the normally understood meaning of allotment, which is either a statutory allotment under the Allotments Act 1922 or a council or other allotment probably let on an annual garden tenancy. These allotments are the specialist fuel and field garden allotments under an Inclosure Act, which some of us will remember discussing during the passage of previous legislation.

The amendments do not seek to prevent the transfer or leasing of any of these excluded classes of land to appropriate charitable organisations—by agreement and after full consultation with the public and those affected—but it should not be under the pressure of this procedure. These classes of land have protection that is long established and rather specialist, and it should remain.

Amendment 133E questions the five-year time limit for land and buildings that are included—

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 120B, I shall speak also to the other eight amendments in this group, which are in my name and in the name of my noble friend Lord Tope, who will arrive in a minute, I hope.

Although we have debated only two groups of amendments so far, we have made quite a lot of progress in discussing the issues around the proposals for referendums. These amendments address the question of who can call referendums under the provisions of this chapter. We approached the question of referendums with some scepticism—that has become obvious. Nevertheless, we understand that there is a localist case for referendums regardless of whether referendums themselves are a suitable part of local democracy. The case was made well by the noble Lord, Lord True, before the lunch break. We are troubled by referendums not just because they present various practical dangers and difficulties, which we talked about last Thursday and this morning, but because of the question of whether local democracy should be plebiscitary or deliberative. The problem with referendums is that they demand a yes or no answer to questions that very often require a great deal of careful discussion and deliberation and are not answerable in a yes/no sort of way; they are answerable in a much more complex way that requires amendment, mediation and compromise between different interests in the community. This is at the heart of the question of who should call referendums.

This suite of amendments would delete those parts of the Bill that allow referendums to be called by a small number of elected councillors. It would also delete the provision that an elected mayor, whether in London or elsewhere, could call a referendum. It would also, perhaps for different reasons, delete the provisions that allow a council itself to call a referendum. I will take those points in order.

In our view, the provision that allows a small number of elected members to call a referendum in their wards is open to a great deal of misuse and abuse. In particular, if,

“one or more members of the authority can make a request”—

in the words of the Bill—then the,

“member for an electoral area”,

or,

“a majority of the members”,

in a multi-member area can call a referendum. It is not clear whether councillors for adjoining wards could join together and jointly call for the same referendum in two or more wards. I put that question to the Minister.

Last Thursday we discussed the danger—so I will not go into it in great detail now—of councillors using referendums in their wards as a tool for re-election, calling a referendum on a populist issue on the same day as they are due to face the electors. An equally dangerous prospect is rivalry within a ward, if perhaps two out of three councillors called a referendum in order to do down the election campaign of a colleague of a different party. A further problem is that wards do not necessarily, and very often do not, match communities.

For all these reasons, many of us find undesirable the possibility that a small number of councillors—one, two or three—can call a referendum in their part of the borough and, as long as it fits the provisions of the Bill, the council will not be able to stop it. The arguments apply equally to elected mayors, who could quite easily call populist referendums to coincide with their own re-election or to boost their popularity. There seems no reason why a mayor should call a referendum about issues that relate to the mayor’s powers because the mayor can address them without a referendum.

As far as the resolution of the council is concerned, these provisions seem unnecessary. Councillors can call referendums at the moment under their existing general powers, and presumably they will continue to be able to do so. They are also able to make arrangements appropriate to the particular referendum that they might want to call. We were given an example in the King’s Lynn area where a referendum called by the district council cost £80,000. It resulted in an overwhelming majority one way, and then the county council ignored it. The argument for not having a referendum on the basis of the resolution of the council is that it is not necessary, and the council can do it anyway without being constrained by the detailed rules and regulations in this Bill.

My final point is that the Bill suggests that referendums can take place within a ward or an electoral division or they can take place in a whole area. However, if you think about towns such as Keighley, which is a clearly separate town within the city of Bradford, why should it not be able to have a referendum, if we are going to have referendums, in a clear community like that? In the case of Burnley, Padiham is a clearly separate town in the Burnley district, but it consists of two wards and bits of other wards; so why should it not be able to have a referendum in the natural community rather than the artificial wards? I beg to move.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I endorse most of what the noble Lord has suggested. In particular I entirely concur with his view that the provision for council members to requisition a referendum is apt to lead to mischief and is unnecessary. It is open to the whole council to choose to have a referendum if it wishes. Perhaps the Minister would confirm that it would even be the case in a mayoral council, that the council as a whole could pass a resolution for a referendum. However, to extend that principle to individual members is unnecessary and likely to be a source of considerable nuisance as well as expense. I hope that the Minister will feel, on reflection, that that particular part of the Bill can be safely abandoned without prejudice to the rights of the public at large.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, as a preliminary point I refer again to the issue raised this morning with regard to the Delegated Powers Committee, because Clause 54 gives the Secretary of State the right to make regulations. Given what he indicated this morning, I assume that the Minister is inclined to adopt the position of the Delegated Powers Committee; namely, that these regulations should be subject to affirmative resolution. I certainly hope that that would be the case. He nods assent, for which I am grateful.

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, touched on an interesting issue when he talked about paying people to requisition a referendum. I do not know of a precise precedent but certainly an analogous situation arose not too long ago in Greater Manchester, where a large commercial concern, Peel Holdings, was, among others, very hostile to the notion of a congestion charging scheme for Greater Manchester. It launched a campaign in the metropolitan borough of Bury to call for a mayoral referendum in the hope and assumption that an anti-congestion charge mayor of whatever political affiliation would be elected, and because in the great scheme of things a single authority in Greater Manchester—only one authority—could veto the whole scheme, that would be sufficient to jettison this scheme, which the company felt was against its interests.

I understand that the company invested a considerable amount of time, energy and cash in securing the signatures to enable a referendum to be held. It was held and there was a low turnout—I recall that something like 11 per cent or so of people voted in the referendum for the holding of a mayoral election, which then took place. Happily, from my perspective, an equally small proportion of the electorate turned out to vote against having a mayor. That is an indication of the dangers that might arise if there was no restriction on what commercial interests might get up to in the context of securing local petitions. Of course, the difference is that that referendum was binding and other referendums would not be; nevertheless, there is a real danger in that regard. However, I take note of what the noble Lord, Lord True, has said—one must be careful about creating new offences. Although the matter is certainly worth exploring, I do not rush to an immediate view that creating another offence of this kind is necessarily the answer. Having said that, I find it difficult to think of a better solution, so one might have to have recourse to that.

I have an amendment in this group, the number of which escapes me, which relates to Clause 54(7) about the making of regulations, and would require the Secretary of State to consult not only the Electoral Commission but the Local Government Association as well. I hope that the Minister will accede to that. It seems sensible to me to involve the LGA in matters of this kind. However, I do not understand some of the provisions that Clause 54 makes for regulations to be made by the Secretary of State. This goes back to some of the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, yesterday. Clause 54(4) states:

“Regulations under this section may make provision about—

(a) when, where and how voting in a local referendum is to take place;

(b) how the votes cast in a local referendum are to be counted”.

A simple assimilation of electoral law, in so far as that prescribes these matters, would surely be sufficient. The notion that detail of that kind needs to be made the subject of a Secretary of State’s regulation strikes me as absurd. On the other hand, if there are to be regulations, I do not quite follow the position of the noble Lords, Lord Rennard and Lord Greaves, and, for all I know, his colleagues on the Lib Dem part of the government Benches, who wish to take out of subsection (6) regulations,

“about the limitation of expenditure … for the questioning of the result of a referendum by a court or tribunal”,

or for

“creating criminal offences”.

Those strike me—provided that we have the affirmative procedure—as matters that should or certainly could be included.

[Lord Greaves]

I may have misread the Bill, but my understanding is that the Bill states that they cannot be part of the regulations.

[Lord Beecham]

I beg the noble Lord’s pardon: that is right. I withdraw my last remarks and accept the noble Lord’s amendments to my comments. However, whatever we have in the regulatory framework, the key thing is that the minimum should be prescribed and that whatever is prescribed should be done in conjunction with the Local Government Association and subject to affirmative resolution.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have been listening to the wonderful words of the Minister about how important it is that local government should not be encumbered by lots of detailed rules and regulations and thinking that at least we are on the same wavelength. Tongue in cheek, I wonder if he will take a pristine copy of the Bill home with him this weekend, and a nice big red pen, and annotate the Bill in appropriate ways to strike out a large number of the detailed regulations and the 140-odd provisions for yet more detailed regulations for local authorities, and hand it to a civil servant next week and say, “This is your job for a week; get rid of it”. I live in hope.

I move Amendment 126A and the seven amendments in my name and that of my noble friend that are set out in this group together with Amendment 128A, as I announced earlier. There is a useful Labour amendment in the group but I will let the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, speak to it.

Clause 47 is an important clause because it sets out the grounds on which the council should make its decision when it receives a petition or indeed a request from a member about whether a referendum takes place or not. This is not a trivial decision. We have heard that referendums across London might cost many millions of pounds; but for any big councils in big cities, we are talking about millions of pounds. Even for smaller councils, it can be an important item in their budget, or one that is not in their budget, which nevertheless they have to find a way of covering. In the present financial circumstances this might well mean cutting other useful services.

This is a list. Whenever we put forward lists, we are always told by the Government to be very careful because, if we put things in the list, they are in, and if we do not put them in the list, people might think they are not in. In this case, we know that they are not in because Clause 47(1) says:

“A principal local authority may only determine”—

I emphasise “only determine”—

“that it is not appropriate to hold a local referendum in response to a petition or request on one or more of the following grounds”.

The list in Clause 47 is extremely important because it ties the hands of the local authority. It does not say to it, as the Minister has pointed out, that if it is in the list, it cannot have a referendum; however, it provides grounds by which a referendum can be refused. Regardless of whether we agree with referendums, I think that everybody agrees that we do not want a proliferation of them. We do not want dozens of referendums taking place all over the place. We want them held on important and useful things.

These grounds are vital. Amendment 126A refers to the first ground. It is a probing amendment to find out what the words mean. Clause 47(2) says:

“The first ground is that the authority thinks that action taken to promote or oppose the referendum question is likely to lead to contravention of an enactment or a rule of law”.

When I read this, I thought, “What does it mean?”. The phrase,

“action taken to promote or oppose the referendum question”,

refers to something happening during the referendum campaign. It is not about the question itself—what the effect would be of carrying out what the referendum wants brought about; it is about action taken during the campaign which,

“is likely to lead to contravention of an enactment or a rule of law”.

I can only think that this refers to the possibility of public disorder of some sort. Will the Minister say what the Government think it refers to? It is very difficult to see how this could be made to stick if it was challenged, because how would you know that the referendum question would be likely to lead to an unruly campaign? Alternatively, what else does it refer to? If it refers to a referendum question that is, for example, overtly racist, it would be easy to reject it, but the chance of getting such a referendum question is very small indeed. Racists who want to use a referendum to promote their cause are going to be more careful about how they word the question. So this is a probing amendment to find out what it means.

Amendments 126B and 126C challenge the word “influence”, and again are probing amendments. We suggest that this should be brought in more tightly to a council’s powers; that is, the things it can do. Even the general power of competence might be very wide. It is difficult to think of things that people might want to hold a referendum on but over which the council does not have some sort of influence. I suppose that a referendum about the melting of the Arctic ice cap might be thought out of order, but even then it might be tied to the council’s climate change policies, so it is difficult to think of areas where the council has absolutely no influence. Some clarification of what the influence of a council is, in this sense, would be helpful.

Amendment 126D refers to subsection (4)(b):

“a principal local authority or a partner authority has an influence over a matter if the authority can affect that matter by the exercise of any of its general or particular functions”.

That is very wide indeed, and I assume that it includes the new general power of competence. Is that true, because it means that it does go very wide? Amendment 126E seeks to insert a new subsection:

“The third ground is that the action requested by the question is unlawful or discriminatory, or would contravene the authority’s codes relating to equality of treatment or its financial regulations”.

Other noble Lords may think of other things that should be included, but this is clear. Surely it should be laid down that if the action requested by the petition and the referendum question is actually unlawful or clearly discriminatory against an ethnic group, the disabled, men, women or anyone else, and would contravene all the codes an authority has on equality of treatment, or if the council could not do something because of its financial regulations, then it should be able to be thrown out without question. Indeed, anything which it would be impossible for the council to do but is being asked for in a referendum should be more clearly set out.

I turn to Amendment 126F. However, as the Minister has already moved an amendment today, this amendment is not needed, and we are grateful for that. Amendment 126H refers to the grounds set out in the Bill. At the moment they do not seem to be sufficiently wide. A council ought to be able to refuse a referendum if it judges that it concerns a trivial matter and spending money on it would simply not be worth the candle. Similarly, if the council or someone else is doing something anyway, the referendum would be a waste of time because the decision has been made. The Government have already moved an amendment to deal with repetition which provides that another referendum on the same subject cannot take place for four years. That, too, is extremely welcome. Our definition of “disproportionate” is that the cost of holding a referendum is excessive when bearing in mind the cost of carrying out the proposal in question. If a council is being asked to spend £80,000 to hold a referendum when to do what the referendum is asking for would cost only £15,000, it is a pointless waste, whether or not the council wishes to do it.

Finally, we suggest that the fifth ground for the decision is that it is not appropriate because what is being asked for is the allocation of a disproportionate level of resource in one area when it is absolutely clear to the council that it is either not practical due to financial constraints or it would be unfair; that is, it would be possible but it would mean taking resources from existing schemes and services to put into a particular scheme or service that was being requested by an area in a way that would not be equitable across the authority. Knowing that before the referendum takes place, the authority can show that it is not financially viable and that holding a referendum would be a waste of everybody’s time and money.

These amendments may not be perfect but the criteria that the Government are putting forward at the moment in this clause are not sufficient to give a council enough flexibility to carry out the kind of localist decision-making that the Minister talked about not long ago—on a common-sense basis, without holding referendums which will simply waste a lot of time and money and not achieve anything. I beg to move.

[Lord Beecham]

I will speak to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, but also to my own Amendment 126CA, which would include on page 40, line 18, under grounds for determination in Clause 47, a definition of “local” which means that an issue can be,

“determined to be so by the principal local authority”.

In other words, in addition to the conditions for what is local, it gives the authority the power to determine an issue of locality.

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has come forward with a mixed bag of amendments here. First, I will address his last proposition on the cost of the project relative to the cost of a referendum—or, indeed, the question of equity. That is Amendment 128A, to which he referred, on the deployment of extra resources in part of an authority’s area. I am not quite with the noble Lord on this. Actually, a petition for a referendum is an opportunity to debate an issue that might be of significance to that part of an authority’s area. Incidentally, I am not sure whether the amendment could extend to the whole of an authority’s area or just part, and if so how that part is to be defined, except perhaps by the petitioners.

If there is such an issue, it is proper that it should be debated. Initially, no doubt, those promoting the referendum would be invited by the council to explain their position and the council would respond. That is a sensible way of proceeding. If they then wished to proceed to a referendum they should not be prevented from doing so. That is an opportunity, certainly for the residents or petitioners to make their case but also for the authority to exercise some leadership and explain what it is doing and the constraints within which it operates. It can make that clear not only for the purposes of the particular referendum but as a matter of general interest to the area as a whole. We all face these decisions about priorities all the time. They are perhaps insufficiently acknowledged or understood by the electorate. If referendums are a way to bring home some of these truths, particularly as they are non-binding, I would not want to resist them taking place.

The noble Lord’s amendments include a reference to the question of influence as opposed to power. He cites the issue of the melting ice cap, implying that that is not a matter of local interest. The noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, is not in his place today, but if he were he might say that the residents of Norfolk have good reason to fear the melting of the ice cap. Saving the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, that issue might not be specifically related to the ice cap, but climate change and its impact on a community might well be a matter over which an authority has some influence and which it is relevant to ask it to look at. Influence would surely include a power, whereas the other way round it would not necessarily be the case. I would have thought that influence is actually a better way of looking at that issue.

I want to refer to one other amendment that the noble Lord spoke to. It is Amendment 128D, on the disproportionate cost of the referendum,

“bearing in mind the cost of carrying out the proposal in … question”.

Again that raises a difficulty, as a matter might be of considerable significance to people but not involve much cost. There might be, let us say, a traffic issue or something of that kind which might be felt to be of great importance in an area. The referendum might be more costly than the exercise of dealing with the issue but I would not like it to be precluded simply on those grounds. Again, I hope that the very process of getting to the point of a referendum might facilitate the resolution of matters. As I indicated in an intervention on the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, there are other methods. Given that this will be on the statute book, it seems wrong to define too narrowly the situation in which it might be used. This might be an example of going a little too far to restrict the right, so I would not support the noble Lord on that amendment.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, not for the first time Newcastle is united in connection with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. A working figure of 10 per cent is probably about right. The figures suggested in some other amendments are on the high side; 25 per cent is more than half the average turnout in a council election. It is asking a lot to postulate a requirement for a petition to have as high a signature rate as that.

I tabled amendment in this group in relation to the areas from which a referendum might be called. The Bill provides for the whole authority or one or more electoral areas, provided they are contiguous within it. That sounds plausible, but if you take, for example, Birmingham, you have wards with an electorate of about 20,000. That argues a population of something like 30,000. It is in effect a small town. That is big enough to contain more than one discrete and substantial community. My amendment simply suggests that in addition to the two criteria laid down in terms of area in the Bill, there could be a further provision, namely,

“such area as may be determined by the authority”.

An authority could say: go and petition the area, we acknowledge it is not the whole of the ward, but we are prepared to accept a smaller area than an electoral division. It gives a degree of flexibility which I think might be reasonable. That is the effect of Amendment 120J.

I was interested to hear the observations of the noble Lord, Lord True, who was emphatically endorsing the principles of petitioning as an alternative to referendums. I wish he had been here to support me and the absent noble Lord, Lord Shipley, when I proposed this afternoon that the provision that would strike out the petition procedure should not be supported and that the provisions of the 2009 Act should continue to apply. Be that as it may, he is right to prefer petitions to referendums; they are undoubtedly better. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, for his analysis of the defects of referendums, taken at large, and his reference to the report of the Constitution Committee last year.

He and other noble Lords are right to point to some of the dangers that can arise and the mischief that can be made. In the next group of amendments, we shall come to the point about members of councils calling referendums. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about that and support his amendment. However, one can clearly see a variety of difficulties. For example, in my own ward there is currently a proposal for a historic building, which has been acquired by the Muslim community, to be made into a school and community centre. The BNP is already stirring up hostility to that proposal. It is not just a planning proposal; it is a proposal for a school and so on. The amendments on planning would cover the planning side but it goes beyond that. One can clearly see the difficulties that could arise from the referendum process, a public vote and so on.

I put another case: tomorrow we shall debate elected police commissioners. If you wanted to stand to be an elected police commissioner and were building up your campaign, it would not be difficult to orchestrate a series of referendums across the area—which might be a single county or an area bigger than that—in the run-up to the election. A local election does not have to be a straightforward party political contest. There are all sorts of ways in which the system could be used and manipulated, which underlines the need to be very careful about substituting plebiscitary democracy for representative local democracy. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said at some length and with some eloquence in our first debate on the Bill, the core principle in a series that he enunciated is that of support for local representative local democracy. There is danger even in non-binding referendums. There may then be pressure for binding referendums, although not from the Government, except in one particular. You can see that outside the major political parties, there could a build-up of pressure for binding referendums to be held on the Swiss or Californian models, nether of which are very persuasive as instruments of good government.

With the characteristic generosity that marks the political approach of the Opposition, we support most of the amendments proposed by the Liberal Democrats in this group. However, with respect to the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, and the noble Lord, Lord True, their proposed figure is too high and difficult to justify.

We shall probably just have time to move on to the next group of amendments. I note with some alarm one amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, which would reduce the percentage to 1 per cent and fix it at that, which strikes me as going much too far. We shall come to that this evening or on Thursday. We are not voting tonight but I invite the noble Lords to continue to convey to the Government their concerns about the way in which these proposals have been made. I hope the Government will take another look, particularly at the threshold figures if they are not prepared to depart from the principle of promoting referendums. I look forward to our debate on Report and to a response that reflects the views that have been expressed tonight.

[Lord Greaves]

Before the noble Lord sits down, will he comment on the view that in many cases, whether or not a referendum is mandatory, if it has been high-profile and hard-fought, it will be very difficult—certainly for a district council—to go against the decision? In practice, and in political reality, they will have to abide by it.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I entirely agree with noble Lords who reject the notion of overprescription in this or any other part of the Bill. However, removing a duty to promote democracy altogether sends an unfortunate signal. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, seemed to admit that he wanted to add to prescription when the Bill was originally debated because he wanted to include bodies to which reference is not made, which is a slight inconsistency.

[Lord Greaves]

In my defence, I should say that there are two lines of attack for Governments, although I should not use that phrase at the moment. The first is that the whole thing should not exist. The second is that if it does exist, we should try to improve it, which is our view on a lot of this Bill. If this was such a wonderful thing, why did the previous Government spend two years after the Bill was enacted not commencing this part?

[Lord Beecham]

The noble Lord will be aware that, no doubt for good reasons, I was not a member of the previous Labour Government and I cannot answer for them. They did not do everything that we would have wished in local government. Perhaps this matter did not achieve the priority that some of us would have liked. In replying, the Minister is right to point out possible costs of the detailed guidance that his civil servants are so ready to produce. Of course, that does not mean that that degree of prescription is unnecessarily desirable and that the costs will necessarily have been incurred.

If we want to encourage participation in local government and voter turnout, the people standing for election or seeking to serve their community as magistrates need encouragement and information. The community as a whole needs to be informed about what its local authority can and cannot do, and how it might be influenced. Much of the Bill is about those processes going on in different ways at different levels. The duty would have reinforced the thrust of the Bill. With respect, I still do not see why it is being removed.

I note that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, is not in his place. Perhaps his two colleagues have taken him to one side because he subscribed to my amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, this is a different matter. We are now on to a substantive issue which the Government seek to introduce into the law of the land and to bind into the practice of local authorities.

I understand that John Major as Prime Minister was a great devotee of the novels of Trollope, regularly reading them, and I think his predecessor Harold Macmillan was much the same. I am wondering whether the present Secretary of State, Mr Pickles, has become a devotee of Dickens. He seems to be metamorphosing into a fusion of Dickens’ characters—a combination of Wackford Squeers, Mr Bumble and Gradgrind, leavened by a dash of Mr Pickwick. However, he is now developing, and has for some time developed, an obsession with waste and refuse collection. This seems to add Boffin, the golden dustman, to the cast list of Dickens’ characters which he is absorbing into his persona. I have never understood the Secretary of State's obsession with this issue. He has, to put it mildly, irritated local politicians of all parties, including the then chairman of the relevant board of the Local Government Association, Paul Bettison—a leading member of the Conservative Party and a leading figure in Conservative local government circles—by suggesting that charge and waste reduction schemes should not be implemented. He has, of course, opined many times about the number of refuse collections that should take place nationally.

First, this obsession seems inappropriate in any event for a Secretary of State. Secondly, one has to ask: what is a specific provision on a particular service doing in a Bill about localism? The Bill makes considerable play of giving councils a power of general competence and talks about the role of local government generally and of local communities, while Ministers frequently refer to the need to avoid prescription—we have heard that more than once this afternoon already. What could be more prescriptive than banning local authorities from a proposal to deal with waste problems, especially since the prescription that the Secretary of State would apply takes no notice of differences in localities or the implications for environmental issues such as recycling?

It is not as if the proposals about charging schemes were prescribed in their turn or as if councils had to embark on such policies. That would have been equally wrong because, again, different circumstances apply to different places. Even within an individual authority, there are areas where particular schemes would be appropriate and others where they are clearly not. It is obviously a matter for local decision but this Secretary of State, in his obsessive regard to this topic, seems to be intent on ruling out something that not many authorities have actually chosen to do. That is their choice. I do not think that many have gone in for those schemes so, again, the question has to be asked: why is this being inserted into the Bill? If it is to be a matter of political debate, should it not be debated rather than prescribed?

Noble Lords opposite have rejoiced at the abolition of prescription in the two areas which we have debated so far this afternoon. I hope they will join me in rejecting this considerable area of prescription that the Secretary of State wishes to impose on local government with absolutely no warrant at all, on the basis of evidence or of the public good.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, the noble Lord is persuasive in his arguments by suggesting that what is happening here is that the Government are removing the freedoms of local authorities, but it is not quite like that. The freedoms that he is talking about are very prescriptive and if he reads the particular part of the Climate Change Act, he will discover that. These waste reduction schemes are all nonsense, really. I keep using that word but I remember that this is another part of a Bill where I made a nuisance of myself in your Lordships’ House by detaining the House for probably too long while it was being debated and discussed.

The Bill refers to schemes relating to the amount of waste, the size and type of the containers and the frequency of collections. There was what was colloquially known at the time as the chip-in-bin scheme, where a chip in a bin would in some magic way measure the amount of waste being provided. There was the big bin and little bin scheme, where if you had a little bin you were okay and got it for free, but if you had a big bin you had to pay more for it, which affected large families. There was the pound-a-sack scheme, where you had to go and buy approved sacks for a pound each and fill them up—a scheme which was reported to have worked extremely well in Maastricht, but probably nowhere else. There was also a frequency of collection scheme, where you had a weekly collection, but if you wanted it more frequently you had to pay—the pay per day scheme. So these four schemes took on an iconic quality as far as the last Government were concerned, but they have never been brought into effect because they are not the way to go about it.

Rather unusually, what the Secretary of State is doing is championing a waste collection service that is a universal free service. That is what he is championing and I thought the Labour Party used to believe in such things. But not now, it wants the chips-in-bins and the pound-per-sacks schemes and all the rest of it. I am delighted to see this go. I wish we had been able to persuade the last Government that we should not have wasted all that time on legislation that was never introduced.

[Lord Shutt of Greetland]

My Lords, Clause 30 removes powers that enable local authorities to run pilot waste reduction schemes. We announced our intention to remove these powers in June 2010. We believe that rewards rather than penalties are the best way to encourage people to reduce the amount of waste they produce. We wish to see local authorities helping householders to do the right thing with their waste, rather than punishing them for doing the wrong thing. We also consider that schemes which include fines based on the weight of residual waste left out by householders are likely to result in fly-tipping and other anti-social behaviour.

This Government are clear that rewarding householders for recycling or for reducing waste is to be encouraged; we want to help them to do the right thing. Removing these powers in the Climate Change Act will free up local authorities to use their broader well-being powers or general powers of competence, as appropriate, to provide rewards for waste reduction. Since their introduction there has been little appetite for using the Climate Change Act powers. No local authority has yet applied to take up a charge-and-reward scheme and no schemes will be dismantled as a result of their removal.

This clause simply removes Sections 71 to 75 of Part 5 and Schedule 5 from the Climate Change Act 2008. This will remove the provisions for waste reduction schemes but have no wider effect on the powers of, or burdens upon, local authorities. It is interesting that Royal Assent was on 26 November 2008, two and a half years ago, and no one has sought to bring this in. I therefore beg to move that these clauses stand part of the Bill.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Thursday 23rd June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I commend the reply of the Minister on this group of amendments. I advise her to use that exact wording for every group of amendments that we put forward throughout the rest of the Bill; however, I do not say that very optimistically. There are clearly some discussions to be had.

I would just like to respond to the amendments spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and particularly to Amendment 43, which I disagree with fundamentally. In a sense, the amendment reflects the diversity and variety of local government and the representation of local government in your Lordships' House and in this Committee. It is a big-city view, a view of big authorities: in a big city, an area committee of 40 per cent would, in almost any conceivable situation, be ridiculous. However, that is not necessarily the case in smaller authorities.

Perhaps I can tell the Committee the position in my own authority in Pendle. We have five area committees and they range from 32 per cent—these figures are based on mid-year population estimates for 2008—down to 10.7 per cent. The 32 per cent is for the town of Nelson, which has an estimated population of 28,745, which, by big-city standards, is not excessive—it might be just two wards or one and a half wards in some big cities. It would be ridiculous to split Nelson because it is a community with a town centre. You walk from the middle of the town centre and you get to the edge of the town and Nelson stops and you are in the countryside and into smaller communities. I believe that the figure of 40 per cent is right. Quite clearly, there needs to be sensible reflection on the basis of local knowledge in a particular area.

[Lord Beecham]

Does the noble Lord agree that the best course would be to dispense with the clause altogether and leave the matter entirely to the discretion of the local authority, which is my first preference?

[Lord Greaves]

The noble Lord knows that I agree with him on that. It should be left to the good sense of local authorities. It is difficult to see a situation in which you would want a system of area committees where one area committee was more than half, but there might be such circumstances. There might be a district authority with a large town that is surrounded by a constellation of smaller communities. That would be the sensible way to do it. I believe that if it is left to sensible local discretion, the areas will be based on the real communities that exist there in the best possible way they can be defined on a sensible working basis.

I thank the Minister for her interesting reply on Amendment 39 and I look forward to discussions on it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, the noble Baroness has a rather more pleasant duty to attend to in a few minutes when she goes to, presumably, the town hall in Kensington and Chelsea. We wish her well, and an enjoyable evening. We look forward to resuming the debate next week with the new freeman of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I will be very quick; we would not want the Minister to be late. She is quite right: I am totally off message on this issue as far as the coalition agreement is concerned. I am not off message as far as the coalition is concerned. The Government should learn. They have had a huge car crash, as people say nowadays, with the AV referendum; I voted loyally for that on every occasion and now I wish I had not. This will be another, in the modern phrase, car crash.

Whatever has been in coalition agreements and manifestos, there are times when, politically, Governments have to consider what is likely to happen. In most if not all these places, it seems likely that the Liberal Democrats will be campaigning vigorously against having an elected mayor—alongside the Labour party in many cases, and, I suspect, the Conservative party in so far as it still exists in some of these places; it certainly exists in some of them.

I am grateful for the information on the cost. I did not quite catch who was going to bear it. Was it central government? Yes. Well, a waste of public money is a waste of public money, whoever pays for it. I wonder whether the Government can direct me to some serious evidential basis for the view that having elected mayors provides better local government than would otherwise have been the case. I have not seen that evidence. There is lots of political and other argument about it, but I have seen no serious evidential basis for that proposition. If the Government have it, I would be grateful if they would make it available.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 20th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, there are three short amendments here. The first simply reaffirms previous amendments, which would leave out the possibility of a negative as opposed to an affirmative order. The second is slightly different in character and deals with the Clause 8 reference to an eligible parish council on which the general power might be conferred, eligibility being to be determined by the Secretary of State under Clause 8(2). The point of the amendment is to focus attention on the fact that at this stage we have no idea what would constitute an eligible parish council and to invite the Minister either to get that on the face of the Bill or to make the intention clear. It would be ridiculous, in our submission, if we were to leave the Bill in a state whereby a tiny parish council would have the full range of general powers of competence. I realise that that is not the intention, but it should be clarified during this legislative process.

Finally, Amendment 28 again refers to the issue of the affirmative rather than negative procedure. I will not again rehearse those arguments. I beg to move.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, on the affirmative business, I think that the noble Lord and the Minister will know that the proposal has our support. It seems that the Government are looking hard at recommendations made by the Delegated Powers Committee. We look forward to their comments in due course, but there is clearly a head of steam round the House over this, and I hope that the Government are sensible.

On the question of parishes, I have seen a draft version of the proposed order. I am not sure how widely it has been circulated or what its status is, except that it has “Draft” stamped all over it. It would be very helpful if it could be circulated widely. I think that it is a good order in its present form; it makes it much easier for a parish council to become eligible than it is under the present set-up. We will find out whether the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, will also think that it is good, since it may well apply to quite small parish councils. There is no point in discussing that further today—but clearly, before Report, it needs to be in the Library of the House so that everybody can see it.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 20th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jenkin of Roding]

Without wishing to prolong the debate, I should like to endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has said and to thank my noble friend for the swift acceptance of two of the substantial amendments to which I have put my name on the Marshalled List.

When I had the opportunity to discuss matters very briefly with the Minister’s right honourable friend the Secretary of State, he said that he thought that we were going to be able to reach accommodation on some of the points that had been made at Second Reading. My noble friend has done exactly that, and I express my gratitude.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, the Minister’s last two announcements are extremely welcome and I am quite prepared to trade my amendment for them. It is good news all round. As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, has just said, it bodes well for future debate.

It is only in the House of Lords that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, or anyone else, would raise in evidence events that took place more than 100 years ago. While the short-term effects of Joe Chamberlain’s and the other Liberal Unionists’ defection was extremely damaging to the Liberal Party, the slightly longer-term result of it was that the Liberals gained their greatest ever victory in the 1906 election, in which Joe Chamberlain and his allies in the Conservative Party were roundly trounced. If we are looking for historical precedents, there is one.

[Lord Beecham]

Would the noble Lord care to recall what happened at the subsequent general elections?

[Lord Greaves]

The Liberal Government were returned to power with a smaller majority in both elections of 1910. That is a historical fact. Unfortunately, the First World War then intervened and caused all sorts of bother.

I thank everyone who has taken part in this useful debate, which has set the tone for a lot of the detailed discussion to come. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, quite rightly said that the details in the Bill will determine what happens if and when it is passed. The underlying values—or, as he called them, principles—of the Bill and the conflicting principles that many of us see within it will be a continuing theme as we debate the detail, and it is right that we should continue to relate the one to the other.

The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, hit the nail on the head and homed in on the most fundamental part of the amendment: the importance—I do not use the word “primacy”— within any local democratic system of democratically elected local government. We can argue about the structures and whether they are good or bad—about their size and the way they work and so on—but unless there is a presumption that decisions locally will be taken by those who are elected by and accountable to the people in general, the whole system risks becoming anarchic. As we go through the Bill, a recurring theme will be the extent to which what is proposed in it strengthens or undermines local government. That will be absolutely vital.

The noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, raised a fundamental question about what you do when people in a neighbourhood or a community, which are two different concepts—a neighbourhood is a place where people live and a community is the way in which people interact with each other, although they are sometimes, but not always, the same—rise up in a way that you might think is populist, unreasonable or hysterical but which is, nevertheless, in the noble Baroness’s words, ferocious. Those of us who have been around in local government and local campaigning for a long time have all known this and have all seen it. It is very difficult. Without the buttress of democratically elected local government there is no way in which such forces can be resisted unless there is an imposition by bureaucratic bodies from above, which, philosophically and fundamentally, is not the way to do it.

I remember a proposal a few years ago to open a residential home for people suffering from schizophrenia in a former Quaker meeting house. The reaction of the people living in a wide area around it was ferocious. It was a difficult situation but the councillors across the board stood firm, behaved in a reasonable way and gave permission for it. That home is still in operation and no one has a word to say against it. Councillors have to take decisions on the basis of reason and not on the basis of public reaction on every occasion.

This is very difficult just before an election. When we run a council we have a fundamental principle that in the three or four months before an election we never introduce a new traffic calming scheme. This is because everyone is in favour of a traffic calming scheme until it is put in and then everyone finds things wrong with it. However, you sort out the problems and a few months later everything is all right. Another thing you never do is change the arrangements for waste collection and recycling. You do all these things in the summer and well before elections come along. You sort out the problems in a sensible way and everyone then is, hopefully, fairly happy.

There has to be a certain amount of such manipulation, otherwise you cannot do things—at least, you cannot do things and get re-elected. Nevertheless, democratic government is fundamental to it all. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches believe that this is an ideological matter. That is not to say that it is not also a practical matter. The practicalities set out in the Bill relate to how you carry out matters in line with your underlying ideological principles. If it is not ideological, I do not know why it is called “Localism”. “Isms” tend to be ideological. I think “Localism” is a silly name for the Bill. Nevertheless it is the name it has been given. I was musing as to whether we would have a “Conservatism” Bill, or a “Liberalism” Bill, or perhaps a “Conservatism-Liberalism” Bill on the lines of Marxism-Leninism, which I never quite understood. I thought then that perhaps the Finance Bill each year should be called the Optimism Bill.

On that note, I thank all noble Lords for taking part in the debate and look forward to debating some of the more practical things that we will come on to. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, this group might take us a little less time. In moving Amendment 2, I shall speak to Amendment 3, which is in the same group.

These amendments probe in what circumstances a local authority would use the general power to do anything outside the United Kingdom. I do not imagine that local authorities will be encouraged to carry out military adventures in new parts of the Middle East, or indeed anywhere else. What are those things outside the United Kingdom that local authorities cannot do at the moment and which they might want to do under the new general power?

Secondly, I want to probe in what circumstances an authority might want to do anything other than for the benefit of its own area or residents. Surely, local authorities are elected to serve and represent the interests of their own residents and to carry out services in their area. There are already means by which local authorities can do work for other local authorities, for example, and can carry out activities outside their area, but it is invariably with the consent of the local authorities in the areas outside their own area. What is it that the Government think that local authorities might do that they cannot do at the moment outside their area and not for the benefit of their residents? I do not know why residents would want to elect a local authority that spent a lot of its time and energies doing things for other people outside its own area. These are two basic questions. I beg to move.

[Lord Beecham]

Perhaps in the absence of any other contribution, I might make a suggestion to the noble Lord. I do not know whether my suggestion will appeal to the Minister, but there will be occasions when a local authority wants to do something, particularly overseas, which might be deemed to be outside its current powers. For example, it might want to do something in collaboration with authorities in the developing world; there might be relationships with a country or locality where help might be given with infrastructure or education. It might be that in a community or urban area there were people whose origins lay abroad, perhaps in the subcontinent or elsewhere, where there was some sort of disaster, and a local authority might wish to make a financial or other contribution.

I am frankly rather surprised that the noble Lord should take such a narrow view of these issues. We play a reasonably prominent role in the affairs of local government internationally—something that I have always personally eschewed, having neither the time nor inclination to travel to or from Strasbourg, Brussels or places further afield. But there are many in local government who do and who make a significant contribution to international co-operation, so I would have thought it was fairly obvious that it would be desirable to widen the possibilities here. Obviously, local councils in exercising any such powers remain answerable to local communities, and sometimes those communities would be among the first to press for action to be taken by the local authority or local government bodies as a whole. I myself, when I was involved in the Local Government Association, was keen to promote capacity-building in the Israeli-Arab municipal sector, for example. The association, through international local government bodies, has helped out in other places where there have been conflicts—Kosovo is a place in point. The noble Lord could be a little more ambitious in what he thinks local government might be able to do in cases that strike individual local authorities or groups of local authorities as ones where the expertise of local government and local communities in the UK might make a contribution. I hope that he will not press his amendment.

[Lord Greaves]

Does the noble Lord agree that everything that he has mentioned has taken place and is taking place, and therefore can be done under existing powers? What new projects or activities does he think ought to take place that would require the new general power of competence in these areas?

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I do not think that it is necessary for me to answer that. We are talking about a general power of competence; the less fettered it is, the better. It may be that individual actions have not been challenged, although at times of international disasters, when suggestions have been made that local authorities should contribute financially towards appeals that have gone out, that has been felt to be outside their powers. I am not suggesting that that would be a common practice but, if it is seen as a priority by a particular local authority, it should be open to that authority to do so.

Sustainable Local Transport

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, will the Minister look again at the passage in the Statement which says that the local sustainable transport fund,

“forms part of a wider picture of more streamlined and simplified funding”?

Does he not agree that it would be more honest to include the word “reduced” in that sentence? Although I welcome extending the decentralisation of power to local transport, which the Statement also mentions, does the noble Lord not agree that there is a regional dimension to transport and transport infrastructure which the abolition of the regional development agencies will make more difficult to realise than otherwise? Will he indicate whether the Government have any intention of making the Highways Agency more accountable, and, in particular, will he indicate how, under the system of very localised transport, authorities in the north-east will be able to put pressure on the Government or the Highways Agency for the dualling of the A1 north of Newcastle, which appears to have been shelved for a very long period? Finally, does the noble Earl recall that his very distinguished grandfather, the first Earl, in an interview in later life identified transport as one of the major priorities for the future? Does he agree that this White Paper does not bring that future very much nearer?

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords—

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Beecham and Lord Greaves

Monday 29th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Liddle, and I associate myself with the remarks made by my noble friend Lady Armstrong. I, too, come from the east side of the region. Indeed, she spent the early part of her career in the ward that I now represent and she has obviously benefited greatly from that experience.

Today’s debate is quite significant in terms of the problems of the north-east. This morning, I read that Durham University Business School has produced a report for the soon-to-be-abolished One North East that suggests alarming implications for the region. The report refers to 50,000 jobs being lost in the near future, 20,000 of which will be in the private sector, with a loss of £2 billion to the regional economy over the next few years. The report has provoked the chairman of the development agency—a leading private sector businessman in the region who hails from Sunderland—to renew his criticism of the current trend of government policy. It is clear that he is very critical of the decision to abolish the agency and that the private sector in the region, for the most part, wishes the agency to continue. If the current policy is maintained, of course that will not happen.

In addition to those serious concerns, there is another issue that could be partly addressed by an amendment along the lines of Amendment 16, which seeks to require that,

“the ‘eligible person’ to which functions are transferred must be located within the region”.

I invite the Minister to agree that if Amendment 16 is accepted—and even if it is not—the same principle could be applied to the assets built up by the agency within the region. When I asked a Written Question about that recently, I received an answer that I would say was remarkable for its opacity if it were not, I am afraid, characteristic of most of the Written Answers that I and other noble Lords receive. Referring to the White Paper on local growth, the Written Answer stated:

“As set out in the White Paper … RDA assets and liabilities will be transferred or disposed of in line with a clear set of principles which include a key aim of achieving the best possible outcome for the region consistent with achieving value for the public purse”.—[Official Report, 22/11/10; col. WA 286.]

However, the White Paper states that the principal criteria will be,

“that a reasonable balance is reached as part of disposal/transfer between national deficit reduction, national policy aims and local ambitions/opportunity”.

In other words, the local element seems to be the back runner in that field of three considerations.

I hope that the Minister will give a clearer indication that the proceeds of any asset disposal—if assets are indeed to be disposed of, although they may well be better retained within the portfolio of agencies or other bodies that survive the abolition of the RDAs—should be directed to the region to which they have made a significant contribution over the years. The regions will be desperately in need of those, to judge by the report published by One North East today.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with the gist of Amendments 8, 12 and 16. I am aware that we will discuss regional development agencies in their own right not much further along in the Bill—at least, not much further down the page—so I will reserve most of what I want to say for that time. However, we have to see the amendments and the future—or non-future—of RDAs and where their functions are going to go in the context of what will, in effect, be the destruction or removal of the entire regional tier of government in this country. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, but things will be very different from what they are now.

In my view, this decision has been made from a very south-east of England perspective. People tell me that, given London’s governance arrangements nowadays with the mayor and the London Assembly, a regional development agency in London is redundant. I can understand that. People also tell me that the regions that have been created and drawn on a map in the south-east make no sense whatsoever. In any case, it is not clear why a regional development agency is needed in a part of the country that, at least to those of us who live in the north of England and other distant parts of the realm, appears to be relatively prosperous compared with the regions in which we live.

There may be a question as to whether a uniform pattern of regional government is required across the country, but what is—and always has been—clear is that some level of regional government, or governance, in the northern regions is essential. We now face the position in which, not very far to the north, Scotland has its own Parliament, which has an increasingly federal relationship with the rest of the UK. Scotland is able to make decisions for itself and, clearly, can attract and create investment in a way in which we cannot. The idea that Yorkshire, however you define its exact boundaries, and the north-west of England—never mind the north-east, about which other noble Lords have spoken eloquently—are not regions in their own right with an important role to play in economic development in particular and in a series of regional associations, and in regional provision of services of many kinds, seems to me to be nonsense.

I forgot to declare my interest at the beginning of Committee stage as a member of Pendle Borough Council, so I do that now. Some of us who live perhaps in the fringe areas of the north-west get very uptight about what we see as the attempted dominance of the region by Manchester and Liverpool as Greater Manchester and Merseyside. Nevertheless, no one who lives in the north-west would deny that they live in the north-west, which is a clearly understood and accepted region of England. It seems extraordinary to me that our regional level of government is being abolished altogether.

I am all in favour of decentralisation and devolution within the region, but whether the local economic partnerships—which I hope will be set up in all areas, although we have not got them in Lancashire yet—will be the answer is a matter that we will need to see in future. If we are not careful, we could end up with a hotchpotch system in which LEPs will be very effective in areas such as Greater Manchester and Merseyside but much less effective in areas such as Lancashire, because they may not reflect the genuine economic geography there. There is a big argument going on within Lancashire, as some noble Lords will know, about exactly which areas the LEPs will cover. If we are not careful, there is a real danger that we will end up with a two-tier system, which would be unfortunate.