Localism Bill
Lord Greaves Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord True
My Lords, it might be helpful if I speak to my Amendment 37, which is in this group and relates to governance arrangements. I apologise for its rather dense language but it imitates the drafting style of the Bill and I was trying to be as accommodating as possible to the Government. The real issue here is about the relations between lower tier and higher tier authorities, and how we achieve localism where things are done to local people by higher tier authorities.
I have a very live example: before leaving for the House this morning, I received an extremely angry e-mail from a person in my ward asking, “Why on earth are you wasting my money moving bus stops on our high street?”. The answer is that I am not doing that. I have had meetings with TfL asking it not to move bus stops. But it is all being done by a higher tier authority within a lower tier authority without any open consultation with the people affected.
There are many other examples of this kind of thing, and I am sure it does not only go on between London boroughs and regional government—it probably goes on between lower tier authorities and county councils and, in some cases, parish councils. Another example would be the one I cited at Second Reading where, after consultation with local people, we proposed revised parking standards in a neighbourhood. Without holding any public consultation, we received a letter from a higher authority saying that the arrangements were not satisfactory and did not accord with its standards, and we were asked to change them.
I do not wish to unpick the constitutional arrangements between lower and higher tier authorities in this country, but I do not think that the Bill is very localist when it comes to London boroughs. Indeed, it strikingly fails to be localist in that respect. What I am really asking for in the amendment, although I do not expect my noble friend to agree to it at first bite nor do I necessarily want to add to the huge bible of regulation that is emerging from this Bill, is recognition of the important principle here. If we believe in localism, at the very least it should be open to the lower tier authority to be able to say to the higher tier authority, “If you are considering planning changes which specifically affect an area”, such as whether to have high-rise buildings in the centre of Twickenham, which happens to be a live issue in my authority, “meetings should be held by the higher tier authority to gauge the opinion of local people”. It might even be that we could ask officers to come and hold public meetings, or indeed have the right to require that that should happen.
At the moment there is no formal ability for a lower tier authority to act on behalf of its local residents to do what we would regard as absolutely normal in terms of explaining to residents what is going on. It is absolutely inconceivable, if we were planning to change the alignment of a high street in a village or small town centre, that that would be done without prior and detailed public consultation with local people. The purpose of the amendment is to give a lower tier authority such as my own, a London borough, but also those outside London, the ability to propose or suggest arrangements to the higher tier authority to ensure that it conducts itself in a proper, localist fashion in respect of matters that affect local people. I urge my noble friend to reflect on the issue being raised here.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have one amendment in the group and I shall speak to the others. I start by saying that we support the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. They form part of a recurring theme in our discussions on this Bill, which is that while the Government’s proposal is that localism should be more prevalent and that there should be more localism in authorities and among local people, it is being done within a highly prescribed framework and is subject to a large number of orders and regulations from the centre. In other words, it is top-down localism, not genuine localism. There is absolutely no reason at all why this amount of central control and prescription of local authorities should take place. It was not the case when I first became a councillor 40 years ago. We had nothing like this amount of central control when the new authorities were set up in 1973 and elected in 1974. It has crept in over the years from both Conservative and Labour Governments, and we are now getting more of it from the coalition.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have taken part in this quite long debate on the amendment, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, on introducing it succinctly.
The Bill seeks to remove the current prescriptive and overly burdensome rules and procedures for local authority governance arrangements. I am not sure that I am quite on line with my noble friends behind me because, for instance, the Bill allows councils greater freedom to determine their governance arrangements. We have been asked to allow a committee system ever since the previous legislation, when it was arbitrarily removed by the previous Government. We accept that local authorities, as practitioners, are experts in the field of governance, and that most proposals for additional governance models will come from them.
Amendment 34, on the Secretary of State’s power in Schedule 2 to make regulations on this issue, fails to understand that ideas for new governance models may also come from other sources—from government, local government representatives or other bodies. There seems to be some sort of idea that everything has been forced on local authorities. We are not forcing them to do anything; they do not have to adopt the arrangements set out in these regulations for a committee system and can carry on as they are. These regulations—with the prospect of other, newer forms of governance; I cannot think what they are at the moment but there might be some—give them the opportunity to carry them out if they wish.
The restated conditions in Amendment 35 would do little if anything more than recast the existing provisions in the language of today, rather than the language of a decade ago. They are arguably less demanding, since the explicit requirement that the new arrangements must be an improvement on what is already there has been removed. However, it is hard to imagine prescribing a new arrangement unless it achieved something more than what was currently on offer. In short, I do not believe that these amendments would make a substantive difference in how the powers in this section might be operated.
Amendment 36 significantly weakens the conditions, apparently allowing new arrangements that did not provide for decision-taking in an efficient, transparent and accountable way. I am sure that no one would wish to see this. Certainly we do not.
Amendment 37, as the noble Lord, Lord True, said, is all about allowing a district council, for example, to make proposals for governance arrangements that would improve the accountability of the county council to the people of that district. I think that he also mentioned London boroughs as part of that. Effective collaboration between tiers, shared services and shared chief executives, which are coming about more and more, might all be effective ways of improving local governance. I am not certain that we need more central regulation to achieve this. I noted exactly what my noble friend Lord Howard said, that in his area that did not seem to operate. On the other hand, it is a mechanism that I would strongly recommend.
Amendment 37A would disempower local authority leaders by allowing authorities to resolve that the full council, rather than the leader, should appoint the members of the executive cabinet. I remember dealing with the previous local government legislation, where this was accepted as rather a good move, so I am not certain why we now want to get rid of it again.
Lord Greaves
I, too, remember the previous legislation, which brought in this new system. I do not know whether it was accepted as a good move, or by whom, but it was certainly not accepted as a good move by the Liberal Democrat Benches in this House, because we challenged it at the time. The point is that if it is such a good move, surely most authorities will continue to do it that way. But if we are talking about localism, why should they not have the choice?
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, we believe that the leader and cabinet model is a good one. We also believe that the leader should be able to select those whom he wishes to have with him. It is a very close relationship, and it is very important that it works well. We think it right for a leader to be able to appoint his own executive team.
Amendment 38 would prevent the maximum size of an executive being set at a figure lower than 10 members. I accept that current experience with 10 members is about right, but I would not accept that future circumstances will be such that, while it might be right to increase the maximum limit of the size of an executive, it might not be right to have a lower limit. I think that that is what the noble Lord’s amendment suggests. Experience demonstrates that 10 is about the right number, and that a lower number may be too little and a higher number too much. Most of these cabinet systems are working quite well as they are. One might also point out that the more cabinet members you have, the more you have to pay. I hope that that resolves some of the questions.
Lord Greaves
“(1) A local authority that is operating executive arrangements, an executive of such an authority or a committee or specified member of such an executive may arrange for the discharge of any functions which, under executive arrangements, are the responsibility of the executive by an area committee of that authority.
(2) Arrangements for the discharge of executive functions to an area committee made under this section are without prejudice to any other allocation of functions to such an area committee that the local authority may make.”
Lord Greaves
My Lords, Amendment 39 is the most important amendment in this group about area committees. It seeks to remove most of the central prescription about area committees and how they should work. I will also speak to Amendments 41 and 42 in my name, and comment on the two Labour amendments in the group when I respond.
A theme is developing in the discussions this afternoon. The Bill merely restates the existing provision in the new Section 9EA of the Local Government Act 2000:
“The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision for or in connection with enabling an executive of a local authority, or a committee or specified member of such an executive, to arrange for the discharge of any functions which, under executive arrangements, are the responsibility of the executive by an area committee of that authority.
(2) Regulations under this section may impose limitations or restrictions on the arrangements which may be made by virtue of the regulations (including limitations or restrictions on the functions which may be the subject of such arrangements)”.
Why is this necessary? Why are local authorities thought to be so stupid that, even though they decide to set up area committees, of which I am a huge fan, they cannot be trusted to do it in a sensible way? Why can they not be trusted to take advantage of best practice in other places? Why can they not be trusted to listen to what people advise, wherever that advice comes from, and do what is most sensible in the circumstances? Why do they have to do it in the way laid down in detail in Whitehall?
I agreed entirely with the Minister when she said in her response to the first group that ideas come from sources other than local authorities. That is absolutely true. Ideas come from all over the place. Good ideas even come from national government and Whitehall. Local authorities can be expected to take account of those, to listen and do what is sensible. Back in 1974 when the new authorities were set up, it was generally thought that the way councils had operated before then was not very efficient and there needed to be changes. The Government set up a committee and the Baines report was produced as a result. It was almost universally accepted by local government throughout the country. It set up policy and resources committees, which were the big new idea of the time, with personnel and finance sub-committees and so on. The idea was that the operation of local authorities would be brought together in a more coherent, co-operative and corporate way, rather than each department of the authority operating in what people would nowadays call its own “silo”. That still happens in some authorities, but it was an attempt to bring it together, just as the idea of executives was an attempt to bring it together.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, on this debate, I hear what noble Lords say. I shall reflect carefully on what has been said and I shall ask noble Lords to withdraw their amendments for the time being.
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.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I speak to Amendments 49 and 49C, and I support the comments of my noble friend Lord Tope about district councils. Whether the prescription on scrutiny should exist is a matter for discussion. If it should, then it should apply to district councils as well as to everyone else.
There is a view across parts of the legislation that was brought in 10 years ago that district councils’ overview and scrutiny functions are in some way less important than those of bigger councils. However, for some of the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord True, talked about earlier, because district councils are smaller councils and there are more councillors per elector—often a lot more—scrutiny of local services generally, as well as of their own services, is something that they can do very well indeed.
That leads me to Amendment 49, which removes more classic words. The new subsection states that an “excluded matter”, which I shall describe in a minute,
“means any matter which is … a matter of any description specified in an order made by the Secretary of State for the purposes of this section”.
What major national imperative is there that the Secretary of State should make an order excluding matters from discussion? The matters to be discussed are defined as “local government” matters. This exclusion allows the Secretary of State to produce a list of things that the Secretary of State says are not local government matters and, therefore, under this new section, cannot be referred to an overview and scrutiny committee by a member of the council. This is silly.
I do not know what other provision we are using to do it, or if we are just doing it, but my council has decided on and is getting on with scrutiny of part of the local health service within east Lancashire. It provides a vital service that is not provided by the local authority, although it has some limited influence and joint schemes. However, the local authority is performing some scrutiny. Clearly, it will have to do it with the co-operation of those parts of the health service that are being scrutinised, but that can take place. It may or may not be a local government matter. I do not know whether the Secretary of State wants to exclude it under this provision, but it is the sort of situation in which you should let the local authority get on and do what it wants to do in the interests of the people in the area.
The purpose of the second amendment, Amendment 49C, is probing. It refers to new Section 9FF(1)(b) on page 202 of this compendium Bill and to recommendations relating,
“to a local improvement target which … relates to a relevant partner authority, and … is specified in a local area agreement of the authority”.
I have never really understood local area agreements or got too involved in them, but my impression was that this Government were scaling back on the importance of such agreements and perhaps were looking to abolish them. Perhaps the Minister can tell me where we stand on that.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I shall start by saying that I recognise a lot of what I have heard from noble Lords regarding how councils operate. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, would make it compulsory for scrutiny committees to be chaired by the leader of the opposition party on a council. This amendment is unnecessary. I know of many councils that do precisely that, whereby a leader or senior member of the opposition party chairs review and scrutiny meetings. That is absolutely proper, but such a provision does not need to be couched in either guidance or legislation. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, pointed out, there may be some areas where there are no opposition members, but the amendment would make such a provision mandatory. There are some areas where all members are Conservatives and the issue is the same. I hope that from the tenor of the debate noble Lords will agree that such a provision is neither appropriate nor necessary, and that we should not return to it. The annual scrutiny survey, which, I must say, I did not know existed, shows an upward trend, with 42 per cent of authorities allocating scrutiny chairs to members outside the majority group. This idea is clearly taking off well enough, without any interference from Parliament.
Amendments 46 and 47 would change the arrangements on designated scrutiny officers, particularly to make it clear that a designated officer could lead other officers in the discharge of scrutiny functions, as well as requiring district councils in two-tier areas to designate a scrutiny officer. Again, the amendments proposed are not necessary. Of course, we envisage that scrutiny will involve a number of officers to support a scrutiny committee. That already happens, it is part and parcel of the way scrutiny committees are run, and indeed in some councils they are completely separate from the rest of the administration so that they are completely independent. It is unimaginable that one scrutiny officer could not appoint somebody to help him. It is certainly not necessary to make that mandatory because I am quite certain that in most local authorities that is precisely what happens. There is nothing to prevent a district council in a two-tier area designating a scrutiny officer but statute does not require this. Noble Lords have made the point that district councils perhaps do not have quite such onerous responsibilities as county councils and therefore it is not mandatory for them to have a designated officer, although of course if they choose to have one they can. That is perfectly in order.
Amendments 48 and 49 remove the requirement on members to have regard to the guidance and the regulation-making powers of the Secretary of State in relation to referral of matters to a scrutiny committee. These powers enable the Secretary of State to ensure that certain important safeguards are in place. Regulations made under the power that noble Lords are seeking to remove protect against vexatious or discriminatory matters from being placed on the scrutiny committee meeting agenda. They also exclude matters for which there are already statutory processes and rights of appeal, such as planning and licence decisions or matters relating to an individual. It is not unreasonable that those matters should be placed before scrutiny committees in the course of their business.
We believe that the existing framework is working pretty well without removing the requirement for scrutiny committees to make reports and recommendations relating to partner authorities and local area agreements. Having said that, I have some sympathy with Amendment 49C, which is seeking to remove the link between local improvement targets and local area agreements—that might indeed become otiose. We are absolutely clear that where authorities operate executive governance arrangements, scrutiny arrangements must be in place. We recognise that scrutiny plays an important role in holding the executive to account and contributing to policy development in authorities. I certainly support what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, says—that overview and scrutiny committees, like planning committees, should not be whipped. They are clearly committees where scrutiny and challenge should take place and that should not be done against a background of being told what to do.
Amendment 69 would make it mandatory for councils with committee systems to have an overview and scrutiny committee. That is not necessary. The committee system in itself should have a scrutiny role and always did in the past—that was one of the benefits of the committee system. Therefore, that amendment is not necessary.
With the various explanations and assurances I have given, I hope that noble Lords will not press their amendments.
Baroness Hanham
There is quite a lot of common sense in what the noble Lord has said. I am not going to make any commitments but I would like to talk to the noble Lord before the next stage because I accept that things have changed a lot since the previous committee system was in place, not least partnership working and working across public bodies. It may be that as part of the committee system we at least ought to give tacit acknowledgement to the fact that there may be joint issues they need to discuss. I am not sure whether that needs to be a full scrutiny role or whether it should simply be that the local health authority, or whatever it is, turns up if invited by the committee. Perhaps the noble Lord and I could discuss that before the next stage.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, the Minister said that there might need to be some modification in relation to local improvement targets and local area agreements. Perhaps she could write and tell me exactly where we are with these now, what their status is and what the Government’s intentions are.
Baroness Hanham
I will happily do that and I will lay a copy of the answer in the Library.
Lord True
My Lords, I do not want to prolong the philosophical discussion about which system is better but given the principles behind a Localism Bill, clearly the matter should be decided locally and as soon as possible. I am not speaking as a representative of London Councils, but the matter came up at a recent meeting of the leaders’ executive of London Councils and the leaders of all the parties unanimously agreed that they would like the Government to think again about this proposal. We hope that the amendment spoken to by my noble friends Lord Tope and Lord Palmer will gain favour in the Government’s eyes. I submit that what goes for London goes for authorities outside London as well.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I support this sensible and well drafted amendment; my noble friend understands that joke. I want to make two points. First, if councils are to be able to choose the system of governance that they want, let it not be too bound by lots more regulation. Councils used to exist before 2000 and operated committee systems. They did not have lots of statutory guidance, regulations and orders telling them how to run them. They do not need that. Councils can perfectly well set up committees and run sensible committee systems without lots of new regulations.
Secondly, let us not imagine that there was a wonderful era of local representative democracy before 2000, when local authorities everywhere used the committee system, and that it suddenly all went bad when we had to have the executive/scrutiny split, the appointment of leaders, and so on. Life is not and was not like that. In the past, there were councils that operated efficiently, openly and transparently, involved residents and carried out their duties sensibly and efficiently; and there were councils that were pretty hopeless. That has remained the case, even though their systems have changed. Surprise, surprise—those councils that were not so good before 2000 have been not so good since. Of course, councillors can improve and some go the other way but, by and large, it is simply not true that everything was wonderful before 2000 and that everything has been awful since. Different systems may well suit different types and sizes of councils, and the dispositions of different councillors.
I hope that my council will adopt a new committee system and abandon the executive/scrutiny split, although I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, that when you are in control of the council, the executive system allows you to do all sorts of things fairly quickly, and you can just get on and do it. Looking back on the five or six years during which we controlled my council and I was involved on the executive, I have to say that I am not terribly proud of the way in which we made some of the decisions out of the public gaze. Of course, they were all rubber-stamped in a proper and legal manner but, in practice, the decisions were made by a small group of people consisting of top councillors and officials who decided what we wanted to do. It may be that that was always the case and that it will happen under a committee system, but the importance of a committee system, as a noble Lord said earlier, is that the scrutiny process can take place at the time that the decision is being made in the committee. This is one of the real reasons for committees and for not having single-party executives making all the decisions.
I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, is not in her place. She and I were together on Lancashire County Council and we have discussed this in the past. I extolled the virtues of the committee system when it all changed to what I think is the appalling way in which that council now makes decisions, a large number of which are made by a single member of the executive—a cabinet member, portfolio member, or whatever they call themselves—sometimes meeting as a single-person committee, with all the officers and just one person in the middle making all the decisions. That is not the right way to do local government. The noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, would say, “Yes, but even under the committee system, when the Labour Party controlled the county council, the decision was made in the Labour group and very rarely changed”. I would say, “Yes, but occasionally it was changed, particularly when I stood up and pointed a few things out. You made a few changes”. The point is that the decisions were subject to debate and scrutiny in public at the time and at the moment they were being made. That does not happen under a lot of executive systems. The decisions we made on my council, when we were able to do so through the executive route, might have been better if we had had more people there challenging what we were saying and the workability of what we were doing, and persuading us to make some improvements. That is the advantage of the committee system.
However, I hope that people will not continue talking about “going back” to the committee system. We do not want to go back to the old committee system. We who hope that our councils will now move to a committee system want them to learn from the experience of the last 10 years and adopt some of the good things that have happened—scrutiny done well is very good. I know that many councils do not do scrutiny very well at all and that scrutiny committees are simply places to make back-bench councillors think that they actually have a job on the council, but scrutiny can be done very well indeed.
I am sorry that my noble friend Lady Hamwee is not here because she is an expert in scrutiny and would wax more lyrical about it than me. However, I hope that councils which are going to move forward to a new committee system—not an old dinosaur system—will keep the best parts of scrutiny because, done well, it has a role to play. What it does not do is the day-to-day, week-by-week scrutiny of decisions as they are taking place and that is why we want to go back to committees.
I say these things because this is the first time we have discussed the very welcome proposals by the Government to allow councils to make the choice, which some of us have argued for whenever it has come up in this House in the last 10 years. It is very welcome, the Government are to be congratulated, and I hope as many councils as feel it is sensible will go ahead with it.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, that was a short debate and I can probably give a reasonably short answer. We have some sympathy with the points that have been raised, particularly about the time that has to elapse before the changes can be implemented. I will not accept the amendment today but I am happy to take it away and consider whether those provisions are as good as they can be.
Lord True
My Lords, my noble friend might be disappointed that I rise at this point, but I gave her notice that I might do so at some point.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, made a very interesting and thoughtful intervention which I hope everyone in the House will reflect on. It is absolutely beyond doubt that the coalition agreement, and indeed my own party’s manifesto, made very clear that it wishes the mayoral principle to be extended further, specifically in the cities listed in the noble Lord’s amendment, and he has acknowledged that. From my point of view, therefore, it is absolutely clear that we should support and accept that, as I believe it has, in the traditional sense, a mandate. However, our own party’s manifesto, and the coalition agreement as I read it, did not go beyond that into extending the general principle.
There is at least scope for some discussion on this subject. I have an open mind on it, and I am open to be persuaded by my noble friend and others in the House. In the context of a localism Bill, it is a very strange concept that a Secretary of State of whatever political hue can in effect lift the telephone and say, “You’re going to have a mayoral arrangement in your authority”, even if there has been no clear localist wish for one. If people want a mayor and there is scope for one, and if a campaign for a mayor gains ground, there may be circumstances in which the Secretary of State might be tempted to wish that he had such a power, but I hope that over the next few weeks, while assuring my noble friend of my absolute support for the principles set out in the coalition agreement and in the manifesto, she might be prepared to reflect on whether the best way to advance even what you think is a good idea is to take the power to impose it potentially on the unwilling.
In some way or another we might be able to explore, in the traditions of this House, some way in which the absolute exercise of such potential power could be limited. My noble friend will be relieved to hear that I cannot support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, but I hope that we can have some constructive engagement on this point.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have one or two questions. First, what evidence do the Government or anyone else have that in these 11 cities, including Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Wakefield—the metropolitan district of Wakefield is technically a city, but is in fact a collection of towns, as I know well because I grew up there—Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry, Nottingham and Bradford—there is an overwhelming demand, or indeed any significant demand, in these places for an elected mayor? In the absence of such a demand, forcing a referendum on people that is likely to be rejected in the majority of these places—perhaps all but two or three places are likely to reject it, or perhaps they will all reject it—is an astonishing waste of money.
Secondly, can the Minister tell us how much it will cost to hold a referendum in each of these 11 places? Although I may have missed something, the only place I can recall where there was a significant campaign for an elected mayor was Liverpool. It was led by some high-profile people, some of whom were connected with broadcasting organisations. However, the campaign failed to get through the present system to requisition a referendum. It is clear that in each of these places it would be difficult to raise the 5 per cent of genuine signatures for a referendum. In those circumstances, it is extraordinary that in a Bill called “localism”, the Government are imposing from the centre their own version of how local democracy should work.
People might argue that an elected mayor is a more localist system than an elected council, council leader and so on. But it is difficult to see how they can argue that it is more localist. They might argue that it is more efficient, more effective or more exciting, or that more people will turn out to vote, although, as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said, that is not likely. I wonder whether the Minister can tell us the criteria that the Government have used to make them think that this provision of top-down centralised instructions to people on the ground on how to run their cities fits in with a Bill called “localism”.
Thirdly, what evidence have the Government got that, in those places which have already got elected mayors, taking them as a whole, the system of local government is better than it was previously? There are places where the system is working very well. I would point, as I would anyway, to Watford, which has a Liberal Democrat mayor and a Liberal Democrat council, which helps a lot because they work closely together. But I suspect that, without an elected mayor but with a Liberal Democrat majority, the Liberal Democrat elected councillors and, thus, mayor would work together and would be a good council anyway.
I am not arguing that Liberal Democrat councils are always better than other councils. We all know perfectly well that, while we all pretend that our councils are better in different ways than everyone else’s, it is not always the case. As I keep saying, there are good councils and bad councils, and most councils are somewhere in-between, which goes right across the parties. They may have different approaches to things but in terms of whether they are good, bad, efficient, inefficient or whatever, it goes across the spectrum.
There are councils run well by mayors. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, mentioned some in London. There are also councils which may have elected mayors but do not run so well. Local politics and local administration in Stoke-on-Trent has been a basket case for some considerable time. Having an elected mayor made absolutely no difference. You could argue that it made it worse. Another example is Doncaster, another council which has not had a good reputation for being efficient, open, honest and all sorts of things over the years. It now has an elected English Democrat mayor. Does that make the administration in Doncaster any better? The Government do not think so because they keep putting people in Doncaster to sort it out and to run things.
There are places where the local political culture is conducive to being run efficiently, whichever party is running it. There are places where the local political culture is conducive to it being a shambles and very difficult for whoever is running it to sort out. There is no evidence whatever that those places with elected mayors are on average run any better or any worse than those without elected mayors. Surely, if the Government are going to impose things like this from the centre, it should be on the basis of the evidence. If it could be proved to me that imposing mayors on these 11 places would suddenly make them better run than they are, I would consider it, but I have to say that the big cities in England, taken as a whole, have been one of the success stories of local government and administration over the past 10 to 20 years. Not all of them by any means—I do not want to mention particular cities—but some have been outstandingly successful. That is under the present system, so why will having a mayor make a difference?
Unless we can be given some very clear evidence, this just seems to be policy developed on the whim of a few people at the top of and within the present Government. That is not a reason for supporting it. I accept that if something is in the coalition agreement, as a Liberal Democrat I start from the presumption that I will support it. Some things in the agreement are so important to the coalition, so crucial and critical, that even though I think they are completely bonkers, I will go through the right lobby in support of the Government. There have been certain constitutional issues recently where that has been the case. However, I do not believe that whether you have elected mayors in 11 places, or you have expensive referendums for elected mayors to decide whether to have them in London, are matters that are fundamental to the foundations of this coalition Government. So if the House of Lords booted it out or if it goes to a Division at any stage, I have to say to my own party and anyone else who wants to listen, I will find it very difficult indeed not to support the proposition.
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.
Lord Tope
My Lords, the Minister has warned me not to allow my noble friend Lord Greaves to let me stray off message. I have actually said nothing at all on the subject yet, and that might well be a message in itself. I am rather too mindful of the Minister’s immediate appointment elsewhere to take more time with this. I am struggling hard to resist the debate that has been held about the benefits of a London Mayor. Having been a member of the London Assembly for the entire reign of the first London Mayor, I can say that any strategic government for London has to be better than no strategic government for London. What none of us can know—so I will not bother to argue it—is whether another system of strategic government would have been as good, worse or better. At least, there could have been an alternative to an elected mayor, which has not been considered.
Lord Greaves
Perhaps my noble friend would pay attention to the point that having an elected mayor for Liverpool does not provide strategic government for Merseyside, and that having an elected mayor for Manchester does not provide strategic government for Greater Manchester, and that the same applies to Leeds and Bradford.
Lord Tope
He refused and it was one of his wisest decisions, because the person who requested him to do so did not distinguish himself in the interests of the Liberal party within a few years of that. I refer to our then party leader. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is probably too young to remember such an occasion in the 1970s.
I must get back to the point. The amendment relates to the threshold, and I am grateful that, in the end, the Minister paid some attention to it, because no one else has done so throughout the entire debate. Therefore, I have very little to reply to, except to say that we shall be returning to the issue of thresholds for referendums and so on at a later stage. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, we have rightly just had a long debate about a major issue. In moving Amendment 88, I wish to speak also to Amendments 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95 and 96, with which it is grouped. Somebody who looked at them said to me that they were typical fiddly House of Lords amendments, by which I think they meant the kind of amendments that try to probe what is meant by the words set out in the Bill.
We are now on Chapter 4 of Part 1, which is about predetermination. Predetermination is a doctrine that I understand is well established in common law—that people making decisions in a public capacity have to keep an open mind and not close their minds and fetter their discretion before they make those decisions. That principle is vital in the law courts. Within local government that doctrine has really taken off in the past 10 or 15 years. I was a member of a local authority until 1998, when I decided to retire and find something else to do with my life. Until then, it was not something that people paid a great deal of attention to. In planning decisions, the area where the rules on predetermination have really taken hold, if there was a proposal for a new supermarket, councillors were free to campaign about it and election campaigns could involve people expressing their views. It did not stop councillors taking part in decisions.
When I went back to become a member of a local authority in 2004, the situation had substantially changed. I have been aware of that from discussions with people on local authorities since then. At that time, largely because of the decisions of the Local Government Ombudsman, particularly in planning applications, the concept of fettering one’s discretion had become a major factor. Councillors, particularly on planning committees, were warned that they must not express a view on an application before making a decision on it. On many authorities councillors were often told that they could not speak to objectors, residents or applicants—or, if they could, that they had to do so in an organised way in the presence of a planning officer. This whole doctrine has therefore taken over at least one major field of local government: planning.
Over the years many of us have taken the view that this has not only fettered people’s discretion on planning applications but prevented the proper operation of local democracy. We have had ridiculous situations whereby, in one rural town in the West Midlands, candidates from our party campaigned during an election against the one big issue in the town, a major town centre development, but when they were elected to the council they were told that they could not take part in discussions on it, otherwise they risked being hauled up before the standards regime or even being taken to court.
This provision is a welcome attempt by the Government to solve this problem and to put the weight back on the democratic side of the balance, at least as far as planning applications are concerned. That is not to say that people should not make the actual decisions in full knowledge of all the facts and having listened to all the arguments. They should be able to take a rational decision. However, it is ridiculous that on some of the most important proposals coming forward for decision in communities, councillors are prevented from expressing a view, and candidates at elections run the risk of finding that they cannot take part in those decisions if they had expressed a view during an election in which residents, not unreasonably, wanted to know what the candidates thought about the proposals and may well have voted on that basis.
The provision in the Bill is very welcome. However, the more that I read the details, the less I understand what some of it means. Because this whole area has been tied up in legal red tape, the wording has to be absolutely right. Amendment 88 probes why the words “to any extent” are in subsection (1)(b), and whether that weakens the provision. Either you have a closed mind or you do not have a closed mind. Of course, you might have a closed mind at 10 am, open it again at 11 am, and close it again at noon, but I do not understand what a “closed mind (to any extent)” actually means. It would be helpful to have some clear understanding of that.
I am not sure that I shall receive satisfactory answers on all these amendments. I may get wonderful answers this afternoon, but perhaps these are matters that require a clear explanation, perhaps in writing.
Amendment 89 asks what is meant by,
“or to have appeared to have had”
a closed mind. The question, as I understand it, is whether you had a closed mind. I do not understand why “appeared to have had” is relevant. Either a person had a closed mind or they did not have a closed mind on the facts of the case. I question what those words mean and why they are there.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, as I said at the beginning, I should make it absolutely clear that I support what the Government are trying to do. The noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, suggested that this was wonderland—and to some extent it is—but the debate has shown that there are a number of very important issues involved.
When I table fiddly, legalistic House of Lords-type amendments such as this, I always do so with a certain amount of fear that when I move them I shall be denounced around the Committee for wasting everybody’s time, but we have spent almost an hour debating this amendment. The debate has varied from a discussion of what the two particular words mean right through to the general principles. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, made a useful speech which took us through the general principles, the issues and the problems. The debate has shown that this provision perhaps needs a little more careful attention before we leave it in the Bill.
A noble Lord referred to the question of predetermination. One of the problems for local government is that this issue does not derive from any statute that I know about but from common law. It has developed over the past 15 years as a result of complaints and rulings from the Local Government Ombudsman, the Standards Board for England and some court cases.
We are talking about planning here more than anything else. When you are dealing with applicants who put in for planning permission—certain large supermarkets and so on—one of the problems is that it is very easy indeed for a council to end up in court. This can cost a great deal of money and councillors being hung out to dry. It is difficult and I hope that what the Government are trying to do will clarify the situation.
I do not want to see reams of regulations and statutory guidance on this but clear advice will have to be given to local councillors, particularly those on planning committees. That would be extremely useful. On councils such as mine, where the area committees are the planning committee for their area, every member of the council is a member of the planning committee. It affects everyone and they cannot hide behind what councils with very small planning committees do. They cannot say that certain councillors are insulated from the campaigning but everyone else can campaign; on my council, every councillor is a planning councillor on a planning committee and takes development control decisions every month.
There are ways of getting round it. I always say to developers, “Yes, I will meet you. I am not going to be hidebound and say that we do not generally agree to this. I am going to be careful what I say to you and you must be very clear that I shall look at all the issues. I represent people who are against what you are doing—indeed, I may represent you—but I shall listen to you. When the application comes to the committee I shall make a rational decision, but I cannot tell you now what that decision is going to be”.
It is more difficult when you are talking to angry constituents but there are ways and means of saying things. I could say, “Look, I cannot promise—I am not allowed to—that I will support you at the committee. I suggest that you come along to the committee, see what I do and then make your own mind up”. Even then sometimes I do not vote the way they want me to—but there we go. That is life. It has all happened in the last 15 years with regard to planning, but I do not believe that the planning system was hopeless before that all started, and this may get us back towards that. I ask the Government to issue clear advice and guidance to local councillors. It would be extremely helpful if somebody could produce a draft of that advice to councillors, based on what is in this legislation, before we get to Report. If the Government are able to do that, it will clarify a very great deal of the effect that the Government think it will have—not in all these legalistic worlds, but what ordinary councillors on the ground are going to be told they can and cannot do.
I offer that advice to the Government. Meanwhile, I said these were typical House of Lords amendments, and I thank my noble friend Lord Taylor for giving a typical House of Lords response to them, some of which I am satisfied with and some of which I did not quite understand on the spur of it. I will spend a typical House of Lords weekend reading Hansard to try to understand it. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
“( ) This section does not apply to decisions made under a local authority’s licensing functions which relate to—
(a) the suitability of an individual to hold a personal licence, or(b) the personal and private circumstances of any individual.”
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this is a substantive issue, which affects licensing. There is an important point here that needs addressing. I have no idea what the Minister will say in response to this, but perhaps some thought needs putting into it. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, said there was a clear distinction between quasi-judicial decisions and general policy. There is always an argument as to how quasi-judicial planning is, but there are some licensing functions which nobody can possibly argue are not quasi-judicial—not least because it is not very long since they were actually dealt with in the magistrates’ courts. One of the Local Government Acts—I think it is the 2007 one, but I am not sure—transferred the function of granting permission and licences from the courts to the local authority.
In my experience, there are two main areas. There are licence applications for events and entertainments. If you want to run a cinema or theatre or you want a temporary licence for a big shindig in the park, or whatever it is, you have to apply to the local authority for a licence. There are alcohol licences, as well as licences for premises, pubs, clubs and retail premises—for new ones and for changes and extensions to existing ones. Then there are occasions when there might be objections from the police to an existing situation where the question of revocation or restriction of the licence is considered. All those things are matters of public policy. They are not huge, overriding policies and will never be in a manifesto, but the question of whether a particular premise is a suitable place to be a pub or club is general policy. The question of whether alcohol should be sold from particular retail premises is a matter of policy and ought to be treated as policy. The removal of predetermination restrictions should apply to that. But if you are dealing with the question of whether a particular individual is a suitable, fit and proper person to hold an alcohol licence in any of those circumstances, that is not policy. Under those circumstances, judicial rules really have to apply, and you cannot possibly have people going round saying, “That man is a rogue”, or, “That man did my sister down”, or whatever it is, “and therefore I am going to vote against him having a licence”. Members of the licensing committee have to be trained, they have to carry out proper procedures, the whole thing has to be done by due process and it is a matter of whether an individual is a fit and proper person.
The other area is taxi licences for operators, drivers and so on. Again, these are matters that refer to a particular individual and to whether that person is an appropriate person to drive a taxi and carry a member of the public around, or whether they are an appropriate person to run a taxi business. The question of whether premises are suitable to be taxi offices is probably a planning decision rather than a licensing decision. That is public policy, in my view, and it is entirely reasonable that you should be able to go around an area meeting people who are concerned, or even campaigning, about it. The question about whether Joe Bloggs or whoever is a suitable person to run a taxi business or to drive a taxi is like the situation with alcohol licences: they are not questions that councillors should go around debating in public, or in private before the meetings. They are there as if they are magistrates, considering on the facts and the evidence, usually on the advice of the police, whether or not these people are suitable. There is a specific case there where the predetermination rules should be applied, and strictly. The purpose of moving this amendment is to probe the Government’s thinking on this issue. I beg to move.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, I will be brief. I am not unsympathetic to the noble Lord’s amendment but I am not sure that I agree with the basis on which he proposes it. I think that he is distinguishing some circumstances where predetermination can be dispensed with from others where it should not. Without reopening the arguments that we have just been through, I do not believe that that is the import of Clause 14. In a sense, we are still awaiting the definitive government view on that. The issues around predetermination ought to run throughout the decision-making process. It is not quasi-judicial planning issues; there are lots of other decisions that councillors may make. As I understand it, if they have discretion on decisions, it must be real discretion. If they have pre-empted it by predetermination, there is the prospect that that decision will be unlawful, whatever area of decision-making is involved. However, I would not particularly disagree with taking those licensing operations outside the provisions of Clause 14.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I had hoped that the Government might take a rather different view on this. Having listened carefully to what the Minister has said, I am now even more convinced that I am right and they are wrong. The Minister referred to libel and data protection. I am not sure that either has much to do with it. Data protection would come into it with personal details being divulged to whichever licensing committee it was, which are private and should not be made public. If councillors made them public, they would be liable for it.
However, that is not at all the point that I am making. For example, there could be two rival taxi businesses in a community. The taxi business is fairly cut-throat. People do not make a great deal of profit and work very long hours. There are attempts to do the other side down, perhaps in a legal way. One faction is larger than the other and gets to the councillor who happens to be on the licensing committee. They say, “We do not want you to give a taxi operating licence to this person or taxi driver licences to these people, because they will be able to expand their operation and compete with us. We will find it more difficult”. These are personal applications. It would be outrageous if that councillor went around saying, “Yes, I will block the personal applications for taxi driving or operating licences from this or that person”, before the meeting. Councillors should be banned from saying things like that. Any councillor who goes around making such promises should be banned from taking part in the decision.
These decisions, particularly the alcohol decision, were until recently made in magistrates’ courts. Can you imagine a magistrate being in that position: going around and promising a community that they will block a particular person from taking over a pub and being the licensee because that community wants somebody from that community who it favours? Imagine the pub is in the middle of a big estate, and the estate has somebody who they would like to take over the pub, but the owners have an alternative in mind. To go around campaigning against that person getting a licence to run that pub would be absolutely disgraceful. It should be banned by law.
The more I listen to the Minister, the more I am absolutely convinced that I have raised a genuine problem. I disagreed with the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton. He was saying that he wanted everybody to be treated the same, but he wanted it to be more restrictive for everybody. The Bill says that predetermination —I keep wanting to say “predestination”, but that is not quite it—should be abolished for everybody. I am not suggesting that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, is saying that, but it is what the Government are effectively saying.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I do not think that that is what the Bill is saying. If predetermination equals a closed mind—I was trying to get an answer from the Minister earlier—and if predetermination as a concept is abolished, then there are very serious issues, particularly on planning and licensing arrangements, on which the noble Lord touched. That is the point I make about predetermination.
Lord Greaves
Yes, I accept that. I accept that there is a difference. It seems to me that there is a difference between the Government’s rhetoric and what they are saying will happen: that councillors will be freed from the kind of constraints that the wife of the noble Lord, Lord Newton, found, and which I found when I got back on the council. I think that relates to the probing that the noble Lord has usefully undertaken in the past hour or so, but there is no doubt that the regime will be more liberal than at present. We are probing what it will be exactly. The noble Lord said that it will be very radical and that perhaps we were not appreciating how radical it will be.
In general, I am fairly happy with that. However, I am not happy, and I suggest noble Lords should not be happy, about how it applies to applications for personal licences by individuals where they may be seen as controversial in the community. There may be other incidences as well. Let us look at an alternative. In a fairly built-up area, there are two corner shops which do not have alcohol licences but one of them applies for such a licence and the other one objects. The shop owner who objects could have lots of friends in the community who will instigate a petition, saying that the other shop owner should not have a licence. The motivation will be competition, not that the shop owner has spent the past five years in jail or is a fraudster or is generally unsuitable; it is simply competitive rivalry. As a result, the friends persuade a councillor with whom they have close connections, and who happens to be on the licensing committee, to oppose the licence. They hold a public meeting and present a petition. Surely that should not be allowed and yet, as I understand it, that kind of thing would be allowed under the new regime that the Government propose.
There is an important and serious issue here. I ask the Government to take the matter more seriously and to take more legal advice on it. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am not sure we have had a may/must amendment yet on this Bill, but perhaps we have and I have missed it. This is an important amendment. I rise to speak to my amendments in this group: Amendments 97A, 98E, 98F and 98H. I will also speak to the other two amendments in the group, if I may.
There is widespread concern within local government that the Government have not got this exactly right. At the very least, it needs some fettling and a number of probably quite major changes if it is going to work fairly. As my noble friend Lord Tope said earlier, there is a widespread feeling in local government—it is not universal—that the demise of the Standards Board for England is to be welcomed. The Standards Board for England’s regime has turned out in practice to be expensive. It has been arbitrary in too many cases, and therefore it has been seen to be unfair. It has been open to abuse, and it has been open to attempted political manipulation, not by Standards Board members or its staff, but by people trying to use the system in order to do down opponents.
In our judgment, the removal of the Standards Board for England is a good idea, and we congratulate the Government on doing it, but something has to replace it. We cannot simply go back to the free-for-all situation we had up until about 20 years ago when standards codes and sanctions against councillors were hardly known. The system then seemed to work. There did not seem to be any more rogue councillors than there are now, and people did not seem to step out of line more than they do now, but the world has changed. We are now in a world in which standards in public life have come in and are accepted right across the board of everybody who takes part in public life. We have even had to grapple with these matters and come up with solutions here in the House of Lords. Local authorities are no different, and to pretend that local authorities generally, or some local authorities in particular, can be excepted from this situation is not the world that we are now living in.
The Government’s proposal in the Bill is that there will be no national system, no national organisations and no bureaucracies; it will all be left to local authorities. In our debate on a previous amendment, my noble friend Lord Taylor said that it will be up to local authorities to behave sensibly and do what they think is best in their area. There will be no uniform or national standards code, so each authority will be able to adopt its own code or not have one. It can keep, amend or do away with the present code. If any of my description of the present system is wrong, I hope the Minister will intervene and tell me, but I do not think it is.
Authorities will be able to choose whether to have standards committees. Since local authorities all have them at the moment and are institutionally fairly conservative bodies, most of them will probably keep them in one form or another, but it will be open to an authority not to have them, so there will be a hotchpotch pattern; they will be able to invent their own rules for how standards committees work within their own codes of conduct.
In addition, for the offence of failing to declare appropriate interests, either by not entering them on to a register of interests or by failing to declare them in meetings at appropriate times, the only real sanction left is the criminal law and, subject to the Director of Public Prosecutions’ agreement, people will be arraigned before a magistrates’ court if the DPP thinks it is serious enough. Meanwhile, parish councils will be left in some sort of limbo. They might be able to have their own systems or to continue to be part of a district council’s standards committee and system of standards, but if the local district council does not have one or decides to do away with it all, the parish councillors will have the choice either of doing it themselves, which might be rather difficult for small parish councils, or not doing it at all.
That seems to be the regime that is on offer. Perhaps the way I have presented it suggests that I am not terribly impressed with it. Nevertheless, I think my presentation of it is factually correct.
We have been here before and had something similar to this. When standards committees were first brought into local authorities, local authorities were left to do their own thing. Many of them did it very well, but in some places it was not done well. It was done either inefficiently or in an arbitrary, uneven or unfair way. In a small minority of places—it is always a small minority—it was not a good thing. It was fairly dreadful. Some authorities used it to victimise individual councillors in order to conduct campaigns against opposition groups on the council and to conduct witch-hunts against individuals. That is always the danger if local authorities in an area like this are left to their own devices, because there will be some places where malign, malevolent politics gets in the way of a fair system. Therefore, we propose in amendments in this group, and in the next group, which I will speak to later, a system in which every authority must have a standards committee. It seems ridiculous that someone could be dual-hatted or triple-hatted, and on three different authorities at different levels, some of those authorities having a standards committee and some not.
Equally, we are suggesting a uniform, standard, national code of conduct. We are not talking about local diversity. There cannot be local diversity about what is appropriate conduct for people in public life. We are talking about standards in public life. While standards and rules for councillors may be different from those for Members of the House of Lords, Members of the House of Commons, people on national quangos or whatever, the organisations are different. Nevertheless, they should be based on the same principles and underlying standards in public life.
There does not seem to be any reason why, if I am a member of a district council, a parish council and a county council, which I have no intention of being except for one of them, there should be a different code of conduct on each council. Surely, that cannot be right. Nor can it be right that of the 11 or 12 district councils in Lancashire, some do not have a code of conduct and some have a very different code of conduct from the adjoining council. Codes of conduct should be laid down nationally.
We are saying that the drawing up of the code of conduct and its approval should be done by local government and not by the Secretary of State or national government. It should be the responsibility of representatives of local government and, in terms of legislation, the LGA obviously is a key representative. We want systems for appeals and we want to sort out parish councils. We want to look at criminal offences, but they are in the next group so I will not talk about them any more at the moment.
On something like this there has to be protection for the public against rogue councils. Much as I have an underlying, innate aversion to national uniformity in anything, some things are so important and fundamental that they underpin everything else. This is the right way forward.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
My Lords, we agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that we cannot have a free-for-all and that it should be mandatory for every local authority to have a code of conduct. There should be a universal code and an appeals procedure. If that means that we would support each of these amendments, that is where we are.
Lord Greaves
I am confused because my Marshalled List does not have the next amendment, Amendment 98HA, on it.
Lord Greaves
I have found it.
Clause 18 : Disclosure and registration of members' interests
Amendment 98HA
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, in effect this is not a substantial amendment, so I probably do not have to move it formally, but I shall speak to the substantial amendments in the group.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, we do not see the case for these amendments, which would limit the registering and declaring of interests to financial interests. That would take us back to the days before the Widdicombe committee in 1988, when there was widespread concern about the treatment of non-pecuniary interests, which led to the strengthening of the requirements relating to pecuniary interests. There are clearly situations where non-financial interests are relevant to decision-making by councillors, and it is right that the public are aware of such interests so that they can see that decisions are being made fairly and transparently. I hope that my noble friend will see the merit of the argument and withdraw his amendment.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I apologise. I should have jumped up before the Minister. I will speak to Amendments 98K and 98M in this group.
On the two other amendments in the group, Amendments 98J and 98L, which would remove “and other” and “or other” respectively, an important, if not fundamental, point to be made is that the Government are proposing to use in this Bill language which in local government is rather out of date. Local government used to talk about financial interests and non-financial interests. If you had a financial interest, you had to declare it. You then had to do whatever the council instructed you to do, such as leave the room or sit there and not speak. If you had a non-financial interest, you had to declare it, but you were not usually subject to those sanctions.
My experience is that local government nowadays talks about personal and prejudicial interests, which are similar. However, prejudicial interests, while they include financial interests, are wider ranging and may include interests which are not directly financial but are nevertheless thought to be prejudicial to somebody taking part in discussion and debate. Personal interests, which have to be declared, are those which people should know about but are not thought to be prejudicial to people taking part in a debate. It seems to be common practice in local government nowadays for those words to be used. I was fairly sure that they had been used in the previous legislation, although I have not looked it up. Perhaps along with my noble friend, I would ask the Government to check the nomenclature, because there is no point putting in legislation words which are not now used on the ground and, in any case, are narrower perhaps, and less clear certainly, than the words and categories now used in local government.
My amendments in this group follow on from the amendments in the previous group. They are part of a package of the way we suggest the new standards regime needs to be changed. First, if there is to be a local system of councillors being sanctioned by local committees and no National Standards Board procedure, there needs to be an appeals procedure written into the system. There has to be a way in which someone who feels aggrieved by a local decision is able to appeal to a wider group against the sanction made against them. As I understand it, this is normal human rights and administrative tribunal procedure. In many ways these bodies will be operating as administrative tribunals and we hope that the Government will look at this issue. We suggest that it should not be a national quango such as the Standards Board for England and that it should not be run by central government; it should be operated within local government by representatives of local government and it should be set up in co-operation with the LGA. As my noble friend Lord Shipley said, we have set out ways in which this can be done.
My second point concerns parish councils. The Government have not bottomed the issue of parish councils on this new standards regime. I have a long briefing about the problems that it will cause to parish councils but I shall not read it all out. If parish councils have to operate their own procedures, there will clearly be resource implications. Big town councils might be able to do it—although it might be wasteful of their funding—but small parish councils will not possibly be able to do it. If there are many individual local codes so that parish councils operate different systems and some do not have any, how will members of parish councils be trained to understand the code? How will parish clerks, who play an absolutely crucial role, be trained in the new system?
My experience from talking to people involved in standards committee throughout the country is that where there are lots of parish councils they seem to occupy quite a high proportion of the time of standards committees. The reason for this is obvious: parish councillors are not getting the expert advice on standards matters—on declarations of interest and so on—which they ought to be getting; and parish clerks are perhaps not being trained or not passing on that advice. I am a huge fan of parish councils but there may be something about parish-level politics and government that leads to individual rivalries and encourages people to make complaints against each other. Whatever it is, there is no doubt that parishes form quite a large part of the workload of standards committees in many different places. To leave them adrift, as this Bill seems to do, does not seem the right way to go.
In our view, the parishes probably need their own system. That system ought to be operated via the established means of communication and training that parish councils have with the National Association of Local Councils and other bodies such as the county organisations, and there ought to be county-level standards committees for parish councils. Whatever the system is, doing it within the parish council community is a sensible idea—particularly if the parish council finds itself cast adrift with a district that does not have a system. In any case, if districts have different codes of conduct and different systems for standards committees, the parish councils will have to join in those willy-nilly whether or not they agree with the systems and the codes. A separate parish system seems to be the way to look at things.
My final point relates to criminal offences. Again, we think the Government have not thought this issue through properly. On failures to declare interests, a major failure is a very serious matter indeed, whether it be a failure to register or a failure to declare during a meeting. A minor failure would require a sanction—but not a draconian sanction such as being hauled up before a magistrates' court. Yet the government system seems to mean that if the offence of not declaring or not registering an interest is not sufficiently serious for the DPP to agree to prosecute, there will be no sanctions at all. That does not seem to be the right way forward.
As for the criminal investigations and vexatious complaints, that needs thinking through; there are enough vexatious complaints on standards already that end up with people being found not guilty and having no sanctions against them—or, in my case, the complaint was proved and the sanction was nothing. People can imagine what happened. There are enough cases of people using the standards procedure for political or personal vexatious purposes. Think of the prospects of this being used when criminal sanctions are possible. You would get massive headlines in the local papers that the complaints had been made, it would all come to nothing but the damage would all have been done. It has to be thought through a bit more carefully.
I join my noble friend Lord Tope in hoping that we can have discussions with the Government in the mean time and that at the very least we can get the thing thought through again. If no change occurs at the end of the day, so be it—but we are convinced that the Government have not yet got it quite right.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
I am not sure that we would agree with everything that the noble Lord has said, but we would appreciate the opportunity to join in the discussions with government together with the coalition parties.
Localism Bill
Lord Greaves Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Greaves
“Purpose of this Act
(1) The purpose of this Act is to promote a political and administrative system and culture which—
(a) is based on the principle that each decision should be made at the lowest practical and effective level, and that where there is a conflict between decisions at a higher or more local level there is a presumption that the local level will prevail unless there are clear and over-riding reasons why it should not;(b) is underpinned by basic rights for all persons and safeguards against arbitrary discrimination against any person;(c) focuses public decision-making on bodies which are elected, representative and accountable;(d) may incorporate minimum standards for the provision of public services that may be established by Parliament, government and elected bodies at a higher level than that at which decisions are made, but otherwise welcomes diversity of provision on the basis of locally determined needs and preferences;(e) includes a restriction against regulations and orders by government and bodies at higher levels than the minimum absolutely necessary;(f) shapes the structures of local government in ways that are designed to facilitate the involvement of local citizens, individually and as members of their communities and neighbourhoods;(g) welcomes and encourages the involvement of local citizens in the design of such structures and participation within them; and(h) encourages the formation of bodies by local citizens in which they may organise to influence public decision-making, take part in processes of local governance and help to provide local services.(2) A public body or public official shall, when acting under the provisions of this Act, have regard to the political and administrative system and culture described in subsection (1).
(3) In subsection (2) “public official” means a government minister or employee, or an employee of any body responsible for making decisions on behalf of the government or a local authority.”
Lord Greaves
My Lords, as it is the beginning of Committee, I should declare my interests yet again. I am an elected member of Pendle Borough Council, vice-president of the Open Spaces Society and a member of the British Mountaineering Council and its access, conservation and environment group. There may be others, which I shall declare if they arise as the Bill progresses.
Topically and coincidentally, an article by Julian Glover in the Guardian this morning, headed “The coalition still hasn't worked out the principles that bind it together” states:
“Last year's coalition agreement was brilliant at forcing a quick start, but useless as a guide to the government's founding values now the pace is slowing. It provided a to-do list of reform but avoided deep questions that must now be confronted: what is the coalition's attitude to democratic accountability, the role of markets and competition in public service? What does it mean by localism? To what extent should empowerment be accompanied by a harsher willingness to allow people to fail if they do not act? Above all, is the reconstruction and fragmentation of the state ideological rather than a consequence of deficit reduction?”.
Those questions are fundamental to the Bill in front of us.
Localism is not new, although the word “localism” used in this context is fairly new. The first person whom I could find using it was David Blunkett in 2004, and what he said then is not much different from what the Government are saying now.
The amendment seeks to state at the very beginning of the Bill that its purpose is to promote a political and administrative system and culture which is based on localism—localism as defined in the amendment. Proposed new subsection (1)(a) states that it should be based on the principle which in Eurojargon is known as subsidiarity and that,
“there is a presumption that the local level will prevail unless there are clear and over-riding reasons why it should not”.
It is not clear that that presumption is uniformly and consistently applied throughout the Bill. We have some very localist provisions; we then have some very detailed national prescriptions; and they rest side by side as one reads avidly through the 430 pages of the legislation. I do not want to be too critical; I am trying in the amendment to provide the Government with a friendly challenge to look at some of the inconsistencies that may exist and to tell us clearly what their view of localism is.
Proposed new subsection (1)(b) states that localism is,
“underpinned by basic rights for all persons and safeguards against arbitrary discrimination against any person”.
It must not be local majoritarianism; it should be based on the principles of democracy in which basic individual rights are fundamental.
Proposed new subsection (1)(c) states that localism,
“focuses public decision-making on bodies which are elected, representative and accountable”.
All Governments in the past few years have said that they want to decentralise and get away from the controlling hand of Whitehall and Westminster in the detailed way in which it has developed in this country. It is not clear in all cases, either with the previous Government or with this one, that the predominant role of democratically elected authorities is high in their mind; in fact, it is not clear that local government is always held in high regard by the people at the centre. Yet true localism must be based on democracy.
Proposed new subsection (1)(d) deals with the knotty problem of minimum standards. There was considerable and interesting discussion in Committee in the House of Commons as to how localism interacts with a belief that in many areas—certainly, for example, in social care—national government has not only the right but the obligation to lay down minimum standards before local diversity can apply. The question of what those minimum standards should be and in which areas they should apply is fundamental and it is not clear that the Government have given this issue the clear thought required.
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.
Lord Greaves
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.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, of course we expect councils to act in the best interests of the communities that they serve, but we do not believe that it is for the Government to dictate what that means. Local authorities are, as we know, accountable through the ballot box and the other provisions of this Bill, not to mention our system of administrative law, which requires the statutory powers for any public authority to be exercised reasonably, in good faith and for proper purposes only. I think that that covers the questions that my noble friend Lady Hamwee has asked and sets into context the provisions in the Bill.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am not sure that I understood that last exchange; I shall read Hansard carefully so that perhaps I will understand it. I am grateful to the Minister for her response and to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for assisting her. These were probing amendments—nothing more—and I shall read carefully what has been said. On that basis, I ask leave to withdraw Amendment 2.
Lord Greaves
“Objective of the general power
(1) A local authority shall exercise the power conferred by section 1 with the objective of achieving sustainable development.
(2) In this section “sustainable development” means development that meets the social, economic and environmental needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs including the application of the following principles—
(a) living within environmental limits,(b) ensuring a strong, healthy and just society,(c) achieving a sustainable economy,(d) promoting good governance, and(e) using sound science responsibly.”
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this is an important amendment on sustainable development. There is growing concern that this Government are sidelining sustainable development despite their welcome ambition to be the greenest Government ever. At the moment, there is considerable uncertainty out there as to how sustainable development will be achieved by central and local government and how their commitments and goals will be taken forward. Funding has been withdrawn from the Sustainable Development Commission, which was the watchdog and adviser to the Government on their sustainability goals. Without this body auditing government output across Whitehall, it may be difficult to highlight and address government decisions that do not support the achievement of sustainable development.
In February, Defra released Mainstreaming Sustainable Development—The Government’s Vision and What This Means in Practice. There are concerns that this seeks to redefine sustainable development by placing greater emphasis on the economic pillar, as in the document priority is given to stimulating economic growth and tackling the deficit, both of which are, obviously, important matters. Then in this year’s Budget and the subsequent policy initiatives, the Government made it clear that they are taking forward a pro-growth agenda to address the economic deficit. None of us will disagree that that is required, but we must continue to take urgent and effective action to achieve sustainable development, to reduce our impacts on the natural world and to make the transition to a green economy. Such action must be in all sectors, covering the whole Bill—that is the purpose of the amendment—including the planning system, but not just the planning system, to ensure a consistent and co-ordinated approach.
The delivery of local priorities within a localist agenda that involves local people on a far greater scale than at the moment must continue to be linked with the delivery of larger-than-local national and international priorities. Certain critical goals need a shared approach. Achieving sustainable development is one of them. In 1983, the World Commission on Environment and Development, convened by the UN, was created to address growing concern about the consequences of the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources across the globe. The outcome of the work, the Brundtland report, Our Common Future, was published in 1987 and provided us with the well known international definition of “sustainable development”. Importantly, the report launched a comprehensive gateway to sustainability which included social, economic, political, institutional and environmental criteria. It established important broad principles which, to this day, have influenced environmental laws and planning in a wide range of countries, including this one.
In this country, in 2005, we adopted the sustainable development strategy, Securing the future. This strategy established the twin goals of living within environmental limits and providing a just society by means of a sustainable economy, good governance and sound science. These five guiding principles of sustainable development are repeated in the amendment. They are intended to underpin all policy and legislation and act as a lens through which all new proposals are viewed.
My fundamental question is whether this is still the view of the present Government. Do the Government accept that this view of sustainable development underpins all their work, not just planning activities? Does sustainable development underpin everything in the Bill? Do the Government still hold to the Brundtland definition and, if not, what is their definition now? Do the Government still accept that sustainable development is a means of balancing economic, social and environmental needs equally and bringing them together? Or is there now to be a presumption for development which is economically sustainable, even if not socially or environmentally sustainable—or less socially and environmentally sustainable than economically sustainable?
That fundamental question lies behind a great deal of current government legislation and activity. The coalition Government have been working on a presumption in favour of sustainable development to be included in the national planning policy framework, the NPPF. A draft of the presumption was released last Wednesday by the Department for Communities and Local Government. There are widespread concerns that the definition of “sustainable development” used for this purpose is significantly different from the Brundtland definition and gives the economy proportionately greater weight than the environmental or social aspects.
This is also a probing amendment. I hope that the Minister will be able to give me satisfactory answers. The more satisfactory they are, the more progress we will make on the Bill. This fundamental matter arises in a number of parts of the Bill, particularly in Part 4, “Community Empowerment”, Part 5, “Planning” and Part 6, “Housing”. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
The Lord Bishop of Exeter
My Lords, I welcome this amendment with its intention to remedy what is at least a perceived gap at the Bill’s heart. Without it, or something like it—it may need a bit more work—the Bill does not yet contain an adequate definition of “sustainable development”. In fact, almost no definition of the concept is given in the Bill at all.
In Clause 95 there is a requirement for local authorities responsible for planning—district, county, unitary authorities and others—to co-operate in relation to planning for sustainable development, but little clear indication is given as to what this co-operation will entail or what it will achieve in practice. The notes to the Bill indicate that local planning authorities will also be expected to consider whether to prepare joint local development documents, but again such development is not defined.
As so much of the Bill is about planning, empowerment of local communities and new building, it is perhaps unwise to proceed without an associated statutory description of what sustainability means, particularly in these contexts. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has already referred to the most widely accepted and used definition of sustainable development—the Brundtland commission’s statement. That definition is still worth quoting. It says that sustainable development is development which,
“meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
It contains within it two key concepts—the concept of needs, particularly the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given, and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisations on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. This definition of sustainable development has as much to do with spirituality and culture as with the environment and economy—the two categories already mentioned.
A sustainable community has to be one that offers both a positive present and a positive future for all people—economically, environmentally, socially, spiritually and culturally. It is responsible to the needs of all and exercises careful stewardship of a community’s environment and its soul. In short, I suggest that true sustainable development is about sustaining the common good.
In an earlier debate on Clause 1, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, spoke of the distinction between a neighbourhood and a community, between where people live and how people interact and behave. I suggest that true sustainable development has to do with both. If this Localism Bill is to have real value, it must also have the ability to ask not only who gains but also who may be excluded from the benefit of the ideas and proposals which it contains. Without some coherent definition of sustainable development at its heart, I fear that this may not be so.
Lord Taylor of Goss Moor
My Lords, I will speak briefly. I welcome two aspects of what the Minister said. The first is her reiteration of the Government’s support for the principles of sustainable development, which is important. The second is the fact—I have listened carefully and will read Hansard later—that she did not rule out setting out these principles in the Bill. We will have to see whether we can convince the Government to do it. Their open-mindedness at this point is very welcome.
I say to those who think that a thousand years of economic development prove that we do not need sustainable development that in that time some civilisations collapsed as a result of the overuse of their resources; I refer to central America, the desertification of the north African coast and, in my own area of Cornwall, the disappearance of the herring trade. Today we see more profound impacts on the environment, such as the destruction of the rainforests, and we should not sit content in this country and assume, just because until now we have survived quite well when others have not, that we have greater wisdom than civilisations that collapsed before us.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, again I am grateful to all noble Lords who took part in this debate, which has been slightly enlightening and has taken us forward a little. I am particularly grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Exeter and to my noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor for their strong support. As I listened to my noble friend just now, I thought that the greatest economic growth in this country during the past few hundred years was the Industrial Revolution, and how much better that revolution would have been—surely it would not have been stymied in any serious way—if environmental considerations had played a much greater part in development during that period instead of the massive attacks on the physical environment: the quality of air and all the rest of it. It has cost an enormous amount of money to clean it up since. It is not just economic growth, is it? It is the way you do it; it is regulation in ways that protect the environment and finding ways in which economic growth can be environmentally beneficial.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, Amendment 5 is grouped with an amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. I do not normally take the lead on matters Welsh in your Lordships' House, but there seem to me to be two important issues here. One is the matter in Schedule 1 —why local authorities in Wales are to be deprived of what we are told is going to be a wonderful thing: namely, the new general power of competence. I understand it is because the Welsh Assembly Government have said that they do not want it, but it is often the case in legislation that even if Wales and the Welsh Government do not want to make use of legislation in the short run, they are given a permissive power to adopt later, if they decide to do so, powers that are going to be introduced in England. There are a number of matters in the Bill for which that could be the case, and my question is simply: why is that not being done in this case?
However, there is a more fundamental thing. We often get Bills in which we get tangled up with devolution matters halfway through and have to try to untangle them at that stage. The basic reason for putting down this amendment was to ask the Government whether at this very early stage of the Bill they can make a clear statement on devolution and Wales to explain the basis on which Wales is included, and in many cases not included, in this legislation and how the Bill works in relation to Wales and devolved matters. I beg to move.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, Amendment 18 stands in my name and is grouped with Amendment 5. Before getting into my own comments, I warm to the latter comments by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in proposing Amendment 5, about the very complex model of devolution that we now have for Wales. Scotland has a fairly clear-cut model for which something is devolved or not devolved. In Wales, there are bits of Acts here, there and everywhere that are a nightmare for those who need to interpret them. It is something that the Government might like to look at at some stage in the interests of everyone and of getting some symmetry in the relationships that we have within these islands.
At Second Reading, I said that I would ask questions in Committee on the applicability of Clauses 1 to 8 to Wales. Your Lordships will be aware that local government in Wales is wholly devolved. That was established by the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994, when we were still under the Welsh Office. With the establishment of the National Assembly in 1999, responsibility moved from the Secretary of State to the Assembly. Following the referendum this March, full legislative competence came to the Assembly over these matters. I realise that that was after the Localism Bill had started its passage in another place, and I understand that some adjustments have been made to take that on board.
Amendment 18 is therefore very much a probing amendment. The Explanatory Notes with which we are provided state that Clauses 1 to 8 are relevant to England only. I realise that the notes do not have status in law, but they are none the less important for us in debate and therefore one takes notice of them. Yet Clause 5(8) refers to the effects of these clauses upon Wales. Clause 5(2) provides that:
“the Secretary of State may by order amend, repeal, revoke or disapply”,
statutory provisions if he thinks this may prevent local authorities exercising their general powers of competence in England. If these powers apply to England and Wales, quite serious questions arise about the implications for local government in Wales, and that runs through other parts of this Bill. As Clause 5(8) refers to,
“an order … that has effect in relation to Wales”—
those are the words in the Bill—clearly this is a possibility. Will the Minister give us some indication of the circumstances in which this could apply to Wales—some examples, perhaps, or some issues—and how often it is anticipated that these powers might impact on Wales?
Clause 5(8) also states that the Secretary of State must consult Welsh Ministers before using such powers in a way that impacts on Wales, so I shall press a little more on the meaning of consulting. If consulting allows the UK Minister to agree or disagree with his Welsh counterparts, if he agrees and carries on regardless, does that not undermine the devolution of local government issues to Wales as provided in legislation and as was assumed in the referendum that we have just had? I suggest that if there was provision for requiring a legislative competence Motion to be passed in the Assembly on each such order brought forward by the UK Minister indicating the Assembly’s consent to that, it would at the very least safeguard the devolved powers from being eroded by being overridden from Westminster. Otherwise, what measures do the Government intend to put in place to deal with any such disagreement? This is meant to be a helpful amendment to ensure that the power over local government in Wales is not clawed back to Westminster, and that clarity will be provided for those who have to live with its consequences.
I will briefly address Amendment 5, which was moved by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and is also in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno. As things stand, by virtue of Schedule 1, as I interpret it, local government in Wales will continue to retain the power for the promotion of well-being, as laid out in the Local Government Act 2000, even though local authorities in England will be subject to changes under this Bill. Amendment 5 appears to have the effect that changes to local government in England will also apply to local authorities in Wales, but under paragraph 12 of Schedule 7 to the Government of Wales Act 2006 this cannot be done without a legislative competence Motion in the Assembly. The referendum in March confirmed the Assembly’s legislative competence in these matters. Is it the intention, therefore, of the noble Lords, Lord Greaves and Lord Roberts, to re-reserve these powers to Westminster? I would be glad to have the Minister’s comments on this, and indeed on both amendments.
Baroness Hanham
I will have to take advice about that because I was not expecting that question. I will write to the noble Lord and not hazard a guess because we might end up offending each other. If I may, I will make sure that he gets an answer to that specific question.
With that explanation, I hope the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, will feel able to withdraw his amendment. I think the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, was very much heading to get the sort of answers that I have now given, so I hope he will feel able to withdraw his amendment on the basis that I have given sufficient information.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that. I will read it carefully, and I will take advice from people in our group who are more Welsh than I am and see whether they agree with it too. On first hearing, it does sound a fairly straightforward explanation of where we stand in the Bill, which was the purpose of putting down the amendment.
The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, asked me whether I wanted to re-reserve powers. I do not, in any circumstances —this was merely a useful peg to pin a couple of questions on, which have been answered fairly satisfactorily.
The only question that comes to mind listening to the Minister, which she may not be able to answer, is how widely the Welsh Ministers consulted local authorities in Wales on whether they wanted the general power of competence. She may not have that information, but it is an open question that someone might have the answer to.
The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, suggested that the devolution settlement in Scotland was simple. It may be more straightforward than in Wales, but one of the last big Bills in which I was involved was the Marine and Coastal Access Bill in the previous Parliament. The whole relationship with Scotland was an absolute nightmare. It was all down to the details of the way in which the devolution settlement for Scotland affected a whole series of matters in that Bill. However, Scotland is not much affected by this Bill, and perhaps we should be grateful for that.
The Minister’s first remarks on the way in which the Government are thinking about releasing some of the controls on Wales were welcome. If that comes about, I think we would be very much in favour of it. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I will try to be a little more helpful. Part of the answer is that the Government believe that a local authority service should not make a surplus year on year. I think that that was one of the points raised earlier. By providing a power to charge for discretionary services, the Government’s aim is to encourage authorities to provide the sort of services that they would otherwise decide not to provide or improve at all because they cannot justify or afford providing them for free or improving them. I do not think that that actually answers the question, so I am going to write to the noble Lord before the next stage.
Lord Greaves
Before my noble friend responds, the crucial question that comes to mind is this: if the provision as it is in the Bill is passed, does it change the existing situation?
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have Amendments 16 and 17 in this group and, because of the usual vagaries of grouping, I have two amendments in the next group which are either identical or of identical import to Amendments 22 and 23 in this group: Amendment 22 is effectively the same as my Amendment 21 in the next group and Amendment 23 is effectively my Amendment 25 in the next group. I shall therefore speak to the two amendments in this group and not to those two of my amendments when we get to the next group.
Amendments 16 and 17 relate to the process of consultation. Amendment 16 seeks to add a further category to the three categories already in the Bill, which at Clause 5(7) states:
“Before making an order under subsection (1), (2), (3) or (4) the Secretary of State must consult—such local authorities … such representatives of local government, and … such other persons (if any), as the Secretary of State considers appropriate”.
I seek to add to that the words,
“such persons who are representative of interests substantially affected by the proposal”.
Clause 5(7) currently requires the Secretary of State to consult local authorities, representatives of local government and such other persons, if any, as he considers appropriate. Amendment 16 would require the Secretary of State to consult the additional category I have stated.
It is important that the Secretary of State should be required to consult with those who could potentially lose the benefit of statutory protection, whatever it may be, before the provision in question is repealed or amended. The amendment closely reflects the consultation requirements in Section 13(1)(a) of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006, on which it is based, and also Clause 10(1)(b) of the Public Bodies Bill of blessed memory. In both cases the requirement to consult representatives of those substantially affected is additional to the duty to consult such other persons as the Secretary of State considers appropriate. My question is: why the change in this Bill compared with, particularly, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006?
Amendment 17 seeks to remove the words “if any”. Those words appear to have been added to this Bill when compared with the existing legislation on which it is based. In the spirit that the Bill is too long already, I offer to take out two little words. More seriously, what difference in meaning is created by the addition of these words when compared with the existing legislation? That is the kind of question you get from people like me who are suspicious that any change is for a reason and not on a whim.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, referred to his Amendments 22 and 23; as I have said, my Amendments 21 and 25 are of identical meaning. The noble Lord referred to the red tape challenge. The Government seem to have a knack for totally unnecessary major public relations disasters. It is a good idea to remove red tape when it is not necessary, but the huge scale and breadth of the Acts of Parliament and regulations which are being churned out, month by month, on the different areas of the red tape challenge are a recipe for many people becoming concerned, jumping up and down and mounting campaigns which one hopes will be largely unnecessary when the final result comes out.
Having made that comment, I shall devote attention to the amendments. Amendment 21 to Clause 6(2) sets out a number of conditions that have to be met before the Secretary of State can make an order under Clause 5(1). Amendment 22, as moved by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, would add a further condition—
Baroness Hanham
To be a little bit pedantic, I am perfectly happy to answer those questions, but I think we are on the seventh group of amendments, with Amendments 12 to 17 to Clause 5, and Amendments 22 and 23. The noble Lord has just referred to Amendments 20 and 21, which I think come in the next group. It may be more convenient if they could be considered there.
Lord Greaves
I apologise. I shall explain it all again, because there is a mess-up in the groupings and it is best to discuss the questions under the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, rather than under mine that come later. I keep referring to mine because my notes obviously refer to them.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
If my noble friend objected to the grouping and thought that the amendments should have been put together differently, he had plenty of opportunity over the weekend to put that to the Government Whips. As it is, surely to goodness he must debate those amendments in the group in which they are listed on the amendment paper—otherwise it becomes extremely confusing.
Lord Greaves
I agree entirely, except that I did make changes to the grouping. As a result of this, we are where we are. I attempted to make sense of it, but in the end it did not come out that way. Let me be absolutely clear: I am talking to the two amendments in the group that starts with Amendment 12 as moved by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. I apologise for the confusion in the numbers, which is entirely in my head and in my notes. I shall attempt to be much clearer.
I am talking now about Amendment 22, which is in the group that we are debating. The amendment, which was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and which I entirely support, reflects the analogous condition in Section 3(2)(a) of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006. This additional safeguard is needed and is not covered by the other conditions—for example, the requirement for proportionality. The reason is that Clause 6(2)(a) refers to the proportionality of the “effect of the provision”, while Amendment 22 relates to the means of achieving that objective. The Secretary of State would have to be satisfied that the particular amendment or repeal proposed is the only way of satisfactorily securing the objective; it would require him to consider whether there were other possibilities—for example, by issuing guidance to local authorities or by amending or repealing a less significant provision. This is an extremely complicated matter. I do not know whether the Minister will be able to give us an answer that can satisfy us all, but again perhaps further discussion, either by letter or in person, can take place.
Amendment 23, which relates to the Human Rights Act and similar Acts, would add a further condition to Clause 6(2). Section 8 of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act 2006 makes a specific exception for the Human Rights Act. The Minister in the House of Commons stated that Clause 6(2)(e) would preclude the making of an order repealing the Human Rights Act or any part of it, but that paragraph relates to the provision—in other words, what the order proposes to do. This is different from whether the statutory provision itself, which is the subject of the order, is of “constitutional significance”. The point is that the 2006 Act recognises that distinction. The Bill as it stands does not recognise it and the question is why not. Why the change? The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, would restore the distinction, which would be a very sensible thing to do.
Lord Newton of Braintree
My Lords, having already declared my wife as an interest, I will not repeat that. However, in view of the contents of Amendment 14, I should mention that I am in possession of a disabled person’s blue badge and that I chair a mental health trust.
I wanted to join in on this debate partly because of puzzlement and partly because I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, moved his amendments—in particular Amendment 14—with rather more diffidence than I had expected, and certainly with less vigour. By the time you have got through five of these clauses, your mind begins to glaze over, to be honest. However, as I read the provisions as a mere layman, what is being said here is that local authorities can do anything they like, subject to some broad qualifications, and the Secretary of State can allow them to do anything they like if he likes what they want to do; but if he does not like what they want to do, he can do whatever he likes to stop them—and all this with a limited piece of secondary legislation, possibly altering primary legislation, and on the basis of a negative resolution. I think that is it in plain English—I hope that it is, and I see some nods.
At the end of the Public Bodies Bill, I said that I thought that Henry VIII had suffered a major setback but not a terminal defeat and had gone off to regroup somewhere. Well, I now know where—it was in the Department for Communities and Local Government. Here is Henry VIII, on his charger, writ larger than ever before.
I have reservations about this, to put it mildly. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, used a telling figure in the Second Reading debate, that there were over 1,200 pieces of legislation that could be amended by this Bill, using these powers. He has picked out some of them, and I think that he has done us a service, but I want to know the justification for this. If it is secondary legislation that is being changed, I can understand it, but if primary legislation, which has been duly and thoroughly debated and passed by Parliament, can be swept aside in this way, there is a real question about what we are all doing here. I note that safeguards have been written in, but I am not sure that they are on a parallel with the safeguards written into the Public Bodies Bill. At the very least, if the House is expected to acquiesce in these proposals, it needs at least a similar level of safeguard as we have in the Public Bodies Bill. I rest my case for the moment.
Baroness Hanham
My Lords, I hope that I said in my remarks that I understood what the recommendation was and that we would look at it further. It is almost inconceivable that a recommendation from that committee would be ignored.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I shall comment briefly on the consultation amendments in my name, Amendments 16 and 17. The noble Baroness said that they would gold-plate the legislation. As I understand it, they would simply put this legislation on the same basis as the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act and the Public Bodies Bill, which was in this House only recently. I am tempted to ask why those pieces of legislation were gold-plated. I hope that this might be looked at again.
The noble Baroness also said that adding a requirement for consultation with representatives of people who are likely to be affected could restrict the amount of consultation that took place, but as it would be an additional requirement—the requirements in the Bill would not be changed at all—and would include the words,
“such other persons that the Secretary of State considers appropriate”,
it is difficult to see how it would restrict anything. It would simply extend the amount of thought that the Secretary of State would have to give to exactly who is being consulted and provide a bit of guidance to him. The two arguments that the Minister has put forward seem a bit weak. When Hansard comes out tomorrow, I will read exactly what was said, but I think that it would be no skin off anybody’s back to accept the amendments.
Finally, I asked why the words “if any” had been added to the similar provisions in other legislation that this is based on. Perhaps the Minister will write to me and explain the significance of that.
Railways: Light Rail Vehicles
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Earl Attlee
I do not know about that particular line but the noble Lord makes the extremely good point that there will be opportunities to use light rail on old, disused lines.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, does the Minister recall that the last time the railways got enthusiastic about getting cheap and cheerful, lighter vehicles to try to reduce costs, we ended up with a generation of pacers about 30 years ago. Whatever happens with this project, the technology certainly has to be a great deal better than that.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am aware of the pacer vehicles and I agree with much of what my noble friend says.
Disabled People: Transport
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Lord Greaves
My Lords, is it not a sad fact that there is not much point talking about passenger rights in areas where the bus services are being withdrawn?
Sustainable Local Transport
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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?
Earl Attlee
It is my turn! The noble Lord initially asked whether I would look again at a part of the Statement, and he said that funding for transport is reduced. It is, although I shall not generate a groan from your Lordships by saying why. He talked about the abolition of the RDAs but he will also be aware of the local enterprise partnerships. They are not primarily a funding vehicle but they are a means of putting together stakeholders, who can then get on to the local transport authority and bid for money. The noble Lord talked about the Highways Agency and, in particular, the A1 in the north-east. That is a very important point. We have made a start, in that the A1 is now on the strategic route network and is therefore managed by the Highways Agency, although it will still be a long time before it is dualled.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Earl makes an important point about smart ticketing. There is no doubt that better ticketing systems encourage the use of public transport. They encourage me, and I am sure that they encourage many others. He talked about better systems. We are aware that what technology can do for us will rapidly improve. Noble Lords will be aware that the power of laptop computers doubles every 18 months. I would appreciate it if he would brief me on these matters; I would find that very useful.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, the section on the scope of the fund in the guidance on the application process refers to making,
“public transport, walking and cycling the most attractive sustainable travel options. For journeys involving a variety of routes to and from suburban areas and rural hinterlands”.
To that I would add urban services. I live in Colne in Lancashire. If one wants to go to the centre of Colne—to a doctor or to the shops—it is called going up Colne. That is what people say, for the good reason that the town is built on a hill. Many people live on the other side of the valley. They have to go down and up. I am a councillor there, and in my ward we started the route 16 bus service, the Lenches and Bunkers Hill circular, in 1986 after bus deregulation. It has been quite successful. There are only five journeys a day. However, you cannot make it more sustainable if you take it away. Lancashire County Council has now decided that it will take away the service, which is much needed by old people, those with less mobility and so on, to get up Colne. Will the Government, as well as cutting money to local authorities, make some of this fund available for more innovative ways of providing services when current services are reduced for financial reasons?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I have the same problem; I live on a hill. I am not sure that I would like to ride a bicycle up it, but I will try in the summer. The noble Lord will know that bus routes and bus provision are matters for the local transport authority. He talked about the need for innovative solutions. I agree with him, but it is for local transport authorities to develop these solutions. Our role is to encourage them, not to tell them exactly what to do by means of a long screwdriver.
Railways: Investment
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Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am grateful for my noble friend’s contribution on the importance of the IEP to the north-east. That was no doubt very high up in the mind of the previous Administration, quite rightly. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State is fully aware of all these factors and the importance of, as my noble friend put it, a boost to the north-east. My noble friend talked about a lower cost bid. That is welcome as well, but it is important that we select the correct technical solution to the problem of having a bi-mode capability.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, as one of the small minority of Members of this House who live in the north of England, I congratulate the Government on the large number of measures that are suggested, including electrification in the north-west and improvement to services across the Pennines and in the Yorkshire and Manchester areas, even though the much needed increase in rolling stock is yet again London’s cast-offs, which is what we normally get lumbered with. Nevertheless, it is better than nothing—cattle trucks are better than no trucks at all. Is the Minister aware of the need to reinstate a teeny-weeny bit of track in the Todmorden area, known as the Todmorden curve? That would allow trains going from Burnley over the Copy Pit line to join the old Calder Valley main line between Todmorden and Hebden Bridge to turn right as well as left, and allow us not to improve the rail service from the Burnley and Pendle area to Manchester but actually to introduce one.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am aware of the problem of London’s cast-offs, as the noble Lord put it. However, it is a sensible way of extracting all the capital value from the rolling stock. The noble Lord asked about the Todmorden curve. This was raised by a right reverend Prelate the last time I was asked a question on the railways in the north-west. It amused the House that I knew the answer. The snag is that I have forgotten that answer but I assure noble Lords that it remains the same.
Cyclists: Deaths
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Earl Attlee
I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me the opportunity to explain the situation regarding Cycling England. The noble Lord will remember that the Bikeability project is part of Cycling England. The functions of Cycling England will be absorbed into the Department for Transport. However, the Bikeability project will continue. Funding for it is available until at least the end of this Parliament. As for the issue of local authorities, we believe in localism but it is inconceivable that they will not promote bicycling, because of its obvious benefits.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his comments on the health benefits of cycling which, as he said, far outweigh any risks in a ratio of 20:1. Does he agree that any siren calls for making helmet wearing compulsory should be resisted, particularly in view of the evidence that in Australia, when helmet wearing was made compulsory, some 30 per cent or more of regular cycle users stopped riding their bikes?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Lord’s comments. We have no intention of making the wearing of helmets compulsory because it can be extremely difficult to enforce with the youngsters who are our targets. If we can get youngsters to wear helmets from an early age, we hope that they will carry on wearing them as adults. Wearing rates are, slowly but surely, increasing and we have no plans to interfere with that process.
Roads: Cyclists
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Earl Attlee
My Lords, we will have to wait for the comprehensive spending review later next week to answer that question.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I speak as a motorist and a cyclist who seeks perfection in both areas and fails miserably a lot of the time. Does the Minister agree that there is a real difference between traffic offences committed by cyclists or anyone else and breaches of the Highway Code? Simply breaching the Highway Code may be impolite, foolish or dangerous, but it does not necessarily amount to an offence. Does he agree that cyclists are far more vulnerable than drivers of cars, lorries, et cetera?
Earl Attlee
I agree with my noble friend and, returning to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, the reason why the police concentrate more on motorists is because they cause more serious accidents than cyclists.