Draft Cumbria (Electoral Changes) Order 2012

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Liddle]

That this House regrets that the draft Cumbria (Electoral Changes) Order 2012 has been produced with inadequate consultation with the County Council and other interested parties; without a simultaneous review of the district council ward boundaries with the consequence that the electorate will be confused as to their local representation; and with serious flaws in the process conducted by the Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) that specifically contravene the requirements of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 that the LGBCE base their recommendations on population forecasts for five years after the Order comes into force, given that the LGBCE admit they do not have the legally required information for 2017.

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I beg to move the Motion of Regret in my name on the Order Paper. I apologise to the House for having to raise this matter on the Floor, but it is an important one because the Local Government Boundary Commission for England has behaved, I am afraid, in what I consider to be a bureaucratic and insensitive way and has not obeyed its own rules. On all sides of the House, there is support for the principle that boundaries of constituencies, county divisions and borough wards should be set by a process that is independent of party politics and that those boundaries should be reviewed periodically to ensure broad equality of representation. However, the contention of this Motion of Regret, and my reason for moving it, is that there were very serious flaws in the way that the Local Government Boundary Commission for England acted in relation to the boundaries of Cumbria County Council.

There are two points about Cumbria that need to be stressed. First, you are dealing with a very sparsely populated county, with very stable communities with very strong local identities which need to be respected in any review of local boundaries. In my own home town, Carlisle, which particular part of it you were from—such as Denton Holme, where I was from, or Stanwix—defined what kind of person you were. These local identities are very important.

Secondly, and this is a more important point about the process, it is a part of the country where there is two-tier local government. Personally, I regret that and am in favour of a single-tier authority, but I know there is debate about that. If you have two tiers of local government, it is important that they marry together. The problem that we have with two-tier local government is that for most of the public, the districts are the focus of local representation and democratic voice, but it is the county council that has the money and the powers and provides most of the services. There is already confusion about who is responsible for what in this two-tier system and it greatly adds to the confusion if, in revising boundaries for the county council without at the same time revising boundaries for the district, you end up with different bases of representation.

This could have been done differently. The order we have before us also considers town council boundaries, and there is absolutely no reason why the district and the county could not have been considered together. Instead, what appears to have happened was a mechanical, computer-driven process of equalising the wards by drawing lines on maps—which, incidentally, no local people can actually read when they try to print off those maps—but also a process that was without regard for local community ties.

Again, I cite an example from the city that I know best. Ever since my childhood there has been a ward on the west side of Carlisle round the area of the Brunton Park football ground, called St Aidans, and this has completely disappeared. The area where my parents lived for most of their lives, which is called Currock, is being split in two and half of it is being amalgamated with another part of town that is quite distinct from this area. These are bureaucrats who have applied computer principles; they are not people who have looked at local communities.

It also seems strange to introduce a wholly new set of boundaries within four or five months of the elections for the county council next May. People will discover that councillors who have represented them for decades no longer represent them. This simply adds confusion for confusion’s sake. This was a rushed job, in my view, and also did not comply with the legal requirements that the Boundary Commission is supposed to take into account when it revises boundaries.

There is a requirement to take into account population forecasts for five years for each of the wards. The Local Government Boundary Commission for England did not have that information available. It had information for the population forecasts for the districts only up to 2016, when the law requires it to have forecasts up to 2017. It used those population forecasts pro rata to each ward rather than looking at the circumstances on the ground in each ward. Of course, that information would have been available to the Boundary Commission if it had done the district boundaries at the same time because the district councils, as the planning authorities, hold the detailed information about what developments are likely in the coming period.

I am moving this Motion because I believe that the Boundary Commission has behaved with a lack of common sense. It has exceeded its authority and refused to admit its error. While it is right that the Boundary Commission should be independent in its judgments of boundaries, it cannot be independent of the statutes that govern its operation, nor can it be independent of scrutiny if it behaves in an arbitrary and bureaucratic way. I hope that this Motion will give the Boundary Commission an opportunity to think again. I beg to move.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I only wish that the Government could have rejected the product of this review before bringing this before Parliament. The truth is that no one anywhere in the county of Cumbria asked for this review at district, town or county level. Indeed, I quote the Conservative leader of Cumbria County Council in his letter to the Commission on the 8 September 2010:

“I am concerned that the review of Cumbria County Council’s divisional boundaries is to take place in the next few weeks. That there is a need for such a review … I do not contest”.

He goes on to express his “considerable reservations” as to the limited nature of the review, the lack of a full consultation with the county council about the nature of any meaningful review that should take place.

There was one small problem in the county, one ward—Dalston and Cummersdale, near Carlisle—which has led to all this public money being spent, and it could have been resolved by some minor decisions being taken in the structure of county council wards. The county has provoked an anomalous position with overlapping district boundaries, which will probably provoke an equally unnecessary district boundary review, which no one wants and on which no one wants to spend public money, leading to the further use of district and county authority resources.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for his contribution, and clarify and confirm that these are matters for the Local Government Boundary Commission for England. It is normal procedure in such cases that the Government do not take a position.

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey for his robust reply to our Motion of Regret. He has done the Local Government Boundary Commission for England proud; I am only sorry that there does not appear to be anybody from the commission here to have listened to it. Before I sit down, there are a couple of points that I wish to correct.

There is nothing political about this. There was unanimity between the Conservative and Labour members on Cumbria County Council that they did not want this boundary review to proceed. They were not trying to stop it for reasons of party advantage but because they thought it was a completely unnecessary exercise at a time of great austerity when vital services are being cut. They did not want to have to waste their time on it. Frankly, the boundary commission could have dealt with the problem of the overexpansion of the electorate in one ward by simply making some marginal adjustments, such as putting the 1,500 voters into adjacent wards, without having to go through the whole process of a full-scale boundary review, which no one in the county really wants and which, on the eve of an election, has had disruptive effects in terms of local representation and community identity.

I thank my noble friend Lord Harris very much for making the case for the boundary commission; I only hope that the boundary commission listens to this debate and will in future take note of what has been said about how it should proceed. I hope it will accept that responsibility. On that basis I am prepared to withdraw my Motion of Regret.

Motion withdrawn.