Northamptonshire (Structural Changes) (Supplementary Provision and Amendment) Order 2021

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, with his charming recollections of Northamptonshire and his evident commitment to the area that he represented for 24 years in Parliament and has continued to care about since he joined this House. That was a most impressive speech.

My interest in this subject, which I declare, is as a member of Cumbria County Council. I shall not comment on specific Northamptonshire issues, but I would like to engage the Government, if they are willing, in a debate about the general principles of their approach to local government reorganisation.

This May it will be half a century since I was first elected as a local councillor, in the then Oxford County Borough, which became Oxford District Council. For four years I was a member of Lambeth Council in the 1980s, where I led the SDP opposition to Ted Knight—someone who was as far away from the founding principles of the Labour Party as could possibly be imagined. For the last eight years I have been a Labour councillor in Cumbria.

My earliest political experience was living through local government reorganisation, when the county borough in Oxford became a district. Now I am living through it again, because on 22 February the Government formally announced that they were consulting on proposals to reorganise local government in Cumbria. I know that the Minister will not be able to comment on that in detail, but I would like to make some general points, which I hope he may be able to respond to in a letter.

I am a strong supporter of the unitary model. As I said, I was first elected to a county borough, but the problem with a county borough is that it did not reach beyond its hinterland. I believe that unitaries are the best model. The public do not understand two-tier local government: they talk about “the council” and do not know which council they are talking to. Two tiers also create artificial barriers to efficiency. It is nonsense to have local planning and housing issues decided at one level and highways and traffic at another. It is nonsense to separate housing from social services, where a lot of the preventive efforts relate to the housing service.

In the Covid emergency we have seen a split between public health, which is a county responsibility, and environmental health, which is a district responsibility. None of that makes sense and it involves a lot of duplication. In Cumbria we have far too many councillors —possibly including me. We have 350 of them. When we know—as we do from the Budget yesterday—that there will be no cornucopia of provision for local government in the next few years, it is important to make efficiency savings where we can.

People on the other side of the argument say that big unitary authorities mean a lack of democratic accountability. The answer to that, in my view, is to strengthen town and parish councils at the very local level. In the town I represent, Wigton, there is a very active town council and I would like to see its role extended. That would give very local accountability for very local decisions.

Moving to unitary authorities has my general support. The Government have so far adopted a mixed approach. In some places, such as Cornwall and Buckinghamshire, they have created a single unitary for the county. Why did they not adopt that approach in Northamptonshire? This clearly cannot be simply a question of geography and population size, because Cornwall and Buckinghamshire are very big areas.

There is also an issue about whether government policy and plans for local government reorganisation allow county boundaries to be crossed. Has that happened so far? In Cumbria there is now a proposal to create a Morecambe Bay authority—but the only snag with that is that it would deprive Lancashire County Council of its county town. What is the Government’s view in principle of proposals that cross county boundaries? For instance, in the case of Northampton, was the idea of creating an urban-based authority consisting of Northampton, Bedford and Milton Keynes ever considered? That would be logical if we were prepared to cross old county boundaries. What is the Government’s attitude to that?

In Northamptonshire the reorganisation has clearly involved breaking up services that were provided on a county basis. We know that that has been avoided for the lord lieutenancy and the pension scheme, but what has been the experience with children’s services? Has the trust model worked? Do the Government think that a children’s services trust can be held accountable when things go wrong? What are the lessons that they have drawn?

What reorganisation should definitely not be based on is political pressure from Members of Parliament who basically just want to hang on to existing structures. A lot of that is because they see district councillors as their grass-roots organisation. I do not think that should be regarded as a principle to prevent sensible reorganisation.

What criteria will the Government use in looking at all these different proposals for reorganisation? In Cumbria we have four proposals—one for a single unitary, which I support, and three different versions with two unitaries. That is a confusing situation and some order must be given to its consideration.

These are difficult questions and I am not expecting a clear answer from the Minister. I apologise for taking up the time of the House on these issues, but the Government have been rather slow and rather reluctant to show a bit of leg—if I might put it that way—in the reasoning behind local government reorganisation, which in principle I support. I believe in local government, as I know the Minister does. I have a passion for it, and I want to see a reorganisation carried out on a sensible basis, which can last for generations.