Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Newton of Braintree

Monday 17th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I had hoped to be here the other night when I thought that we would reach my noble friend’s amendment. I was sorry that I was not able to be present, but then the amendment was not reached. We have now reached it and I am per contra glad to be here to add my support for what my noble friend has proposed. However, I am very conscious that the word on the street is that everybody wants to see the back of this wretched Bill today, even though it is less wretched than it was before my noble friend started amending it, and I do not want to delay the House. Indeed, I may shortly put myself beyond temptation in order to avoid doing so later.

Meanwhile, the House is already aware that I think this Bill is misnamed. Certainly, as it started, it was not a Localism Bill but a centralism Bill because “localism” meant what the Secretary of State said that it meant, not what local authorities decided that it meant. This debate is essentially on that very point.

I do not pretend to wish to defend the detail of the amendment, any more than my noble friend did. However, its fundamental thrust is that, where satisfactory local arrangements to achieve the Government’s objective exist, the Government should not stamp on them and insist that they are replaced with a template—I repeat the word used by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves—imposed from the centre. I cannot see any sense in that. It is the opposite of localism and common sense, and the Government need to look at it again.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I entirely support my noble friend’s amendment for two principal reasons. One is that local authorities can game the system anyway—all they do is get their councillors to get a group of 20 members round locally and kick off the process that is in the Bill. That will be an expensive and tiresome way of doing it and will result in councils being divided up on ward boundaries, which is not perhaps the right way of doing it because wards have been created for equality of size and electoral convenience rather than to encompass natural communities.

My other reason for supporting the amendment is that it is the best hope—despite all the other hopes that I shall express later in respect of my amendments—of getting the Bill to work in cities. As it stands, the Bill has very little to offer a city community. What a city wants, by and large, is the local application of the policies of its council rather than a hand in planning, where in a built-out environment there is very little to offer. Co-operation and working with the council to establish the area that is a neighbourhood will be a great deal easier if that comes from the council rather than a community that does not exist and has no momentum or reason to create itself. The whole process of creating neighbourhoods will happen much better in cities when guided by councils. If we consider not just relatively easy parts, such as Lavender Hill, but areas where communities are at loggerheads, how the system set out in the Bill will work when it will merely become a vehicle for neighbourhood power struggles rather than anything really creative, is beyond me. The department needs to get a grip on the question of cities, particularly inner-cities, and how we are to bring the benefits of the Bill to them.

My noble friend’s amendment seems to address this most constructively, and I hope that the department, even at this stage, will start to pay some attention to that. We all had a wake-up in our holidays and reappeared here when we suddenly discovered that communities in cities were not as strong as we might have liked to hope. This is the “Department for Communities” and it ought to be doing something, but it is not, I am sad to say.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I have an amendment which covers very much this area—Amendment 210AC—which I do not now have to speak to, I am delighted to say. I agree with everything that has been said. I will add just one rider to it. It seems to me that where a community has got itself together and has gone to the lengths of putting together a neighbourhood plan, dealing with the criticisms of it and then winning a referendum, that should count for something in the arguments with its local authority about whether it should be a parish. At the moment it does not, and I think that it should.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I cannot resist the temptation, so clearly I am going to have to go shortly. Meanwhile, I have been tempted. Perhaps I may ask a possibly elementary and perhaps even naïve question. How does all this relate to the fact that, in my understanding, and certainly in my neck of the woods, the concept of parish is basically an ecclesiastical one? Indeed I am slightly surprised to find that the Bishops’ Bench is empty during this debate. Is the parish essentially an ecclesiastical concept? Whether it is or is not, this clearly raises the possibility of parishes being extended in a rather curious way, by a proposition coming from an adjacent district—albeit requiring the consent of the parish council—which creates a parish council that then, by definition, extends into more than one parish. I find this very curious. If we are going down this path, which I do not object to in principle, at the very least we need some different terminology, because it would not be a parish council as normally understood in my kind of area.

My second point—noble Lords will be glad to hear that it is my last one—is that subsection (4) states that there must be a community governance review if there is a request for one, and that if there is a review, there must be a presumption that a new parish will be created. Why? Why cannot a review come to the conclusion that the world is all right as it is and that no change is needed? Whatever the merits of the intended fundamental thrust of this amendment, the amendment needs a lot of looking at.