Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Moynihan and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 5th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I have Amendment 130ZC in this group, which I will speak to in a minute. Before I do, I want to say that I think we agree with a very great deal, if not everything, of what the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, has just said. We certainly agree with the broad thrust of his amendments. It seems illogical that if there is to be a system in which local people can, in the terminology here, challenge the existing providers of a service and suggest that they might do it better, that should be only for services that are provided by local government, not by other public bodies, because when it comes down to it services provided by local government, as opposed to other public bodies, are fairly arbitrary. There are good reasons for a lot of them, but for some of them it is not very clear why local government does them and someone else does not. It is certainly not clear why someone else does a lot of things and local government does not in this country. The division is arbitrary and it seems to me that the relevant criteria should be whether it is a local service and then whether it is desirable that this should apply to it.

We agree very substantially with the noble Lord’s Amendment 130, and with his Amendment 131, which would allow a local authority on behalf of its community to take over in appropriate places. Of course, there is a great question mark over how funding is going to be arranged. You immediately get into all sorts of questions about whether there would be ring-fenced funding for a particular service or whether it would be rolled up in the general local government grant, the existing formula funding or whatever is going to replace it, and how that would be organised. Nevertheless, those are not insuperable problems. Initially, one assumes that there would be ring-fenced funding for particular services that were transferred, but the basic principle is something that we would certainly support.

The noble Lord is not enthusiastic about his Amendment 132 requiring local authorities to produce a list of challengeable services. He suggested that it is bureaucratic. However, there is certainly another side of that coin because the Government are going to lay down a list of services that are not challengeable and that are excluded. Indeed, they are going to give themselves power in regulations to change that list from time to time, as we have already discussed. If people know what they cannot challenge, presumably they can work out what they can challenge, so it is not really a problem and the noble Lord’s amendment is probably unnecessary, whether or not it elicits enthusiasm.

My Amendment 130ZC would allow a district council in a two-tier area to challenge the county council and to suggest in certain circumstances that it could take over county services. There is an ongoing argument in some areas between districts and counties about what counties do and what districts do. In my own county of Lancashire, there was a great deal of devolution from the county to the districts in 1974. It simply followed existing practice with the old municipal boroughs and even some of the larger urban districts in the county. In recent years, the county council has been pulling services back and taking them to the centre, even though it is a large, far-flung council. I do not know exactly how far it is from north to south, but it cannot be far off 80 or 100 miles, and it is 60 or 70 miles from east to west, so it is a huge county. It is also an area with strong districts, some of which used to be county boroughs and are still resentful of having been downgraded, and some of which have always been strong municipal boroughs and are now the basis of strong districts.

District councils across the country vary hugely. Some are, frankly, quite feeble and weak affairs, and others try to behave as if they were unitary authorities but do not quite get away with it. Nevertheless, there are a lot of services that it can be argued would be better run at a local level and which in many cases have been. An example is local highway functions that cover not the main roads but local streets. In Lancashire, they were run by most of the districts until three or four years ago when the county decided to take most highway powers back to itself. Demonstrably, the system has not improved since then. Some would say that it has not got worse, but others might disagree with that. It is an area that could be challenged.

The whole area of leisure and recreation has a very local base to it in many cases. One example is country parks. Having a network of country parks across a wide council might be the best way to do it, or country parks might best be run at a local level and involving local people.

[Lord Moynihan]

I am grateful to my noble friend for raising that. Very briefly, a classic example of this are the national sport centres, which initially were set up to focus on excellence in sport and did so for many decades but which increasingly have come to serve the local community through community use and Sport for All. These are surely very good examples of where you can be far more aligned to local authorities—if they are run by local authorities—working with local clubs and with local governing bodies while protecting high-performance sport.

[Lord Greaves]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that intervention. Libraries are an example of this. In some parts of the country they are very controversial at the moment because they are being closed down on quite a large scale, while in other places they are not. So long as the existing funding for a library may be transferred to districts, there is no reason at all why districts cannot take libraries over. Indeed, the municipal boroughs before 1974 were the library authorities, and many of the fairly new libraries that now exist were built by the boroughs and not by the county council. If the county council is seriously looking at reorganising its library service, one of the ways in which it could perhaps increase the efficiency of libraries and local involvement in them is by transferring at least some of them to the districts. I am not saying that that is an ideal solution everywhere, but it is something that ought to be challengeable. There are a number of things like that.

As for national services, the ward I represent on the council had a recent problem of raw sewage flowing down from an inefficient septic tank system on a caravan site on a hillside and causing real problems to residents in the lane below. Noble Lords can imagine what their back gardens were like—not very pleasant at all. The Environment Agency became involved in this. It came and went and came and went, and the district council, which has no direct responsibility for it, became involved, and in the end it was the district council that actually organised the system, spent the money and connected the caravan site to the main sewage system. It then recharged the people who lived on the site and the people who own it. It was the district council that actually sorted it out on the ground, even though, as far as I could work out, the statutory responsibility lay with the Environment Agency. That is a classic example of the kind of service that, if transferred at a local level to a competent local council, might well be run better.

As for the river system, the Environment Agency is responsible for main rivers, but certainly in our part of the world some of the things that are classified as main rivers are tiny little streams. There is no reason at all why they should not be the responsibility of the district council. The district council has no statutory responsibility for rivers and it is not funded by government for it, but some district councils employ drainage officers because they are the sensible people on the ground who sort out flooding and drainage problems when they occur. How much better if they were actually statutorily responsible for it? I therefore support the noble Lord’s amendment with some enthusiasm, and put mine forward with enthusiasm as well.