Local Government Finance Bill

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill]

I do not have to take my name off the top of this amendment because it was never there. However, I share the natural anxieties of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, whose name is to one of these amendments.

The argument put forward in these amendments is to put off till tomorrow what should be done today. There is never a good time to do this. Putting it off will not solve this or help in any way. The argument put forward by noble Lords is that we need a greater lead-in time. The Olympics had a great lead-in time for security but there was still a mess at the end. There may be a mess at the end of this and there may be a mess at the end of the Olympics, but greater lead-in times do not necessarily solve problems.

As other noble Lords have said, local authorities have put in a lot of work. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, says, some are further advanced than others. A district council is, by nature, a smaller authority than a London borough, so size should make it easier to deal with IT, benefits and the like. However, you still need a scheme, although the amount of money involved may be vastly different. I worked with a district council and I am still a London borough councillor, and it is different. The answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, who makes a very valid point, must be that we need to find a way in which those district councils and other councils that are not that far advanced can be assisted. That is why the Local Government Association, London Councils, neighbouring councils such as Norfolk council, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, described, and the regional authorities have to help those councils through the experience of others. A small district authority should not have to reinvent the wheel.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham]

The problem is that in a district council—a billing authority—you have two rounds of consultation to go through. There is the precepting authority. Then you amend your scheme. Then you go out to the public for three months. Then you amend your scheme again before it is accepted. That, as much as the software, is the problem. I entirely take the noble Lord’s point about co-operation.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill]

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, that there have to be different consultations. An authority may have a £500 million revenue expenditure, as Barnet authority has, but you have to focus your mind within that authority and, even if there are two or three levels of consultation, it has to be done. There is a short time in which to do it, but there is time.

The noble Lord, Lord Tope, talked about there being a difficult time over the next few months. I agree. Central government and local government, the Olympics and all sorts of organisations are having a difficult time, but local authorities have a history of rising to the occasion. I believe that they are doing that and that they will continue to do so. Therefore, I am against postponement.

[Lord Beecham]

The difference between this round of change and a general round of changes is that hitherto we have had to cope with a national scheme. There has been the shift of national and domestic rates, the introduction of the poll tax, and the introduction of the council tax—and they were national schemes. One factor in the present round is that consultation has been meaningful and that people will naturally want to see what is happening in their adjoining authority. The authorities may well consult, but as the whole purpose of this misguided legislation in my view is to create variety across the whole country, and no doubt even within county areas, presumably people will want to know how their scheme, as a resident, compares with the scheme in the adjoining district or in another district at the other end of the county.

These decisions will be very difficult for councils to make and, I would have thought, equally difficult for their residents to understand. They will certainly be concerned—it is the intention of the Bill—if they come up with a wide range of options that will then be exercised. In this very tight timescale, how will the citizen or the organisations that will act as advocates for groups of citizens—we shall come on to some of those in more detail later—be able to contribute meaningfully to this consultation process? There will not be time to weigh the implications of one scheme against another. This is a third dimension to the problems that my noble friends have outlined, and I do not think that they have been taken into account in the way in which the Bill has been drafted and the way in which the Government are proceeding.