Local Democracy in the United Kingdom

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Shipley for initiating this debate and congratulate those noble Lords who have made their maiden speeches.

Over the last 15 years, we have witnessed the steady erosion of local democracy, with decisions being taken by fewer and fewer people and being centralised. We need to strengthen local democracy and bring it closer to local people, and we need to ensure that there are always checks and balances.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Greaves that, over the last 15 to 20 years, local democracy has evolved piecemeal. It perhaps started with the Blair Government, when the idea was to modernise local government with the so-called cabinet system. It sounded very good: the cabinet would make the decisions and the back-benchers would scrutinise them. However, in reality, the back-benchers did not have any power at all. They could not vote on any issue that they felt strongly about, with the exception of the budget. There might have been an issue in their ward that they felt absolutely passionately about; they might have scrutinised it to death and found that what was happening was wrong. But the cabinet could override them and they could not even put their hands up to make a point and vote against it. That is not the best way to bring local democracy close to people.

At the same time, the Labour Government dabbled with the notion of elected mayors. This seemed to be another way of taking local democracy away from people. Elected mayors would be all powerful and represent their communities. The Government at the time said that there should be referendums, and the coalition Government and the current Government carried on with the notion of city mayors. In my city of Liverpool, initially, the opposition at the time, the Labour Party, were opposed to an elected mayor for Liverpool. They came to power and some sort of deal was stitched up whereby we had a city mayor. There was no referendum—the people could not decide. There was no local democracy and so we now have a city mayor.

I am concerned about the current situation in Liverpool because the all-powerful city mayor has abolished the mayoral scrutiny committee and the overview and scrutiny committee. How can you have an elected mayor with no scrutiny at all? It is little wonder that people are concerned about the decisions that are being made. The city mayor—again with no scrutiny—can decide, say, to abolish bus lanes, with no scrutiny of whether it was the right decision. The city mayor can decide to sell off parkland with no scrutiny of whether that should happen. In any devolved system there has to be scrutiny and checks and balances. They are absolutely essential to our democratic system.

We have now moved on to metro mayors. It is a good idea to have someone standing up and speaking for their city region—but, again, the system needs to be rooted in a democratic setting. It should not be a cabinet of political self-interests.

The idea behind police and crime commissioners was that local people could vote for the person they wanted to be in the post. However, under the new system of metro mayors, the elected mayor may decide that he or she will take on those responsibilities or give the position to someone else. We need to make sure that there is independent scrutiny of metro mayors. It should not be beholden on the mayor to decide whom he or she wants to carry out that scrutiny.

At all levels of society we see power being taken away from local people. I shall end where my noble friend Lord Shipley started, on the issue of education. Parents should be at the heart of our education system. We have seen Governments slowly strangling local education authorities, first by denying them resources and now by saying that all schools will be academies and that they will have no part in the system. Academy chains do not have any democratic input; they are not allowed to be scrutinised. In fact, one academy chain has abolished governing bodies—an absolute nonsense—and we have unelected regional officials making the decisions that local councillors and local people should make.