Growth and Infrastructure Bill
Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Greaves(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Tope
My Lords, before the Minister responds, may I respond briefly to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham? He questioned whether the 20 years suggested in my amendment might be too long. He may well be right and it may well be so. At this stage, my consideration is more to get the principle accepted rather than a specific time period. Part of the reason for that is that I think we would all want to incentivise the surprisingly large number of local authorities that still do not have a local plan in place. The positive intent, if you like, of the amendment is to provide that incentive. I suggest that whether the period is 20 years, 15 years or any other period is less material at Committee stage than the principle that the amendment is trying to achieve.
Having said that, perhaps I could comment on what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has just said. Again, I think that most of us who propose amendments in Committee do not expect that they will eventually appear in the Act, but they cover the particular issues that we wish to raise in order to air our concerns, to hear the Minister’s response and, most importantly, for the Minister to be able to take it back to her ministerial colleagues so that the Government can come back on Report in exactly the way that the noble Lord is suggesting.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I wonder if I can respond very briefly to the noble Lord, Lord Deben. Surely it is the case that because the criteria for granting planning permission in national parks are much more rigorous and strict than in many areas, many developments will actually need more time for negotiation and discussions with the applicants to make them acceptable within a national park context. In national parks particularly, it may well be that some of the authorities are not as efficient as they might be—I can quite believe that—but in general I would expect that similar applications in national parks will take longer than in what I might call ordinary areas, for those reasons.
The statistics are interesting and worth putting on the record. In the past year the Lake District had 19 major planning applications—far more than most others, which is interesting—and the Broads Authority had 13. Of the rest, Dartmoor had two, Exmoor had two, the New Forest had seven, the North York Moors had seven, Northumberland had two, the Peak National Park had five and the Yorkshire Dales had three. With that level of application, it would clearly be ludicrous to apply anything like a strict 30% rule or any other simple cut-off.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Greaves(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Tope
Only in a localist sense. It is fair to say that this issue has divided opinion throughout the country and, certainly, opinion within local government. When the Government’s proposals were first announced as the localisation of council tax benefit—council tax support, as it now is—many of my colleagues in local government were surprisingly enthusiastically supportive of it, perhaps because of the word “localisation”. That is a seductive word for many of us who would quite rightly describe ourselves as localists; I am very much one of those. I said in the Second Reading debate, and say again, that others including myself have thought throughout this that it properly belongs with universal credit. That is my personal view; it is not shared by all colleagues in my party. To be fair, it is not shared by all colleagues in any party. It divided local government. The Local Government Association still supports the localisation of council tax support in principle, with increasing reservations. On the other hand, London Councils, to which my authority belongs, has always opposed the move. Let us not pretend that there is one universal belief about all of this.
I cannot help feeling that today we are having a Second Reading debate that actually happened last year rather than in relation to this Bill. I know that this was much debated—and others here know much better than me; they experienced it—during the passage of the Welfare Reform Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, is almost certainly right to say that it was an argument between the DWP and DCLG, the outcome of which we are here today to discuss. I feel now that we have to move on.
The reality is, whatever our dire predictions may be—and I have to say dire predictions that it will be “just like the poll tax” are exaggerated; I cannot know that, nor can anyone else here, but I do not think it will be that bad—it will pose some real difficulties for local authorities. We have heard mention already of the difficulties experienced under poll tax, and in other situations, by local authorities having to attempt to collect relatively small debts, particularly from people who have not previously been paying council tax, and for whom paying it is not the norm or part of the culture. Whether or not these predictions are exaggerated, only time will tell. I think they possibly are but then I joined the Liberal Party in the 1960s—I am an optimist. We wait to see.
As we say so often, we are where we are. This is what is going to happen, and what we need to do today and in future proceedings on this Bill is to see how we can mitigate the very worst effects of what is proposed in it and the accompanying regulations. It was inevitable that we were going to have this Second Reading-style debate now, but we need to move on and accept that, whether we like it or not, we have to implement what is to come in the best way possible. I hope and believe that we will have a constructive debate on how we are going to achieve that.
One of the worst aspects of all of this is actually calling it the localisation of council tax support. Frankly, I do not believe it is localisation; it is passing a scheme to local administration. It is the worst of all worlds. I am sorry to say this to my noble friends: it is not localisation, it is not moving to local authorities the right to determine the schemes for themselves; it is passing them a very prescribed scheme, together with a £500 million reduction. We will not debate the need for that reduction today; I think there are better ways of achieving that, but again that is what is going to happen and this is the way it is to be done.
There is extremely qualified support from me for what my Government are trying to do. I have to speak honestly about that but I hope that from now on we can discuss how we can make it better—or, if Members opposite prefer, less bad.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, perhaps my noble friend should have spoken after me.
Lord Greaves
My noble friend was looking for some guidance? He might get some. My noble friend said that the role of this Committee is to look for ways of mitigating what I believe is going to be a potentially disastrous situation. He is right, of course, but before we can understand how to mitigate it, we have to understand what some of the problems are going to be and the effect this policy is going to have.
My noble friend is right in saying that it is not going to be as bad as the poll tax. It only causes one of the problems the poll tax caused, not the two main problems—certainly in my part of the world—and it is not going to affect as many people. But for the people it does affect, some of the problems are going to be the same.
The poll tax had two basic problems. As has been discussed, one was that it resulted in local authorities having to collect relatively small amounts of money from a lot of people. This was extremely expensive and not cost-effective. The second problem was that for people in the kind of houses that exist in large parts of the north of England and other areas—that is, relatively cheap terraced houses, which had very low rates in the past—the poll tax resulted in a huge increase in what they had to pay. In our area, it increased overnight by three or four times for people who were moving into a new house or an old house like that. That was one reason why people refused to pay it. Another was that it was a poll tax, not a property tax.
I was leader of the council at the time. I had the pleasure of introducing the first poll tax budget in Pendle. The consequence of that was that my party got booted out at that year’s elections, was kept out for another couple of years and I was no longer leader of the council. However, these things go round in circles. There is a new leader of the council now. That is what happened. We should learn from history but people simply do not. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, mentioned the Poor Law of the 1830s and the poll tax. It seems that people simply are not learning the lessons of history here.
The noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, talked about the kind of housing in Wigan, of which we have large amounts in east Lancashire. He is absolutely right. Although we have a relatively high vacancy rate in such properties—perhaps 5% or 6% in some areas—it will be extremely difficult to collect the money from those properties. Again, there is a question of cost-effectiveness. You cannot really send the bailiffs round to an empty house. You have to pursue the owners, who may be in other parts of the country and often are.
I will just put forward one or two facts from my own small district authority that illustrate the problem. All authorities will differ in the proportion of people who fit into different categories and so on, but the basic problems will be similar, certainly in the north of England. At the moment, 10,457 people in total receive council tax benefit. Of those, 42% are pensioners. In some areas the figure is higher—much higher in some—and in some it is lower. In addition, there is the question of identifying vulnerable people, who will also be protected. That in itself will cause a problem to local authorities. There will be different definitions in different authorities, which may be seen as unfair, as the noble Baroness pointed out.
In total, those protected will account for between 40% and 50%. Of the rest who are not pensioners—50% to 58%—the number who are passported claimants of working age is around 64%. That is, of the people of working age who claim council tax benefits, around 64% are passported benefit claimants who get, in most cases, 100%. In other words, around 36% of people—around 2,200 of them—are being means-tested by their local authority. They are the people who are, by and large, being given part-payment. Some get 100% but most get part-payment. That is the sort of scale. They are the people who, between them, will cause problems.
Of those 10,457 people, 8,816 are in properties that are classified as band A for the purposes of council tax. They are mainly terraced houses but some are flats and bungalows and so on. This means that those 58% of people of working age will be lumbered with the whole cost of the 10% reduction if the local authority chooses to pass it on to them by charging them a council tax. If it is all done that way, the council tax benefit reduction under the new scheme will be around 18% for persons of working age. Some of those persons are on benefits. Some are working but, by definition, they are not in a position to pay more tax or to pay tax when they do not at the moment. In any case, if they get housing benefit and so on, they are often already suffering from cuts in what they will receive. So it will not be easy and the collection will be a problem.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Greaves(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
There are one or two brief things that I would like to say. I apologise to noble Lords for not being present at Second Reading, when I was enjoying myself in France. I declare an interest in that I am a member of a district council in Pendle, in Lancashire, and a member of its executive. I am also vice-president of the Local Government Association. Why my noble friend is not is a mystery.
Lord Greaves
The noble Lord was sacked. I think further investigations are required, and we will report back.
I was moved to speak by listening to my noble friend Lady Eaton. I support a great deal of what she said, which was in emphasis a little different from some of the contributions made by other noble Lords. In principle, these amendments are right: 50% is a remarkably low figure to be retained by local government, and certainly not what was expected when the scheme was first announced to the world. However, I want to bring noble Lords down to earth with regard to some local authorities. Retention locally of the business rate will not be a financial bonanza for those local authorities at 50% or at any other higher percentage. Many authorities, as my noble friend said, will continue to need to rely on the rate support grant, if it continues to be called that, because they will have great difficulty not only in finding ways in which to expand their tax base by increasing their business rate but also maintaining them at the present level. This is a fact of life, and the localisation of business rates in these areas, including my own region of east and Pennine Lancashire, does not have the rosy glow around it as it does in areas that will find it easier to grow a commercial base. That is not to say that people will not try to do it, but in areas such as my own it will be a matter of trying to hang on to what is there at the moment.
I give an example. A small district might have two or three large mills or factories contributing quite a high proportion of the business rate. It only requires one or two of those to close down and the position will be fairly catastrophic. It is not the same in every kind of area and whatever kind of system we have in future will have to retain a substantial element of redistribution at least for those authorities. I do not know what proportion of authorities that is, but I have heard my honourable friend Andrew Stunell tell me that about 20% will be substantially reliant in future on continued redistribution elements of the grant. I do not know whether the Minister has an idea or can enlighten us after this Committee.
The second thing that causes a certain amount of alarm is the 50%. It is really the argument about what happens to the money that is centrally controlled. How far will this kind of area, which tends to be the old, declining, industrial area—although not all as some are coastal towns that have fallen on bad times, and so on—rely on the traditional kind of government grants, particularly capital grants, for regeneration? We discussed this issue in your Lordships’ House last week in a debate launched by the noble Lord, Lord Mawson.
The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and I were making similar points that parts of the country are missing out on the grants that are now available, compared with the past. That is partly as a result of the reduction in funding for capital schemes and the fact, for example, that the regional growth fund is cumulatively less than the regional development agencies used to have available to disperse. It is partly because there is a tendency now to go for growth and to go for the places where growth is easiest and perhaps to go more to the south-east, the Greater London area, the big cities, the city regions and metropolitan areas. There are very exciting and worthy schemes for authorities to work together for economic growth and development in areas such as Greater Manchester. Those places that do not naturally fit into the big city regions risk missing out. I am talking about my own area in Pennine Lancashire, but there are others as well, in the north-east, in west Cumbria, and elsewhere around the country. Our concern is about how much the less fashionable and less sexy areas, or the areas which find growth more difficult and where the return on investment may be less as a percentage, are going to miss out on this 50% redistribution. There are huge questions there.
I ask the Minister whether the Government have an assessment at this stage of how much of this central fund is expected to be used for different purposes. How much of it is expected to be used for council tax issues which the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, was talking about? How much is expected to go on administration? How much is expected to go on straightforward redistribution to the sort of areas I am talking about? How much will go to traditional funds and schemes for capital investment and development around the country? How much will go on regeneration? How the Government will use this money is not clear to me at all. I can see in total the kinds of things it is going to used on, but I do not really know whether they have an estimate of how much is likely to be used for the different elements. I would find it extremely interesting and useful to have that information, if the Government have worked it out.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Greaves(13 years ago)
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Lord Tope
My Lords, neither the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, nor the noble Lord, Lord True, were Members of your Lordships’ House when some of us spent many happy hours—hours and hours—dealing with what I think was the first part of what was then the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. We argued for hours about petitions and petition schemes. I recall my noble friend Lord Greaves—who I think I have just managed to shut up for a few moments—actually bringing in some petitions to his council so that we could see that they are rather different from petitions that come to Parliament in their general layout and form.
We had a very listening Minister then who listened and indeed made many amendments to what was proposed, but we were still left with pages of prescription about how councils should collect, receive and deal with petitions. We heard that most councils did not have such a scheme. What actually emerged, and it was a legitimate criticism, was not that most councils did not have a scheme but that most councils had not thought to put it on their website, which of course they should, but that is rather different from saying that councils do not receive or deal with petitions.
I have much sympathy with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said in moving his amendment. The crucial difference between us is that I believe he was talking about good practice and I do not believe, especially in a Localism Bill, that it is for your Lordships’ House to be prescribing in legislation what should be disseminated as good practice. I still bear the scars of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill, and that, I am afraid, tempers very considerably the sympathy with which I listen to the noble Lord, Lord Beecham.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I will just add a few brief things. My noble friend reminds me of one or two things which I had thankfully forgotten about. I was trying to remember how many amendments I actually put to this chapter of that Bill when it came. That is also something I had forgotten about, which is something that happens.
The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, quite rightly said that councils have to welcome and encourage petitions. But what is really important is the seriousness with which they treat them and deal with them when they come. You can set up as many bureaucratic, complex, legalistic schemes as you like, but if people do not treat the petitions seriously it is just going through the motions and wasting time and energy. If people treat petitions seriously you do not need a complex, bureaucratic, top-down—and, I have to say, pretty patronising—piece of legislation like Chapter 2 of Part 1 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. I note with some wry amusement that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is desperately trying to hang on to this classic piece of new Labour nonsense, which frankly has not improved the situation of petitions in any council in the country. Those who take them seriously, take them seriously; those who do not, do not.
This is eight pages of primary legislation telling councils in great detail how to deal with petitions. I, along with my noble friend, pay tribute to the Minister at the time, the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who listened to a great deal of what we had said—it was 12 pages of nonsense before we started, and between us we managed to persuade the civil servants and the powers that be in the then Government at least to take some of it out. As I told the noble Baroness at the time, if the Government simply want to tell councils to have a scheme for dealing with petitions that deals with them seriously, they could do so in half a page of legislation, not eight pages. I have been through this and reminded myself of the huge amount of nonsense in it. I will not detain—or should I say entertain—your Lordships’ House with any more of this tonight, but it really does deserve to go.
The one point that I will raise relates to Section 16 of the 2009 Act, which is the requirement to call officers to account. I do not know how often, if ever, this has been used since this part of the Act was commenced. At the time, we had a long debate, and in our view it was totally inappropriate for officers of the council to be hauled up and held to account before the public in this way. The people who should be held to account are the elected councillors: those who run the council and who have been elected by the people to be responsible and accountable to the people. Clearly, they will need support from officers, and if officers are not performing their jobs properly, the elected councillors are the ones who should take a grip of the situation and sort it out. That is a fundamental principle, in our view, but we could not persuade the Government at the time that that was the case. I am delighted that my noble friend Lord Shutt is, I assume, going to resist this amendment.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Greaves(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Tope
My Lords, the noble Lord began by suggesting that we might not remember the provisions of the local democracy and everything else Bill. Some of us in this House remember it only too vividly. The noble Lord had the good fortune, if I might say so, not to have been a Member of the House then, but I remind your Lordships that we spent many, many hours on this part of that Bill.
The short answer to the noble Lord’s question as to why my noble friends and I rejoice at this clause is prescription. We spend many hours in this House, including on this Bill, complaining about central government prescribing in detail to local government what it should and should not do, what it can and cannot do, and even more particularly how it should do it. That is what Part 1 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill did in enormous detail. I am sure my noble friend Lord Greaves will remind us exactly how many pages, words and possibly even letters it took to do this. That Bill started in your Lordships’ House and we spent a long time trying to improve that part of it, arguing that it was not the business of central government to prescribe exactly what local government should do and how they should do these things. Of course we should promote democracy. Of course we should encourage all these things. All good local authorities of whatever political control are already doing that. They have been doing it, in most cases very successfully, for many years and will carry on doing so whether there is an Act of Parliament requiring them to do so or not. So I, for one, rejoice at this clause, and this might be one of the few times I say that during this Committee.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I underline what my noble friend has just said. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, is not here to take part in the discussion today because she was the Minister who had to take this nonsense through the House. She did it with great composure and good manners, although I am not sure what she secretly thought about it. The other Minister involved was the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, who is here. Perhaps he can tell us whether he is quite as appalled that this duty is going as the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, suggested.
I regret to say that I, too, am extremely familiar with the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009, particularly this part of it, and it is seriously flawed. As an explanation of local democratic involvement, it completely missed out the voluntary sector, local partnerships and so on, which some of us tried to put in but failed. As my noble friend said, it is extremely prescriptive. If it is localism, it is top-down localism of the kind that we are criticising in this Bill, and it is very pleasant to see that this Bill is getting rid of a bit of that.
The effect that this part of the Act has had since it was passed appears to have been zero in most parts of the country. I am not aware of any authority having done anything significant as a result of this legislation, and in two-tier areas it set up a ridiculous bureaucratic system of exchange of information. Again, I have no idea how many councils have actually been carrying out this duty, but I suspect that a lot of them have just been ignoring the legislation because it was fairly useless. So I, too, rejoice that this duty is going, and I wish that the spirit behind this clause was more prevalent in some other parts of this Bill.
Lord Tope
My Lords, I do not want to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and I will not do so. Once again, I rejoice at this clause and very much wish it to stand part of the Bill, unlike my noble friend, Lord Shipley, and the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. We spent many hours—I have a recollection that it was probably many days—on this part of the Bill. We discussed pages and pages in extraordinary detail, debating how to collect, submit, and process petitions. When the Bill started in your Lordships’ House, the debate seemed to be based entirely on the premise that a petition to a local council was of the same format and standing as a petition to Parliament. In fact, all of us who have been councillors will have seen petitions to councils, and know that they are not usually the most formal documents you are likely to come across. They are of their nature at their best, because they are collected by and within the local community and do not have any formal standing or, often, any formal wording, as was originally suggested in the Bill.
We asked for evidence during all of this that local authorities were not dealing properly with petitions. I find it hard to believe that there can be a local authority of any size in the country that does not receive petitions. I wanted evidence that they were not dealing with them properly. The one merit of our hours of debate was that we discovered that quite a lot of local authorities, including the local authority of the then Secretary of State, did not adequately describe their procedure for dealing with petitions on their websites. The fault was not so much with the procedures of the council as with the adequacy of their websites. My own authority, and I am sure many others, improved their websites considerably as a result. That was a useful outcome, but it justified neither the hours that we spent on it nor the fact that it was all laid down in such prescriptive detail in a Bill.
The other useful factor of the debate was that it addressed the rather more modern issue of e-petitions, to which some local authorities probably had not then given sufficient attention. As a result of the Bill, and subsequently the Act, some authorities, including my own, probably gave them more consideration and put them on their websites.
We do not need an Act of Parliament to do that; we do not need pages and pages of prescription to do that; it is quite simply good practice, which could, possibly was and certainly should have been disseminated by the Local Government Association, in which the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, played such a leading part. I shall not disappoint the noble Lord: I once again rejoice at this clause.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I cannot resist adding just a little bit to what has been said. I went back to the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act when I saw Clause 29 stand part on the Marshalled List. There are in it 10 pages of detailed, prescriptive instructions to local authorities about how to receive petitions. Our discussions on that part of the Bill were extremely long, and I hold my hands up and say I was largely responsible for that. I remember my noble friend Lord Tope, having arrived back from one of his European trips, coming into the Moses Room, where we were discussing the Bill in Committee, and saying, “Good heavens! You’re not still on petitions, are you?”. But we were. I again pay tribute to the two then Ministers, including the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who is in his place, for making some effort to improve that part of the Bill. I think that it was 14 or 15 pages when it started off, and we at least got it down to 10.
My view is that very few authorities have taken petitions through this system, and that most petitions to local authorities since the legislation came into operation have continued to be dealt with as they always have been. I do not think that my own council has had a single one. We have had one or two that appeared to qualify. In those cases, we have suggested that the petitioners do what everybody else does and just go along to the area committee, talk to the petition in the normal way, and get it dealt with within days rather than the weeks and weeks of bureaucratic procedure set out in that part of the Bill. So I, too, rejoice that this nonsense has gone. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, that we are getting a bigger and more dangerous nonsense, which we will discuss later on today.
Localism Bill
Debate between Lord Tope and Lord Greaves(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
My Lords, I will be very quick; we would not want the Minister to be late. She is quite right: I am totally off message on this issue as far as the coalition agreement is concerned. I am not off message as far as the coalition is concerned. The Government should learn. They have had a huge car crash, as people say nowadays, with the AV referendum; I voted loyally for that on every occasion and now I wish I had not. This will be another, in the modern phrase, car crash.
Whatever has been in coalition agreements and manifestos, there are times when, politically, Governments have to consider what is likely to happen. In most if not all these places, it seems likely that the Liberal Democrats will be campaigning vigorously against having an elected mayor—alongside the Labour party in many cases, and, I suspect, the Conservative party in so far as it still exists in some of these places; it certainly exists in some of them.
I am grateful for the information on the cost. I did not quite catch who was going to bear it. Was it central government? Yes. Well, a waste of public money is a waste of public money, whoever pays for it. I wonder whether the Government can direct me to some serious evidential basis for the view that having elected mayors provides better local government than would otherwise have been the case. I have not seen that evidence. There is lots of political and other argument about it, but I have seen no serious evidential basis for that proposition. If the Government have it, I would be grateful if they would make it available.
Lord Tope
My Lords, the Minister has warned me not to allow my noble friend Lord Greaves to let me stray off message. I have actually said nothing at all on the subject yet, and that might well be a message in itself. I am rather too mindful of the Minister’s immediate appointment elsewhere to take more time with this. I am struggling hard to resist the debate that has been held about the benefits of a London Mayor. Having been a member of the London Assembly for the entire reign of the first London Mayor, I can say that any strategic government for London has to be better than no strategic government for London. What none of us can know—so I will not bother to argue it—is whether another system of strategic government would have been as good, worse or better. At least, there could have been an alternative to an elected mayor, which has not been considered.
Lord Greaves
Perhaps my noble friend would pay attention to the point that having an elected mayor for Liverpool does not provide strategic government for Merseyside, and that having an elected mayor for Manchester does not provide strategic government for Greater Manchester, and that the same applies to Leeds and Bradford.
Lord Tope
He refused and it was one of his wisest decisions, because the person who requested him to do so did not distinguish himself in the interests of the Liberal party within a few years of that. I refer to our then party leader. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is probably too young to remember such an occasion in the 1970s.
I must get back to the point. The amendment relates to the threshold, and I am grateful that, in the end, the Minister paid some attention to it, because no one else has done so throughout the entire debate. Therefore, I have very little to reply to, except to say that we shall be returning to the issue of thresholds for referendums and so on at a later stage. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am not sure we have had a may/must amendment yet on this Bill, but perhaps we have and I have missed it. This is an important amendment. I rise to speak to my amendments in this group: Amendments 97A, 98E, 98F and 98H. I will also speak to the other two amendments in the group, if I may.
There is widespread concern within local government that the Government have not got this exactly right. At the very least, it needs some fettling and a number of probably quite major changes if it is going to work fairly. As my noble friend Lord Tope said earlier, there is a widespread feeling in local government—it is not universal—that the demise of the Standards Board for England is to be welcomed. The Standards Board for England’s regime has turned out in practice to be expensive. It has been arbitrary in too many cases, and therefore it has been seen to be unfair. It has been open to abuse, and it has been open to attempted political manipulation, not by Standards Board members or its staff, but by people trying to use the system in order to do down opponents.
In our judgment, the removal of the Standards Board for England is a good idea, and we congratulate the Government on doing it, but something has to replace it. We cannot simply go back to the free-for-all situation we had up until about 20 years ago when standards codes and sanctions against councillors were hardly known. The system then seemed to work. There did not seem to be any more rogue councillors than there are now, and people did not seem to step out of line more than they do now, but the world has changed. We are now in a world in which standards in public life have come in and are accepted right across the board of everybody who takes part in public life. We have even had to grapple with these matters and come up with solutions here in the House of Lords. Local authorities are no different, and to pretend that local authorities generally, or some local authorities in particular, can be excepted from this situation is not the world that we are now living in.
The Government’s proposal in the Bill is that there will be no national system, no national organisations and no bureaucracies; it will all be left to local authorities. In our debate on a previous amendment, my noble friend Lord Taylor said that it will be up to local authorities to behave sensibly and do what they think is best in their area. There will be no uniform or national standards code, so each authority will be able to adopt its own code or not have one. It can keep, amend or do away with the present code. If any of my description of the present system is wrong, I hope the Minister will intervene and tell me, but I do not think it is.
Authorities will be able to choose whether to have standards committees. Since local authorities all have them at the moment and are institutionally fairly conservative bodies, most of them will probably keep them in one form or another, but it will be open to an authority not to have them, so there will be a hotchpotch pattern; they will be able to invent their own rules for how standards committees work within their own codes of conduct.
In addition, for the offence of failing to declare appropriate interests, either by not entering them on to a register of interests or by failing to declare them in meetings at appropriate times, the only real sanction left is the criminal law and, subject to the Director of Public Prosecutions’ agreement, people will be arraigned before a magistrates’ court if the DPP thinks it is serious enough. Meanwhile, parish councils will be left in some sort of limbo. They might be able to have their own systems or to continue to be part of a district council’s standards committee and system of standards, but if the local district council does not have one or decides to do away with it all, the parish councillors will have the choice either of doing it themselves, which might be rather difficult for small parish councils, or not doing it at all.
That seems to be the regime that is on offer. Perhaps the way I have presented it suggests that I am not terribly impressed with it. Nevertheless, I think my presentation of it is factually correct.
We have been here before and had something similar to this. When standards committees were first brought into local authorities, local authorities were left to do their own thing. Many of them did it very well, but in some places it was not done well. It was done either inefficiently or in an arbitrary, uneven or unfair way. In a small minority of places—it is always a small minority—it was not a good thing. It was fairly dreadful. Some authorities used it to victimise individual councillors in order to conduct campaigns against opposition groups on the council and to conduct witch-hunts against individuals. That is always the danger if local authorities in an area like this are left to their own devices, because there will be some places where malign, malevolent politics gets in the way of a fair system. Therefore, we propose in amendments in this group, and in the next group, which I will speak to later, a system in which every authority must have a standards committee. It seems ridiculous that someone could be dual-hatted or triple-hatted, and on three different authorities at different levels, some of those authorities having a standards committee and some not.
Equally, we are suggesting a uniform, standard, national code of conduct. We are not talking about local diversity. There cannot be local diversity about what is appropriate conduct for people in public life. We are talking about standards in public life. While standards and rules for councillors may be different from those for Members of the House of Lords, Members of the House of Commons, people on national quangos or whatever, the organisations are different. Nevertheless, they should be based on the same principles and underlying standards in public life.
There does not seem to be any reason why, if I am a member of a district council, a parish council and a county council, which I have no intention of being except for one of them, there should be a different code of conduct on each council. Surely, that cannot be right. Nor can it be right that of the 11 or 12 district councils in Lancashire, some do not have a code of conduct and some have a very different code of conduct from the adjoining council. Codes of conduct should be laid down nationally.
We are saying that the drawing up of the code of conduct and its approval should be done by local government and not by the Secretary of State or national government. It should be the responsibility of representatives of local government and, in terms of legislation, the LGA obviously is a key representative. We want systems for appeals and we want to sort out parish councils. We want to look at criminal offences, but they are in the next group so I will not talk about them any more at the moment.
On something like this there has to be protection for the public against rogue councils. Much as I have an underlying, innate aversion to national uniformity in anything, some things are so important and fundamental that they underpin everything else. This is the right way forward.
Lord Greaves
I am confused because my Marshalled List does not have the next amendment, Amendment 98HA, on it.
Lord Greaves
I have found it.
Clause 18 : Disclosure and registration of members' interests
Amendment 98HA