Viscount Eccles
Main Page: Viscount Eccles (Conservative - Excepted Hereditary)Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]
Viscount Eccles Excerpts
Lord Beecham
I am grateful to the noble Lord. He will be less grateful to me when I say that I am afraid I do not agree with the amendment that his noble friend Lord Shipley moved in relation to the role of the overview and scrutiny committee in the appointment process; I do not think that that is a proper function for such a committee. We will come later, as the noble Lord has just said, to the functions of the overview and scrutiny committee, and it seems to me that its job should be to look at how the mayor and the combined authority are working, in terms of both looking at policy as it is made and looking forward to future policy. I do not think it appropriate for those committees to play a role in making the appointments, and we will not be supporting the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, in that respect.
Between us, the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and I led Newcastle City Council for something like 20 years—with varying degrees of success over time, no doubt. There have been many distinguished local authority leaders. Right now I am looking at a distinguished local authority leader taking his place on the Benches behind the Minister, who was herself a distinguished council leader. My noble friend Lord Woolmer was a distinguished council leader, although I detect a slight difference of opinion between us on some of these matters today—but then nobody is perfect.
It seems to me that those who see in the mayoral system something infinitely better than anything we have had before are making a great mistake. What worries many of us—certainly on the Labour Benches, I think on the Liberal Democrat Benches and perhaps in other parts of the House—is the enormous concentration of power which will be granted or withheld by the Secretary of State in a manner which diminishes accountability locally. For those reasons, we shall certainly wish to return to these matters.
Viscount Eccles (Con)
Would I not be right to say that the noble Lord is going to have at least part of the privilege of deciding whether the north-east wants to have a system with a mayor and the devolved powers that will go with there being a mayor? If he does not like the system, I assume he is going to decide that the north-east should not have a mayor in its combined authority.
Lord Beecham
Much as I would like to be able to take decisions on behalf of the whole population of the north-east, I would not be able to do that. My view, which may be shared by others, is that we would much rather not have imposed upon us a requirement for an elected mayor for the combined authority which, as the noble Viscount well knows, would run from the Tweed virtually to the Tees and from the Cumbrian border to the North Sea coast—a very large area and somewhat different from some of those which have been mooted. Of course, the people will not be given a choice as matters at present stand. It will be a take-it-or-leave-it decision that councils or the combined authority will have to take on behalf of the people; otherwise, it is said, they will not receive the powers. That is part of the problem.
So far as the detailed arrangements are concerned, our amendments would deal with the situation where, by agreement or otherwise, a mayoral system is created within the combined authority area. We will need to return to some of these matters on Report. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Earl of Lytton (CB)
My Lords, having not spoken on the Bill before, I must declare a few interests as a former president of the National Association of Local Councils, a vice-president of the LGA and a practising chartered surveyor with urban interests of all sorts. Apart from apologising for my lack of involvement in the earlier stages through a clash of diaries, my reason for intervening is to remind noble Lords that the Committee on Standards in Public Life will shortly produce a report on the subject of police accountability. I suspect that part of it will look at the role and efficacy of police and crime commissioners. Before the Minister responds, she might like to bear in mind that that particular issue is in play.
Your Lordships would not expect a comment from these Benches that is unequivocally in favour of the normal democratic processes for deciding the best way of governing accountability. I always think of my late father’s nostrum that vox populi is not necessarily vox Dei—he was a man of great religious conviction—and I think that the saying may possibly apply here. I am not convinced that mixing these two functions together is necessarily a great idea. It may be, but I do not see that it is guaranteed to be so.
At the moment, I suspect that we have a growing problem that boils down to the question of who has oversight of the regulator. That is an issue where powers are extensive and largely not subject to any sort of external oversight. They gradually accrue to themselves things that perhaps should not be accrued. There is a natural tendency—it is a tendency in human nature and I do not apportion blame for that—to try to exclude those who might loosely be termed the prying eyes of external forces. The question is one of accountability: how it sits with elected mayors, who are elected on a rather different template, and how it actually keeps the two functions separate. I would hesitate to suggest that it would be appropriate for the hard-nosed commercial thrust used by the elected mayor of one of these great metropolitan combined authorities to be applied to dealing with the police. I do not think the two are quite at one.
I thought that I should flag up those points—particularly the Committee on Standards in Public Life which, as your Lordships will know, is under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Bew. I think that its deliberations and its report will throw some light on this whole question of accountability.
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, I had concluded, perhaps wrongly, that we would not see very many combined authority mayors in any great hurry. Since the deal that will be negotiated in order for there to be a mayor of a combined authority and a transfer of powers is a complicated matter, and since this is an enabling Bill to enable those deals to take place, the question of whether the commissioner’s authority is passed to the mayor will be one of the subjects of negotiation when the deal is being struck. If a combined authority—let me take the north-east—decided that it would like to see whether it could negotiate “yes” to become a mayoral combined authority but “no” to taking over the powers of the police commissioner, it would not be outside the bounds of negotiation. Some of what we are discussing comes to the point at which one would say, “Surely if a mayor is to take over the powers of the police and crime commissioner, it should happen from the start”. It should not be something which, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, suggested, could be done at any time in the future; it should be part of the deal.
One problem we have in debating the Bill in Committee is that from our point of view it is starting from the wrong end. It is starting from local authorities putting up their suggestions as to how their area of the country might be better governed as a matter of local government. This is not where we usually find ourselves. We are usually in the position of saying, “This is what will happen and you will obey the rules”. That is not the situation here, for better or for worse. Certainly for my part I am trying to think through as carefully as I can the implications of this change in direction. They are very complicated but I hope that we will find a way of supporting the endeavour for the devolution of much more power to local authorities.
It has been said several times in our proceedings that the problem may then become a fiscal one: where is the money coming from? I am certainly very conscious of the fact that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Perhaps I could suggest that if this whole system becomes successful in one or two places, maybe some fiscal changes will follow upon that success.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I, too, start with an apology, having not answered the point of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, earlier. The noble Lord, Lord Riddle—Liddle, sorry—brought up the same point, which was about how police areas would be changed. Power to change police force boundaries exist in Section 32 of the Police Act 1996. I referred to that mechanism in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, a moment ago.
The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, also asked a question, which I shall answer now because he asked it previously as well, about the full-time nature of the PCC role and how we will ensure capacity to cover PCC matters. It will be for the mayor to ensure that there are sufficient resources to fulfil all PCC functions and we have included the ability for a mayor to delegate these functions to a deputy PCC mayor. We anticipate that there will also be a wider police governance administration structure taking over the role of the PCC’s office.