Northamptonshire (Structural Changes) Order 2019

Baroness Pinnock Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2020 Grand Committee

Finally, I would just like to mention my personal experience. My own council will soon be the new unitary Buckinghamshire Council. I am looking forward to exercising my democratic rights on 7 May in electing councillors to that new authority. I am also most encouraged by the recent local government reorganisation in Dorset. While it is the first time that I have taken one of these debates in my newish role within the department, for my officials this is of course business as usual. I am pleased to report that the implementation phase for this reorganisation is well under way. I have full confidence in the local area implementing the unitarisation by April 2021. I therefore commend this order to the Committee and I beg to move.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

I remind everybody of my entry in the register of interests, as a councillor in Kirklees in West Yorkshire—a unitary council—and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The order enacts decisions made in response to the financial calamity that befell local government in Northamptonshire through its county council. It was clearly imperative that action was taken; it is my understanding that change had to be made. However, I would like to comment on and perhaps challenge some of the decisions that have resulted from the decision to reorganise local government in Northamptonshire.

First, it seems that we as a country are in danger of taking the “local” out of local government. I say that as somebody who serves a very large ward—not the largest in the country, but one of the largest—at a unitary level and understands the demands on the three councillors who serve a population of 16,000. From my experience, it means that some of the very local issues become less important to councillors, who have to deal with high-level strategic decisions, but remain very important to local people. When you have a big ward, there is a tension between the strategic and the local. If we are not careful, local people often miss out. That is more so with large wards serving rural communities.

I do not know the county of Northants very well, but I guess that some of its wards will be significantly rural in nature. In my experience, this creates a potential disconnect between decision-makers and the people they serve. There is potential for the Government to give additional powers to parish and town councils, so that they can take up some of the very local responsibilities that would previously have been the remit of district councillors. That would enable a local element to be retained in local governance. I will leave it there and hope that the Minister will have some sort of response to it.

The second element is the size of the two unitary councils and the number of councillors they have. One has got 93 and the other has 78. In my experience, that is quite a large number. The Explanatory Memorandum states that there will be a boundary review for those wards before the next local elections in 2025. Are the Government thinking about reducing the number of councillors, because that is what a boundary review could achieve? On balance, having fewer councillors might improve governance but, on the other hand, it increases the size of wards and makes it more difficult for ward councillors to undertake their local responsibilities. Is that in view?

My next point is a general one about when there are 93 councillors—even 78—and only 10 of them are actual decision-makers. They are in the cabinet; they make the decisions for the council. That leaves another 83; they can do scrutiny, but they are not taking decisions, which is what local people expect them to be doing. Apart from the annual budget, the local plan and, perhaps, an annual children’s plan, there is not much that every councillor has to take decisions on. There has to be a rethink of the roles and responsibilities of councillors who are not in a cabinet. It can make councillors feel remote from decision-making. As ward size makes people feel remote, councillors feel remote if they are not in the cabinet. In my experience, remote decision-making fuels discontent and we should take note of that.

Paragraph 7.6 of the Explanatory Memorandum, which the Minister referred to, outlines the benefits of the new structure:

“aligning infrastructure; housing and environment services to help deliver growth; advantages in … health and wellbeing; improved education and skills provision”,

though I have to say that the responsibilities of local councils regarding education are very limited these days. The levers that they have to change anything are minimal, so I would not have referred to education in that way. Does the Minister agree that there could be an alternative to achieving that aim, which I think will come up in the next few months in a number of ways? A constructive collaboration, formalised between districts and the county, could achieve the same aims without the upheaval of a structural reorganisation. This would be an upheaval, and it takes a long time—several years—for councils to get on their feet and begin delivering strategically, not operationally, the services that they should.