Local Government: Reinvigorating Local Democracy

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, like previous speakers, I have spent a lot of time in local government and absolutely agree with the closing remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. I want to speak about town and parish councils. In doing so, I declare an interest as the president of the National Association of Local Councils, the national membership body which works across 43 county associations to represent and support England’s 10,000 local town and parish councils. What I will say this afternoon I have said before, and the bad news is that I am going to keep saying it until I think someone in central government actually listens.

This is a tier of councils that varies enormously. My husband is chair of our parish council; we have about 200 residents and a precept of a few thousand pounds. Some town councils have budgets of many millions and are delivering a whole range of important services but, whatever their size, what they have in common is that this is the level of government which is literally closest to the people, yet it is often ignored by central government and other tiers of local government which, frankly, ought to know better. These hyper-local councils and their 100,000 councillors—all local people who have put themselves forward because they want to help their community—are an essential part of local democracy. At a time when people are losing faith in politicians, they can be a really important part of restoring trust and visibility, a point powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. They are delivering hyper-local services, building strong communities and strengthening local fabric.

Of course, these councils are doing all the things we would expect them to do—delivering the services we know and love, such as allotments, war memorials, parks and playgrounds—but, looking at the current picture across the country, they are now doing so much more by supporting their communities in many innovative and surprising ways, such as promoting health and well-being through building dementia-friendly communities, offering carer respite schemes and mental health first aid, and tackling loneliness through clubs and outreach. They are developing their local economies and community businesses by supporting high streets, holding markets, promoting their towns as tourist destinations, and helping to set up community businesses such as shops, pubs and post offices. They are supporting young people by providing youth services and summer events, running youth centres, employing youth and outreach officers, providing skate parks and outdoor gyms, and providing bursaries for students and grants for school uniforms.

Even at parish level, councils are stepping up and taking responsibility for playing their part in tackling the climate crisis. Some 40% of local councils have declared a climate emergency and are developing action plans, installing EV charging points, signing Motion for the Ocean, cleaning up their local rivers, and increasing biodiversity in their green and open spaces. They are tackling the current cost of living crisis through creating community pantries and warm hubs. Finally, they are helping to tackle the housing crisis through neighbourhood planning—a vital tool in which local councils are working with their communities to shape new development, promote affordable local housing and tackle the problem of holiday lets.

This is real parish power in action, but there is an awful lot more that could be done. Very helpfully, NALC has created a manifesto for building stronger communities across England, which sets out policy ideas to strengthen the sector. The first is that the sector must be expanded across all areas of England. At the moment, around two-thirds of England’s population are being left behind in taking community-led action because they do not have a local council at this level. Onward’s social fabric index shows that areas with full coverage of local councils score significantly higher than those without local councils when you look at the key measures of community strength.

Over the last decade, more than 300 places have seen new councils created in response to community demand or through local government reorganisation, but there are still significant barriers to extending local democracy right across the country. Sometimes it is about awareness in the communities themselves that they could have such a council; in some cases it is about the lack of support to help those communities go through the process. The process itself is very complicated and principal councils are often resistant and entirely unhelpful in their attitude. I urge the Government to use the opportunity of the levelling-up White Paper to make it easier and quicker to establish local councils.

Secondly, we should be making it easier and more attractive for people to get involved. We need to make performing this civic role easier, not harder. The main example of that is giving councils the flexibility to hold online and hybrid council meetings. This year marks the two-year anniversary of the Government’s call for evidence on remote council meetings, but they have yet to publish the results or take any steps to address the issue. There has been some new research from NALC: nine out of 10 local councils want flexibility to have some form of online meetings. Two-thirds of them said they would use the power for some but not all of their meetings. One-third of the respondents to that survey knew of councillors who had stood down once councils had returned to being fully in person, and one-fifth of those quoted childcare as the main reason.

NALC’s census survey of councillors shows that 40% of parish councillors are women—three times as many as in 1966. We are working really hard to get more women involved, but one of the big barriers is helping those with caring responsibilities, so the option of remote meetings would make a very big contribution to that. Unlike every other type of councillor in England and Wales, parish councillors are specifically excluded from being able to access help with childcare and other caring costs in order to attend meetings and perform their duties. I can see absolutely no reason at all why that is the case. When I raised this on the levelling-up Bill, I was told that it would be too expensive. I tabled a Written Question to ask how much it would cost and was told that the department did not know.

Thirdly, we should be supporting local councils better. Local councils are very diverse, both in the areas they cover and in the people who bring themselves forward in terms of their skills, resources and capacity. We have developed many self-improvement initiatives as a baseline for building but are hampered by a lack of investment, including from the Government. Since the national improvement strategy for town and parish councils was published, there has been no direct investment from the Government to support that vision and its initiatives. That contrasts with the £18 million a year of funding that goes to the Local Government Association, for example. That underinvestment leads to constraints in increasing the sector’s efficiency and its capacity to take on these new challenges, so I hope the Government will consider funding it directly with a share of the ongoing sector support.

I look forward to the Minister’s reply. This is a wide-ranging debate and he has a lot of ground to cover, but I hope he can commit to taking this sector more seriously than perhaps some of his predecessors have.