Local Government (Leadership)

Brandon Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson) on securing the debate and I am grateful to him for giving us the opportunity to air a hugely important issue. I join colleagues who have congratulated him not just on today’s debate, but on the way he has brought up the topic over the past few years. It is a key issue. He is right about that. Effective local leadership is vital and possibly more important today than it has ever been. Up and down the country, areas face huge challenges in local government. Service delivery is becoming increasingly complex. An ageing population presents areas with real challenges. Efficiency savings are required. Partnership working needs good, strong, clear leadership. Another challenge involves community engagement, particularly now that we are in a social media-led environment. I shall come back in a few moments to my hon. Friend’s comments on digital issues.

We face real challenges, particularly in ensuring economic growth. We believe that the best way to do that is for it to be driven locally. The key to dealing with those challenges comes from our towns and cities. It is about strong, inspirational leadership that can take the challenges on, and not just see them as challenges but make them into opportunities.

I disagree to an extent with the comments of the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) about the leadership gap when we lose chief executives. We need to be clear that in some areas and particularly some small districts, the days of big, expensive, silo management teams are gone. Just financially, they are history. People have to work together and share good chief executives to get the good management that has been commented on. I agree with the hon. Lady that good political leadership, with good management, gives that magic option, but I have to make it clear that my view is very much that the leadership of a council for an area should come from the political leaders. If we go down the road of saying that a chief executive is part of the leadership, that can only be because our councillors are not doing their job. Our councillors are there to make decisions, to deliver, to lead and to represent their community. Our officers are there to give good advice and to implement the decisions made by councillors.

The comment about directly elected mayors, which I will come to in a second, highlights the importance of leadership from the political leaders. We must never underestimate that, and we must congratulate those leaders throughout the country who put so much time and effort into their communities. Actually, that applies to all councillors, but I am thinking particularly of the leaders who step to the forefront, take that leadership seriously and move their communities forward. Whether they are mayors or just elected leaders, they do all our communities and our country a great service.

Cities are a good example of where the Government are recognising this leadership. Our belief in strong local leadership has meant that it is one of the asks for the city deals. We have made it clear that if cities want significant new powers and funding streams, they need to demonstrate clear, strong, accountable leadership. Cities with directly elected mayors have clearly shown that.

Several hon. Members have spoken in favour of mayors. My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle has regularly made comments about directly elected mayors. Particularly in the case of single-tier authorities, they can be a hugely beneficial step forward, with real power and real ability to deliver on the ground for their communities. I share my hon. Friend’s view—I can answer that question directly—that it would be good to see more of them around the country. I am interested in looking at how we can motivate people and encourage more of that to happen. I shall come to my hon. Friend’s three specific asks in a moment.

I am pleased that we are at one on this particular issue. Directly elected mayors can and generally do provide good, strong, clear and visible local leadership. My hon. Friend highlighted that very well in his description of the meeting at the school. He makes a very strong point about the accountability of the role of mayor. A directly elected mayor does seem to have recognition in a community that goes beyond that of an elected councillor. There is, therefore, increased—clear—accountability. People understand exactly who is in charge, who is making the decisions, who is accountable. That transparency fits perfectly with the localism agenda with which we are moving forward.

There is a very strong case on this issue. Research undertaken in 2005 shows that the democratic mandate provided by directly elected mayors has

“provided a basis for a stronger, more proactive style of leadership than other models.”

We have seen how mayors around the world have reinvigorated their cities. I am thinking of places such as Frankfurt, New York and Lyon. That has also been the case on our own doorstep, in London. The mayors—the office holders—become very well known. That highlights again the clear accountability and understanding of who is responsible—who is in charge. The Mayor of London, particularly, I would say, over the past four years, has transformed the city. In the 12 years of its existence, the London mayoral office has been hailed across the world for its influence in raising the profile of the capital and for securing major projects that the city needs, from Crossrail to the Olympic games.

Of course, in addition to the Mayor of London, we now have, as my hon. Friend said, new mayors in three of our biggest cities: Leicester, Liverpool and, most recently, Bristol; I have already met the mayor of Bristol a few times. In our “Mid-Term Review”, published on Monday, hon. Members have seen that we are proud to record that we have enabled the people of those cities to join London in choosing a directly elected mayor.

My hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle has outlined a number of measures that he feels would make it easier for communities to bring about mayoral governance in their area and to see that happen from the local community up, rather than central Government deciding that an area should have a referendum. I am attracted to any measures that will allow areas to adopt good, strong, effective leadership, which an elected mayor can provide and which is vital to their success.

Let me deal with my hon. Friend’s three points directly. The first concerns the petition for governance and the idea of a change in the threshold. He is right to say that we can change that by amending existing secondary legislation, so it is not difficult to do. I shall do some further work and invite my hon. Friend to come and have a conversation with the Department about that. I am cautious about it, but I am open-minded. Let me explain why I feel some caution about it. We want to make it easy for people, when there is a genuine need and desire in a community to see clear accountable leadership, to move forward and have a vote for it. We also need to avoid small interested parties being able too easily to get something that does not have full community support. There is a balance to find on the size—the proposal is to move from 5% to 1%—and the implication that that would have in different areas. As my hon. Friend says, having to find 20,000 votes is different from having to find 1,000 votes. That depends on whether it is happening at the level of a small authority, county level or whatever it happens to be. There is a bit of work to do on that. I am happy to look at it, but I shall work with my hon. Friend to see whether we can come up with something that might deliver what he wants without going too far and getting the wrong result in the wrong areas.

My hon. Friend’s second query was about the time frame for collecting signatures. Again, I am willing to look at that, but I think that it goes in tandem with point one, in that I suspect that if we were looking at a lower threshold, there would be less need to expand the time frame. If we do not lower the threshold, there is a stronger argument for widening the time frame. It is probably one or the other. We can consider those points in tandem. As I said, I shall work with my hon. Friend on that.

With regard to e-petitions, I can be slightly more direct and positive, in that I think my hon. Friend makes a very good point. I think that we are moving towards those days when far more things will be, whether we like it or not, done online. We certainly should be looking at how we can move forward with that. The coalition’s e-petition website has already had 17 million visits, with a total of 36,000 petitions submitted and almost 6.5 million signatures. That equates to roughly 12 people signing up every minute since it came into force. I support my hon. Friend’s suggestion of allowing electors to support a petition online, and we can look at how we deliver that—how we can make it possible. It was a very good point that we should look to move with.

I agree with my hon. Friend that leadership in a local community is vital. We should give great credit to the leaders who provide that around the country for their communities. They do a great job, as do all councillors who go out and work for their communities. Where we can move forward to make that more accountable and more transparent and have clear accountability through directly elected mayors, and where that would be practical for communities and is something that they want, it could be a very good move forward for them. I am happy to work with my hon. Friend to see whether we can deliver that to strengthen our democracy and our local communities.