Sustainable Communities

John Pugh Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on introducing the debate, and on his persistence, which I regard as entirely responsible for the fact that the Minister has published the regulations today. I am sure there can be no other explanation.

I have always been a warm supporter of the original legislation in all its incarnations, and have done my share of Fridays. I have been lobbied on the subject by my local newsagents and sub-postmasters, and by the New Economics Foundation; and I accept the principle of locally driven initiatives with proper community buy-in. I have done my share of community campaigning, and once owned the domain name nogo2tesco, when my local Tesco wanted to extend its non-food range, appreciably to the detriment of my local town centre. I have been there and got the T-shirt, in a way, and I accept that the idea is good. I recognise, however, that it has been largely killed by the process.

I visited a website—it might have been Local Works, but I apologise if it was not—which offered a diagram explaining how the legislation works. I cannot help thinking that if a diagram is needed to explain legislation, its supporters are in some sense doomed. There are an awful lot of filters to go through before anyone can secure the new power so widely promised in the legislation. By the time people get to the end of the process, they have forgotten why they started; it is so long and convoluted. That reflects central Government nervousness about localism at the time of the legislation. Central Government are always happy to talk the talk, but are more concerned about what might happen if they walk the walk. That is an endemic feature; it is in the DNA of Government, and probably also the civil service which advises them. We talk about community empowerment, which is a bit of a cliché; we talk about powers of general competence, autonomy and localism. We even passed the Localism Act 2011. However, in the end, any power bequeathed to local government is regarded by central Government with slight anxiety.

Offsetting that, at the moment, and hopefully leading central Government down a different track, is another anxiety, which is both complement and antidote. The anxiety is about what we see around us—or think we see: the corrosion of communities and the creation generally of a more anomic, impersonal environment, where the citizens of our land move and have their being. We regret that, and think that things are not as they should be. We also couple it—I am sure that the Minister does—with the belief that something can be done about it, and that that needs to be locally driven, within a proper national framework that provides the appropriate levers.

Generally, we also believe that what happens must be sustainable, although, as the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) said, we are not all clear about what we mean by “sustainable”. Clearly we do not mean something that we think should be sustained—something that, nostalgically, we still want, such as steam engines. I think what we probably mean is that we want something that will work, last and survive. There are people in this land who think that the high street can work, last and survive, despite changes in shopping habits, and that so can the local pub and possibly even the local post office. People want them to survive, because they see them as defining features of the area.

The issue, however, is not what we want but whether we can bring about what we think we want. Are there sufficient ideas around that will produce the outcome that people seem to hanker after, and are powers needed to ensure that we get the result we want? I am not certain that we are particularly clear about either of those questions. I think that we accept that any local power in this country, which is a non-federal state, is given by central Government to local government. I think that the Government are, generally speaking, ruminating on that. I hope that they are not ruminating on the imposition of mayors on communities that may not want them. Frankly, at the dinner parties I go to, people have never expressed an overwhelming demand for that. However, if we consider the Portas review, among other things, we see that the Government’s acceptance of certain proposals is based not on a clear understanding of what to do to revive the high street, but on wanting a variety of projects to proceed, so that it can be seen whether any are successful and worth implementing.

[Rory Stewart]

Will the hon. Gentleman reflect on why he thinks people should not have a directly elected mayor?

[John Pugh]

Probably because there is an element of democracy in my nature, and I think that wherever possible, and all things being equal, people should be asked whether they want things, rather than having them imposed on them.

It is not clear to me that, as a political class, we have clear convictions yet—we may be struggling towards them—about what is possible or desirable and, in the long term, achievable. After all, we are not talking about the collapse of the retail sector. People get their shopping and alcohol, and they have their mail delivered. However, the way people get those things is affected by changes in their habits, and so on. My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives mentioned specialist shops, and I am keen on their establishment, but we must recognise the fact that now a specialist shop means one that is on the internet, thus acquiring a wider clientele than it would ordinarily do where it was originally established.

We are becoming something of a market society, in which we judge everything by price. The battle that I see us having to reach sustainable communities cannot be pitched as one between nostalgia and market brutalism, because market brutalism will win. However, something called a sustainable community can be established, and it can work, deliver and progress. It is along the lines suggested by my hon. Friend, but it requires a positive political will, and realistic evidence-based policy to implement it, because if we are to produce the outcomes that many of us want, and avoid some of those that currently happen, we will need Government to engage with the topic further. I am sure that the Minister is only too keen to do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Greg Clark)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Weir. I join the congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on securing the debate. I detect from the excellent speeches that we are a band of believers. It is a pleasure to be able to respond the debate and to speak again on one of the most important Acts of Parliament that we have passed in recent years. As was made clear by the references to the various midwives from all parties and of different vintages of parliamentarian, it very much reflects the view of the whole House of Commons representing our various constituencies. The legislation going on to the statute book was an early marker of the power of leadership for people in constituencies, beyond political parties.

I am delighted that so many Members contributed to the debate. It is good to see my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) here. I know that he was to speak at the funeral of his neighbour and constituent, whom he knew for 50 years. He has attended the debate to represent his constituents, and I am sure that members of his community will greatly respect the obligations that he has to the House. I offer my condolences and, I am sure, those of other Members to the family of his friend and constituent.

The ambitions of my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives are completely shared by the Government. The cross-party support for the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 has been striking. If I were to summarise the Act’s contribution, I would say that it established the principle that the right of initiative should not be held in monopoly by people in Westminster and Whitehall—that we should not be the only people who can propose changes to the way things are done, but that that right of initiative should increasingly, and perhaps more normally, come from people in communities, and we as parliamentarians and members of Governments should respond to the initiatives of people in communities.

Our role should be to be the midwives to good ideas that come from local level. It is extraordinary that for so many years—decades—it has been the almost unthinking assumption that ideas have to come from this place and are then visited upon our communities. The notion that Ministers in Whitehall or parliamentarians in Westminster have exclusive access to wisdom and sagacity when it comes to ideas is extraordinary. More than that, as was evident in the contributions today from representatives of almost every part of the United Kingdom, the idea that any place in the UK is in any sense identical to another is for the birds. It is the glory of this House that we represent places that are unique and have their own local character and civic and political traditions—every aspect of community life is reflected.

When people in communities are given the right of initiative, we should of course expect that they will want to do things their own way—differently from one another and from one place to another, and differently from how they have been done in the past. Traditionally, Government and, too often, local government have, first, been frightened of those differences and, secondly, tried to suppress and iron them out. They have tried to impose uniformity across the country, across counties or across districts, as though the differences were regrettable anomalies, rather than a reflection of different requirements and needs that should be positively encouraged.

The principle established in the 2007 Act—that every community in the country should have right of initiative, the right to be heard and the right to address the Government directly and pitch its ideas to them, and that the Government should be under a legal duty to respond—is important not only as a principle, but as the germ of an idea whereby it has an even greater influence on our deliberations across the board. It has been seminal in the Government’s thinking on various reforms, such as the 2011 Act. Section 1 of that Act on the general power of competence reverses completely the old idea that local government exists to do what central Government require of it. That has changed and local government is free to do whatever it wants in pursuit of the service of local people, unless what it proposes is specifically prohibited by central Government. That seems to be the correct default position. The contributions of the debates over many years on the 2007 Act were important in establishing that principle across Government.

[John Pugh]

On what central Government may or may not prohibit, there is much Government thinking at the moment about making social services entitlements portable across local communities, no matter in which local community someone is resident. How do we manage that tension?

[Greg Clark]

I am not saying that there are no tensions, but rather than start from the position that nothing is possible that was not previously allowed, one should deal with each case and consider whether it may give rise to problems. That is exactly the philosophy and spirit of the 2007 Act. My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives offered many suggestions, all of which I accept it is our duty to consider. I hope that they will come through the procedure of the 2007 Act. That is the right approach.

Let me say a little about the process and then I shall respond to some of the points made—I am conscious that I have very little time. I do not accept the admonishment of the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) about the timeliness of the measure for two reasons. First, part of the frustration that many communities experienced during the early days of the 2007 Act was that, having responded to an invitation to submit proposals in October 2008, the previous Government did not respond at all before they left office. We inherited every one of the proposals made under that initial call for evidence. The previous Government took no action whatever and sat on them for nearly two years, but within six months we responded to all the proposals.

More than that, we have swept away the requirement to be forced to consider proposals from communities. We have now established a principle in my Department that any proposal from any member of the public or any community can be pitched to the Government, and we will consider it and it can be tracked in real time via the barrier busting service. There is a website—www.barrierbusting.communities.gov.uk—and since it was launched in December 2010, we have dealt with 258 cases that have come from it. With the regulations, we are talking about back-stop powers for people who are dissatisfied with the Government’s response.

I signed the regulations to bring these measures into effect today. It took a little time because the consultation revealed disagreement between the representatives of local councils and the representatives of community groups, such as Local Works. I was keen that we should not take the lowest common denominator, but seek agreement, which we have been able to do on matters including, for example, the retention of the duty to seek agreement and the establishment of an advisory board to the selector. I fully expect Local Works to be part of that process and group. We have very much strengthened the regulations, and it was absolutely right to do so.

The regulations were signed today and will be formally laid before Parliament within a week—they need to be printed. They will come into force by 26 July 2012. They include a duty on local authorities to consult their communities. There will be a memorandum of understanding between the Secretary of State and the selector to include a time limit during which proposals that have been submitted for consideration will be considered—that is likely to be a maximum of six months, except for special cases. There will be a requirement to be transparent about the processes that are gone through. We will publish simultaneously with the Hansard report of today’s debate the response to the consultation, and a consultation specifically—it is required, unfortunately —to allow parish councils to submit proposals directly. Parish councils already can submit proposals through the barrier busting website, but we will consult on that additional safeguard. I strongly believe that we should allow parish councils, through the principle of subsidiarity, to engage in that process.

I am keen to see many applications. People should not wait to go through the formal process; if they want to pitch directly to the Government, they should. I hope and am confident that following the enactment of the regulations, the rights of every community in the country will be robustly enshrined.