Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [Lords]

John Stevenson Excerpts

Tuesday 17th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[James Wharton]

I would like to make a little progress and then I will give way to more hon. Members who want to have their say on this issue.

Lowering the voting age to 16 for local elections in England and Wales would be a major change to the fundamental building blocks of our democracy. The right starting point for making such change would be that those democratically elected to represent the people of this country should consider all the issues involved. Before such a step, we shall seek the views of those we represent. We should seek to recognise where public opinion stands on the issue, and how to maintain and strengthen confidence in ensuring that elections are free and fair. We should carefully discuss the issues and, having weighed the arguments and recognised where consensus and opinion lies across the country, only then would we decide whether or not to make such a change.

[John Stevenson (Carlisle) (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that if we were to go down the route of 16 to 17-year-olds having the vote, logic would dictate that they should also be able to stand for Parliament, stand as a councillor or stand as an elected mayor? Is that something he would support?

[James Wharton]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. There is a need for a joined-up approach in such matters. There is a need to ensure that any change is fully considered in the context of all the other things we place age restrictions on—all the other things that we do or do not allow people to do at different ages, often for very good reasons. Whether that is buying cigarettes or alcohol, using a sunbed, voting, standing for Parliament or driving a car, we have different ages for different things for long-established reasons. Those ages are not set in stone, but they are in place for a very good reason in principle. There is a debate to be had, but the conclusion of that debate is not foregone.

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[Liz McInnes]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question. Sometimes pressure needs to build up before change is made. It is correct to say that the Labour party did not make this change in 13 years in office, but I am going to talk about the build-up of pressure and the involvement of various organisations. We saw in the Scottish referendum that there is a real feeling that our young people are affected by the democratic process. To take the right hon. Gentleman’s arguments to their conclusion, we would never make any changes whatever, simply because we did not do so in a previous term of office.

I was quoting the Power commission on young people feeling excluded and therefore not being interested in politics. The commission proposed that reducing the voting age to 16 would be an obvious way of reducing the extent of such exclusion for many thousands of young people. It would increase the likelihood of their taking an interest and participating in political and democratic debates if they actually felt that they could influence such debates.

[John Stevenson]

Logically, if 16-year-olds have the vote, they should clearly be entitled to stand as candidates as well. Is the hon. Lady comfortable with the idea of a 16-year-old being able to get elected to a position that has executive authority?

[Liz McInnes]

The Power commission did not recommend that 16-year-olds should become candidates, but rather that they should have the vote to raise their awareness of the democratic process so that when they reach an age when they are eligible to become a candidate, they will have played some part in the democratic process.

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[Alison Thewliss]

I rise to speak in support of the comments made on this side of the House about votes for those aged 16 and 17. It is odd that the House of Lords, the unelected Chamber at the other end, should have become the defender of the right of young people to vote in this country. Its wise intervention should be maintained, however, because our experience in Scotland of having 16 and 17-year-olds voting has been very positive.

It is interesting that, since my election to this House in May, every opportunity to discuss the matter has been met with the comment that it is neither the time nor the place to debate it. I should like to ask the Minister when the right time and place would be, because we should seize every opportunity to have these discussions. There is always a good time to get people involved in politics and in voting. Starting at local level, where local services are delivered to young people, is a good way of getting them involved because their schools, youth services and other local services are relevant to them at first hand. They can see what local government does and get directly involved in it.

It is interesting that lots of Members have mentioned the referendum. In my experience, speaking to young people during the two years that we spent debating the referendum was incredibly positive for their engagement. Anyone who saw the debate that filled the Glasgow Hydro arena with young people will remember that it was one of the best in the whole referendum campaign, with incredibly engaged young people making incredibly valuable contributions.

The leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Ruth Davidson, has become converted to this argument. She has said:

“I’m happy to hold my hands up and say I changed my mind. I’m a fully paid-up member of the ‘votes at 16’ club now, for every election. I thought 16 and 17-year-olds were fantastic during the referendum campaign. I can’t tell you the number of hustings and public meetings I did, and some of the younger members of the audience were the most informed.”

That tells us everything we need to know about how young people ought to be engaged in politics and why they need to be.

[John Stevenson]

I am looking for a bit of consistency in the argument for reducing the voting age for 16 and 17-year-olds. Would the hon. Lady suggest that, if they had the right to vote and the right to stand for election, we should also consider reducing the age limit for alcohol consumption and for driving?

[Alison Thewliss]

There would be public health concerns relating to the alcohol question, and those are entirely different from democratic concerns. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) talked about party manifestos. If 16 and 17-year-olds were able to vote, perhaps they would campaign on issues such as those, but we do not know whether that is the case because they do not have the right to vote in elections to this place or to local authorities, which have licensing powers.

The Minister mentioned that parties that included votes at 16 in their manifesto had not been particularly successful. I have to correct him on that. The Scottish National party had that proposal in its manifesto and we were very successful. I know that 16 and 17-year-olds welcome and respect the rights and responsibilities that we have placed on them. If they are going to be subject to taxation, it is perfectly reasonable that they should have the right to vote.

Turning to some of the other matters under discussion, I am a huge supporter of the single transferrable vote, the system under which I was elected as a councillor. The introduction of that system made a huge difference to the local authority of which I was a member. Before the introduction of STV in Glasgow, only four of the 79 councillors represented the SNP; when the STV election was held, we fielded 22 candidates and we got 22 candidates elected.

The result of these changes can be seen in the Electoral Reform Society’s report of 2010, entitled “Working with STV”. It used Glasgow as a case study and interviewed officers from that council, one of whom stated that Glasgow “has a council again”. There is proper debate and scrutiny. More recent work by the Electoral Reform Society on the need for electoral reform has found that councils that do not have a system such as STV can become one-party states with uncontested seats and, in the worst cases, there is a risk of corruption due to the lack of scrutiny of council decisions.

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[Alison Thewliss]

I appreciate that English local government is complex and has lots of different examples. In Scotland, we had a boundary review which looked at ward sizes and shapes. My experience, having been elected under that system in 2007 and re-elected under it in 2012, is that it works very well for our constituents, because they always have three or four representatives to take their issues to. At the very best, they have a good team of people standing up for their local area. At worst, if they have a councillor who is not doing what is needed, people have an option to go to two or three others who can represent them. That is good for our constituents, and they see the value in that arrangement. A process whereby local councils could decide on this issue by themselves might need further thought, but it is an interesting idea. If the House is not going to take any action to introduce STV, we should certainly allow local government to do it if it wishes to. There would be great value in that.

I also want to talk about local referendums. They are a good thing for local democracy and responsiveness to issues involving a local demand. People should be able to have a say on the matters that affect them, and that could also include the question of revising the way in which local government is set up in their area. The local government arrangements might not be working well, for example, or there might be no clear lines of accountability. There has been a great deal of debate on those issues in relation to elected mayors and to how the rest of the process below them would need to change.

[John Stevenson]

On that point about elected mayors, does the hon. Lady believe that the great cities of Scotland should have the opportunity to hold referendums to decide whether to have an elected mayor?

[Alison Thewliss]

People are not generally calling for that in Scotland. There has not been that tradition there.

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[Chloe Smith]

I am interested in that argument. Although it is for the Minister to give the real answer on that, rather than for me to attempt to give it, I think we run a risk of creating a patchwork. I do not feel comfortable with 16-year-olds in one part of the country being able to do something that their counterparts in another part of the country cannot. I am not hugely comfortable with the inconsistency, and I would far prefer us to debate this in the round properly.

[John Stevenson]

I agree with my hon. Friend that this is not the right forum for the discussion on reducing the voting age to include 16 and 17-year-olds. Does she agree that if that other debate ever were to come forward, it would have to include things such as the alcohol age and whether 16 and 17-year-olds should be able to have executive power, so that there is consistency?

[Chloe Smith]

I agree entirely. In fact, the next section of my notes tells me to acknowledge the points made by my hon. Friend about executive power and standing for office. We should also go through all the points relating to marriage, joining the armed forces, taxation, the use of substances, criminal responsibility and the age of consent for sex. They are all items in that much longer list. Before the Minister looks at me with absolute horror for moving his Bill on to something that is not included here today, I should say that I merely make those points to make the broader debate a real one. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) said when he was in his place earlier, we need to have that debate, and we might hope to do so in the next couple of years, because the topic is important.

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[Mr Graham Allen]

I am surprised, but delighted, to follow the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith). She is a very important performer in the democratic constellation, having been a Minister and given evidence to my Select Committee, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which could have been the perfect vehicle for bringing forward such proposals had the Government not abolished it—that probably tells us all we need to know.

I must say that the speed of reaction by Government to proposals from the Commons has not noticeably been a problem in my 20-odd years in the House. Some might feel that there has been a constant blur of democratic innovation in the House, but that has so far escaped me. Perhaps that happens when I am not in the Chamber. I might just be very unlucky.

I say to Members: when in doubt always read the title of the Bill. This one is Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill. It says “devolution” and not decentralisation. We are not saying, “Here is Whitehall handing out a bit of power, but it is on a string and we can pull it back when we like.” Nor are we saying, “Power should lie at the centre, but let us try a little experiment on a very strong piece of elastic should the simpletons who are out in the sticks be unable to administer their own affairs.”

Devolution is entirely a different concept. It is about giving power away to a more appropriate level. Therefore, devolving power is, by definition, going to create difference and best practice. Lots of people will experiment, or innovate, on how they do things to suit themselves better in areas in which it is appropriate for people in localities to do those things. A patchwork, or a differentiation, or lots of different levels of change, is at the heart of devolution in a way that decentralisation never can be. Let us read the title of the Bill and let us try to make the Bill do what it says on the tin, which is to devolve power down to the localities rather than to have the localities as a means of administration of what the centre wants. That is a very, very clear distinction, which all of us who want to talk about devolution should understand.

In essence, new clause 3 applies that principle to a number of fields, but most obviously to the electoral systems in this country. There is no longer one electoral system that applies everywhere in the United Kingdom. There is a massive diversity and plurality of electoral systems and we have decided that this is about horses for courses—I am talking about a typical British constitutional evolution. The last major one was around the way in which we elect people to the European Parliament. Then there has been change in our devolved Assemblies and Parliaments, and people are finding their way in different areas. They should be allowed to continue to change if that is what they wish to do in those areas, regions or nations. It should be a process of constant exploration. So why on earth can we not do that in the localities? With the consent of people in the localities, why cannot we try, if they so wish, to go for votes for 16 to 17-year-olds?

Given the immense power vested in the Secretary of State under the Bill—he could not be a better person to trust to use these powers, I am sure—he could use his discretion to try a pilot and see what happens and what the turnout is likely to be. Let us do a proper evidence-based analysis in a number of areas to see whether young people are interested in participating in that way. Trying to do that seems to be one of the benefits of devolution. Other places might be happy with first past the post and such a change might never occur there, but pressure might be brought to bear.

Some people say that it is wrong that there are one-party states in local government. I do not happen to be one of those people, but if we get enough momentum in a locality to say that the system should change and people say, “You know what? It might refresh us. We might do better if we had more challenge,” or whatever the logic of the argument and political debate taking place, they should try something else. Let them try an alternative vote. Let them try, if they wish, the single transferable vote. Let them be the arbiters and judges and jury about the electoral system that they want in their area.

Similarly on governance, if people wish to have a form of governance that includes a leader concept, a committee structure or a mayor, they should be allowed to try it. The imposition element—if people want to run their own affairs, they must do it in the way that the Government say and have a mayor—is one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Government’s proposal, and I do not list many. The Government say, “If you don’t want the mayor, you’re not going to get the powers.” That is unfortunate. It is counterintuitive to those of us, even the Secretary of State, who believe in devolution, and it has not done the cause any good.

If we genuinely, perhaps after one or two more Bills before 2020, get to a position where we trust local people to have the wit and creativity to devise their means of governance, they should decide whether or not they want mayoralty. The reason why only one city went for the mayoralty in the last round and the rest rejected it was partly that it was felt to be an imposition. It came close on the back of a number of elections where people had expressed a political view about who should run their locality. It was done in a clunky, clumsy way, and we can see the fingerprints from that exercise on the one that has been transposed into the Bill. That is unfortunate. Let us allow people to find a mayoralty if they feel that it is appropriate for their area. Let us allow them to test that or to experiment with it if they wish, rather than saying yet again, “You’re getting devolution, but only in the way that we in Whitehall say is appropriate.”

If, like me, hon. Members have had the opportunity to study a document about devolution, they will see that the Government are not doing any of us who care about devolution any favour at all in the way that these things are written. It is like a gathering of local officials and centralised, Whitehall officials with a very large lashing of LSD, and it is difficult for ordinary people, let alone politicians, some of whom are intellectually challenged, to understand what is meant by much of the documentation. That may be based on my errors, but I suspect, given the size of the smile on the Minister’s face, that he, too, realises that to an extent officials at local and national level have depoliticised the very thing that he and the Secretary of State have done so well in bringing the Bill to the House.

[John Stevenson]

I hope Members on the Government Benches are not intellectually challenged. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when we look back at Governments of his party and of mine, we see that the present Government have done an awful lot to further the cause of devolution, and should be given credit for that effort?

[Mr Allen]

I know that the hon. Gentleman is an assiduous reader of my speeches, even more so than I am, and he will see that on Second Reading and a number of occasions subsequently I paid tribute to the Secretary of State for his determination to bring devolution to its present state. It is an extremely good foundation for my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) on the Front Bench to build on in 2020.

I am surprised that we have got to this point in the debate today without anyone mentioning that devolution deals have been announced. I am surprised that the Minister has not mentioned that. I do hope word does not get back to the Chancellor about his omitting to mention the deals in Liverpool and the west midlands, in addition to the deals in Sheffield, the north-east and the Tees valley. I hope deals are rapidly on the way in my area—Nottingham/Nottinghamshire and Derby/Derbyshire. I believe there are 38 potential deals, covering up to 80% of the population.

It may seem odd for someone on the Opposition Benches—I hope I am regarded as all-party on this issue—to point out that there are large areas, Conservative areas, rural areas, county areas, that have been left out of the party. If this is to be a genuinely democratic change of the order of developing national Parliaments and assemblies—a change that will lead to a federal United Kingdom, as my hon. Friends on the Front Bench said in The Huffington Post this morning—we cannot leave our friends in the rural areas, whether they are Conservative or not, out of the equation.

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I will not ask the Committee to vote on the new clauses I have tabled. I have put them down as a marker. If the Minister wants to take forward the debate about what will come next in the English devolution arena, I will send him my personal copy of the Local Government (Independence) Bill—signed or unsigned, whatever he prefers—to give him ideas that might find the light of day the next time we legislate on devolution.

[John Stevenson]

I will say a few words about new clause 30. The Bill includes plenty of references to elected mayors and their powers. Indeed, much of our debate has centred on elected mayors. I have long supported the idea of elected mayors and very much welcome their introduction into legislation. However, the Bill deals with larger areas such as combined authorities, large cities and the larger counties. It does not address the possibility of elected mayors in smaller councils and communities.

I acknowledge that the Government want this change to come from the bottom up, with local authorities coming together to put forward ideas and proposals, hence all the deals that we have heard about up and down the country in recent days—I am sure that there are many more to come. I understand that process, although I do not wholly agree with it at all times. I sometimes think that there needs to be greater direction from the centre. Nevertheless, the Government are moving in the right direction.

New clause 30, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) and I tabled, is a small change that would allow smaller council areas and communities, which are unaffected by this legislation in many respects, to consider having an elected mayor in a simpler way and give their populaces the opportunity to vote on the prospect of an elected mayor. For example, there is an elected Mayor of London, but of the 32 boroughs underneath that, only about two have elected mayors.

I would like other boroughs to have an easier opportunity at least to consider the prospect of an elected mayor, and to extend that provision to other parts of the country. It is my view, and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), that the hurdles that prevent such an opportunity from being made as easy as possible for local communities are currently too high. Requiring 5% of the local electorate to sign a petition to bring about a referendum is a high figure. One or two places up and down the country have achieved 5%—indeed, Copeland District Council in Cumbria managed to achieve that figure, and people subsequently voted in a referendum for an elected mayor.

New clause 30 is a small change that would enable local people—with the support of a reasonable but realistic number of members of the public—to bring about a referendum, and I suggest that the Government change the requirement in the Bill to 1%. That does not necessarily mean that there will be an elected mayor; it means that that community will get the opportunity to vote in a referendum on whether they would like one. I accept that some places will reject that opportunity, but if more such opportunities exist we will start to see more elected mayors in different parts of the country and it will become an established form of local government. I firmly believe that that is far more transparent and accountable, and it will provide real leadership in different parts of the country.

I look forward to the Minister’s response, and would be delighted if he accepts the new clause so that it can be incorporated into the Bill and mean that referendums can be held across the country over the next few years on a regular basis. I appreciate that he will probably want to consider the matter, and I will not be pressing the new clause to a vote. I ask him to consider the issue seriously, however, and to see whether he can reduce the 5% to a percentage that is more realistic and will enable local communities across the country to petition for a referendum and decide whether they wish to have an elected mayor.

[Mr Betts]

I wish to raise two issues that the Government and the Committee will have to deal with at some point. When I spoke on Second Reading, I indicated that I was generally supportive of the Bill. I have reservations about some aspects and details of it, but the direction of travel is essentially right, as is the idea that devolution will happen and is on the agenda, and there is a good deal of cross-party support for it. That is an important step change from how things were when I first came to the House in 1992, or in many subsequent years. We are seeing progress. Members of the House are standing up and talking positively about devolution, and no one is saying “Local councils can’t do that—they can’t be trusted”, which was very much the attitude a few years ago.

I am comfortable and supportive of that idea, but we need a dialogue and debate about two important issues. The first has been raised continually by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), who chaired the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the previous Parliament. He was a strong advocate for trying to codify or set in a more formal arrangement the powers of local government and its relationship with the centre. That is important because there is a danger that some powers and aspects of policy will be devolved to local councils, but that other powers—without talking about centralisation or taking anything back to the centre—will be removed from local councils, and more controls introduced in their place.

There are currently two Bills before the House, and I expect the Minister is considering them both fairly widely. The Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill is about devolution. That is welcome, and we can discuss how devolution should take place. We also have the Housing and Planning Bill, and the Royal Town Planning Institute said that it was astonished at the amount of planning centralisation in that Bill. With starter homes, measures in the Bill are attempting to decide on the nature of section 106 agreements, which are essentially agreements about a particular site between a local authority and a developer. That is a particularly wide issue.