Keith Simpson
Main Page: Keith Simpson (Conservative - Broadland)Local Government Bill [Lords]
Keith Simpson Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)
Let me begin by saying that I warmly support the proposal made by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. Let me also remind colleagues on both sides of the House that the announcements made yesterday and their effect on local government were brought about entirely by the incompetence of the last Labour Government. The cuts are due entirely to those Members who are now on the Opposition Benches, and we are going to hang that round their necks. People in Norwich and Norfolk know that only too well.
My right hon. Friend began by saying that the whole issue was like something straight out of Dickens’ Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. It has been going on for four years, and at the outset—my constituency was then called Mid-Norfolk; it is now called Broadland—I was in favour of the status quo, although I was prepared to hear the arguments. The problem that the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) has, and which Opposition Members generally have, particularly the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), is that when we look at the sorry trail of order, counter-order and disorder over the past four years—the different instructions given to the boundary committee, the contradictory instructions given by successive Secretaries of State, the amounts of money that have been wasted, and, perhaps most importantly, the original riding instructions given to the boundary committee—we see that the views of local people were specifically excluded. There was no democracy at all. Indeed, the very few opinion polls that have ever been conducted in Norwich and Norfolk—we cannot look at the unitary issue without considering the whole county—showed no advantage at all to those who wanted a unitary authority.
The irony is that, to begin with, pressure was brought to bear on the boundary committee to consider expanding the boundaries of Norwich to include its outer areas, but not one individual wanted to join a unitary Norwich, as became obvious in the local government elections and from the letters and e-mails I received from the surrounding villages that would have become part of a greater Norwich. Why did they not want to enter a unitary Norwich? It was not a question of ideology or principle; unfortunately for the right Member for Don Valley, it was because Norwich city council has been incompetently run under Labour for decades. Norwich city council has had high council tax, has been unable to achieve high scores for any local government criteria, and has had a housing scandal in only the past two years. It has been an absolute disgrace, and as somebody who was born in Norwich I think it a great shame that such a fine city has had to put up with such total and utter incompetence. I suggest that the Institute for Government use the track record of the past four years as a model for how not to carry out reform in government. However, what has happened is well documented, so I will not go into it again.
There is no overall public support for the proposal. The right hon. Lady pointed out the financial consequences, but having seen different sets of figures produced by the Department for Communities and Local Government over the past four years, even the former Member for Norwich North, Dr Ian Gibson—who was deselected by the Labour party and resigned, after which there was a by-election, which was won by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith), who was re-elected in the general election—could not see the advantages. The disadvantages would be felt not just by the people of Norwich, but by the people of Norfolk. The population of Norwich is approximately 130,000, but these proposals would have affected the population of Norfolk, which is nearly 800,000. What would have been the advantage of having two directors of libraries, two police forces and two of virtually everything else? There would have been no advantage whatever.
This sorry saga has incurred a vast cost to taxpayers living in my constituency and in Norwich. I would be interested to put in a freedom of information request to see what letters, e-mails and conversations Ministers’ private secretaries received from members of the Labour party over the past four years. It has been obvious to people living in Norfolk that this has been a ramp by the Labour party intended to secure a Labour party advantage. The great irony is that, as a consequence, there are no Labour MPs left in Norfolk at all. The people of Norwich and Norfolk have recognised how incompetent this process has been and how much it has cost. The attempts by the noble Baroness Hollis to seek all kinds of judicial reviews to string things out have been regarded as a joke in Norwich—and the same could be said of Exeter.
I come back to my first point. The right hon. Member for Don Valley laid great emphasis on democratic representation and criticised my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for not letting local communities decide. Local communities did decide. They made that quite clear in a by-election and a general election, which saw Labour lose two Norwich seats and the election of my hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis). The people of Norwich and Norfolk have spoken. I support the measure proposed by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
This is a rather strange debate. We are discussing a Bill with which it appears to be unnecessary to proceed, and which is being defended on grounds that seem far from anything relating to the reality of what occurred with the applications for unitary status. Indeed, it is being defended by the Secretary of State on the basis of what was, in fact, a series of spurious claims about costs and various other elements. It provides for the retention on the statute book of the 1997 legislation enabling unitary status applications to be received by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State said, in typically colourful language—clearly it was a metaphor, or he would have been arrested—that there was a pistol in his desk which he would take to anyone who dared to suggest to him that the democratic structures of local authorities might be changed in favour of local people’s wishes.
Even stranger is the Secretary of State’s argument about value for money. He suggested that one conclusion of a consultant’s analysis of local government in general might be that one of the impediments to really good value for money was the number of councillors making decisions, holding meetings and incurring expenses as a result. He implied that local government would become much more efficient in terms of value for money—if that is the sole criterion—if local councillors were abolished, along with any local concerns about their election, and councils were replaced by a series of local authorities run by commissars. I do not think that any Member present would be particularly happy with that outcome—I imagine that they would want local councillors to run local authorities—but as soon as it is decided that local councillors should run local authorities, the question arises: what kind of authorities should those be?
To say that in the light of those value-for-money considerations, the whole question of who wants what kind of local government to act in their interests in particular areas is irrelevant, is fundamentally to miss the point of what local government is about. It certainly misses the point in terms of the Conservative party’s claim that it is now the party of localism. That would be so even if the arguments about the financing of the authorities that we are discussing were not as finely balanced as they have been.
The Secretary of State’s claim that unitary status would cost £40 million ought to be withdrawn by the end of the afternoon. It is grossly misleading, and a shameful defence of the Government’s proposals. Almost all the money would be recouped within five years, and there would be savings thereafter. Even if there were a financial argument, however, it would be trumped by arguments about local accountability, and about the purpose of councillors and local democracy.
Mr Keith Simpson
This is not the hon. Gentleman’s fault, but I do not think that he participated in any of the earlier debates on this subject. Many of them were held in Westminster Hall. I suggest that he read the evidence presented by my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon), a senior member of the Public Accounts Committee, who said that all the arguments about the savings that would be made had invariably been substantially wrong.
Dr Whitehead
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but my figures are from the explanatory memorandums to two statutory instruments that were presented to the House—and indeed have been confirmed by figures from the Government. I am at a loss to understand why more weight should be given to certain views on what costs might be than to cost figures that have been deposited in the House for Members to examine. I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman’s point was very telling, but even if it had been a little more telling, I do not think that it would have undermined the real question before us, which is how local government can work in the best interests of the people who elect councillors and want them to run services on their behalf.
Again using colourful language, the Secretary of State snuffed out the ambitions of Norwich, Exeter, and by implication Ipswich, to become unitary authorities in the future. That suggests—I am reminded again of the pistol analogy—an overall and enduring hostility on the part of the Secretary of State and others to the very idea of unitary authorities in the future, although the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 still provides for the possibility.
The position could have been different if that deep prejudice had not lain behind the decisions that were made. Even the judicial review was clearly based on narrow parts of the overall tests and consultation. The judge concluded that, essentially, the issue was fixable. He said
“this does not prevent them”—
the proposals—
“being put forward for approval after what need only be a short period of consultation.”
His judgment was based not on the grounds that the proposals were irrational, but on narrow grounds relating to the tests before the consultation, and anticipated that the proposals might be presented again. It has been made clear today that they will not be presented again, because of what the Secretary of State and the Government have decided is their view—not the people’s view, not the local authorities’ view, not councillors’ view, but the Government’s view—of how local government should be conducted in the future.
Another strange aspect of the debate is the suggestion that the proposals result from the revolutionary ideas of local authorities that are attempting to break free from counties and move into unknown territory on their own, to the detriment of those counties. In fact the whole history of local government, not just in Norwich and Exeter, but across the country shows that the opposite is the case.
It is interesting to reflect on the history of county boroughs. As has been mentioned, both Norwich and Exeter have a long history of independent self-governance as local authorities. The 1889 legislation that created the modern local government system introduced the idea of county boroughs; the large number of county boroughs reflected the wishes of people in those cities. The framers of that legislation specifically said that it would be impractical for towns and cities whose local government had previously been independent to be incorporated into counties, which was why the county boroughs were introduced. That was done to ensure that that tradition and that system continued, and residents of cities and towns could exercise unitary self-government within the cradle of the county around them. This is not a new idea that was just dreamed up by the Labour Government; it is historically the way in which local government outside metropolitan areas has been conducted.
What has happened in local government in relatively recent years is that with the overwhelming approbation of the people living in these towns and cities, there has been a move back towards what is, in essence, a local government structure of county boroughs across the country. Some 85 of the 87 unitary authorities introduced between 1889 and 1965 survived until that date; three of them then became London boroughs. In 1974, 37 of those county boroughs became metropolitan boroughs, and subsequently, particularly in the early 1990s under a Conservative Government, a large number of those became unitary authorities again. Some 24 of the 45 remaining county boroughs became unitary authorities, but 21 did not, and two of the five largest of those are Exeter and Norwich. It was largely a matter of chance that they did not become unitary authorities as a result of that process.
People with a reasonable memory of local government will recall the hanging commissions that went around the country in 1992 to determine the future of local government, county by county, across England. Commissioners were sent out within those county frameworks to produce independent reports about what the future local government structure would be, and the then Government implemented them. Those reports advanced a variety of different approaches, depending on the view of the commissioner involved.
Some commissioners produced reports saying, “The county borough is so important to the county that we cannot possibly have it excised from the county, so there must be two-tier local government.” On other occasions, the same commissioners sent out to perform the same exercise in the same county said, “The county borough is so important in the county that it must be excised from the county and given back unitary status, because that is logically the right thing to do.” In one part of the country a particular commissioner was so enthusiastic about unitary government that he abolished the whole county, and six unitary authorities were produced instead. That commissioner is familiar to many of us in a different guise—as the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope). A variety of conclusions were reached at that time, which meant, among other things, that Exeter and Norwich did not become unitary authorities because of the accident of who went out to do the report.
We have heard this afternoon that the people of Norwich and Exeter overwhelmingly support the idea that the long tradition of unitary government in those towns should be restored.
Mr Simpson
Can the hon. Gentleman give the House the factual evidence for that view? What polling has been done? Has a local referendum been held?
Dr Whitehead
The hon. Gentleman will recall hearing earlier this afternoon about the results of various polls conducted in those local areas, the results of consultations with councillors and the information that came from various bodies within the local authorities, all of which pointed to the idea that the people in those areas strongly supported the idea that their authority should become unitary.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
In cases such as this one, it is important that we come back to first principles, and those first principles strike me as being quite straightforward: do the people of Norwich and Exeter want this, is it rational that they should want it, and is it appropriate for unitary status to be conferred?
Norwich is the closest city to me of those that are under discussion. Does it want this? Yes, it does. Norwich city council currently has 34 Labour, Green and Lib Dem members, and they were in favour. Only the Tories, with five seats, were against. Earlier, the hon. Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) claimed that the two seats of Norwich South and Norwich North changed hands at the election because the Labour Government had been pushing to try unitary status there. He should have more faith in his colleagues who represent those constituencies. They represent the new generation of MPs, and I am sure they would attribute their success to much broader reasons to do with their appeal.
Mr Keith Simpson
Will the hon. Gentleman give me an example, either orally or in written evidence, in this place of the former MP for Norwich North, Dr Ian Gibson, coming out in favour of the unitary proposal?
Gavin Shuker
Dr Gibson is no longer a Member of this House so I do not see the relevance of the question. I can, however, assure the hon. Gentleman that when I was campaigning in the elections that were forced as a result of the Secretary of State’s decision, many of the people to whom I spoke were very much in favour of the proposal.
Mr Keith Simpson
Let me explain the flaw in these arguments. What I am about to say does not necessarily apply to Exeter, but the only way in which Norwich could get unitary status and also fulfil all the economic criteria—one problem is that Secretaries of State have changed their minds about that—is to enlarge Norwich and bring in all the outer suburbs, including large parts of my constituency. They did not try to do that for the simple reason that the majority of the people there were totally against it, and they were totally against it because of the complete and utter incompetence of Labour-led Norwich city council. Therefore, even their economic criteria did not add up.
Gavin Shuker
Much as I am enjoying this conversation with the hon. Gentleman, I should point out again that he claimed the only reason why the two Members were elected to the House was because of the supposed opposition to the Labour Government’s strategy for introducing unitary status. If he wants to talk about election results we should talk about those of last month: in Norwich, the Lib Dems were down one and the Tories were down one, while both the Greens and Labour were up one. If we want to draw lessons from the electorate, we could begin with those results.
Chris Williamson
I have taken a few interventions. I want to make some progress.
The other important fact that the Government are ignoring is that Exeter and Norwich are significant economic drivers—the economic powerhouses of their local areas. If they were freed and allowed to speak up for the people they represent, they would be in a far, far better position not only to improve the services they deliver, but to bring in new inward investment to create the jobs that will be desperately required as a result of the horrendous cuts that the Secretary of State has sanctioned, which we heard about only yesterday.
Chris Williamson
I want to make a little more progress and deal with another point that the hon. Gentleman made. I will give way in a moment.
The hon. Member for Broadland betrayed a lack of understanding of local government when he said that the creation of unitary authorities in Norwich and Exeter would result in two police forces in each area. Clearly, that is utter nonsense. Let us get that on the record. He said that the move was supported by the former Secretary of State because it would generate some political advantage for the Labour party. Again, that is utter nonsense. It seems to me that, in making that remark, the hon. Gentleman is being economical with the truth. If someone is economical with the truth often enough, sometimes people start to believe it.
Chris Williamson
The hon. Member for Broadland wanted to intervene and I give way to him.
Mr Simpson
I am thoroughly enjoying listening to the hon. Gentleman’s speech and looking at the expression on the face of his Whip. He talks about gerrymandering and various other matters. The main reason the then Secretary of State turned down Norwich’s original bid was that, with its current boundaries, it did not meet all the economic and regeneration criteria, yet, four years later, it was accepted. Can he explain why an argument that had been knocked down was accepted by a new Secretary of State four years later?
Chris Williamson
The hon. Gentleman wants to fight the battles of yesteryear. A number of changes occurred, not the least of which was that a better case was made by the authorities in question. In addition, there was a significant change in the economic conditions facing the country and, as I have pointed out, the cities are excellent economic drivers.
Robert Neill
Because they had not realised the extent to which an incoming Conservative Government would encourage and facilitate joint working through creating local enterprise partnerships rather than remote economic development associations, and grant the power and general competence to enable local authorities to set up special purpose vehicles. We can answer the arguments very well, without incurring the costs of reorganisation, which is a distraction at a difficult time.
I shall skim briefly through the other contributions out of courtesy. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), like several other of my hon. Friends, forcefully made the point about the need to recognise links. To remove considerable elements of the tax base from the two counties and leave sparsely populated areas with a lower tax base but with, as is generally accepted, the higher costs of delivering the full range of services across rural populations, would significantly undermine their ability to deliver quality services in their areas. That is why the views of residents of the surrounding county areas must be taken into account just as much as those of the residents of the cities. The Opposition have been conveniently silent on that subject.
Mr Keith Simpson
On a very important point, I failed to catch the eye of the hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson), but he gave the impression that there was a sharp distinction between the poverty-stricken urban deprivation of Norwich and the wealthy rest of Norfolk. I do not think that he has ever been there. That, of course, is the problem. Labour has no MPs in the area: the nearest one is in Luton. The people of King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth and Thetford would be amazed at such a caricature.
Robert Neill
My hon. Friend, who has lived in and around the county pretty much all his life, makes a very well-founded point. I know from when I used to practise as a lawyer in parts of East Anglia that there is real deprivation and difficulty in some of those villages—a fact that seems to be ignored.
That brings me neatly to thanking the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) for his contribution. It was much appreciated, particularly by Government Members. He confirmed that as a Luton MP, he was the nearest Labour MP to Norwich—a mere two and half hours away—which was a wonderful and graphic illustration of the abyss into which the Labour party has fallen. Next time, so that he can strengthen his arguments about Norwich rather than rely on a telephone canvass, we will all club together and get him a day-return fare. He can go there in person, which I hope will help.