Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Callanan Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I listened with great interest to the speech from my noble friend Lord Heseltine earlier because I was a councillor in the 1980s and the 1990s, when he served with great distinction in the Conservative Governments of the time. I was a councillor in the same part of the world as the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Beecham, who spoke earlier—the north-east of England—although I was not on the same authority. I also never had the chance to be council leader, as they did, because I was a Conservative in Gateshead. In fact, not only did I not have the chance to be leader, for many years I was the only Conservative out of 66 councillors.

That of course was a difficult time in local government: a time of rate capping and when the Governments of the time took considerable powers away from local government. At the time, I was a cheerleader for that. I thought that many local authorities were dominated too much by ideological, left-wing councillors and that ratepayers—ordinary men and women—needed protecting from some of those people by methods such as rate capping and the removal of those powers. I now believe that I was wrong and that it was a mistake to do that. Since then, events have proved that. So I fully support the Government’s aims now in seeking to return those powers by devolution to local authorities. I hope that they will be able to take matters further and devolve considerably more powers to local authorities. The mayor model is the right way to do that. It was in the Conservative manifesto and for that reason alone the Government should do it; Governments should stick by commitments they have made.

However, that is not the long-term answer to the problem. We have seen declining rates of participation in local government elections for many years. Most people do not bother taking part in those elections. I think the reason is that most electors have worked out that it does not really matter in most cases which councillors they have because councillors have their ability to act so constrained by national legislation and the fact that the vast majority of their finance is supplied by national government that it does not make a lot of difference whether electors participate in local government elections.

It is not in the scope of the Bill, but ultimately the only way to regenerate properly local democracy will be to reform the system of local government finance so that, once again, electors have a considerable stake in their local authorities and it actually makes a difference to what is delivered locally and, more importantly, what they must pay out of their own pocket for those services—then we would regenerate local government, and that would make a big difference.

That is not in the scope of the Bill and it is a very controversial subject. Clearly there are no easy answers to it, but ultimately that would be the way to regenerate local government. As a first step, the Government are going the right way. They are reversing the path of many Governments for a number of years in accumulating power towards the centre. It is a good first step and I wish them well in their endeavours.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said in his analysis of the problems facing local government. He is quite right that local government has been denuded of its powers over decades. He is quite right that many councils simply do not change political colour during elections. However, the solutions to those challenges provided by the noble Lord are not ones that I personally agree with, as they do not provide an adequate response.

The first challenge is that councils do not change political colour. Well, as the noble Lord rightly pointed out, neither do two-thirds of constituencies during a general election. They never change political hands. That political problem is resolved by having not a mayoral system in local government but a different electoral system. A fair voting system would provide the opportunity for people to elect differences. At the moment, under the current system, they do not have that opportunity. The second issue that—