Localism Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I should declare an interest as a recent vice-president of the Local Government Association. Perhaps I should also say that I am a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution. Therefore, I wish to consider this evening some issues of principle about when referendums are appropriate.

On 12 October last year, we debated the Select Committee’s report on the principle of referendums. I said that,

“the Select Committee was right to see significant drawbacks to the widespread use of referendums”.—[Official Report, 12/10/10; col. 428.]

The House expressed many reservations about holding referendums in a representative democracy.

Many noble Lords who spoke in that debate quoted powerful evidence given to the Select Committee about the problems of referendums. They included: people potentially voting on issues different from those on the ballot paper, or voting for or against a Government rather than on a specific issue; problems with getting sufficient turnout for any result to be legitimate; problems with ensuring that both sides of an argument had sufficient resources to make their case; and problems with undue influence being exerted by dominant media groups or party machines.

The case against widespread use of referendums was made very strongly. My noble friend Lord McNally said that he had not found a committee report that had been so much respected by officials and Ministers. He said:

“This is not a report that has been put on the shelf and forgotten”.

My noble friend drew attention to the fact that in his official response to the report, Mr Mark Harper, on behalf of the Government, agreed that,

“referendums should be exceptional events”.—[Official Report, 12/10/10; col. 471.]

These were seen as being required only for major constitutional changes such as to abolish the monarchy, to leave the European Union, or for any of the nations of the UK to secede and so on.

The question must now be asked whether we should have similar concerns about local referendums. Should they become common or should they be rare? On what sort of issues should they be held, and how easily could they be triggered given all these potential problems? There seems at the very least to be a possibility of an allegation of double standards being made if national government are saying that their policy programme should be subject to a referendum only on major constitutional issues, but that all issues decided by locally elected representatives should potentially be subject to referendums, with all the problems that we know about of conducting referendums fairly.

No national Government have ever suggested, for example, that their powers of taxation be subject to a referendum. Many national controversies have been debated in this House, the other place and across the country without the suggestion that national government should resolve the issue by putting it to a referendum.

Since that debate last October we have also had experience of a national referendum. Many of those on the no side in that referendum campaign argued that a reason for voting no was simply the cost of holding the referendum, even though these costs were minimised by holding it at the same time as many other elections. Those who argued this case on the no side must now argue why local referendums should be conducted at the expense of council tax payers in addition to the cost of electing local councillors.

If such local referendums are to be held, then we should be much clearer about when they are appropriate than is outlined so far in this Bill. There must be substantial proven public demand for them locally. They should not simply be a device that either a local council or the Secretary of State can use to avoid the sort of considered judgment that should be taken by elected representatives and be subject to examination at election times.

There may be problems with some council administrations being unrepresentative of the areas that they serve. Some councils are effectively one-party states. The answer is to make those councils more representative—not to make each of their decisions potentially subject to a referendum.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for turning up in time so I did not have to deliver his speech, which he did far better than I would have done. I just want to add one or two things and speak to the specific amendments which my noble friend and I have put forward.

The noble Lord, Lord True, and the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, spoke about how opposition parties and opposition councillors might well use referendums to promote their own interests. In my own local political career I can think of major issues where I would have had, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord True, a great deal of fun. We would have made useful political points but it would have cost people a lot of money and it would not have been the right way to do it.

What concerns me more than what opposition parties and opposition councillors might do is the way in which parties in control, or mayors or anyone else with the ability, might use referendums to manipulate the political and electoral process by launching referendums on populist issues to entrench their own local power. I am not suggesting that all such local leaders would ever do that but, without naming names, I can think of one or two around the country who might regard this as manna from heaven. You organise a referendum on a good populist issue or a bad populist issue to coincide with the year of your re-election and have it on the same day as your re-election to turn the referendum campaign into your election campaign and—Bob’s your uncle—you are probably back. As I understand the Bill, there will be no limits on referendum expenses so it would blow a huge hole in the rules for local election expenses.

People organising referendums—whether they are organising a petition for it or whether they are persons in power trying to use it for populist purposes—may be goodies. They may be doing it for benign purposes but they might not: they might be malign extremists movements or commercially motivated and commercially biased or politicians seeking re-election, as I just said. Whatever it is, there is a severe risk that they undermine the processes of representative democracy, which rely a great deal on proper procedures, democratic deliberation, debate and compromise and the role of the council as a mediator in the community—which I think the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, was talking about last week.

You cannot compromise in a referendum. Everything is black and white; everything is yes or no. It polarises the community and, while it might be a lot of fun for people taking part in it, it simplifies what are often quite complex issues and runs the risk of undermining the whole process of liberal democracy in the local community. We are generally sceptical about the value of Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Bill and if it is to remain, we believe it needs a much stricter tying-up so that the number of referendums which can take place are relatively few and are on appropriate subjects.

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[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, not for the first time Newcastle is united in connection with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. A working figure of 10 per cent is probably about right. The figures suggested in some other amendments are on the high side; 25 per cent is more than half the average turnout in a council election. It is asking a lot to postulate a requirement for a petition to have as high a signature rate as that.

I tabled amendment in this group in relation to the areas from which a referendum might be called. The Bill provides for the whole authority or one or more electoral areas, provided they are contiguous within it. That sounds plausible, but if you take, for example, Birmingham, you have wards with an electorate of about 20,000. That argues a population of something like 30,000. It is in effect a small town. That is big enough to contain more than one discrete and substantial community. My amendment simply suggests that in addition to the two criteria laid down in terms of area in the Bill, there could be a further provision, namely,

“such area as may be determined by the authority”.

An authority could say: go and petition the area, we acknowledge it is not the whole of the ward, but we are prepared to accept a smaller area than an electoral division. It gives a degree of flexibility which I think might be reasonable. That is the effect of Amendment 120J.

I was interested to hear the observations of the noble Lord, Lord True, who was emphatically endorsing the principles of petitioning as an alternative to referendums. I wish he had been here to support me and the absent noble Lord, Lord Shipley, when I proposed this afternoon that the provision that would strike out the petition procedure should not be supported and that the provisions of the 2009 Act should continue to apply. Be that as it may, he is right to prefer petitions to referendums; they are undoubtedly better. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, for his analysis of the defects of referendums, taken at large, and his reference to the report of the Constitution Committee last year.

He and other noble Lords are right to point to some of the dangers that can arise and the mischief that can be made. In the next group of amendments, we shall come to the point about members of councils calling referendums. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, about that and support his amendment. However, one can clearly see a variety of difficulties. For example, in my own ward there is currently a proposal for a historic building, which has been acquired by the Muslim community, to be made into a school and community centre. The BNP is already stirring up hostility to that proposal. It is not just a planning proposal; it is a proposal for a school and so on. The amendments on planning would cover the planning side but it goes beyond that. One can clearly see the difficulties that could arise from the referendum process, a public vote and so on.

I put another case: tomorrow we shall debate elected police commissioners. If you wanted to stand to be an elected police commissioner and were building up your campaign, it would not be difficult to orchestrate a series of referendums across the area—which might be a single county or an area bigger than that—in the run-up to the election. A local election does not have to be a straightforward party political contest. There are all sorts of ways in which the system could be used and manipulated, which underlines the need to be very careful about substituting plebiscitary democracy for representative local democracy. As the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said at some length and with some eloquence in our first debate on the Bill, the core principle in a series that he enunciated is that of support for local representative local democracy. There is danger even in non-binding referendums. There may then be pressure for binding referendums, although not from the Government, except in one particular. You can see that outside the major political parties, there could a build-up of pressure for binding referendums to be held on the Swiss or Californian models, nether of which are very persuasive as instruments of good government.

With the characteristic generosity that marks the political approach of the Opposition, we support most of the amendments proposed by the Liberal Democrats in this group. However, with respect to the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, and the noble Lord, Lord True, their proposed figure is too high and difficult to justify.

We shall probably just have time to move on to the next group of amendments. I note with some alarm one amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, which would reduce the percentage to 1 per cent and fix it at that, which strikes me as going much too far. We shall come to that this evening or on Thursday. We are not voting tonight but I invite the noble Lords to continue to convey to the Government their concerns about the way in which these proposals have been made. I hope the Government will take another look, particularly at the threshold figures if they are not prepared to depart from the principle of promoting referendums. I look forward to our debate on Report and to a response that reflects the views that have been expressed tonight.

[Lord Greaves]

Before the noble Lord sits down, will he comment on the view that in many cases, whether or not a referendum is mandatory, if it has been high-profile and hard-fought, it will be very difficult—certainly for a district council—to go against the decision? In practice, and in political reality, they will have to abide by it.

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[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I am not able to give a specific answer to that. All I can say is that the noble Baroness will be aware of the current situation in respect of parish polls and we will be consulting on the parish regime and, no doubt, consulting the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, in particular.

[Lord Greaves]

I have just a couple of points. When we get to Clause 56 on parish councils we will have a stand part debate. It would be extremely helpful if the Government had some fairly clear ideas on where they are going on parish councils because those are the questions we will be asking.

The Minister said that the Government thought that it was right that people in an area should have a say on whether or not there should be a referendum, but if there is a petition signed by 5 per cent of the people to have a referendum, why should that prevail over an alternative petition in the same area signed by 10 per cent or 20 per cent of people who do not want a referendum?