Cumbria (Structural Changes) Order 2022

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Grand Committee

My simple question is: why this process? How did it come about? What consultations took place beyond those with the individual local authorities of Eden, South Lakeland and Barrow? Why was a similar process not followed to that used for the western half, which will be Cumberland? Will Cumberland itself now have too few councillors, as it is being reduced to 42, which is the number of the existing county council seats? I see the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, nodding. There has been a degree of confusion about this process and I would like further elucidation from my noble friend, if he can give me that in due course.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests in this matter. I was born in Carlisle and attended Carlisle Grammar School. I live in Cumbria now and have an interest on the present county council, as the councillor for Wigton.

I have three things to say at the start. First, I am delighted by what the Minister said about maintaining Carlisle’s city status. It means a lot to me. I remember, as a little boy in 1958, attending the 800th anniversary of the foundation of the city.

Secondly, I am glad to know that the lord-lieutenancy for Cumbria is being maintained; my wife, as deputy lord-lieutenant, will be very pleased by that. Thirdly, it is very good to have as a Minister someone with the great experience and success in local government of the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, dealing with these questions. I hope he might listen carefully to what I have to say about the proposal, which I would oppose as it stands, but I know that is not the way the House proceeds and I shall obviously not do that. But I will make the case for why the Government should take the remaining opportunity to pause and think a bit about what they are doing in the case of Cumbria.

My starting point is simple. I am a passionate supporter of unitary authorities, and have been for a long time, but the proposal for Cumbria, splitting it in two, does two things. First, it removes the strategic role that the county council presently plays; secondly, it divides in two the services that the county council currently provides. These services are vast by comparison with what the districts provide. The county council’s net revenue budget, excluding the schools grant, is of the order of £400 million a year. The six district councils all together are little tiddlers: their spending together is less than £100 million. The order is, in effect, cutting in two the most effective bit of local government in Cumbria.

The justification that this makes for more local government does not stand up to serious examination. The new unitary authority of Westmorland and Furness embraces both the Barrow shipyard and the remote Pennine communities 60 or 70 miles to the north of it. They are as different as heaven and hell. I shall not say which I think is which, but they are totally different. As for the new county of Cumberland, Penrith, to which the noble Lord, Lord Henley, referred, is torn out of the historic county of Cumberland. I always remember Willie Whitelaw affectionately describing his constituency of Penrith as being a place of slumbering calm—we probably need more of that in our lives. That is removed, and for Cumberland, there is my home city of Carlisle, together with what is largely post-industrial west Cumbria. My forecast is that that will be a rather uneasy partnership. Cumbria is a county of great diversity: great beauty mixed with shocking deprivation; a very proud history, with all the problems of modernity.

What I and the majority of my colleagues on the county council think the Government should have done was to go for a single, strategic authority but then allow for maximum devolution to towns, with their rural hinterlands, for local access to services and the capacity for genuinely local decision-making over genuinely local matters. My town council in Wigton should certainly have been expanded and given a greater role.

Given the decision taken, the county council—rightly, in my view—sought to challenge the Government’s plan through a judicial review. After a very detailed consideration in a judgment that took Mr Justice Fordham, who is very eminent in this field, an hour and three-quarters to deliver, he refused leave for a judicial review. It is important to emphasise, however, that this is not an endorsement of the Government’s plan; it is only a legal judgment that the Minister had not overstepped his powers in ignoring his own criteria in deciding on the current plan.

We are now put in a very difficult position in Cumbria as a result of this split. The Minister referred to savings estimated by Allerdale and Copeland— goodness how they could calculate them, because they know nothing about the main services—of between £19 million and £30 million a year. We were expecting much bigger savings from having a unitary authority—as much as £40 million or £50 million a year. The truth is that we need those savings to reinvest in what are badly overstretched services, and we now will not be able to do that. That overstretch is apparent in all the main services one looks at. Our children’s services are under great pressure. For the last few years, they have overspent their budget every year. For social care, we were forced to put in an extra £10 million last autumn simply to keep a creaking system going so that the hospitals in Cumbria would not be completely clogged up with people who could not be given care in the community. Of course, the consequence of that would have been even longer waiting lists for patients.

People complain about highway maintenance in Cumbria—potholes are a big issue; I am always lobbied about them—but we have no extra money to spend on that. Indeed, the Government have this year cut the highway maintenance grant by some £10 million.

The situation is serious. At the same time, whereas the creation of a single unitary authority would have been a relatively simple matter, splitting the services in two is highly complex. The existing councils, and I hope that the people who support this scheme are prepared to defend this, have already had to put aside some £18 million to spend on management consultants to work out how the new authority will work. I suggest that the Minister inquires about this; a lot of money is being spent on trying to work out how to divide the services we have.

Supporters of the plan argue that we are being ridiculously pessimistic. They say that the two new authorities can form a mayoral combined authority that will deal with strategic planning, can negotiate a growth deal with the Government and could run county-wide services that it does not make sense to split—that is the argument. However, the truth is that the Government currently do not, as I understand it, have any power to force a mayoral combined authority on Cumbria. It all depends on the decision of the new authorities as to whether they want one. From what I know and from what I gather, particularly from my Liberal Democrat friends in Westmorland and Furness, there is no enthusiasm for establishing such a combined authority. Therefore, I think this is a bit of a fantasy.

However, in the House of Commons, when John Stevenson, the Conservative MP for Carlisle, whom I like a lot, asked Secretary of State Gove what the position was, the Secretary of State implied that the Government could force a mayoral combined authority on the new councils. Can the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, clarify that very important point for us? I can send him chapter and verse on what was said in the House of Commons, and I would like to know what he thinks about what his boss said on that occasion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

No, you are landing them—keep going.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

Okay. I am trying to explain that there are serious risks in what is now planned. A pause could well be necessary. I do not see any problem with the Government revising their plans. What will happen if it becomes clear that the current timetable is not workable? The Government need to form a judgment on this quite quickly. I am not advocating this for any personal reason, but they could keep the county council going for longer than another year so that there would be more time to plan for the division of services, which would then have some prospect of stability.

In the light of their Levelling Up White Paper, which came after this proposal was made, the Government could think about keeping a single unitary authority in Cumbria but doing a deal with that council that it will have an elected mayor. I am not against elected mayors in principle; I am actually rather in favour of them. I think they have worked quite well in metropolitan areas. In the Levelling Up White Paper, if you are going to get maximum devolution of power, you have to have an elected mayor to achieve that. Why not put that proposal to Cumberland, to a united Cumbria, and see whether it would be acceptable?

I am very worried about what is happening, not from a party-political point of view, but simply from the point of view of how all this is going to work in practice. I hope that the Minister might take away what I have said and have a think about it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I am ashamed to say that in my time on this earth, I have not set foot in glorious Cumbria, so I have learned an awful lot. One thing that I will take away is that I must visit the place. I understand that it is very rural. It is quite interesting to note how the geography is such that there are natural divisions too. That was set out incredibly helpfully by my noble friend Lord Jopling.

I always enjoy the experiences that noble Lords bring to bear. I listened very carefully to the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. However, I am calculating, at 59 minutes and 38 seconds, and having had quite a late night the night before, when we are likely to finish these three statutory instruments. However, I will do my best to respond.

My understanding of the point around preserving the city status of Carlisle is that Cumbria simply did not ask for it, whereas North Yorkshire did. It is just a process of responding to the customer, rather than an intention not to do it. Therefore, the assurance is very sincere. We will produce whatever orders that we must. It has been written out, so we have that assurance that the process will go ahead irrespective of what we have set out in the order. It does not have to be done in the same way to get to the same end point. Noble Lords have had my assurance at the Dispatch Box. It is clear that the councils want that, so it is not a problem.

I have some experience in delivering council services, so I will respond directly to the central point made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. Philosophically I agree with him that where possible you build bridges rather than walls, and that with services such as adult social care, which is typically about a third of a council’s budget, you had better not split the overhead of commissioning the service, but it is very possible. For instance, when I was the leader of the council in Hammersmith and Fulham we had a voluntary arrangement with neighbouring councils to bring together the commissioning of adult social care across three London boroughs, but we had very different entry criteria into the social care system. You could save on the overhead by collaborating with other councils but have very different criteria. I am very proud that my council had the best entry criteria into the social care system, extending right through to people in greater moderate need, which is very rare in local government these days, particularly with the increasingly ageing population. Therefore, you can do both if you want to. That requires local leadership, above all, but there is nothing in this structure, east/west, that would stop that sort of arrangement taking place as a possible outcome, where you can create two different entry points but share the overhead of the delivery of the service.

I really appreciated the point made by my noble friend Lord Jopling. The reality is that the units of local government, if we think strategically, become awfully large. A stat that is not in my speaking notes but which really interests me is that the average unit of local government in Switzerland is 3,733. In the United States it is 8,333. In Germany, it is 7,454. In the United Kingdom, it is 155,000. Therefore, I have great sympathy with the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, that we must ensure that we do not forget the tiers, the town and parish councils, and their contributions to their local areas, particularly more rural areas as opposed to cities. There is no intention of changing that structure from this order. I give that reassurance. It is about ensuring that the funding flows down through local government to the lowest tier. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not, but we are not changing that structure in this order. I note the important contribution that parish and town councillors make to their local area.

I will respond directly to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, who speaks with great experience of Cumbria—I have admitted my own failings in that regard. I understand that the criterion is not about a majority: it is whether there is a good level of support. In this case, two proposals had a good level of support. It is not a referendum, where you win if you get more votes. That is essentially the answer to that question. In the round, there are three criteria and then you form a judgment. I tried to set that out as best I could in my speech. Any Government will take those three points and form a view. There are pluses and minuses for different routes, and the Secretary of State took a decision in the round on the three criteria that I set out in my speech.

I was worried by some of the comments about elections, but I assure noble Lords—and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, in particular—that elections to the new unitary authorities will take place as scheduled in May 2022. The councils will be in shadow form until they take on their new, full powers on 1 April 2023, and they will serve until May 2027. We are on track to deliver that. In response to my noble friend Lord Henley and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, the order provides for the returning officers for the May 2022 elections, so we can be confident about the administration of those elections. The May elections will go ahead; we are on track for that. That is very important, given that, presumably, candidates are out there pounding the streets already.

My noble friend Lord Henley asked why 65 and why the wards are as they are. The warding arrangements are a local choice, and councils in both areas made their choices. It has been very much a bottom-up process. These arrangements are for the 2022 elections only. As I know from my experience in local authorities, the Electoral Commission will review ward boundaries and so forth, and then there will be representations, but this has been very much a bottom-up process.

I now have a series of attempts to respond to the very many points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. Candidly, I am unlikely to succeed in answering every question. If he wants to approach me afterwards, I will do my best to get a full response.

I have addressed the central issue, which is that you can split into two councils but not necessarily split services. It is also fair to say that many of the services are area-based and they may be a smaller part of the budget. Sometimes it is better to recognise that fact. Universal services are often organised on area lines, and so forth; it depends on the service areas of the council.

The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, invited me to comment on something said in the other place by my current boss, rather than my previous one. We do not have that interpretation when he said the word “yes”, which has been interpreted as there being great support for a particular person, as opposed to imposing mayors on a particular place. It is all down to interpretation. Of course, you cannot impose a mayor on a particular area, but yes, there is support for a particular candidate—if there were a mayor.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

Since this has caused quite a lot of local confusion, I ask that the Minister writes a letter to that effect explaining what Secretary of State Gove meant.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I think I have my “get out of jail free” card. I will write a very careful note responding to the point raised on the debate in the other place and ensure that I lay a copy in the Library.

I move on to a topic that I know a little bit better. I have spent just up to two years as Fire Minister now, which is actually quite a long time to survive as a Fire Minister for England, which includes Cumbria. We are about to launch a White Paper looking at reforming fire and rescue services. I assure people that we have thought very carefully about governance models that enable a move from the scrutiny-based arrangements we have typically seen to a more executive-based arrangement. That provides a county council model, as well as a PCC and mayoral model where appropriate. You can get single-person leadership and accountability through different governance models.

The PCC is currently consulting on fire going to the PCC. He needs to consult. Local people will have their say on that. Time will tell where we end up there, but that is the status at this time. We recognise the need to continue investing in our fire and rescue services to ensure that response times are effective and that we continue to see the downward trend in fires, as well as investment in capability, because they do so much more than that as a fire and rescue service, dealing with flooding and other events of considerable concern to the people of Cumbria.

I move on to the ceremonial points raised by my noble friend Lord Jopling. Everyone seems to have a special interest in the lord-lieutenancy, or the deputy lord-lieutenancy, whether current or past. We leave that alone with this order, so the current arrangements remain as they are. It is a matter for the Crown if it wishes to change the arrangements to reflect the new east/west divide. I am delighted that one of the benefits is to reinstate the proud status of Westmorland, as my noble friend raised. That is a matter for the Crown rather than the state, if you like, but it could come to pass. This order does not push that one way or the other.

Just for completeness—this will be my last point—in response to my noble friend Lord Jopling, the Kendal mayor is the mayor of Kendal Town Council. There will be no change to this town council or any other existing town council, as I said in response to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley.

This order seeks to respond to the local area. I say to people of clear Cumbrian heritage, who have served the people of Cumbria, that in essence the order will largely restore a structure that local people will recognise, which will provide much benefit and, I hope, stand the test of time.