Localism Bill

Lord Tope Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tope]

My Lords, I, like the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, begin by congratulating the noble Baroness Lady Hanham on receiving the freedom of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I am not sure what privileges that confers upon her—she shakes her head rather sadly. Nevertheless it is a well-deserved honour. I also thank the Minister for the manner in which she introduced this Bill today. I welcome particularly her statement that the Government are still willing to listen and to try to address remaining concerns in the Bill where that is possible. That is certainly the approach that my noble friends and I will adopt and I hope it is one that will be shared on all sides of the House. To this end, it will be helpful if the Minister can agree today that any further amendments that the Government already have in mind will be introduced in Committee so that they can receive proper scrutiny and debate then and, if necessary, at later stages of the Bill.

As has been said, this is a huge Bill with many important and quite difficult provisions. I have half the time available to me that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, had, and he began by confessing that he was unable to address most of those provisions. My 10 Liberal Democrat colleagues who will speak later in this debate will certainly refer to many of them, notably those on housing and planning. If time had permitted today, I would have dealt with some of those in the early parts of the Bill, such as why some councils will have to wait three or four years—until after their next elections—to implement the governance changes they may wish to make. I would also have referred to the imposition of the EU fines and the many issues that are raised by the provisions on local referendums. Above all, I would have wanted to know how the imposition by the Secretary of State of unelected shadow mayors can possibly fit in a Bill entitled “Localism”.

Instead, as this is the Second Reading, I shall confine my remarks to the principles of localism. I declare an interest as an executive councillor in the London Borough of Sutton. I have now been a councillor there for 37 years and was a Member of Parliament for exactly half that time. I was initially in the other place for a short time before I was first elected as a councillor. Shortly after I became a councillor, when I still had slightly longer service as an MP than as a councillor, the Conservative leader on my council, who was also the Conservative leader on the then Association of Metropolitan Authorities, told me I would find that there were really only two parties—the central government party and the local government party. In the years since I have found that he was absolutely right. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, who has similar experience, agrees with me. I suspect we will find this many times during the progress of the Bill through your Lordships’ House.

If I must declare myself as a member of either of those parties, I am firmly in the local government party. However, it is not as simple as that. My commitment is not particularly to a system, or a level—I prefer the word “sphere”—of government; it is to local democracy, and to local government only as the best vehicle for delivering local democracy. I am the first to say that local government is not always very good at doing that. Indeed, some local councils can be as controlling and reluctant to share their power as any central Government. Therefore, I was delighted when I first learnt that the coalition Government intended to introduce a Bill that would give effect to my party’s long-held commitment to localism, or rather to local democracy. I must admit that the same commitment from our coalition partners does not have quite the same long pedigree, but blessed are the sinners who repent and we should welcome the zealousness of the converts.

However, too many statements and some actions by some Ministers have led me to wonder whether we share the same understanding of the word “localism”. Indeed, parts of the Bill lead me to the same conclusion. I looked up “localism” in my dictionary, which defines it as,

“a pronunciation, phrase, etc., peculiar to a particular locality”,

or “another word for provincialism”—another word I had never heard of. I suppose that is a little better than “subsidiarity”, which is not in my dictionary at all. I will not attempt a definition today, but it seems strange that we should have a Bill with a one-word title that clearly means very different things to different people, and parts of which seem to contradict a common understanding of its title.

To me, and I am sure to all my Liberal Democrat colleagues, it means local democracy and subsidiarity: decisions being taken as closely as possible by and with the people they affect. That includes the right to make the wrong decisions or, more accurately, decisions with which some of us, including and perhaps especially central government, may disagree. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches will judge the Bill by the extent to which it enables and enhances local democracy, and the extent to which it reduces or removes central control and interference.

Here it is important to understand that local democracy is not populism. It is not rule by the best organised, the most articulate, those who shout loudest or have the greatest vested interests; it is a system that allows all voices to be heard and listened to with equal respect, allows the decision-makers to be better informed when they make decisions and ensures that such decisions are made in the interests of the whole community. Above all, it is a system that ensures that the decision-makers are properly and effectively accountable to all the people affected by those decisions. We might even choose to call such a system “local government”. For localism to work it is not necessary for central government to like local government, still less to like all that it does, but if central government is genuinely committed to localism it has to trust local government, and to demonstrate that trust.

My noble friends and I look forward to working with the Minister to ensure that by the time this Bill leaves this House it is truly worthy of its title as the Localism Bill, a Bill of which we can all be proud.