City-to-city Diplomacy

Viscount Falkland Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Viscount Falkland (CB)]

My Lords, I confess that I am somewhat daunted by the Question although I have been asked to talk about the twinning of towns and cities. Therefore, I will not talk about the actual Question but about twinning. Indeed, a noble Lord virtually said that what we are discussing is “twinning plus”.

I have always been fascinated by twinning although I did not know very much about it. When I was asked to speak in this debate, I rang a number of councils. Given the time constraint in this debate, I shall discuss only three of them. These three councils are very different but have in common the fact that their communities decide the way in which they operate their twinning systems with towns in different countries, which I like. I am sure that the noble Earl would have no difficulty answering questions on this topic but anyone who is vaguely Eurosceptic might become more so on hearing his speech. However, I obviously need to do a lot more homework on that.

The twinning system is withering on the vine. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, gave various reasons for that but did not refer to age. People are getting older. Two local authorities told me that they had built up wonderful relationships over many years. For example, Torquay has a curious relationship with Hamelin, or Hameln as it is known, which you would not expect. Those who have read the Grimms’ stories will know the story about the pied piper and the rats. Torquay has built up a very strong relationship with Hamelin in relation to a number of issues, including life saving, which I thought was very strange. Germans from Hamelin come over every year and discuss life-saving issues with people in Torbay, which has a lifeboat service. When I asked why the citizens of Hamelin would be interested in that, I was told that the Weser is a very deep river. Noble Lords will remember the fate of the rats in the fairy story. The charming thing about twinning is that you learn such interesting and varied facts.

Barnet is an interesting example in this regard. It has a budget for this work, which it does not think is big enough. However, it wishes that it had no budget at all because most of its time is taken up dealing with freedom of information requests, which can be asked by all kinds of cranks and lunatics. This is the phenomenon of the unexpected effects that flow from seemingly perfectly worthy legislation. These requests take up all that authority’s time. People want to know how much of the relevant budget is being spent, and on what. It emerged that the cost of this work for each taxpayer in Barnet was 0.01 of 0.01p. We are in a ridiculous situation in this country. We should not impose on people all kinds of strange democratic things which I hardly understand, although I suppose that I am a democrat. Basically, we have got this right. It just needs to be brought up to date and changed as new pressures emerge.

The other council I contacted was Basingstoke, which is closest to the example given by the noble Earl as it is working on projects as they come up. I have talked to a number of people involved in this issue, including volunteers who were enthusiastic, polite and pleased that I was inquiring about it. Therefore, I put in a request that we leave the situation as it is and forget “twinning plus” for a while.