Local Government White Paper

My Lords, the key words in the Statement which the Minister has kindly repeated are ““strong direction nationally””. There are many words suggesting this is about devolution and decentralisation but I think that most of the proposals—although there are some useful relatively minor things—are about greater central direction; they are authoritarian, centralist and will lead to greater uniformity. I am a member of a borough council in Lancashire. What got me laughing about the chart on page 37 is that it sets out what any good councillor has been doing almost every day of their life for the entire time they have been on a council—in my case for much of the past 35 years—and I am not quite clear why it needs legislation to tell councillors how to take up issues on behalf of their residents. I shall focus on the emphasis in the White Paper on local area agreements which, from the perspective of a district councillor in the very large county of Lancashire, are neither local nor agreements; they are, very substantially, imposed from the centre. The negotiations to which the Secretary of State referred earlier in the House of Commons are very one sided. They are conducted on the basis of, ““Do this; do it this way and you will get the money. Don’t do this; don’t do it this way and you won’t get the money””. A very large county such as Lancashire runs the risk that if you start including matters such as housing, leisure and so on in local area agreements, you end up with a uniform policy—a one size fits all—for a hugely diverse county, from the Fylde coast, to north Lancashire, to central Lancashire and Preston, to the east Lancashire towns and all the rural areas. There are many such counties where local area agreements are a means by which central government impose their policies, their targets and their wishes on local people. I do not see much in the White Paper about the right to be different—not the right to be different because needs are different but because different places have similar problems, different solutions are surely relevant. If local people democratically want different solutions, surely that is what local democracy is about. Does the Minister agree that what is in the White Paper militates against that kind of local democratic diversity?