Sustainable Communities Bill

I want to make some progress, as other Members want to speak. It is easy to identify the problems to which I have alluded; the key thing is how to tackle them. The Bill offers an opportunity to do that by promoting participation from the whole community and giving communities responsibility for identifying the problems. As Members have already pointed out, the Bill places on communities the burden of responsibility to take action. Fundamentally, it provides greater accountability in a way that extends beyond the remit of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill, as I said earlier. The Bill encourages greater participation across the whole spectrum of the community, including those from the most deprived wards, which is my experience from such involvement in my constituency. The Bill is bottom-up. We have only to see the number of people turning up at the public meetings to realise that it is not a top-down Bill. If it was, it would not have provoked so much interest across the country and received the support of so many organisations. The public meetings have been well attended not just across a range of different areas, including deprived areas, but by community groups. For example, there is an active member of a local residents association in one of the most isolated and deprived parts of my constituency who would refuse to consider becoming a councillor, but who is a loud voice for the community that she lives in and the people whose views she feels that she is able to represent. We are not saying that there is not participation at the moment, but the proposals provide a way of formalising that and allowing best practice to be shared. In my constituency, there is an urban regeneration company called CPR Regeneration. It has done lots of excellent consultation with local communities on plans, but the problem is that it is seen as separate from the other processes that are going on in the community and there is no feedback. Probably it errs on the consultative side, rather than the participatory side. So, although there is brilliant evidence of best practice that can be taken forward, there are still real ways in which that can be extended. A key issue is that the Bill would mean that the budget—much of which is not funded by local government—and how it relates to the rest of local spending would be much more transparent. That brings me to what I see as the most important point of accountability: the fact that the Bill seeks to provide greater transparency in Government spending in any local area. The regeneration company that I referred to earlier is spending millions of pounds in the area. That is excellent and it is helping to regenerate the area, but there is no clear sense of how that relates not only to other local government spending in the area, but to wider national Government spending. There is no sense of relative priorities. People have no opportunity to ask, ““If I were given the choice to order my priorities, would I put these particular issues of regeneration above other things?”” That adds to the sense of powerlessness. In Cornwall, there are more than 100 area-based initiatives—they are directly funded Government initiatives—many of which will have their own secretarial support, which will be replicated time and again all over the constituency. The initiatives are targeted like a laser on specific issues, so it is difficult to see what they are trying to achieve in the ranking of local community priorities, although obviously a lot of the intentions are good. I will give an example. Redruth is a deprived town in my constituency. I had a meeting with the chamber of commerce two weeks ago. Over the past six months, there has been a huge amount of work. I am not sure whether that is through the market and coastal towns initiative or a local heritage scheme. There has been massive refurbishment of the car park and the replacement of all the paving stones with granite, at the cost of tens of thousands of pounds, in order to beautify the area. In itself, that is not a bad thing. Redruth is a former mining town and it is not a pretty coastal town, so perhaps that will help. There is a problem, however. The town does not have any multiples. Virtually all the retail outlets in the town centre are independent traders. In the past six months, five shops have closed. So, we have a town centre that has a refurbished car park and granite paving slabs, but, unfortunately, fewer and fewer shops. I am sure that that issue is replicated across the country. If they had had the opportunity, the people in that community might have said, ““We’d like to see some support going into our local shops so that when people come to the town they will visit the shops.”” We know that people do not come to visit nice pavements. The pavements might make their visit more pleasant when they get there, but, if there are no shops, people are not going to visit the town in the first place. All that money is being spent and the chamber of commerce, a key community group, has no opportunity to raise those concerns. Priorities are being misdirected, even if that is well intentioned. I am sure that there are examples of that all over the country. To conclude, the Bill is about empowering local communities and complementing and extending the White Paper. It is about supporting communities that we all feel passionately about, in terms of the environment, social exclusion and the economy. It makes the most of what communities already do. There are hundreds of thousands of people who are passionate about their communities and who want to see services restored and extended, but they have no opportunity to have their voices heard. That is what the Bill is about. If the Government are serious about extending democratic accountability, I hope that they will support the Bill today, in broad terms at least. I hope that they will not be minded to halt its progress and will allow it to go into Committee.