Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

Indeed, and I shall deal with this point in a little more detail in a moment. Perhaps both the hon. Gentleman and I should declare an interest, in that both our wives happen to be members of the county council. We both disagree with the view that the county leadership have been putting forward. [Interruption.] We both agree with our wives about this issue; indeed, all four of us agree with each other. In fact, all four of the county’s Members of Parliament agree on this issue, as I shall shortly explain. The districts put together a proposal for two unitary authorities which is an impressive feat of consensus. What really struck me was the fact that they had recognised that different issues would confront the two authorities. The more urban of the two authorities, they said, would primarily face issues such as health inequality, low educational attainment, access to employment, crime and disorder, and synergy with the wider city region based in Newcastle, whereas the dominant issues for the more rural authority would be access to services, market town sustainability, tourism and economic diversification, affordable housing, transport and the condition of the highways. There were different strings of issues, from which I have merely cited some examples. That was a revealing analysis. We are talking about two different areas that face rather different problems. They obviously have some problems in common with other parts of the country, but there are some striking differences. The financial calculations, which are notoriously unreliable in any local government reorganisation proposal, did not show huge differences between what could be achieved by having two authorities and by having one. I turn to the point that the hon. Member for Blyth Valley so vividly portrayed. When the county leaders put their single-council plan to the council, they realised in the end that they could not win—that they simply did not have the votes—although extremely strong letters had been sent to Labour councillors, saying that if they did not toe the line they would be expelled, and would not be allowed to stand in the district council elections later this year. That was a pretty serious threat, which they nevertheless continued to withstand. I should explain that in the meantime, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) had written to Conservatives in the area, saying that they should not support any change at all, although quite a number of them were by that time firmly committed to the two-council option. The council’s Labour leadership realised that they were not going to get their proposal through, so at the very last minute a revised motion—it was not on the agenda paper; councillors did not have it beforehand—was produced, containing the following wonderful words:"““Council…Endorse the submission of a single unitary proposal in the context of county support for the submission of both a single unitary by the County Council and two unitary councils by the district councils.””" In other words, they could take their pick. As the county leader said at the meeting, the Government are going to decide which one to have, anyway. So the council leadership could not get their own proposal through their own council. The bid was very complex, involving adding 22 neighbourhood structures. One factor that influenced a lot of people was the county’s failure to deliver for rural areas. Opinion probably swung even more behind the two-authority solution when it was realised that the county had an institutional inability to cope with some of the rural problems. The Minister for Schools has taken a close interest in a very vivid example of such problems, and he has recognised that further work needs to be done. In trying to deal with school transport issues, the county ended up imposing a very high charge for school transport for over-16s. It decided to charge £360 per child aged over 16 for transport to school in the rural areas of the county. That does not happen in Cumbria. The council also withdrew train passes from students from Berwick who were travelling to college in Newcastle and told them to go on the bus, which took one and three quarter hours. The usage of the bus has fallen to five people, because it is such an impossible way to travel to college. That is one example of how the decision-making structure of the county did not enable the rural aspects to be considered. Another example is the executive, which does not have a single member from either the Alnwick district or the Berwick borough, and has only one from Tynedale. That reflects the partisan differences between the different areas, but those differences would be writ large in a single unitary authority. Whichever part of the authority managed to gain control of the executive, the rest would feel very left out. The two-council alternative is more attractive and more popular.