Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I am grateful to the Minister for giving me the opportunity to clarify that. It is very much centralised at borough level. What has been drafted for the programme of expenditure is driven by the service professionals, whether they are in statutory organisations or the borough itself. The complaint from members of my neighbourhood renewal panel is that what was working well, and what empowered the local community to be very responsive to things that came out of the community at a local level, has been diminished and has almost disappeared. That is to the detriment of the programme. Another part of the Bill that I very much welcome is the intention to expand the support and involvement of the third sector. When we do that, and in particular when we talk about introducing local parishes in London, we need to guard against those communities that have readily available to them the capacity to take advantage of those powers at the expense of those communities that are more disadvantaged and therefore less likely and less able to do so. In saying that, not only do local councillors need to play their role, but we as MPs need to play a role, too. Often when we draft this type of legislation, we overlook our role as champions within our communities. I have been involved in setting up local community forums in my constituency, and I am currently involved in trying to set up a charitable trust involving local residents. One of the problems that we are coming up against is that we already have an existing centre that is used by young people. The charity is funded by a trust, held by a bank, and it had a capital sum invested for it. Unfortunately, as a result of the dotcom collapse, some of that capital sum disappeared. The income is now reduced and the fall means that the charity has drawn on the lump sum that it invested, making its income even lower. It has been a vicious circle. None the less, the charity is an important voluntary organisation within my constituency and it is having serious problems in identifying a source to fund the core activities of a charitable trust. It has a number of irons in the fire with regard to applying for grants, but it does not have a means to access resources readily. It needs resources that can be underwritten for three years or more to give it sustainability and the chance to plan ahead to perform its core functions. That is a big problem. The forthcoming taskforce report into the third sector must address the problem of core funding for the third sector to ensure that such bodies can stand up and play their role in delivering some of the strategies that the Government and the funding bodies want an organisation that engages with young people in the community to deliver. If those organisations fold because of a lack of funding for their core functions, the opportunity is lost to engage with them and with the use of their resources and links within the community. That is an essential part of ensuring that we have a vibrant and effective third sector. I want briefly to cover one or two other things. Part of the Bill deals with the future of local government boundary review procedures. My experience when we had the local government boundary review in Greenwich was that the whole process was unsatisfactory. The local government boundary commission was not accountable to the local community. It held no public inquiry to conclude its initial findings and it split many well-established and well-understood local community boundaries across not only council wards but, inevitably, parliamentary seats, because its findings were the building blocks for the future parliamentary review. I say that having benefited slightly from the parliamentary boundary review. I do not want to give the Minister the impression that this is sour grapes. In fact the difference is marginal, so it is neither here nor there. The Cator estate in Blackheath is run by its own trust, currently served by two wards and in future to be served by two Members of Parliament. None of the decisions made any sense, but the commission committed itself at an early stage to delivering a set of ward boundaries providing for a number within 1 per cent. of the average number per ward if the population is divided by the number of wards. By setting itself that standard it drove a coach and horses through any idea of local accountability, local knowledge and local communities. If we are to engage with local communities and encourage people to participate in elections, we must ensure that they feel some affinity with the boundaries of the areas that are being represented. In Greenwich, we underwent the painful exercise of moving from two-member and one-member wards where we had 62 councillors to three-member wards with 51 councillors. In the process we made the wards too big. They are unwieldy and unrepresentative, and parts of communities are lumped together in a ward while half a mile away there is another part of another community, although there was a much more sensible solution to the problem in the locality. The Bill suggests a system of directly elected mayors, leaders or executives. I believe that there have been 35 referendums on mayors, and that on 23 occasions the proposal was rejected. If we value elections and putting information before the electorate, allowing them to make up their own minds, we should recognise that communities that have been given that choice want to exercise it; but the Bill suggests that we take the choice away, and allow no referendums before introducing mayors. The Minister looks puzzled; if I am wrong he can correct me, but I believe that if a local authority decides that it wants a directly elected mayor, it should be able to put the proposal to members of the local community in a referendum so that they can decide. Heaven help them if they are stupid enough to vote in favour of it, but that will be a matter for the community. In any event, the proposal should be put to the community in the form of a reasoned argument. It has been said that we have diminished the role of local councillors by electing executives. I am passionately in favour of the committee structure, because when we were on committees as local government councillors we had the opportunity to scrutinise the officers who were charged with responsibility for delivering services. At present, scrutiny means scrutiny of a member elected to an executive rather than scrutiny of the officers. What used to happen was that a group of members with broad knowledge of, say, social services in an area could interrogate the officers charged with delivering those services.