Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I tabled objections to Clauses 2 and 3 stand part in the belief that we needed a short debate about general issues in the restructuring proposals. It is clear that the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, has taken advantage of her amendment—I did not understand what it meant specifically—to initiate such a debate now. I shall not, therefore, pursue the stand part discussion later; which might be helpful to the Committee, as long as I can have my tuppenceworth now. I should qualify and expand my declaration of interest on the previous amendment. I said that I was a member of Pendle Council; I should remind the House that Burnley and Pendle together put forward an excellent bid for a unitary authority but the Government did not approve it. This was not because of the quality of the bid but because of the problem with the rest of Lancashire. If some authorities within Lancashire were to escape the clutches of the county council, what would happen to the rest? It is absolutely clear that that is why the decision was made. This raises further issues to which I shall come in a minute. My first point concerns the way in which this whole exercise has pre-empted the passing of the legislation. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, referred to this in moving the amendment, as did my noble friend Lady Hamwee. It is a scandal that this should have happened. Without going back too far, I can remember times in the past—perhaps 25 or 30 years ago—when the Government were trying to increase council house rents, for example, and were telling local authorities to put them up before the legislation had gone through Parliament. That was a great scandalous issue at the time and some authorities said that they would not do it. Nowadays, the Government announce what they are going to do regardless of the legislation, and everyone lies down and does it. The whole culture has changed. But it is still wrong and should not have happened. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said, the way in which it has happened has increased the difficulties and caused more confusion. My second point relates to the timescale. Some authorities, knowing that this might be coming up, had been planning for a long time. However, a timescale of effectively no more than about two months—if you take out the Christmas break—in which to decide whether to put in a bid and to carry out the detailed work necessary behind it was, frankly, ridiculous. It was an absolute shambles. It would have been perfectly easy for the Government to have announced in last September or October that they were going to consider bids, to get the legislation through and to do it. They may say that that would have increased the uncertainty, but at least it would have given people more time to plan, to put in good bids and to talk to other people; it would have given the authorities in a county time to talk to each other and to try to find a consensus, instead of fighting the pitched battles which are taking place in some areas. The third point, as raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, is that the Government have no strategic view about unitary authorities. They started off with a strategic view and said that unitary authorities were good—just as the previous Government did with the changes from the 1992 Act—but, as time has gone on, it has been watered down. I think there were 25 bids originally, 16 were shortlisted and we are told that about eight might be approved. We shall wait and see. Is unitary government the best system or not? Is there a general presumption that the two-tier system has had its day? I think that the two-tier system set up under the Local Government Act 1972 worked very well in many counties for quite a long time, but in much of the country it is no longer working well for all kinds of reasons that I will not go into now. It is certainly not working well in Lancashire. A strategic view across England really is needed. If the Government think that this round under the Bill will close the issue down, they are wrong. It will not close the issue down at all; all it will do is put it off for another five or 10 years until it is raised once more and then we will have to go through the whole thing again. Certainly, in a county such as Lancashire, the present situation is frankly not tenable. It certainly will not be tenable under local area agreements and things will have to change. The uncertainty has not been removed; it is there all the time. It has been there now for the past 10 years, it is still there and it will remain until it is properly resolved. I agree that we are talking about functions rather than structures but we are also talking about communities. It seems that some of the bids being considered in terms of communities are far too large for the geographical area of the unitaries. I am not suggesting that in some cases counties will not make good unitaries. In some of the more compact counties where the districts are traditionally weak—places such as Shropshire or even Cornwall, which is not very compact but has a real sense of community—the unitary model might work. But would it work in North Yorkshire, which extends from the North Sea coast at Scarborough and Filey to within a few miles of Morecambe on the west coast, takes in two national parks and a vast tract of the north of England? The idea that North Yorkshire County Council without districts would be a satisfactory local authority redefines what is meant by local authorities and local government. The fact that that such an idea is being taken seriously indicates a serious flaw in the system. There is no strategic view. What is the ideal size for a unitary? We are being told that some bids were not really big enough, yet they are bigger than some of the existing unitaries; for example, in Lancashire and the north-east. Are we looking for compact unitaries such as Blackpool or Blackburn, or are we looking for great big sprawling counties such as North Yorkshire or Cumbria? There is no overall strategic view. I do not think a satisfactory solution can be found until a decision is made. I may not agree with that decision but at least one has to be made as to whether we are looking for compact authorities on perhaps the metropolitan borough model, for which I would be looking, or something much bigger. The present proposals are a mishmash. They do not really make any revolutionary change to local government; they do not make much change at all; they involve change in just a few parts of the country. Even within the present proposals—we have Exeter, Norwich, and Ipswich on the one hand and North Yorkshire, Cumbria and a unitary Somerset on the other—there seems to be no idea of what it is we are looking for in terms of local government. I would be very happy if the Government withdrew this part of the Bill even though it would upset some of the people who are well on the road towards unitary status and cause real problems in those areas. Whatever happens with this, it is not going to go away; it will come back and if we are preserved long enough we will all be here discussing the same thing in a few years’ time.