Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I support my noble friend Lady Hamwee in her attempt to introduce more flexibility and choice in the models of governance available to local authorities. I want to make a number of points. The experience of the last few years has shown no particular appetite among the public for the elected mayoral model, which suggests that the general public are wary of the prospect of the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. The public are being rather wiser than the Government. Certainly until now the majority of referendums held on the mayoral model have resulted in no support for a mayor. There are some practical difficulties, which are not insurmountable, but about which the Government need to think carefully before going too far down the road of forcing local authorities to choose the mayoral model. There is a real possibility that in many areas, at the time of election, there might be a particularly contentious local issue—it might be not even council related, but something like a hospital closure. A mayor might get elected on the back of a single-issue campaign. There is nothing wrong with that, except that under this model that person will then have complete control of the local authority, with a budget of many millions of pounds, and yet might well have had almost nothing at all to say about other council services. Nor is there any evidence of a great groundswell of support for mayors once the referendum has decided that there will be a mayor. My noble friend Lord Greaves, speaking to an earlier amendment, referred to the situation in Torbay. There the turnout for the mayoral election was 24 per cent, and there were 14 candidates. The level of popular support for the winning candidate—for the person who exercises all this executive authority in that area—was very low indeed. The Government need to understand that someone is not a strong leader because they or the Government say that they are a strong leader; they are a strong leader partly because of the way in which they govern in their area, but also partly because they have a level of popular support. With the low turnout and all the problems that we have heard about from my noble friend Lord Greaves about how the supplementary vote system works, there is a real problem for people identifying with the mayor. I urge the Government not to get too carried away with the London example, because London is not typical. Around the country, there are few figures as prominent and well known as Ken Livingstone is here. The political realities and the cultures of local authorities vary enormously across the country and reflect the history of the area. A wider range of leadership models enables councils to choose a model that better suits their culture, ethos and tradition. Another practical difficulty worries me, to which I hope the Government have given some thought. Under the old committee system in particular, people rose through the ranks, in effect. They chaired sub-committees and then they chaired major committees or held cabinet positions. All those jobs provided testing grounds for them where they learnt their craft and where colleagues and the public could decide whether or not they were suitable people. Under the new system it is difficult to see where the mayors of tomorrow will come from. Where will they get their experience when there are no other executive positions on offer? I strongly support my noble friend Lady Hamwee in saying that there is no evidence from past performance that the leadership models impact directly on the quality of local government produced. In recent years, central government has thrown a raft of inspection regimes at local government, all of which have shown an improvement across the board, with no evidence to link that to the style of governance. I could be cruel and point out that the governance model chosen for Stoke-on-Trent’s council resulted in its performance plummeting. I support the amendment and urge the Government, if they really want to be taken seriously on devolution, to give local authorities more choice over the single most important issue facing them—their style of governance. If the Government are not prepared to let go and give local government that choice, I am afraid that all their words on devolution will be seen as meaningless rhetoric.