Sustainable Communities Bill

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, on bringing forward the Bill for consideration today, and I am pleased that the debate on this important legislation is being kicked off by two Peers from the beautiful county of Suffolk, which has the sort of communities that would benefit enormously from these provisions. I also congratulate the Local Works campaign on the sterling job that is has done not only on producing the legislation but on the campaign that led up to it. When I first read the Bill I was concerned that it might be rather technocratic and wondered whether people in communities would get behind it and understand what we are seeking to achieve. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of local meetings across the country, the attendance at the rally here and the wide range of interest groups that have put their weight behind the Bill. I am glad that my initial misgivings were proved wrong. We on these Benches certainly give the Bill our wholehearted support. The fact that there are sometimes successful campaigns against the closure or the opening of a supermarket should not cloud the fact that one of the fundamental problems facing society is a sense of powerlessness. People feel that decisions about their lives are taken in a way that they do not understand or have no opportunity to influence. People feel a huge sense of frustration when time and again they come up against a system that provides no accountability or recourse and when they cannot voice their concerns with confidence that someone will listen and take them on board. We support the Bill because it puts people first and gives them a bigger say in what happens. It does so in three ways. First, it helps to identify and tackle community decline, promoting greater social, economic and environmental sustainability in communities. Secondly, it actively encourages participation by communities in the decisions affecting them. Finally, it provides accountability in areas where there has previously not been enough democratic accountability. I particularly welcome the fact that the Bill helps to provide a framework within which groups that do not always have the strongest voice can make their voices heard. Too often it is a minority of very loud people in a community who get their way, rather than the majority, who find it difficult to fight their way through the system. The Bill’s potential merit is its holistic approach to community involvement. Closures of schools, post offices and family farms are part of an interrelated package. Campaigns against the loss of services such as a village school, for example, are often not formed exclusively of the immediate beneficiaries of the service. Even when people do not have children in the local primary school, it is evident that if the demographics of the area change, then the shop could close, public transport could be decreased and the economy could change. All such changes have a knock-on effect. A Bill that actively promotes participation by the whole community by helping them to identify problems and to do something about them can be only welcomed. The Bill’s important aspect, particularly as it relates to the local government Bill going through your Lordships’ House at the moment, is that it puts the duty on central government to help local areas, whereas the local government Bill is very much about how local councils have to adhere to the policies and practices put forward by central government. There is a tendency among central governments of all kinds to adhere to one-size-fits-all and not always to understand that, although there are times when a policy may well have the effect which they desire in one area, the law of unintended consequences will always kicks in and result in things going badly wrong somewhere else. Local spending reports are one of the most important parts of the Bill . At present there is no sense of relative priorities in areas—funding streams are split up and managed in different ways; some are more or less accountable. People very rarely have the chance to say, ““What would my priorities be for my area? If I could put all this together and think about how the money is spent, how would I do it?””. If the information in the local spending reports helps to provide them with the information to do that, that can only be welcomed. The Bill is about empowering local communities and complementing and extending what the Government were intending to do in their White Paper. It is about supporting communities. Communities are something that we all feel passionately about, whether in terms of the environment, social exclusion or the economy. There are hundreds and thousands of people who are passionate about their communities and who want their services restored and extended, but they have not had a chance to have their voices heard. That is what the Bill is about and that is why we shall support it from these Benches.