Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 204CF: 204CF: Clause 89, page 59, line 12, leave out subsection (7) The noble Lord said: We start again. Amendment No. 204CF refers to the part of the Bill that is about parish reviews, the constitution of new parishes, existing parishes under review, and so on. The first amendments in the group are fairly minor, but they nevertheless will be of interest to people involved in their local parishes. Amendment No. 204CF challenges the suggestion in Clause 89 that a review must make recommendations in relation to new styles. Members of the Committee will remember from our debates last week that the new styles will make it possible for a parish council to be called a community council, neighbourhood council or village council instead of a parish council. It is not clear to me why a review that is about the existence of parishes, the areas that they cover, the grouping of parishes and the possible abolition of parishes should make recommendations about the styles. Surely, that should be left to the individual parishes once they are set up to make their own decisions. If we believe in devolution, that is the kind of decision that should rest at parish level; and for all existing parishes it will be taken at parish level. It is not at all clear why a new style should be imposed on a parish by the district council as part of a review. Amendment No. 204CG is about a parish name change, and Amendment No. 204CH is about whether there should be a parish council. Again, it is not clear why those have to be the subject of recommendations in the parish review, but they clearly may be, and they may be an important part of the parish review. If there are no proposals for new councils as part of that review, and it is simply a matter of boundaries, and if there are no proposals for a parish name change, it is not clear why the review should waste everyone’s time in considering it and possibly stirring up arguments where otherwise they would not exist. Amendments Nos. 204CQ and 204CR are slightly more substantive. They are about the criteria that a parish review must take into consideration in deciding whether the parish should be divided into wards—in other words, have more than one electoral area—or whether it should be elected as a whole, as many smaller parishes are. At page 62 of the Bill, a number of criteria are set out that must be considered. They relate, for instance, to the number and distribution of local government electors for the parish; whether community links make it desirable that that part of the parish should be separately represented; the size and boundaries of the wards and the number of councillors to be elected; the number of local government electors and likely changes to that; and easily identifiable boundaries and local ties. In Amendment No. 204CQ, I propose that in each case an additional criterion should be whether the parish is divided into wards for elections to a principal council. In most cases, that would be the district council. Some parishes might be big enough to have two or three district council wards, or perhaps even more, and it is an important criterion in deciding whether the parish should be divided. In the interest of convenience and people understanding the local electoral system, it is sensible that parish wards should, where possible, be based on district council wards. It may be that in some cases the district council ward is big and may form two parish wards. However, that does not alter the principle that it would not be sensible for a parish divided into district council wards to ignore those divisions and to have different wards or to elect at large. That important consideration should be included in the Bill. Amendment No. 204CS relates to the circumstances in which a district council can ignore the review. I am not sure that this is the right place for this amendment and I probably should have taken out some earlier words. Its purpose is simply to probe the circumstances in which a district council, having conducted a parish review, can ignore it. The implication would be that if a parish review was taking place, the district was going to carry it out. Would the district simply be able to ignore it or make changes in any way that it wanted? Would the district have to give reasons and what would those reasons be? Amendment No. 204CV, the last in the group, is to probe the statement of intent on how restrictive the Electoral Commission advice on parish reviews, ward boundaries and the number of parish councillors should be. Is it intended that this will be done on some sort of sliding scale, whereby if there were a population of so and so, there would be so many councillors, and so on? Or will there be reasonable flexibility and scope for local choice? For example, a parish with 5,000 electors might want considerably more councillors if it consisted of a number of villages in a far-flung rural area—or even a far-flung rural area without villages—than if it was a compact town. Will there be adequate scope for local choice? How restricted is it intended that the Electoral Commission advice should be? I beg to move