Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I am grateful for the Minister’s assurance that he will try to do that. We will be interested to see which authorities he comes up with, because we do not think that many would fit into this. We shall be fascinated to see the list and, if there are some authorities doing this, we will be interested to talk to their members to see exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it. On the list of connected authorities, the Minister suggested that there would be no real problem in their providing information. Not all the authorities in the list of connected authorities that we considered last week appear to be the best at providing information when it is asked for by anyone, whether it is the local authority or anyone else. Some of those bodies do not seem very good at providing information. That is why these proposals were tabled, but we shall see. On the question of prescription, we have already made it clear that we would prefer this part of the Bill to be much shorter. The problem, once again, is that once you start to prescribe, it is difficult to stop. When the Government want to prescribe they say, ““It is necessary and vital and it will not work without it””, and where they do not want to prescribe they say, ““We do not want to overburden people with lots of detail””. The argument never seems to get past the question of why the particular detail has to be in or cannot be in. We will come on to that later when we talk about petitions. Guidance to local authorities is far too often regarded on all sides as being instructions. I thought that the Minister made a fairly sinister statement when he said that the aims of legislation will be made clear in the guidance. That is what we are used to, but it is still sinister and it is still top-down prescription, because the councils are told, ““This is the aim of the legislation, so you’ve got to do it””. Then he said, ““We do not intend to tell local authorities what they must do””. The two do not tally at all. When the Minister read out what would be in the guidance, I thought, ““This is dreadful. It sounds as if the document is going to be the size of a telephone directory, full of information about what people have to do and how they have to do it””. I started to wonder how many civil servants it will take to carry out the process of putting the information together and producing the guidance. When the local authorities receive the document, how many extra staff will they need in order to do all this? This kind of thing requires staff resources; it can be quite staff-intensive, particularly when you are negotiating with a wide range of other bodies. I thought, ““If the main body doing this in Lancashire will be Lancashire County Council, that will mean another couple of staff—at least one, and probably two—to be employed by the county council to do this work””. Is that the priority in this detail? From the headings in the guidance that the Minister read out, the Government are proposing top-down detailed micromanagement where, as my noble friend rightly forecast, I would much prefer best practice advice. However, there will be both, which means that the Local Government Association is going to have to employ someone to produce the best practice advice, on top of the civil servants employed by the Government to produce the detailed micromanagement that is going to go out. The more you send out, the more people will have to be employed by local authorities to understand it and carry it out. That is the way it works. A mini-bureaucracy—perhaps not so mini—is being set up here to do something that starts off by promoting the local understanding of democracy but ends up potentially being a big new bureaucracy across the country. I hope that the Government will think again about some of this, but for now I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 65 withdrawn Amendments 66 and 67 not moved.