Sustainable Communities Act 2007 (Amendment) Bill

No, I will not, because he has already spoken for an hour and I wish to make a few brief remarks. It will not be possible for this Bill to go through all its stages today because so much time has been taken up already. If the Bill is as simple as its promoters suggest, I am surprised that it took more than half an hour for my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) to introduce it and more than an hour for my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree to explain why it would be such a good idea. The 2007 Act was introduced when our great friend Eric Forth was very active on Fridays, and he shared the concern of many of us that it would not achieve much. I am sure that he will be looking down on our proceedings today and saying, "Well, I told you so." The original objectives of the Act included halting the decline in the number of corner shops, banks, grocers, post offices and pubs. Two and half years later, we have seen a substantial and continuing reduction in the number of those businesses. The Government have not even decided on any of the proposals that were made by individuals—perhaps naive individuals—who thought that the 2007 Act would actually give them an opportunity to contribute to significant change for their local communities. The Act has been a complete failure. Hon. Members have suggested that it has been a success, but they are living in a completely different world to me and—I suspect—to most of my constituents. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire gave some examples. He said that a Wiltshire librarian had put forward a proposal to increase the tax on chewing-gum. However, action could have been taken much more quickly if the librarian had communicated with the local Member of Parliament, who could have tabled an amendment to the Finance Bill and we could have had a debate on the issue. Similarly, a proposal from Hackney suggested changing the planning rules relating to betting shops. It so happens that a private Bill on London local authorities is going through the House at the moment, and it would have been open to Hackney council to include that proposal in that so that we could debate it. The Second Reading of that Bill is coming up soon. Those two examples are of suggestions that could have been implemented more quickly through a direct relationship with Members of Parliament. My hon. Friend also cited the further example of Liverpool city council trying to restrict the closure of post offices. That has not achieved anything. The only success that I am aware of was in Essex, and in that case the county council took direct action in defiance of the Government. The Government say that they support the Act, but people are given an incentive not to pay their road tax renewal at the post office but to do it online, because they are then entered into a prize draw for some foreign-manufactured car. That is meant to be an incentive not to use the local post office, and it is supported by the Government. It is ludicrous that the Government are promoting and encouraging that by giving people financial incentives not to use local post offices, while purporting to be interested in sustainable communities. The whole thing does not add up; the whole thing is a complete farce. As my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire made clear in his extensive speech, the 2007 Act received Royal Assent on 23 October 2007, but it took almost a year for the Secretary of State to invite local authorities to make their submissions. Conveniently, the deadline was nine months later—they had to make their submissions by 31 July last year—and as of today not a single decision has been taken. Indeed, the Bill before us today is a recipe for further delay by the Government, because clause 1 would enable the Secretary of State to say, "Well, although I have all these shortlisted proposals put forward on a particular basis, we are now changing the basis on which I should assess them, and I can now decide, not whether to implement them, but whether to implement them in whole or in part." That introduces a completely new dimension that was not available to the local authorities when they decided which proposals to put forward, and neither was it available to the people when they came forward with the proposals in the first place. It is not surprising that people are cynical, because they are being misled into thinking that the way to make change in this country is to go down the route suggested in the Bill. However, change is really made through direct engagement with Members of Parliament and the Government. I shall give a few examples. When I was involved in local government politics in Wandsworth, we were fed up with the Inner London Education Authority: we thought that we would have a sustainable community in Wandsworth if we abolished it. We did not go around namby-pamby trying to get people to make submissions under something like the 2007 Act; we engaged in direct action. We held public meetings, engaged the people and lobbied the Conservative Government strongly for its abolition. That was achieved and since then things have got a lot better in Wandsworth as a result, and many more people now stay there to enable their children to go to good-quality, local schools. Something similar happened when the people of Wandsworth, and a lot of other people in Greater London, decided that they would like to abolish the Greater London Council. Pressure was put on the Government, and the changes were made. Another example: a lot of people thought it extremely frustrating that their local councils were not prepared to engage in competitive tendering. There was a strong lobby of Parliament, including early-day motions with more than 200 signatures, and eventually a Conservative Government decided to legislate requiring local authorities to engage in competitive tendering—and that is what they did. As a result, the costs of local government were reduced.