Local Government Bill [HL]

My Lords, I begin, as I always do, and as I did when we debated the orders on 22 March, by declaring my personal interest as a councillor in a unitary authority, which is a role that I have had for more than 35 years. On 22 March I said—and I am very happy to repeat it—that I am a very strong believer in the benefits of unitary government. I need no convincing of that. That is the position from which I started when I moved the fatal Motion on 22 March and it is the position that I continue to hold. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked whether the Liberal Democrats support this Bill wholeheartedly. My answer, as our spokesperson, is an unequivocal yes. Most of the debate today has been a rehearsal of the debate that we had on 22 March. The argument has been almost entirely confined to Norwich and Exeter and the perceived benefits there; very little has been said about the effects on the wider communities in Norfolk and Devon. That was part of the argument that we had three months ago, which is still relevant. Noble Lords will be relieved to know that I am not going to repeat all the arguments that I set out on why we felt it necessary to move the fatal Motion and why we so strongly opposed those orders. In summary, I understand very well why some but not all of the councillors in Norwich and Exeter wanted unitary status. I know that they believed that what was on offer was not as good as they hoped, but it was all that was on offer, and they took a view that it was better than nothing. I understand that, but we have to take a wider perspective and consider the effects on the wider communities, which is exactly what we did. I shall summarise why we were opposed to these things. First, with my much more limited knowledge of Norwich and Exeter—but still some knowledge, as I was born and partly grew up in Devon—that they were the wrong boundaries and the wrong proposals. I do not believe that it is in anybody’s interests to have something that is supposedly better than nothing. If you make that sort of mistake—and I believe very strongly that those proposals were a mistake—then you live with its consequences for years and years. That takes me to the next reason why I felt that they were wrong; the timing was completely wrong. I do not just mean the appalling way in which it was brought in within days of a general election. I mean the slightly longer timing, to which I think I referred on 22 March, of what was clearly then the financial climate into which we were heading. I think I said, and certainly believed, that the recession in the public sector had not then started. It has started now. That is no surprise to anyone; we all knew that, in local government and elsewhere, we were going to be facing a very hard financial climate for the next three or four years, at least. That was emphatically not the time to be going into what would inevitably be, at least in the short term, the very expensive, emotionally draining, challenging and uncertain times of a comprehensive structural reorganisation. The timing really could not have been worse. I understand why the timing of the proposal came so late, with all the long process that had been going on. Nevertheless, we got to where we got to and within days of the Dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a general election the Government came forward with these proposals, to which others have referred in detail. Of all the many warnings given to the Government about why they were wrong—from this House, the Civil Service and all sorts of quarters—let us remind ourselves that part of it was a statement from the Permanent Secretary to the Minister, in seeking that written direction, that the Minister had already had strong and clear advice of the very strong probability that the legal challenge, which was known to be coming, would be successful—and so it has proved to be. None of this should come as any surprise.