Localism Bill

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from ““That”” to the end of the Question and add:"““this House, whilst affirming its belief in the important principle of devolving power to local people and their elected representatives, declines to give a Second Reading to the Localism Bill because the proposed devolution of power to local authorities is undermined both by the extent to which the Bill hands powers to the Secretary of State to over-ride those devolved powers and by the extent of powers of the Secretary of State to direct local authorities in their governance arrangements, and because the community empowerment and neighbourhood planning sections of the Bill, which have been put together hastily and without adequate consultation with important stakeholders, would cause the planning functions of local authorities to become incoherent and ineffective and create new costly and complex systems of service procurement and would reduce the effectiveness of local authorities; and is strongly of the opinion that the publication of such a Bill should have been preceded by both fuller consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft Bill.””" After all the delays, the false storms, the spin and the briefings, finally we have the Bill where it should be—before the House. It is a Bill that we will demonstrate over the coming weeks will not, I am afraid, revolutionise local politics, empower the masses to shake up their town halls or reinvigorate local democracy. It is a Bill that the Business Secretary rightly described as ““not thought through””. Above all, the Bill empowers one person: the Secretary of State. We believe in devolving power to local communities and giving people a real say in how their local area is run: we believe that power should rest in the hands of the many, not the few; and we are optimistic because we have faith that there are few problems so intractable that local communities do not ultimately have the answer. We would welcome and support a Bill, therefore, that genuinely devolved powers, which is what the Localism Bill was meant to do. We were promised a radical redistribution of power from central Government to people —a new dawn for people power and a groundbreaking shift in power to councils and communities. We were told that this would be the first Government to leave office with much less power in Whitehall than they started with. Today we see that that is just another broken promise. If page 1 of the Bill gives local councils the power to do whatever they like to improve their local areas, why do we need a further 405 pages? This Bill fails to live up to its name. For all the Government's talk of localism, the Bill does nothing to convince us that it is anything more than a smokescreen for unprecedented cuts to local communities up and down the country. All those warm words about devolving power and empowering communities ring hollow when, at the same time, local councils face cuts that go deeper than in almost any other Whitehall Department; cuts that fall heaviest in the first year; cuts that hit the most deprived communities the hardest. There is nothing localist about that. Let us nail the myth that local councils can spare front-line services simply by cutting executive pay, trimming waste and sharing backroom functions, because they cannot. I know that maths is obviously not the Secretary of State's strong point, because last week he was telling the newspapers about how good the Tory canvass returns were looking in Oldham. We support greater transparency in the pay of senior officials in the public sector and the measures to increase pay accountability in local government, and the right hon. Gentleman does not need a calculator to work out that cutting executive pay and streamlining administration will not help a single council to avoid cutting front-line services.