Localism Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council. In view of the contents of the Bill and the likely debates as it goes through, I also declare an interest as vice-president of the Open Spaces Society, and I remind the House of my relationship with the British Mountaineering Council. We have had an astonishing number of erudite speeches, many of them about planning. I was going to talk about planning, and I promise the ministerial team that I shall be heavily involved in the planning section of the Bill when we get to Committee, but most of what I would say now has already been said, so I shall just make a few discursive remarks about how I see the Bill in general. For a start, I shall tell the House what I was doing last night. I went to a meeting in the ward I represent on Pendle Borough Council, Waterside ward, of a body called the NAG—the neighbourhood action group. It consists of residents, ward councillors and local agencies and groups who are doing very valuable work within the ward, including an organisation called Open Door, which has just won The Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service and does brilliant work. People come together with a couple of officers from the council who are part of the new locality working team, which I shall mention in a minute. It is an area of very considerable deprivation. Under the census categories—the super output areas, as they are called—depending on which indices you take, it variously comes within the top 10 per cent to the top 1 per cent of deprived areas in the country. The top is the most deprived. It is not a posh, middle-class area at all. It is an area which has had active residents’ groups of various sorts for all the 40 years that I have been associated with it. If you go back 10 years, a series of residents’ groups in different parts of the ward came together in a group called the Waterside Community Network, which put a lot of pressure on the council, the county council and other public bodies, campaigned against problems in the area and for better facilities and ran local events. Six or seven years ago, the then Labour Government set up the housing market renewal scheme, and Waterside was part of it. As part of that, they put a lot of resources in to set up a neighbourhood management scheme and, as part of what in those days was known as double devolution, attempted to move decision-making and involvement below the level of the local authority. There were lots of pilot neighbourhood management schemes around the country, including in the HMR areas. The resources were council staff and council community development workers who have done a great deal of really good work. It is interesting that, as a result of putting in council staff and resources, the original voluntary residents groups, which relied entirely on voluntary involvement, atrophied and it all became part and parcel of the council-run scheme. All that money has been stopped now. It was always going to be stopped. It was not just because of the Government’s cuts, although perhaps it has stopped a bit more quickly than it might otherwise have done. As a result, we now have the NAG meeting where these people come together, but there are far fewer resources than there used to be. We have all got to start again. That is a lesson of governments spending a lot of money perhaps in very good ways and then suddenly pulling it out again. Most of the areas of neighbourhood management in Lancashire have closed down. Throughout Pendle, including in my ward, we are keeping it going because, despite the present budget difficulties, the council has been able to put some mainstream resources into what it now calls its locality working team. On Thursday evening, I am going to a meeting of the Colne and District Area Committee, an area committee of Pendle Council, which takes a lot of decisions about what happens in our town and in our part of the borough. It consists of all the councillors in our part of the borough. It does all the planning applications in that area but takes lots of other decisions as well, has resources to spend and makes decisions quite independently of the central council setup. The important thing about these meetings is that people can turn up and take part in the meeting. They can speak on any item on the agenda, tell us what they think and very often change for the better the decisions that are made. All that was done without any national legislation. There are no local government Acts, localism Acts or whatever telling our council how to run area committees or how to involve residents in the working of the council in various ways. We have done it because it was thought to be the best way to do it. At the time, there was a lot of opposition. Now, you could not tear the councillors and the council away because it works very well. There is a lesson to be learnt here: under the previous Government, the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act came into being. I think that there are six pages of detailed primary legislation about how councillors should deal with petitions. During the passage of that Bill, I detained the Committee for quite a long time, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, will remember, when I tried to point out that it was all nonsense. Councillors are perfectly able to make up their own minds about how to deal with petitions. If they cannot, and do not, they can be turfed out and councillors with more sense can be found. One of the good things about this Bill is that it scraps all that petition nonsense. Instead, we have all this new referendum nonsense, which is far worse. It is far more complicated and time-consuming, and will be far more costly. I hope that the House of Lords will kick it out. It is exactly the same kind of nonsense; that is, the only way to get councils to behave reasonably when residents in an area want to put forward their views is to produce detailed, national legislation, along with reams of guidance and regulations. That is not localism. It is top-down legislation. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said something really interesting when she explained what happens in her area when residents are ““on the warpath””. That is the other side of localism. It is people campaigning, agitating and deciding something for themselves, not the council saying that it has got to be done this way or whatever. It is about going out and occupying a council chamber with wheelchairs, which takes me back to my youth. It is a political rather than a bureaucratic and administrative process—not party political, but politics with a small ““p””. People decide to do something about a problem, they get organised and put the pressure on. This is the sort of thing that the kind of people who have written this legislation do not understand at all, but I think that some Ministers understand it only too well. I hope that we can bend the legislation a bit so that people who want to agitate in this way will find it easier to do so. We can provide structures for people to gain access more easily, just as we have provided structures to allow people access to our area committee. What we cannot do, of course, is force people to act. However, the way to really get them involved is to make them angry by closing something down or doing things they do not agree with, but that is the way of the world.