Localism Bill

My Lords, I take issue with my noble friend Lord Taylor only to the extent that we should start with not just the ““how”” but the ““why””. It does not matter what you call something, provided you do not then use your term as an excuse for sloppy thinking. That is a danger. It would be easy during our debates on the Bill to say that such-and-such is local or localist, without analysing what that means and what it should mean in each context. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, referred to Pepper v Hart. I must say that it worries me when people who have not been closely involved with our proceedings say, ““Parliament clearly must have thought such-and-such””, and one wonders whether Parliament has thought at all about a particular issue. Representative democracy is so valuable for lots of reasons, but I have written down four: balance, priorities, nuance, and wide objectives. When the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, spoke about community groups being self-selecting, I thought that she was going to say that they were self-serving—just occasionally, they are and I, too, recognise the examples she gave. The issue of bail hostels precluded my party from taking control of our local authority in 1978. My noble friend Lady Tonge was elected in a by-election shortly afterwards, having failed to be elected at that earlier point. However, the issue was of concern in a community that one should have thought was most sympathetic to the problem that the establishment of the bail hostel was addressing. The centre has a role, but its role is not to protect local people against their own local authority. The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, asked what the clause would achieve. It sets criteria against which the detail of the Bill can be tested. Something that is superficially local or localist is not sufficient.