Localism Bill

My Lords, I have one amendment in the group and I shall speak to the others. I start by saying that we support the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. They form part of a recurring theme in our discussions on this Bill, which is that while the Government’s proposal is that localism should be more prevalent and that there should be more localism in authorities and among local people, it is being done within a highly prescribed framework and is subject to a large number of orders and regulations from the centre. In other words, it is top-down localism, not genuine localism. There is absolutely no reason at all why this amount of central control and prescription of local authorities should take place. It was not the case when I first became a councillor 40 years ago. We had nothing like this amount of central control when the new authorities were set up in 1973 and elected in 1974. It has crept in over the years from both Conservative and Labour Governments, and we are now getting more of it from the coalition. There is an obsessive view, which I suspect comes mainly from civil servants at the centre in Whitehall, that local authorities cannot be trusted to get on and do things sensibly unless they are provided with thousands of pages of detailed rules telling them exactly how they should do them. It is inefficient, because it means that people cannot adjust things to what is sensible for their area. A huge amount of time and resources is wasted at the centre in putting all these documents together and getting agreement on them—it even wastes parliamentary time; and time is wasted in monitoring all the rules and regulations, with people having to account for the way in which they do things, and then in changing them all when things are not going right. It is a ridiculous way to carry on. Surely now is the time, in a Bill called Localism, to call a halt to it. I have not counted the number of new rules and regulations that the Secretary of State may make. We are told that there are 142 sets of regulations and orders in the Bill, including statutory guidance and so on, that about half of them are new and that half simply restate existing provision. We ought not to be putting in most of the new regulations and we ought not to be restating the existing situation; we should be using this Bill to get rid of a large number of them. Some are necessary—nobody says that none is necessary—but the degree is ridiculous. We agree with Amendments 34 and 35, and Amendment 36 is consequent in a strange sort of way on Amendment 34, so we are pleased to be helpful there. We agree with Amendment 38. In our view, the size of an executive in a council should be entirely up to the council, but if it has to be controlled, any changes made by order should apply only if the allowable size is increased and not reduced. The last time we discussed this, which I suspect was in 2007, under the relevant Bill of that year, we argued this case and met with resistance from the government Front Bench, which at that time was being manned by the Labour Party. Rules such as this are neither Labour, Conservative nor coalition; they are the rules of civil servants who want to keep their detailed central control over local authorities as far as they can possibly can. I was very interested in the amendment spoken to be the noble Lord, Lord True. The problem that he indentified is widespread. The noble Lord talked about the situation in London, which I do not have direct experience of. I do have direct experience of the situation in Lancashire, which is typical of many two-tier shire counties. They are two-tier for very good reasons: county councils are much bigger and cover a much bigger area, and decisions are often taken a long way from where they are carried out. The degree of public information and consultation which takes place on all sorts of projects is far less than if it were being carried out by the district council. That is partly because decisions are often taken by officials or, if they are taken by councillors, it is not obvious to local people that they are being taken. There are many decisions. In my part of the country, Lancashire, most of the boroughs used to have substantial agency agreements with the county councils to do a lot of the highways work. Most of the local highways work was carried out by the districts. It was carried out in the normal way that district councils carry out their work. Open meetings are held; the local press attends them; they are reported in the local papers; and there are lots of councillors involved who tell people in their wards what is going on. That does not happen on county councils because of the much bigger scale of everything. I am not saying that they do not want to tell people; it is just the way the system works. Three or four years ago, Lancashire County Council decided in its wisdom to take back all these highways powers, and things nowadays are done much less openly and transparently. For people to find out what is being proposed, they have to look at public notices in local newspapers which are in six-point or eight-point type and are not the kind of thing that people tend to read every week. So things have changed. Lancashire County Council knew that there was a problem and two or three years ago set up what they called Lancashire Locals, which were regular monthly meetings in each borough in the county at which a whole range of county council issues were debated and considered. In some cases, such as traffic regulation orders, those Lancashire Local meetings took the decisions. They consisted of half the local county councillors in each borough and an equivalent number of borough councillors; it is a genuine joint committee. It had decision-making powers, and even on matters where it was not making the decisions, such as building new youth centres, the reports were presented, the local press turned up and a lot of members of the public took part. I pay tribute to the Labour county council, as it was at the time, for introducing that. Unfortunately, when the Conservatives took over Lancashire County Council last year, they closed down the Lancashire Locals and it is now very difficult, even for people like me as a borough councillor who wants to keep in touch with what is happening in my part of the area, to find out what is going on. You can find out, but you have to spend a lot of time trawling websites and obscure agendas and so on. It really is quite difficult. I am not sure that the wording of Councillor True’s amendment—I give him his higher title of the noble Lord, Lord True—is exactly the way to go but the spirit behind it we very strongly support. Amendment 37A, which is in my name, would give a local authority the power to choose whether, when it appoints its executive, it is done by an ex- cathedra announcement by the leader of the council or whether, at the annual meeting of the council, it can do what councils have been doing for the past 10 years in most cases and decide itself who should be on the executive. There are arguments both ways. It should not be a matter for central prescription. Local authorities should simply be allowed to choose the way to do it. Having this variety will not cause the whole structure of local government to collapse. It would simply be one more relaxation of central legislative controls allowing local decisions to be made, which is surely what localism is all about.