Localism Bill

My Lords, this is another example of possible misplacement in the groupings, for which I do not blame anyone. It is very difficult to get a perfectly rational system. In fact, I pay tribute to the officer of this House who works so hard, so long and so late in trying to make sense of my and other noble Lords’ belated efforts to table amendments. She does a wonderful job and I have every sympathy for her. At least she does not have to read my handwriting, which would make the task impossible and not just difficult. In relation to the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Tope, I certainly concur, as, I think, do these Benches, with the proposal for a higher threshold. However, I want to address the rest of the amendments in this group, which go to the critical question in relation to governance of whether there should be compulsory referendums at the diktat of the Secretary of State. The amendments that follow essentially relate to that. The Minister has fortunately helped us by removing the conflation of the position of mayor and chief executive, and she has dealt with—perhaps liquidated—the position of shadow mayor. We are now left with this element of the compulsory referendum. In that respect, it is necessary to look at the whole question of the mayoral system—its provenance and development. I was present at the meeting about 15 years ago when Tony Blair launched on an unsuspecting Labour Party, and an even more unsuspecting shadow Secretary of State in the person of Frank Dobson, the notion of an elected Mayor of London and, following that, the possibility of having elected mayors elsewhere. I took his motivation at face value. He thought—and others who have advocated this in the past have thought and currently think—that it would invigorate local democracy, improve turnout at local elections and enhance the accountability of local political leadership because the elected mayor would have a mandate from across the whole authority. That was the theory; let us look a little at the practice. Bearing in mind that until now, and until the legislation changes, only 5 per cent of the electorate in any authority has been needed to requisition a referendum, there have been, I think, only 41 referendums, if one takes Leicester into account, in the 10 years in which this option has been open. One area has had second thoughts and has terminated its adoption of the system. Of the 40 referendums, 14 were in favour of an elected mayor and 26 against. What is perhaps more significant is the turnout in the referendums and the turnout in the local elections. This, after all, was going to be the great advantage to local democracy of this new system. There have only been two referendum turnouts greater than 40 per cent and both of those took place on a general election day. Some referendums had turnouts of less than 20 per cent, 10 had between 20 and 30 percent, and 17 had between 30 and 40 per cent. The upper thirties is probably about average for a local election—by no means satisfactory, but self-evidently at least no worse, and in many cases better, than the turnout in these referendums. It is quite significant that the turnouts were also very low in the ensuing elections. Some of the referendum turnouts were abysmally low: Bedford had a turnout of 16 per cent; Lewisham had a turnout of 18 per cent; among the best were Hartlepool with 34 per cent and Torbay with 32 per cent. However, this does not give any grounds for saying that this is an enormously popular reform that people are rushing to adopt. Nor has the turnout in elections been very much greater, even in London. The turnout in the first mayoral election in London was 37 per cent. In the second, there were two—how shall I put it?—charismatic or certainly very visible candidates, and an election that seemed to run for a year, such that every time I stepped out of a Tube station in London and saw an Evening Standard banner, it was always proclaiming something about Ken or Boris. It was impossible, even if one wished to, to escape the fact that there was a London mayoral election. However, even then, the point seems to have eluded 55 per cent of the London electorate. Again, there does not seem to be much evidence for the initial inspiration of this change: that it would improve—whether dramatically, modestly or even at all—the turnout in local elections or interest in local government. The other arguments were about visibility and effectiveness. Many of the elected mayors have been capable people. In London, I can certainly cite three of them: Robin Wales in Newham; Steve Bullock in Lewisham, albeit with a referendum there of only 18 per cent and, I think, a mayoral election turnout of about the same, when he was first elected; and Jules Pipe in Hackney. All of them, incidentally, had been council leaders before they became elected mayors. However, what sort of alchemy is it that is necessary to transmute a council leader into a mayor? Or is it—and I hope the right reverend Prelate will not take exception to my analogy—some process of transubstantiation that transforms a less visible and accountable leader into an all-singing, all-dancing mayor with much enhanced visibility and effectiveness? It was interesting that, in promoting the idea of elected mayors, the Labour Party saw fit to send a delegation to the Netherlands to see how this wonderful system was working. They slightly overlooked the fact that, in the Netherlands, mayors are in fact Crown appointees and not elected at all. Similarly, those who pointed to very successful continental mayors, such as the mayor of Barcelona, seem to overlook the fact that he was not personally directly elected—he was the leader of the largest group or faction in the Barcelona council. He was a very able—in fact a brilliant—local politician and extremely effective, but he but not directly elected. In our own politics, although I remember Tony Blair saying in a television broadcast, ““The people of Britain elected me Prime Minister””, actually they did not. They certainly have not elected the present Prime Minister. That is not to disparage him; it is just a fact. Why should it be assumed that it is necessary to have that direct personal mandate to be a legitimate leader? It is said that if authorities adopted the mayoral system, extra powers would be given and a certain amount has been given to mayors in that position. Yet the question arises that we discussed briefly at Second Reading and earlier in Committee: why should those powers be confined to the directly elected mayor, as opposed to the leader and executive model? There seems to be no particular rationale on that. One thinks of great local government figures of the past, from all parties: of Joseph Chamberlain in his initial, Liberal incarnation; of Neville Chamberlain, who was slightly dismissed by Lloyd George as a good mayor of Birmingham in a bad year but who nevertheless had a considerable local government reputation and, it is fair to say, did a lot for it as a Minister; or of Herbert Morrison, a great leader of local government; or, perhaps slightly more controversially, of one of my capable but slightly flawed predecessors as leader of Newcastle council, Dan Smith, who was nevertheless a hugely influential and creative figure, in the best sense, during his surprisingly brief period. People in all political parties have also been extremely effective. Why should it be assumed that council leaders are necessarily less visible, accountable or effective than elected mayors? There are problems stemming from the system as it has been created, not simply because of the accretion of powers in a single pair of hands but because of the structure around that. It takes a two-thirds majority to overturn an elected mayor’s budget. Yet you can have a situation with an elected mayor from one party and a majority of the council from another. It has happened twice in the authority adjoining mine. It happened with a Labour mayor and a Tory council and it is now exactly the other way round, with a substantial Labour majority in North Tyneside and a Conservative mayor. That highly anomalous situation raises two questions. First, what is the other councillors’ role in that kind of situation? It has to be a substantially downgraded role from what we are used to and what is appropriate. Secondly, will there not come a day when people wonder, ““What is the point of electing councillors at all, or of voting for a particular political party, if you are required to have at least two-thirds of the council to vote down a proposition from the mayor””? Most particularly, there is the most crucial decision of all: that about the budget. There are, it seems, real difficulties inherent in the system. There is also a suspicion, certainly on this side of the Chamber—it may be in certain parts of the other side of the Chamber—about the current political motivation for this decision to take the power to require referendums to be held. I refer in particular to a speech made by the Member for Grantham and Stamford in another place, Nick Boles. He is, I suppose, a Tory intellectual. There are people unkind enough to think that term a bit of an oxymoron but I would not allege that in the case of Mr Boles, who is an extremely bright, intelligent and articulate man. Yet he said some time ago, apropos of this position about elected mayors, that it was the only way in which there would be a ladder back into power for the Conservative Party in places where its chances were pretty minimal. I think that he cited Manchester and other places where Conservative representation has been minimal, if not nil, for some time. I hope that is not the Government’s motivation and I would not for a moment imagine that the Minister would subscribe to that motivation, but others elsewhere might. Going back to the original idea that Tony Blair had, the problem is that as a great charismatic figure—and whatever views one might have about him, he was the most effective politician, certainly in Labour Party terms, for generations and had a hugely charismatic style—he envisaged that there were around the country at least 430 charismatic town-hall Tonys able, willing and ready to step forward and operate in the same way. That assumption is not necessarily true or desirable. Having said that, there may well be cases where the mayoral system actually offers a way out of a very difficult political situation. I referred to the mayor of Hackney as a very successful and capable mayor, and he was a very successful leader, but he inherited an extremely dysfunctional council in which there was little prospect for many years of getting anything done at all. One can well see that in those circumstances, a mayoral system might actually be the only way of carrying forward necessary change and getting a degree of consistency, clarity and political leadership. We are in that sort of gridlock situation, and there seems to be a strong case for having the possibility of an elected mayor. There may be a genuine popular demand. Nobody is suggesting for a moment that there should not be the option of an elected mayor. It has been there for 10 years. It has been little used, but it is still there. For those who want it, there is every opportunity, at the moment requiring a 5 per cent threshold—perhaps they should be heading for the petitions now before the threshold is increased, if that is what happens as a result of the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Tope—and they should certainly take advantage of it if they wish. The question the Minister and the Government have to answer is: why should local authorities be compelled to have a referendum when the opportunity has existed for 10 years and there has been no petition? The point of these amendments is therefore to dispense with the element of compulsion and leave it to people to exercise the right they have, to political parties in those areas, if they wish to promote the cause, to call a referendum or, indeed, to councils, as Leicester has done recently and Tower Hamlets did a little while ago, to call a referendum under the existing provisions. Why should there be this element of compulsion? It is just conceivable that the Government may not accept these amendments either here or on Report. There is that remote possibility, in which case noble Lords will notice that Amendment 81B, which was tabled very late, I am afraid, effectively preserves the current decision of the Government to proceed with an order in respect of the 11 authorities. There were originally 12, but Leicester anticipated the Government’s wishes, held a referendum and now has an elected mayor, as we have already heard in another context. We understand that this proposal for these—previously 12, now 11—referendums was part of the coalition agreement. We are not incapable of simple arithmetic, and it seems to us unlikely that we would have an accretion of strength from the Liberal Democrat Benches were an amendment pushed to the vote. I certainly will not be voting for a referendum in any debate in Newcastle. On the contrary, I will be part of a campaign that I think both the Labour group and the Liberal Democrat group in Newcastle will be waging—and I think it will be the same in many, if not all, of the other authorities—against having an elected mayor, should the legislation go through. We think it better to have a fallback position in case the Government perchance are not minded to accept the proposition that we should be abandoning the concept of compulsory referendums tout court, which we would very much like to see. We will not divide in Committee, but we will do so on Report unless there is a change of policy. In our view, the Government have a long way to go to make the case for compelling referendums in the absence of any evidence of any desire for them either in authorities that have not yet had them, or indeed in those that have.