Localism Bill

My Lords, I am not sure we have had a may/must amendment yet on this Bill, but perhaps we have and I have missed it. This is an important amendment. I rise to speak to my amendments in this group: Amendments 97A, 98E, 98F and 98H. I will also speak to the other two amendments in the group, if I may. There is widespread concern within local government that the Government have not got this exactly right. At the very least, it needs some fettling and a number of probably quite major changes if it is going to work fairly. As my noble friend Lord Tope said earlier, there is a widespread feeling in local government—it is not universal—that the demise of the Standards Board for England is to be welcomed. The Standards Board for England’s regime has turned out in practice to be expensive. It has been arbitrary in too many cases, and therefore it has been seen to be unfair. It has been open to abuse, and it has been open to attempted political manipulation, not by Standards Board members or its staff, but by people trying to use the system in order to do down opponents. In our judgment, the removal of the Standards Board for England is a good idea, and we congratulate the Government on doing it, but something has to replace it. We cannot simply go back to the free-for-all situation we had up until about 20 years ago when standards codes and sanctions against councillors were hardly known. The system then seemed to work. There did not seem to be any more rogue councillors than there are now, and people did not seem to step out of line more than they do now, but the world has changed. We are now in a world in which standards in public life have come in and are accepted right across the board of everybody who takes part in public life. We have even had to grapple with these matters and come up with solutions here in the House of Lords. Local authorities are no different, and to pretend that local authorities generally, or some local authorities in particular, can be excepted from this situation is not the world that we are now living in. The Government’s proposal in the Bill is that there will be no national system, no national organisations and no bureaucracies; it will all be left to local authorities. In our debate on a previous amendment, my noble friend Lord Taylor said that it will be up to local authorities to behave sensibly and do what they think is best in their area. There will be no uniform or national standards code, so each authority will be able to adopt its own code or not have one. It can keep, amend or do away with the present code. If any of my description of the present system is wrong, I hope the Minister will intervene and tell me, but I do not think it is. Authorities will be able to choose whether to have standards committees. Since local authorities all have them at the moment and are institutionally fairly conservative bodies, most of them will probably keep them in one form or another, but it will be open to an authority not to have them, so there will be a hotchpotch pattern; they will be able to invent their own rules for how standards committees work within their own codes of conduct. In addition, for the offence of failing to declare appropriate interests, either by not entering them on to a register of interests or by failing to declare them in meetings at appropriate times, the only real sanction left is the criminal law and, subject to the Director of Public Prosecutions’ agreement, people will be arraigned before a magistrates’ court if the DPP thinks it is serious enough. Meanwhile, parish councils will be left in some sort of limbo. They might be able to have their own systems or to continue to be part of a district council’s standards committee and system of standards, but if the local district council does not have one or decides to do away with it all, the parish councillors will have the choice either of doing it themselves, which might be rather difficult for small parish councils, or not doing it at all. That seems to be the regime that is on offer. Perhaps the way I have presented it suggests that I am not terribly impressed with it. Nevertheless, I think my presentation of it is factually correct. We have been here before and had something similar to this. When standards committees were first brought into local authorities, local authorities were left to do their own thing. Many of them did it very well, but in some places it was not done well. It was done either inefficiently or in an arbitrary, uneven or unfair way. In a small minority of places—it is always a small minority—it was not a good thing. It was fairly dreadful. Some authorities used it to victimise individual councillors in order to conduct campaigns against opposition groups on the council and to conduct witch-hunts against individuals. That is always the danger if local authorities in an area like this are left to their own devices, because there will be some places where malign, malevolent politics gets in the way of a fair system. Therefore, we propose in amendments in this group, and in the next group, which I will speak to later, a system in which every authority must have a standards committee. It seems ridiculous that someone could be dual-hatted or triple-hatted, and on three different authorities at different levels, and some of those authorities have a standards committee and some not. Equally, we are suggesting a uniform, standard, national code of conduct. We are not talking about local diversity. There cannot be local diversity about what is appropriate conduct for people in public life. We are talking about standards in public life. While standards and rules for councillors may be different from those for Members of the House of Lords, Members of the House of Commons, people on national quangos or whatever, the organisations are different. Nevertheless, they should be based on the same principles and underlying standards in public life. There does not seem to be any reason why, if I am a member of a district council, a parish council and a county council, which I have no intention of being except for one of them, there should be a different code of conduct on each council. Surely, that cannot be right. Nor can it be right that of the 11 or 12 district councils in Lancashire, some do not have a code of conduct and some have a very different code of conduct from the adjoining council. Codes of conduct should be laid down nationally. We are saying that the drawing up of the code of conduct and its approval should be done by local government and not by the Secretary of State or national government. It should be the responsibility of representatives of local government and, in terms of legislation, the LGA obviously is a key representative. We want systems for appeals and we want to sort out parish councils. We want to look at criminal offences, but they are in the next group so I will not talk about them any more at the moment. On something like this there has to be protection for the public against rogue councils. Much as I have an underlying, innate aversion to national uniformity in anything, some things are so important and fundamental that they underpin everything else. This is the right way forward.