Localism Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for turning up in time so I did not have to deliver his speech, which he did far better than I would have done. I just want to add one or two things and speak to the specific amendments which my noble friend and I have put forward. The noble Lord, Lord True, and the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, spoke about how opposition parties and opposition councillors might well use referendums to promote their own interests. In my own local political career I can think of major issues where I would have had, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord True, a great deal of fun. We would have made useful political points but it would have cost people a lot of money and it would not have been the right way to do it. What concerns me more than what opposition parties and opposition councillors might do is the way in which parties in control, or mayors or anyone else with the ability, might use referendums to manipulate the political and electoral process by launching referendums on populist issues to entrench their own local power. I am not suggesting that all such local leaders would ever do that but, without naming names, I can think of one or two around the country who might regard this as manna from heaven. You organise a referendum on a good populist issue or a bad populist issue to coincide with the year of your re-election and have it on the same day as your re-election to turn the referendum campaign into your election campaign and—Bob’s your uncle—you are probably back. As I understand the Bill, there will be no limits on referendum expenses so it would blow a huge hole in the rules for local election expenses. People organising referendums—whether they are organising a petition for it or whether they are persons in power trying to use it for populist purposes—may be goodies. They may be doing it for benign purposes but they might not: they might be malign extremists movements or commercially motivated and commercially biased or politicians seeking re-election, as I just said. Whatever it is, there is a severe risk that they undermine the processes of representative democracy, which rely a great deal on proper procedures, democratic deliberation, debate and compromise and the role of the council as a mediator in the community—which I think the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, was talking about last week. You cannot compromise in a referendum. Everything is black and white; everything is yes or no. It polarises the community and, while it might be a lot of fun for people taking part in it, it simplifies what are often quite complex issues and runs the risk of undermining the whole process of liberal democracy in the local community. We are generally sceptical about the value of Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Bill and if it is to remain, we believe it needs a much stricter tying up so that the number of referendums which can take place are relatively few and are on appropriate subjects. I want to say one more thing about the dangers of extremism. I am really very fortunate in that I represent a small, compact urban ward on my local council. We have small wards and the electorate is under 4,000. I say that I am fortunate because you get to know a large number of people in the area. I was looking at the result for the last time when I had to stand for election, three years ago—I did not have to, but I did—and the party which came second in that ward was the BNP. The BNP got 337 votes, which you might not think is a huge amount but 5 per cent of the electorate is under 100 voters in a ward of under 4,000 electors. I worked it out as 95; I could go and get 95 signatures on a petition for almost anything, on any afternoon that I wanted to, because that is the way that things are with people signing petitions. If somebody goes along and gives them the blarney, they sign it and do not necessarily look at the words on it. That is unfortunate but true. In an area like that, which does not have a large ethnic minority population but does have a significant number of Asian ethnic minority families, I can imagine the real danger that would occur with an appropriate subject question for the referendum. If they were clever, it would not fall outside the rules but everybody would know exactly what it meant. I would be very unhappy with a threshold of 5 per cent. Certainly, for smaller wards, our view is that it should be very much higher. We are suggesting 25 per cent in the first of our amendments. In the second, we question whether the Secretary of State should by order be able to move the required percentage threshold up or down. It is such a sensitive matter that we question whether the Secretary of State should have that power, which is set out in the Bill. The third thing that we question is whether a council ought to be able to regard a petition for a referendum as being valid even if it does not have the right number of signatures on it. It is a very odd provision which says if you want a referendum, you have to go through these hoops—you have to submit it according to the rules and have a certain number of people on it—but that if you do not manage to get that number of people, we can think, ““It’s on a good thing, after all, so we'll have the referendum anyway””. If you are having rules on referenda, it is our view that they need to be pretty rigorous and not be open to continued political argument on whether the petitions fit those rules. We have some doubts whether it is possible to set out a sufficient number of rigorous rules to make the system foolproof against the kind of populist and perhaps extremist manipulation that I have been talking about, and we will be scrutinising the rest of this chapter of the Bill very strongly indeed.