My Lords, I do not want to add to the comments made by anybody who knows something about Suffolk, like my noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market. I just remind the Committee of my interests as a councillor in Yorkshire and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The comment I want to make is that I have attended a number of these sessions where, as a Committee, we have considered mergers or boundary reviews and, in every instance, the existing local councils involved make claims about the savings that will be made and services that will be more efficient and that residents will be happy with the general situation. My question is: do the Government or the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government do a review post hoc to test whether this is in fact the case? We always accept these claims at face value, and we have a very specific claim here about the savings that will be made. No doubt that is the intention of the councils involved, but my experience of what council officers claim and what actually happens can often diverge. If such reviews do take place, I would really like to have access to them and, if they do not, I suggest that they are undertaken, partly because the funding savings that will be made are very specific. Councils always also make claims about efficiency of service provision, which may well be the case, but does anybody ask after the event whether it is the case?
I share some of the concerns expressed earlier, among all the comments that have been made, about the confusion of local government now and whether or not we are losing the “local” from local government. The area where I am a councillor, for example, serves 450,000 residents—it is a unitary, metropolitan council—and my ward serves 13,000 electors, so some 17,000 residents. This is compared with some local authorities
where the wards will be considerably smaller. We have to ask the question about whether there is a democratic deficit for people in some parts of the country. How local is local government? There is, I think, a debate to be had between getting scale and service provision and losing the local touch, which democracy requires if it is going to work well. With those comments—well, questions—I will end what I have to say.