My Lords, I refer to my relevant interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I thank the Minister for explaining the order. I agree with many of the points made by every Member here. Like my noble friend, I am generally a supporter of unitary authorities. I think they are the way to go, generally speaking. However, this is quite a sad day in some ways. We are not here because councils have come together and decided that this is what they need to do for their county. They have not had discussions and worked out that this is the best way forward. We are here because of complete incompetence and bad management at Northamptonshire County Council. This unitary authority decision has then been imposed on people. As we have heard, they could not have one unitary council—I do not know why, but they could not—and they could not have three. It had to be two. That is very disappointing.
I know the area really well. I lived and worked in the east Midlands for a very long time. I like Northamptonshire a lot. The town of Northampton got its charter in 1189. It has a beautiful town hall. The town was incorporated in 1835. The county itself is wonderful. As has already been said, it has a very compact shape and great road and rail links. There are great businesses there. Dr. Martens is in Wellingborough. The county also has Weetabix, Barclaycard and Carlsberg —all really good businesses. It is the home of the motor industry, with Silverstone and the Rockingham Motor Speedway. These are Premier League businesses with a Sunday league county council working for them. It is dreadful that we are where we are today.
Corby is another great town, with a great history in the steel industry. We may not all remember, but it was 40 years ago that the steelworks closed. Some 10,000 people lost their jobs in one fell swoop. However, the local community, the local authority and the councils came together, and they reinvented themselves.
I am also disappointed in the names of these two councils: North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire. They are terrible, dreadful names.
Where have the historical county names gone? I mean names such as Northamptonshire, Kettering, Wellingborough, Corby and Daventry. We must also remember that we can have all the new names and structures and we can dismantle what has gone before, but unless the structure is sound, the funding is stable and the officers and members understand the challenge before them, this will solve nothing at all and we will back here again in a few months or a few years’ time.
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Northamptonshire County Council failed the communities of Northamptonshire completely. A lot of good people tried to deliver, but a failure of political leadership was at the centre of this disaster. I thank the staff and the people who worked hard in the councils. In particular, I pay tribute to Councillor Tom Beattie, the long-serving leader of Corby Borough Council. Corby was very much against this reorganisation. If Tom had been the leader of the county council it would not have opened a brand-new, glitzy county council office—with Sajid Javid opening it—for it to go bust only a matter of weeks later. It was absolutely ridiculous. He would never have got us into this mess in the first place.
Having said that, the order creates two new local authorities. I wish them well as they progress from shadow authority status in May to taking over full responsibility for all services in April 2021, but we need to take a serious look at what happened. There was a complete failure of leadership, which we must try to avoid in other councils. As other noble Lords asked, why can there not be one unitary county council? We seem to have been forced into this as the only option, which is not a good way to do it. I believe in devolution and unitary authorities, and I believe that local people should have some status in that. I will leave my remarks there. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.