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Local and Regional Government

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) on securing an important and timely debate. In preparation for it, I thought about who I would consider the most influential figure in recent local government history, and I concluded that it was probably not anyone pictured in the halls around Westminster, but Derek Hatton, or ““Degsy””, as he is known in Liverpool, who managed not only to be a bête noire of Labour and the Conservatives but to be not much liked by Liberal Democrats. He was the last person I can recall who set municipal power into deliberate conflict with Whitehall power. When Derek Hatton came to power, the Government had already decided, post-Toxteth, that local government could not really be trusted, and had tried to emasculate or sideline it by creating other agencies. The Greater London council and metropolitan counties had already been abolished. Certainly, Mr. Hatton played a pivotal role in a hardening of Whitehall thinking which, I should say, spans different Administrations. The strategy that I have described has not been reversed. Those of us who have observed local government in recent years have noticed a reduction in its functions, a limiting of its role as a provider, a capping and controlling of its budgets, with, on balance, a preponderance of its funding increasingly being provided from the centre, and the loss of business rates. The Government have gone so far as to determine the structure of council meetings, with the imposition of the cabinet system. To be fair, the Government would probably claim, by contrast, to have given local government some new powers. However, when those powers are examined in detail they tend to emerge as powers to enable rather than provide, powers that, often, are shared with other partners, or what I might call short-straw powers, such as the power to impose congestion charging or administer the Licensing Act 2003—unattractive numbers that central Government do not fancy. We must accept that the great days of civic power are some way behind us now, with the not unexpected result that turnout is down and local government is by and large left as a useful whipping boy or, occasionally, bogey man, whereas in reality genuine power has shifted massively to the centre. I should go so far as to say that local government is not only no longer an autonomous unit, but not any more even a trusted partner. Centralisation, however, goes only so far. There comes a point at which centralisation assumes a burden that it can no longer carry. It has thus been necessary for the centre to create various satellite agencies, such as the development agencies and the Government offices that inhabit the regions like colonial viceroys, and to try through them to administer the region in various ways. Such agencies certainly father, in conjunction with regional assemblies, a host of varied strategies. I disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives that there is paralysis; I think that there is progress, because we all know that a range of interesting strategies are at the moment cooking in the bowels of various Government offices and development agencies—spatial strategies, housing strategies, transport strategies and economic strategies. All those are influential or bound to be influential. They are consulted on in a brief and perfunctory pattern, but I do not think that anyone would recommend them as genuine, ideal democratic products. Perhaps I can give two local examples from the region that the Minister and I inhabit. A north-west transport strategy is being developed. That is basically a 10-year transport plan for the entire north-west. It is being produced fairly quickly, with a deadline of around January for the region and around March for the Government. It is proposed that £1.4 billion of public expenditure will be committed or prioritised. Included in that strategy there will obviously be some schemes that many Members of Parliament would like; but other schemes that they would like may well not be there. Key decisions are being made with inordinate haste. The whole process is veiled, by and large, from council leaders, certainly in part from Members of Parliament, and certainly from much of the business community. None the less, it will undoubtedly be fairly influential. The region that I share with the Minister comes under the Northwest Development Agency. It often says that it has a three-year strategic plan that identifies which projects it will and will not fund, but I invite Members just to try to get it off them—they will find it fairly difficult. They would also find that not even the Freedom of Information Act 2000 will prise the plan from the agency. I think that there is an appalling democratic deficit, and most people would say that that was the case in the example that I have just given, but the situation is complicated by haste and the genuine lack of regional government. Whatever we think about it, there is now some regional decision making by our regional government. That, coupled with the regionalisation of emergency services—something mentioned by other Members—and of the health services, is not so much a democratic deficit as a complete democratic vacuum. That is one reason why the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister will look into regionalisation over the next few weeks or months. I turn to the poor old counties—I say ““poor old counties”” because they have essentially been stripped by the regional bodies of their strategic transport role. Roads are no respecters of council boundaries; I accept that. Counties have been largely stripped of education, and are simply a postbox for educational funding. Social services are, by and large, shared between counties and health bodies now, and so the counties act in partnership rather than autonomously. In fact, it has to be said that they are now an extra layer in a world, largely, of unitaries. As function and structure are intimately related, if all those changes in function are made, some change in structure will inevitably be suggested at some point. Therefore, the leak from the Minister for Communities and Local Government the other day was heard with a sense of inevitability by some of us, because it follows logically and consecutively from the Government's prior plans. However, I do not want to get into a debate about the structure of local government, or even to suggest an ideal template to hon. Members. The fundamental issue, as was highlighted in the introductory speech, is the democratic deficit. The question is how we get public ownership of local and regional decisions, and how we persuade people that it makes a real difference to vote for any local or regional body.