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Local and Regional Government

I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) on securing this debate, which is on an important and timely topic. I agree with him especially on two points. First, I agree with his preference for power to be held at the most local level possible. If that turns out to be regional, or zonal, as he puts it, that is fine, but it strikes me—as I think it strikes him—that that will be quite a rare occurrence. Usually, power can be held at a level more local than the large zonal level to which he refers. The second point implicit in what he said was that power ought to be built up from the bottom rather than imposed from the top. That leads to my, and I think his, preference for joint working and joint commissioning of services as a way of overcoming the problems of economies scale, rather than starting with gigantic authorities built around the principles that sometimes quite rare services must be delivered in the most efficient way. It strikes me that the regional level might be suitable, say, for strategic planning and some aspects of transport—although even in respect of transport, sub-regional levels are often better—but that there are otherwise few natural functions for it. As my hon. Friend said, however, as long as regional offices exist, and as long as regional quangos multiply, there is a serious democratic deficit to be dealt with in our approach to regional government. It is important to review the way in which existing regional assemblies work to ensure that they are properly accountable, and we should be thinking about looking for ways in which to make them more clearly accountable downwards to local government, rather than upwards to national Government. The situation of local government following the leaked memo to The Daily Telegraph is interesting. The Lyons review started as a review of finance. Then the Government announced that it was to be expanded to look into function. Now it seems that we are to have a review of structure as well. Add those three things together, and we are in the midst of a general review of local government. Albeit perhaps by accident rather than by design, that is the point that we have reached. If so, this is the right time at which to return to first-principle thinking about local government, and for the Government to publish a White Paper outlining their view of the whole relationship between central and local government, rather than tackling the question in parts. For Liberal Democrats, the basic principle is localism.