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Parish Councils (Planning)

The hon. Gentleman brings me back to the main tenor of my speech. That is the principal concern for many parish councils, particularly the smaller ones. They feel ignored. They feel that there is a lack of recognition of their role in the process and that they are wasting their time giving great care to consideration of development control planning if nobody at a higher level takes a blind bit of notice. That applies not just to planning. I mentioned affordable housing earlier. Parish councils have tremendous potential for playing a role in seeing through the acquisition of appropriate and affordable housing in their parish, from the point of site identification to the point of allocation. That is not done well at present, and parish councils are often overlooked as a resource in that process. The Government’s rhetoric suggests that they intend to recognise the role of parish councils in planning. Since the rural delivery review in 2003—the so-called Haskins review—they have consistently stressed that the role of parish councils is important, and they have supported that role by, for instance, working with the National Association of Local Councils in developing quality assessment and training. Question marks still remain for the future and in the present, and I hope that the Minister will say something about the future in the light of press comment in the past few days. We know that the Government are seriously considering the future of local government in this country. On unitary authorities, they are considering whether it is better to have the present two-tier system in shire counties and rural areas by which parish councils exist below both a district council and a county council or whether it would be better to reduce that to a parish council and a unitary authority. I am a former county councillor, a former leader of a county council and a former leader of a group on the Association of County and City Councils, so I have some knowledge. I remember the previous local government review, which was a difficult process that turned colleagues at different tiers against one another as they advanced the case for their own authorities and their own way of doing things. The arguments were often equally valid—the role of district councils is closer to the public whom they serve, while county councils, as strategic authorities, have the scope to get better value for money through economies of scale. There is an argument for unitary authorities, but the Government will make a big mistake if they repeat the 1972 local government changes, which not only instituted new patterns for local government, but told people that they no longer lived where they believed and continued to believe that they lived, which is a point that applies to the creation of the so-called county of Avon. People do not care who collects their dustbins, but they know whether they grew up a Somerset man or a Gloucestershire man, and they do not want to be told that their culture, history and geography has been turned upside down. If the Government want the process of moving unitary authorities to succeed, then I advise them, however the local authority boundaries are determined, that they should allow the cultural and historic boundaries to remain so that people can still say, ““I live in Somerset, but my dustbins are collected by South Somerset council””, which would allow people to maintain their identities. That is an aside, but it is an important consideration. If we are to have unitary authorities, they will by definition be more remote than the present district councils. Such local authorities should be able to consider matters and deliver services at a more local level, in which case the role of the parish council will become even more important as the voice of the local community.