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Local Government

My Lords, I am indebted to my noble friend Lord Bowness for the opportunity to say a few words on the subject of local authorities and the way in which the Government appear to be setting themselves up in opposition to the whole idea of local choice, local accountability and local government. I entered this House nearly 10 years from the voluntary side of my party, following my work in and for many other voluntary organisations, particularly with WRVS in Leicester. At that time I also sat as a representative on Leicestershire County Council Social Services Committee, which drew together the various contributions from those bodies. On the political front, both at district and council level, councillors constantly prepared for and attended meetings, were constantly available for anyone in their ward or division, took some fairly difficult decisions from time to time, and were above all answerable to the electorate. Councillors often had a specialism, but they saw most of the papers and sat on committees that met regularly and had the great merit of keeping all members informed of the issues of the day. I believe that the cessation of big committees—education, housing and social services, for example—and their replacement, to which my noble friend referred, by cabinet, overview and scrutiny committees has reduced the number of councillors who are sufficiently in the know to respond well to their electors. I understand that the next move is the formation of local area agreements which will, or are intended to, bring together key local agencies as partners grovelling for ““government”” money in return for meeting ““government”” targets. These LAAs will involve all the councils within the area. They will also include the Countryside Agency and Environment Agency, primary care trusts, the police authority, the strategic health authority, colleges of further education, councils for voluntary services and so on. The regional development agencies and national bodies such as Sport England will be consulted and, as they say, ““kept in the loop””. The ODPM has issued guidance on how to bid successfully for government money under an LAA. It includes mandatory outcomes arranged in four basic blocks: children and young people, safer and stronger communities, healthier communities and older people, and economic development and enterprise. Despite the work of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, who was wearing his rural proofing hat, there is no mention of the environment. I understand that a few councils may be trying to insist on including an environmental block, but it remains to be seen whether the ODPM will agree to it. It is bad enough that the environment seems to have been overlooked or deliberately excluded in the local area agreements, but that is only one manifestation of the shift from local to central and from elected councils to partnerships, which will be rendered impotent by the very breadth of their membership. How will the Government punish an area that fails to meet its targets? Will it simply be denied extra funds? Will that denial extend to the normal annual grants, and could there be any element of penalty by which the standard funds will be cut or delayed? The councils will have to commit themselves to their LAA while carrying on their normal duties. Those authorities with rural responsibilities are faced with the perennial problems of affordable housing, transport, planning and the delivery of services miles out of town. I recommend that noble Lords reflect on the very good report on rural housing that the noble Lord, Lord Best, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Rural Housing Policy Forum launched yesterday, which showed quite clearly that young people needing homes in rural areas are in a worse situation than their counterparts elsewhere and that urgent action is definitely needed to overcome that. They also recognise that the incomes of those employed in rural areas are frequently lower and yet home costs are often higher. House building levels are falling in rural areas. They are down by 4 per cent from 2003-05, compared with a 19 per cent increase in urban areas. The proportion of new house building that comprises affordable, usually subsidised, housing has been just 6 per cent compared to 16 per cent in more urban districts. The building of houses on greenbelt land in areas where local residents feel that there has been sufficient development, because water resources and their roads and railways are under strain, is decreed by Whitehall. They are seen to have regard for their own local services, or rather concern about them. How can local people hold their local representatives to account for that? New build is particularly unwelcome when the prices go too high for those born and raised locally and the demand is coming from people from other parts of the country who are fortunate enough to have the cash to have access to that type of housing. The Government have decreed that there will be free local transport for all those over 60, and the Prime Minister has indicated that schoolchildren will be eligible for further free school transport. I am told that the central funds supplied to enable that to happen are inadequate. Perhaps the Minister will comment on that. If it goes wrong, who will be blamed? It will be the local councillors if they take the balance away from other services; but curtailing expenditure to match central funding can result only in a restricted transport timetable. Planning has been mentioned by other noble Lords. Planning law and guidelines have been changing constantly. The result has been an upsurge in the need for training and familiarisation for officers and councillors and considerable expenditure on publications of various sorts. There seems to have been a by-product in the form of greatly increased pressure on the enforcement side of planning. That may be an unintended consequence, but it places great pressure on local council funds and results in misplaced dissatisfaction with the efforts of local councillors. The delivery of those services that are in rural locations is obviously more expensive and complex. Waste collection is now the subject of government targets. It costs more to send a lorry to pick up paper, tins or bottles from rural doorsteps than it does within towns. Ask any of the petrol companies whose delivery surcharges result in a steady closure of rural filing stations. Are those true costs taken fully into account when the financial settlements are agreed? I thank my noble friend for giving us the opportunity for this debate. One could be tempted to give up the struggle and allow central government to take over the running of local services were it not for their own ineptitude. The list is lengthy and expanding almost daily. This week alone, there has been the revelation of an overpayment of £4 billion over two years in child tax credits, £1 billion of which cannot be reclaimed. Then there are the 1,000-plus prisoners released onto our highways and byways, instead of being deported. We believe that ““local”” should be local. We urge everyone to vote at the local elections next week and to take into account the contribution that local councillors have made to their councils and to have some say in the way that their councils move in future.