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Local Government

My Lords, we are all very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, for a good and timely debate on local government, particularly in view of the Government’s intention to publish a White Paper. Today’s discussions have ranged around many issues in which I have been engaged for the past 30 years. It was, in fact, 30 years ago during local elections in Southampton that somebody knocked on my door to ask me how I was going to vote, that I ended up being persuaded to join a political party. Since that time, I have not only been a city councillor, but a Member of both Houses of Parliament. I have dealt with Front Bench issues on local government. Last year, I once again became a democratically elected member of a council in Northumberland—and, oh, how I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, about internal arrangements on councils. I much preferred the system we had in Southampton to the executive we have today. During that time, I have not changed my views on the importance of local democracy in underpinning the health of our national democracy; the importance of local bodies that are accountable to those people who elect them; and the importance of openness and transparency in the way that democratically elected bodies operate. I have also not changed my mind about the fact that decisions should be made as close as possible to the things that are being decided upon and the people who are affected by them. Like many noble Lords today, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, I firmly believe that it is not possible to devise a hierarchy of local and regional bodies below national level that will suit every corner of Britain. One size does not fit all. These principles and beliefs have underpinned my life in local government for the past 30 years and those of my noble friends on these Benches, many of whom have also been in local government. We have had a lot of criticism from other political parties because we sometimes do different things in different places. That is because the needs of my constituents in Berwick North are not the same as those I represented in the city of Southampton and they require different solutions. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, made this point. Underlying those different solutions should be consistent principles and philosophy. Over the years, I have found it difficult and frustrating to deal with the shifting sands. The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, made this point. Over the years, other parties in government seem to have changed their attitude to local government. Various pieces of legislation have come forward, we have seen much more central control and local democracy in England has been fettered, as many noble Lords have said today. That has meant that there is less opportunity for citizens to control their local environment and their own services. Hand in hand with that, turnouts in local elections have gone down. Several noble Lords have remarked on that this afternoon. My noble friend talked about the voting system, but it is interesting that if one talks to people on the doorstep who are not going to vote and asks them why, the answer very often is, ““Because it won’t make any difference””. If we are going to reform local government, we have to make people have a different response. As noble Lords have reflected, recently there seems to be agreement across the major parties that local accountability and local involvement—we all tend to use different words—by citizens is the key to revitalising local democracy. I have even heard the Government talk occasionally about parish councils. They are very important, and we have to look very carefully at how they can develop their role in line with what people say they want, which is local accountability. It has not always been so. I can remember the days when the Labour council in Southampton railed against Margaret Thatcher, centralisation and capping. I can remember another place in the dying days of the Major government. As the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, said, we have had several years of this Government and, disappointingly, they have undone very few of those changes. In fact, many of us believe that they have compounded them. In recent years, we have seen a huge proliferation of partnership bodies, appointed bodies and quangos of all kinds that undermine local accountability and transparency even more. A very interesting study was recently funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. The report was called Whose Town is it Anyway? The State of Local Democracy in Two Northern Towns and was written by Stuart Wilks-Heeg and Steve Clayton. It concerned Burnley and Harrogate and dealt with many of the issues that we have touched on today. It is an in-depth study and I recommend it to noble Lords. There is a case study of a man who, like some us, got involved in a local issue and ended up being a member of an unbelievable number of bodies. Most of them not were elected, so he was not accountable. On finance, which my noble friend Lady Scott and the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, talked about, I am grateful to the study because it shows that a district council these days probably is accountable for only about 5 per cent of public spending in its area. If you go up to the county and unitary level and include police and fire authorities, you might get up to 50 per cent of the public spend under democratic control. That means that 50 per cent of the public spend in any area is not under democratic control—of course a lot of that will be health services. My conclusion from this and much other evidence is that any reform of local government must reverse many of the trends we have discussed. We want to see powers going down to authorities and not up. We want to see accountability, particularly for finance, where it is spent. We do not want central control on finance, but more independence for local government. I believe that these improvements will do more to revitalise local government than any grand structural changes to the size and area of local government. Any changes that are brought about should not be imposed from above; they should come from below and be the desire of local people who live there. I agreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, on that point. I also agreed with her about size. There are some very interesting figures about size in this study, and it refers to other studies elsewhere that looked at the size of local authorities. There is a lot of evidence from Europe and America that bigger is not better and that in fact sometimes, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, also said, it can be worse. Interestingly, in England we have one of the highest ratios of people to an elected person and by far the lowest turnout in local elections in Europe. There is much evidence that larger units of provision can mitigate against democratic and community engagement, and that economies of scale sometimes throw up other matters that then require money to be spent on them. There is a very interesting example in this book that the larger the school, the more problems there are with bullying, truancy and so on, and then you have to put money into special measures to deal with that. Therefore, it is not always true that big is cheaper. There was a lot of evidence from a study by Denters in 2002, which looked at local government in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and here. There is considerable evidence that citizens living in smaller local government unit areas tend to express greater levels of satisfaction with the services such units provide and that they have a greater trust in the local politicians and officials than residents who live in larger municipalities. There are many other good studies on good local governments and many debates such as today’s. We will soon have the Lyons report and the Government’s White Paper. But it is clear to me from where I am in Northumberland, which is perhaps a little different from where the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, is in Norwich, that we do not want any more grand local government changes. We are still recovering from people jockeying for places in the regional referendum—whatever one thinks about that; and we know that there are different views here. But, there is plenty of local government legislation on the statute book which could be used to give control back to local authorities, financial and other. Councils in my area need time to work together more efficiently on local matters rather than trying to respond to the Government and jockeying for place in reorganisations. One thing that happened recently was that the local authorities within Northumberland were not able to agree how they could work together on elderly people obtaining their travel passes—which includes me. It is clear that changes may need to be made, but please can they be underpinned by good principles? Can it not be a case of ““one size fits all””? Can it be local? Can decision-making be transparent? I hope that I can hear from the Minister today some of the principles that underlie what the Government are doing and some of the evidence-based research that they will use to ensure that we do not go off in directions that end up with us having to reverse measures in future years. That has been the sorry history. We need consistency in local government—certainly in my area.