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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 17: 17: Clause 3, page 3, line 22, at end insert— ““( ) making its own proposal in accordance with the result of consultation with members of the local electorate;”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, Amendments Nos. 17 and 28 are designed to put greater flexibility into this part of the Bill by allowing local authorities to send back, in response to a request or a designation, an opinion of their own, and to permit greater time for them to do so. This would be too late for people who are already well down the line on this and whose fate has been sealed, unless the Government hold up some of the procedures that have been started. This amendment does something that the Bill does not; it makes a real allowance for the voice of local people. It is instructive to read what has happened in both Durham and Cornwall with the proposals that have been forced out. I will quote only the Cornwall response, where on average over 80 per cent of the electorate in the district decided that they did not want a unitary county. What a surprise. I get an appalling sense of déjà-vu. In about my third year of involvement in local government, there was a royal commission. It became known as the Maud report on the structure of local government. Maud looked at the structure as it existed objectively, and he came up with a proposal for unitary local government across the country based on what was essentially a county structure. Of course, small counties became larger and the large counties became smaller and the districts across the country were opposed anyway. The districts, remarkably, were much more likely to be contiguous with constituencies. Not particularly unsurprisingly, the Maud report disappeared into a very deep pigeonhole. With the benefit of a great deal of hindsight, sometimes I think it is a pity that the Maud report was not implemented, because we would not have had some 50 years of destabilisation. There has been constant irritation and movement, which has been largely inspired centrally supposedly to rationalise the structure of local government. I have regarded that as not particularly helpful when one comes to consider properly what local government is about. It is about the services that are provided to local people. The amendments are small, but they are important. I hope that the Minister might give us some hope that it is worthwhile considering at this stage—she still has time to consider it—and that the amendments might be worthy of introduction; or that greater flexibility in some form might be worthy of introduction on Third Reading, if she is not prepared to accept the amendments now. This is a small matter, which does not affect the substance of the Bill. It would ease some of the pressures that local authorities feel they are being put under by what is being proposed and by what is happening on the ground at present. It would be a concession that would improve the Government’s standing with local government if it were made. I beg to move.