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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 30: 30: After Clause 6, insert the following new Clause— ““Referendum in case of proposals for single tier of local government (1) This section applies where a proposal for a single tier of local government is made under section 2 or 5. (2) The principal authority for the county concerned must hold a referendum on the proposal before any steps are taken to implement it. (3) Notwithstanding section 7(1) below, if the result of a referendum under subsection (2) is to reject the proposal the Secretary of State must not implement the proposal. (4) In this section ““the county concerned”” has the same meaning as in section 5(6). (5) The Secretary of State must make regulations specifying the arrangements to be made for the holding of any referendum under this section.”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, this amendment follows on from the subject of consultation. We have briefly discussed it before; it would require any authority putting forward a proposal for a unitary government to hold a referendum. The amendment would tie the action of the Secretary of State into the result of the referendum—if the referendum went against the proposal, the Secretary of State would have to abide by that—so that local people would be at the heart of the decision whether or not to change their structure of local government. Previously, the Minister has queried who the electorate would be in that referendum and who would call it. Our revised proposals for a referendum in Amendment No. 30 clearly set out that any referendum undertaken would include all those who would come under the final proposal. Under our amendment, the county concerned takes on the same definition as that in Clause 5. In other words, our proposal for a referendum would slot in nicely with the process proposed by the Bill. It would be part and parcel of a local authority’s response to an invitation or direction from the Secretary of State. There would be no sense of the elaborate arbitrating between the already made-up views of dithering local authorities or the Boundary Commission, as the Minister suggested in Committee. For the simple reason that there was a referendum part of the package, no authority would make decisions until it had consulted those likely to be affected. That is the right way around: electorate first and politicians later. It about time that that order of importance was recognised formally in this process. The structural change of government is so long-lasting, affecting every aspect of local government, that it is only right and proper that the electorate should be the final judge of any changes. To briefly review what has been happening until now and the results of the process so far, there have been a number of ways of testing some local opinion, as the Minister said earlier. There have been stakeholder consultations, but they tend to involve local business groups, PCTs and other groups of people. There have been focus groups, but they are pretty refined in terms of the numbers who take part. There have been citizens’ juries, but they, too, involve a limited number of people. There has been the odd survey but, as far as I am aware, there has been no requirement that all members of the electorate must have the opportunity to put forward their views. This becomes even more important when we realise that, of the nine authorities that have been announced as being those that the Secretary of State is considering agreeing to, four—Bedford, Chester, Ipswich and Essex—have been asked to undertake further work, so there is no guarantee that the results will come about or that anybody wants them to come about. In the remaining five—Cornwall, Durham, Northumberland, Shropshire and Cheshire—there is pitted opposition. I do not think that we should overlook that. I know that the noble Baroness said that there would clearly be opposition in places, but this is huge opposition, not mini-opposition. In Cornwall, for example, there was a local poll, which, if we extrapolate it, shows that 97,000 of the electorate would be opposed to the proposal with only 21,000 supporting it. They are significant numbers. North Cornwall District Council surveyed 6,000 of its residents to gauge whether there was any local support for the unitary proposals and 82 per cent were against the proposals. All the way through the Cornish proposals, there has been opposition.