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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 89: 89: Clause 64, page 37, line 21, after ““proposals”” insert— ““(a)”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 90, which contains the meat of the two amendments. The amendments relate to whether there should be a referendum if a council decides that it wants an elected mayor. There have been a number of referendums under existing legislation for elected mayors, and that is the system. You cannot at the moment make a decision about whether or not to have an elected mayor unless you have a referendum. The proposal in the Bill is that the council will be able to vote to have an elected mayor, by a two-thirds majority, and that decision will be binding. The Minister will say that the council can also make a decision, if it wishes, to have a referendum. It is all rather confusing, because the decision on whether to have a referendum will now be made by the council, a body that may or may not wish to move to an elected mayoral system. The reason for pursuing the amendment at this stage is to put down the marker, yet again, that out there in the country there will be some very angry people if they find that their council is foisting on them an elected mayor that they do not want and they do not have a vote in the matter. You can argue about whether the decision to have an elected mayor should or should not be subject to a referendum of the people—that discussion took place seven years ago—but the system that is now entrenched is that, if you are going to make such a decision about an elected mayor, you have a referendum. What the Government are now doing in the Bill is potentially taking away that right. In some of the places that have elected mayors, the decision was not terribly controversial at the time; in other places, it was highly controversial and a matter of great local debate and campaigning. Indeed, in some places far more campaigning and effort went into the referendum on whether to have a mayor than went into who should be the mayor once the elections came round. That turned out to be a damp squib—Torbay is the extreme example, but there are others. Nevertheless, people will feel that that right existed for the people in Bedford, Torbay or Middlesbrough—wherever it was—and it has been taken away from them. I move the amendment to warn the Government that they will get into serious trouble in some places if councils vote to go ahead with an elected mayoral system but people do not have a vote on it. The case for changing the rules has not been made. As my noble friend has pointed out, elected mayors have become a lot less popular since they first came in, and it is now very difficult to win such a referendum. There is a suspicion that that is why the Government are potentially abolishing the referendum, which may or may not be the case. I do not know why they want elected mayors in the first place, but that goes back to the arguments that we were having before about the nature of leadership and so on. If we are to have a system in which a fundamental change can take place from the existing way in which local authorities are elected to the election of an executive mayor, taking away the right to a referendum is going to cause a lot of anger and trouble. I tell the Government that, even on pragmatic grounds, it is not worth it. I beg to move.