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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 5: 5: Clause 56, page 29, line 33, leave out ““an appropriate”” and insert ““a divisible”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, in moving Amendment No. 5 I shall speak also to Amendment No. 6, which is grouped with it and is effectively part of the same amendment. The amendments address a fairly small issue which has not yet been sorted out satisfactorily—a constitutional matter, though one which is perhaps rather less weighty than those which the House has been discussing in the past hour. It is about the arrangements for electing councillors in a relatively small number of, usually, small authorities. The Bill sets out the background to the way in which the Boundary Committee and the Electoral Commission will look at whether councils elected by thirds or by halves can have single-member wards or, if the councils are elected by thirds, two-member wards. However, this is really about single-member wards in rural areas. We had much discussion of this issue in Committee and the Minister kindly explained the Government’s thinking, which seemed a little confused. She said that the Government felt strongly that when a council elects by thirds, it is best that each ward should vote at each election, allowing electors in all parts of the district to vote at the same time and to have an equal chance of influencing the overall composition of the council. I am talking mainly about non-metropolitan district councils and some unitaries. However, she said that the Government did not wish to make that mandatory and that it would be a matter of looking at the specific circumstances in each council when a boundary revision took place. We are talking mainly about single-member wards in small village communities in rural areas in relatively small counties. In such areas there are many single-member wards in councils that elect by thirds. I am not sure exactly how many there are, but 18 non-metropolitan districts elect by thirds, of which at least half have single-member wards. The arguments on each side are this. Some years ago, the Electoral Commission produced a report that, in a fairly academic way, said that, ideally, all electors should take part in each election. On the other hand, single-member wards work well in some rural areas because they allow the relationship between the councillor and the rural village to be much stronger. We have single member wards in such places, simply because during past boundary reviews this was thought by local people to be the best way forward, due to the relationship between these rural areas and councillors. Multi-member wards would be geographically large, and it would be better to have smaller wards with fewer councillors. The purpose of tabling the amendment at this late stage in the Bill is to try to get the Government to give a clear statement of their thinking and what approach will be taken if there is a Boundary Committee review in certain authorities. My reading of Clause 56 is that there will be a very clear presumption in favour of three-member wards—or two-member wards in areas that elect by halves. I am not clear what the exceptions to that might be. The amendment tries to take out of the equation an assumption either way, and tries to put on to the statute book a situation in which local opinion will count and the local circumstances will count in each case. It tries to take a balanced view. I am therefore trying to take out the word ““appropriate””. Although I understand that the way in which the word is used in the clause can be regarded as just a technical matter—whether it is appropriate to have two or three, according to how the council elects—the word is full of value judgments, and people will read that wording as though it is appropriate to have either a two-member or a three-member ward but not a single-member ward. I am trying to replace the word ““appropriate”” with the word ““divisible””, a totally non-judgmental word that is already in the Bill, to describe the situation in the wards concerned. So in one sense this is a very technical matter, but in another sense it is very important. This is one of the proposals in the Bill that people on the ground simply do not understand are being made. People will find out too late that single-member wards in rural districts—which they have become used to, which have become accepted as part of the local political scene and which they want to continue—may no longer be possible because what they will see as an obscure clause in the Bill was passed and no one noticed. I am asking the Government to notice and to put the clause on a more even keel. I beg to move.