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Local Government

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. It may engender a modicum of silence from further down the Chamber, and it proves the virtue of doing one's local homework. It also sits rather ill with the Government's contradictions on this issue, because this is part of a process of reorganisation that will involve a number of areas. Back in 2006, the previous Secretary of State, who is still in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Transport, described the whole question of local government reorganisation as a great distraction. I suspect that she was nearer the mark than her successor and the current ministerial team, for the reasons that we have set out. May I return to the real concern? If one is going to make changes, there must be strong evidence to support them. Such evidence has not been set out in respect of this order. The suggestion that it will bring significant financial advantage depends on a particular case that has been put together, and it is challenged by a number of the other parties. When one examines the detail of that case, one sees that it rests on a number of assumptions about how the transitional costs work out and what the savings will be. Those are not borne out by close examination of the evidence. I was interested to hear the Minister say that there will be a particular treatment of grant. I assume it will apply across the piece, but that was the first time that we had heard about it. That grant treatment was not taken into account in the proposal in terms of setting out the savings. The districts have put forward their own contention, which would tend significantly to undermine the one put forward by the county council; the point being that there is conflicting evidence and, to return to my principal point, there are no objective criteria by which to judge it. It is thus difficult to see how the case for change can possibly be made against that background. We will return to that issue throughout this process, because the same principle seems to apply across all the orders that the House will have to consider in due course. One final thing worries me about the Minister's stance, although I appreciate that he may have inherited this situation. He said that there must be consistent evidence, but a few breaths before, he said that the evidence will vary from authority to authority; so it is difficult to have any great faith in the process. I should also ask some questions about the order itself, because it concerns me. The Minister hits on a point about this not being a takeover. He has been at pains to stress that, and it is set out in the explanatory memorandum. The reality is that if he looks at it fairly, it is difficult to see how he could say to anyone outside this process that it is anything other than a takeover, given that the construction of the implementation executive is that the chairman, who has the casting vote, shall be the leader of one particular authority—of the county council, as opposed to anything else—whether or not there is consensus. There is no obligation to seek consensus. The fact that there has been willingness on the part of the members of all the district councils to try to work together to make the best of the bad job that has been foisted on them is to their credit, rather than to the credit of the Government, who have set forward this unsatisfactory proposition. It is difficult to sell a built-in working majority in favour of one partner as a collaboration of equals, rather than a takeover. I am also concerned that the work of the implementation executive will not be adequately scrutinised. That is important because it is at the time of the transition that the hoped-for savings are most likely to be lost and costs are most likely to overrun. Scrutiny at that stage is therefore especially important. There is, interestingly, a duty on the districts to co-operate on implementation of the transition plan in both paragraph 6.7 and paragraph 11, but surprisingly there is only an option for collaboration on scrutiny. I do not understand why the scrutiny provision—in paragraph 8.6—is not also an obligation. The provision on scrutiny is not as rigorous as that on the duty to take executive action, but both are important. From all that I know of what happens in Wiltshire, the districts will ensure that there is proper scrutiny, but the orders do not guarantee that—and they should. That is a technical concern about the nature of the orders. The political composition of the implementation executive also raises concerns. It is an odd creature, because it does not follow the normal requirements of proportionality. It provides certain guaranteed places, but there seems to be no precedent for that, and I would be interested to know why it has been set up in that way. It is perhaps significant that the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments says, of an identical provision in one of the other orders:"““The use of the powers in the manner proposed is an unexpected use of the powers conferred by section 13(1) of the 2007 Act””." It is an odd departure, and I would like to know the justification for it. On the face of it, it appears to be an arbitrary use of the procedure.