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Local Government

As I said, that is a matter to be decided at the local level. I have absolutely no intention of prescribing from here what should or should not happen—[Interruption.] I am asked again from a sedentary position what we would do. We would not have had this process in the first place, but we think it absolutely right that local areas should have a say on how they would best like to be governed. We should celebrate diversity in how that is achieved, because Wiltshire is very different from Cornwall, for example. I would like to follow up some of the issues that the Minister raised. He was careful to be very clear that the order is not simply a takeover by the county council. However, with this and other orders, real concerns remain that that is what will happen. Unfortunately, the way in which the order is set out will only underline some of those concerns. I am grateful for the Minister's clarity about the legal reasons, but I wonder whether he can do anything further to counter the perception that, as a result of the order, we will be left with a takeover. I also want to follow up the issue of the duty of co-operation between district councils and county councils in the implementation executive. The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) has already raised the issue of the lack of parity and an equal duty to co-operate in the implementation executive and in the scrutiny process, but there is also a wider issue. Why is there no duty on the Secretary of State to co-operate to help local authorities to achieve their aims of reorganisation? That lies at the heart of the matter, because perhaps with the authority we are considering—this will certainly apply in other cases that will be discussed in the days ahead—there is real frustration because the orders will not help local authorities to achieve all they would want from the reorganisation process. There needs to be a duty to co-operate on Ministers so that they cannot stand in the way of authorities trying to achieve higher ambitions. This is only the beginning of the process. The position is difficult because we do not really know what will be in the detail of transitional orders further down the line. We do not know what vision the implementation executive will seek to deliver; there is no sense of what the implementation team will be asked to do; and there is no idea of what the scrutiny process will be or what will be considered. The Secretary of State must give the sense that the process will not be directed from the Minister's desk—there must be a duty to deliver what the proposals want to achieve. Another key area that flags up the kind of barriers that could arise is parish elections. Parish elections took place in 2007. My understanding is that the order will delay any further elections until 2013, after the new body is in place. Given that a new authority is likely to seek to give greater control to parish authorities in taking on new roles and responsibilities, I am concerned that parish councillors elected with an entirely different remit will be asked to take on those new powers. Given that there will be a boundary review and all-out elections to the new authority in 2009, will the Minister comment on what scope there might be to enable parish elections to happen at the same time as those unitary authority elections to allow people to seek election knowing what their terms will be? On the boundary review, will the Minister tell us the time scale under which the Electoral Commission wants to operate? My concern is that we are debating the order close to the deadline that the boundary committee for England has set to be able fully to undertake a boundary review process in time for the 2009 elections. I hope that the Minister will also respond to the concern about the capacity of the boundary committee to undertake other boundary reviews in areas where there are likely to be other unitary elections in 2009. Will it have the capacity to deliver that number of reviews within the necessary time scale? For a lot of authorities, that will be important in demonstrating that a new authority will be elected. With the existing boundaries, if the change does not take place, that will be a real hurdle. Fundamental issues need to be resolved. Otherwise, it will be difficult for the process to have a successful outcome. Locally, many people are disputing whether the changes will bring improvements. If they are correct in disputing that point, either the Government have not assessed the proposals properly or the potential lack of success might be down to failings in the process that we are debating. As we have heard, members of the district authorities are participating in the process to try to make the best of a bad job. The Government have a responsibility to ensure that they are doing their best to make something that is practicable and workable, too.