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Unitary Authorities

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs. Humble. For many colleagues present, this is a walk down memory lane, as the consideration by the boundary committee for England of proposals for unitary authorities in Norfolk, Suffolk and Devon has been an issue since October 2006. A vast amount of time, effort and money has been spent by local authorities in that period, and their attention has been diverted from the delivery of good local services. It has also been a time of great uncertainty for the staff of many local district authorities, as they do not know whether they will have a job at the end of the process. This is the third debate that I have initiated on this issue. The first, a one and a half hour debate on 20 November 2007, and the second, a half hour debate on 9 July 2008, narrowly considered Norfolk and a bit of Suffolk, while today's debate covers all three county areas. I asked for this debate largely as a consequence of the legal challenges that different local authorities have made, and of the Secretary of State's decision to extend the deadline for advice to 15 July 2009. I find it amazing, at this stage, that both the boundary committee and the Secretary of State have conceded that the committee misdirected itself in restricting the publication of its draft proposals to a single scheme, last July, thus making the process unlawful. The boundary committee said that it would have published proposals on more than one scheme if it had thought that it could. With the best will in the world, although colleagues may disagree on whether the principle of having unitary authorities in their county areas is good, that kind of monumental cock-up, at procedural and administrative level, is an absolute disgrace. Either the boundary committee will have to go back to square one and reconsider all the evidence, or, as I shall reiterate at the end of my speech, the Minister should, with some grace, drop the whole proposal as it is fatally flawed. My approach to this issue has been to consider whether any reorganisation of local government in Norfolk from the current status quo will provide better services and better value for money to my constituents. From the beginning, I have never been convinced that any of the options would do that, but I accept that other colleagues take a different view on different options. From the start of the process, I have believed that it is heavily politically inspired and related to the Government's desire to help the Labour parties in Norwich, Ipswich and Exeter. There is considerable local evidence to support that view, which I have presented in earlier debates. For me, the two main issues are, first, whether unitary authorities would, in principle, be good for my constituents in Norfolk, and, secondly, how legitimate and efficient the process followed by the boundary committee, as instructed by the Government, has been.