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Unitary Authorities

The right hon. Gentleman may have received such representations; I accept his word on that. All I know is that the business community is divided on this issue. Big business tends to be in favour of the proposals, but most small businesses tend to be against them. I hear a desperate argument from some people in Norwich who want a unitary authority because they fear that local government in Norwich has not been in the top league in the past 20 or 30 years. The auditing of local government accounts, the recent problems with housing allocations, and the fact that, even today, Norwich city council is going to be in the biggest dog fight possible about setting the council tax rate, means that Norwich has specific problems, and I am very sorry for the constituents of both the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) and the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson). The right hon. Gentleman mentioned cost savings. The problem is that there is no agreed set of criteria by which to judge what savings have been made. That issue needs to be revisited given the economic downturn and the enormous economic pressures on all the councils in all the relevant areas. I suspect that the Treasury will not look favourably on any reorganisation that will cost money. In a previous life, the Minister was a Treasury Minister, under the current Prime Minister, although he might not want that fact publicised in these days of economic turbulence. When mentioning the alternative proposals being put forward for Cheshire, in a debate on the Cheshire (Structural Changes) Order 2008 on 4 March 2008, Baroness Andrews, the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, said:"““It is important to stress from the outset that this is not a choice on which one delivers greater savings or which one has greater public support. It is about which one can better deliver long-term outcomes in a very challenging environment.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 March 2008; Vol. 699, c. 1031.]" The problem is that that assessment is subjective rather than evidence-based. Local opinion in Norfolk and, I suspect, in Devon and Suffolk, has become cynical about reorganisations. We have had experience not just of the appalling process of reorganisation of local government, but of the reorganisation of the primary care trusts—we went to six and now we are back to one—and the attempts, which the right hon. Member for Norwich, South supported, to reorganise the police in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, which was greatcoats on, greatcoats off. My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and I have attempted to achieve democratic accountability through the Broads authority, and that has failed. So, local opinion is incredibly cynical about these outcomes. Having passed briefly over some of the principal aspects of whether unitary authorities are a good idea, I now want to look at the process itself, which has shown ministerial interference and plain incompetence at the level of both the Government and the boundary committee. The committee's process began in summer 2007 before it received any ministerial instructions: it was found that it was attempting to bully local authorities into coming up with options before any instructions were received. The committee informed us at the time that cross-county proposals would not be considered and were not on the agenda, but in December 2007 ministerial instructions said that they would be. The committee had also said that it was unlikely that it would consider unitary authorities covering more than 500,000 people. Of course, as we know, the first unitary authority to be considered in respect of Norfolk and Suffolk would probably have had a population of between 750,000 and 800,000. The boundary committee told Members of Parliament and peers that it would cost only those proposals that emerged from an initial sift. No other area that I can think of, either in the private or public sector, would do that. It is rather like the Ministry of Defence having bids for the procurement of a piece of equipment and deciding only to cost them after an initial sift. I find that absolutely incredible. In July 2008 the boundary committee published its proposals: a single unitary for Norfolk, including Lowestoft, with two alternative patterns; a two-authority pattern for Suffolk; and, in Devon, a single unitary authority, less Plymouth and Torbay. Shortly after those proposals were published, a meeting of Norfolk and Suffolk peers and MPs saw the boundary committee chairman and officials absolutely scragged—to use a Dickensian expression—in terms of their proposals and the process. My right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) and the right hon. Member for Norwich, South were forthright in their views on those proposals. Later, we discovered under a freedom of information request that the boundary committee's own experts had proposed an east-west divide as the favoured unitary authority for Norfolk. Why was that advice ignored? Why have experts if they are going to be overruled? Perhaps the boundary committee, or the Minister, could tell me the criteria by which it overruled its own experts. That does not give us confidence in the process. I suspect that the proposals for all three areas satisfied no majority of local opinion and, if anything, enraged it. Norfolk district councils went to the High Court to challenge the basis for the boundary committee's proposals and, as a consequence of a judgment, the deadline for advice was extended from December 2008 to February 2009. Now the Secretary of State has further extended that deadline to 15 July 2009. We were told from the beginning that, like the Mad Hatter, we had to rush and decisions had to be made very quickly indeed. However, I understand, from a judgment in court last week, that the judge said that there appeared to be no deadline and that it could be extended to 2011 or 2012. Once again, there appears to be a muddle about the process. It was interesting that the Secretary of State's letter said that she wanted to take into account"““directions contained in the judgment handed down by Mr. Justice Cranston after an application for judicial review by East Devon council.””" That actually means that the Secretary of State keeps refining her advice to enhance proposals for what she wants rather than what the boundary committee wants. As I mentioned at the beginning of my speech, there is a suspicion in Norfolk, Suffolk and Devon that this has more to do with party political issues than the good delivery of local government in our areas. It is unlikely that the Secretary of State will be introducing any orders in Parliament until the new year of 2010 or, if those are passed, bringing any unitary authorities into being in Norfolk, Suffolk and Devon until May 2010—and by then there is likely to be a general election. I suggest that the Minister either goes back to the drawing board, given the failure to reach any agreed solution to the options on the table and given that the process is fatally flawed, or, even better, that he scraps this disastrous process, which has had relatively limited support within the county structures and has been an embarrassment to the Government.