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Norwich and Norfolk (Structural Changes) Order 2010

I begin by declaring an interest. I have lived in Norfolk all my life. My forebears were in Norfolk as far back as we can trace. I have been a Norfolk county councillor for a division of the city of Norwich. I have been a Member of Parliament for south-west Norfolk, and I am a deputy lieutenant. I pay tribute to the Minister, who is well respected in this House, for the skilful way in which he has presented the case for this extraordinary can of worms. What he has presented bears absolutely no relation to the perception of people in Norfolk of the process that has led us to this evening. It is impossible to imagine a more incompetent and unconvincing process than the one that has got us here. The whole episode, which has been characterised by delay, contradiction and disunity within government, began, as he admitted, in 2006. It has been massively costly in public money, energy and time on the part of councils, other public bodies and the voluntary sector. Local decision-making has been blighted and local government left paralysed at the very time when it must meet unprecedented demands and spending cuts imposed on it by the Government. I do not for one moment doubt the seriousness and commitment of noble Lords who today support these orders. I have known the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, for at least 34 years. She is serious about this process; but people in Norfolk wonder whether the Government are serious, and this is why. They say that if the Government were serious about imposing unitary local government throughout England, why did they not propose such a policy in their manifesto? If they were committed to the empowerment of people at local level, why did they legislate to ensure that the public should not be consulted on the issue, and that the status quo—that is, two-tier local government—would be ruled out without discussion? If they were really serious about unitary local government for Norwich and Exeter, why have they taken four and a half years to lay these orders today—arguably in the last four and a half days of their legislative life? Those are the questions that are being asked in Norfolk and Norwich. I do not intend to rehearse the history of the episode—the issue of the criteria, the U-turns and the overruling of the decision of Hazel Blears—but I will emphasise, as did my noble friend Lord MacGregor, the extraordinary intervention of the accounting officer and Permanent Secretary at the DCLG. I can tell the Minister, because we have researched it, that his intervention is without precedent within the history of the department. He requested a political direction before the announcement could be made on the very reasonable grounds that the policy did not meet the Government’s own criteria. He also pointed out that the newly introduced criterion of Total Place had not been part of the original considerations and therefore had not been consulted upon. Like my noble friend Lord MacGregor, I have had no experience in the five Secretary of State jobs that I have held of having such a direction. It is impossible to avoid pointing out that the present Norwich City Council has recently had difficulty in coping with its current responsibilities. In four of the past five years, its accounts have not been approved, and two of its recent decisions are at present being challenged in the courts. It is unclear that it could cope with broader policy areas, such as those relating to the elderly or vulnerable children. Its population—around 122,000—