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National Assembly for Wales (Legislative Competence) (Local Government) Order 2010

My Lords, we welcome these measures for the local councils and, particularly, the community councils in Wales. As the Minister has quite correctly stated, the order is conceived through three reports. The Aberystwith University College of Wales, as it was then, produced a report which identified the constraints that community councils believed they faced. The report concluded that existing procedures for establishing a community council were too restrictive, as the Minister has mentioned, and that those for dissolving community councils were too lax. These procedures have been tightened up as a result of the recommendations of the report and the scrutiny of the Welsh Affairs Committee and the Assembly. The issue of directly funding councils was also taken into account. The second report, Representing the Future—which was produced by the Councillors Commission established by the Assembly—dealt with the future of community councils; and the third report was produced by the Independent Remuneration Panel and addressed the remuneration of councillors. A number of matters arise from this legislation which I wish to address. The voting procedures are addressed in paragraph 7.10 of the Explanatory Memorandum. In our view, this is a lost opportunity in voting terms. We could have introduced a proportional system of voting but the Government and the Assembly appear not to have gone along that route. That is to be regretted. Issues connected with population sparsity are not properly addressed within Wales and the Official Opposition during their tenure reduced the calculations of population sparsity regarding need and we are now in a far worse state financially than perhaps we would have been. One of the problems with this legislation is that the aspirations are great but the economic rewards for trying to achieve the end results that we all desire will not be met. For example, the aspirations on grants will certainly be difficult to achieve in the current economic climate. On the other hand, collaboration between community councils is extremely important, as is the transparency and participation within them. There is mention of the national park authorities—of which there are three in Wales—and we cannot understand why all members are not elected from within the areas of the national parks; the majority are appointed by the Assembly. In the case of councils, many councillor representatives on the national park authorities do not live within the areas of those bodies. In fact, I can name people who live 80 miles away from national parks but are still representatives. The question of scrutiny was addressed by both the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran. It is interesting that, in the Explanatory Memorandum, paragraph 8.5 refers to the fact that exercising competence might have unintended consequences in, ""raising unrealistic expectations of what smaller community and town councils could undertake and deliver"." Expectations in many communities in Wales are great and can be achieved. For example, in 1987, three people came to me and suggested that it would be a good idea to have a book festival in Wales and to bring the authors there and so on. They asked me what I thought of that, and I said that we should do it immediately—and the Florence family did it. We know today that that is not entirely funded by grants from the Welsh Assembly, but add-on match funding has produced a very successful festival. I was involved in that from the beginning, as I was in the Brecon jazz festival, which has been equally successful. So communities should be given their head, and they can do it when they are given the opportunity. There are other factors that we believe are important. This is a small leap for the National Assembly and, as we will discuss in the next LCO, there is a very long way to go. The matters that we are discussing are small but very important to Wales. We welcome this LCO.