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City of Wakefield (Mayoral Referendum) Order 2012

As my noble friend has argued for a referendum, I simply say to him: let the people in these other cities decide whether they want to continue with their mayoral system. They have had long enough to test it out, and he may be right that it is only in Stoke that they would say, ““No, thank you very much””. If we are to have referendums in places that do not have mayors—I would rather we did not have any at all—then let us have them in places where they do. I have a couple of questions about the cost. The only statistic that I have is from House of Commons Hansard of 20 December, where the Government said that, "““the cost of referendums for elected mayors will be £2.5 million””.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/12/11; 1187W.]," which is an average of about a quarter of a million pounds per referendum. Frankly, I am not very interested in who pays for it; all I know is that we will. I suppose it would be very unfair to put it all on the local authority, but the blunt truth is that those of us who do not live in any of these cities—I am one of them—will be paying for them to have a referendum, which I certainly do not want. We will find soon enough whether the public want that. Can the Minister confirm whether those figures are accurate? I also note that paragraph 10 of the Explanatory Memorandum says: "““A Regulatory Impact Assessment has not been prepared for these instruments as they have no impact on business, charities or voluntary bodies and the cost of conducting the referendums across the 11 cities is less than £5 million””." I do not know how these impact assessments are worked out these days, but that may be the cost of the referendum. Of course, if the referendum results in a yes, then the cost of implementing this system in 11 cities will be massively in excess of £5 million. In effect, through these orders we are setting in train a motion that will cost an awful lot of money. I would like the Minister to tell us who will pay for the reorganisation costs in the event of there being a yes result of a referendum. I would also like to know the estimate that the Government are making before we go on this journey about the cost for each of the local authorities because most of them can ill afford any unnecessary expenditure at the moment. I would also like to ask the Minister about the responsibility for implementing the new system. The order is loose enough, as it stands at the moment. Article 4, under the title, "““Action to be taken after referendum””," states: "““If the result of the referendum held by virtue of this Order is to approve a change to a mayor and cabinet executive, the authority must implement that change””." It goes on to say that if a local authority does not do that, the Secretary of State will. Following the question asked by my noble friend Lord Beecham earlier, if there is a decision to make the change, I would like to know the timescale within which the implementation of that change must take place whether it is done by the local authority or by the Secretary of State? I very much regret that these orders have come forward. I know this was an idea dreamt up by some policy expert in some recess of the previous Labour Administration. I did my best to stop it happening then, but without success, and this is my second attempt. I do it with more confidence now as I know—I will check the figures because they are around somewhere—that there was no evidence of any great enthusiasm for this system when local areas had the chance of holding referendums under the legislation that the previous Government brought in. There were very low turnouts, by and large. Some were lower than normal for local government elections. I know of no great evidence that these places have been a riotous success. Mercifully, where I live in the West Midlands, we do not have a directly elected mayor but, like the rest of us, I spend lots of time in London, and I am massively unimpressed with the directly elected mayoral system. I do not find it a wonderfully impressive and exciting operation, and I do not know why we should proceed with this without the evidence to justify it. I am, to put it mildly, unhappy with these orders.