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Local Audit (Public Access to Documents) Bill

My hon. Friend speaks with great knowledge and experience on this matter. The amendment is, in a sense, supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker). On Second Reading, he intervened on the Minister to ask,

“might not the Government—in the interests of honesty, openness and accountability—consider…opening things up completely, well beyond the intention of the Bill, so that anybody can access this information?”

The Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), said,

“I shall come on to that point a little later and explain why the balance is right.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2016; Vol. 617, c. 1211.]

Unfortunately, apart from asserting that the measures in the Bill were proportionate, the Minister never got on to that important point. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), will be able to address that shortcoming.

I was somewhat perplexed by a comment made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole, who was the Minister in Committee on 7 February:

“I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher, who in her maiden speech introduced the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960, which was in a similar vein; it was about opening up local government to journalists and other interested parties.”––[Official Report, Local Audit (Public Access to Documents) Public Bill Committee, 7 February 2017; c. 4.]

With the greatest respect to my hon. Friend, I think that the core of Margaret Thatcher’s Bill was ensuring that the public had access, which is what I seek to achieve with this amendment. We need more open, public access, just as the late Baroness Thatcher wanted the public to have access to local authority meetings. Her references to journalists in the 1960 Act were mostly about ensuring that accredited representatives of newspapers who attended such council meetings were provided with reasonable facilities for taking their report. I do not think it is fair to pray in aid our distinguished former Prime Minister as a supporter of the Bill, but not amendment 2. I suspect that the noble Baroness would have been a strong supporter of the amendment.

The amendment is highly relevant in the current climate, in which many councils seek to reorganise themselves into new structures—you know that as well as anybody does, Mr Speaker. At district council level, Buckinghamshire, Dorset, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire and Kent are all toying with that idea, and I have no doubt that many others will do so. At present, it is difficult for a local taxpayer to get hard access to information about what is happening in another council, despite the fact that that local council may aspire to take over the assets and income of the council in which the taxpayer is resident.

I will illustrate that point with an example from Bournemouth. In speaking of Bournemouth, may I say how proud those of us who live near Bournemouth are of the way in which my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) conducted himself on Wednesday? That was an example of public service at its best, and I fear that what I am about to say compares very unfavourably with his conduct.

9.45 am

On 9 February, Bournemouth and Poole councils made a submission to the Secretary of State to incorporate Christchurch Borough Council in a new unitary authority comprising Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch. Although Christchurch is financially sound, the Bournemouth case is based on the need for greater efficiency and effectiveness, which the council says cannot be achieved in any other way.

However, Bournemouth has a local reputation for being profligate, spendthrift and secretive. A topical example is the decision, announced earlier this week, to make the council’s chief executive redundant, which came completely out of the blue. The chief executive is to be made redundant and given a £394,000 pay-off, which comprises £85,000 as six months’ pay, because apparently the council does not want him to work any longer; £63,000 in statutory redundancy pay, although no reason has been given why the post is no longer required; and £246,000 on account of early release of pension funds. I have no criticism of the chief executive, because I think he is on to a good thing. I am sure that if I were made a similar offer, I would be sorely tempted by it.

Bournemouth’s proposal is currently before the Secretary of State, and it has been signed by the leaders of Bournemouth and five other Dorset councils. It envisages Christchurch taxpayers having to subsidise Bournemouth residents for up to 20 years by paying higher council tax than do Bournemouth and Poole residents. Effectively, they will have to meet the bill for the redundancy of Bournemouth’s chief executive. Extraordinarily, the council did not meet to discuss whether it wanted to make the chief executive redundant. Not even the council’s cabinet met to discuss the matter. No justification has been given for the substantial payoff, although I understand that there is to be a meeting of the council later next week, in which it will try to approve the decision retrospectively.

Fortunately, in our locality we have an excellent newspaper, the Daily Echo, which heard about the situation and told the world. It ran all sorts of headlines about the £390,000 payoff. As I indicated earlier, £390,000 is a slight underestimate, but the headlines get the message across. The paper discloses in, I think,

today’s edition that the council is going to discuss the matter, following the revelations in the newspaper earlier this week.

We are still left with the question of why the situation arose, and local accountability is crucial if we are to get to the bottom of that. It seems as though the chief executive has fallen out of favour with the leader of Bournemouth Borough Council because the chief executive questioned the council leader’s conflicts of interest with his businesses. The council leader runs an organisation called Hospitality Solutions. This morning, I interrogated its website, which sets out all the things that the business does. In particular, it gives advice on town planning consultation for new build hotel and leisure development, planning support to maximise site potential, planning applications and reports, project planning and management, and building and refurbishment management. The website states that to arrange

“an initial discussion without any obligation”

on any of these issues, the person to contact is none other than John Beesley FIH, who is the leader of the council. On 23 January, the Bournemouth planning board gave approval for a £40 million hotel and apartment redevelopment on the site of the former Belvedere hotel to build a 131-room hotel with leisure facilities, a sky bar, 66 residential flats, a basement car park and so on. I understand that the developers of the site sought and obtained the advice of none other than the leader of the council when developing their ideas. The leader of the council—not wearing his hat as leader of the council, but wearing his hat as a planning consultant—gave them advice and encouraged them to make their pitch to the planning department, which knew of his involvement as a consultant, but was not, of course, influenced by the fact he was leader of the council.

What I suspect happened is that that, as well as various other things that have been going on, caused the chief executive to raise his eyebrow, that he was about to start an investigation into the leader of the council’s conduct and conflicts of interest, and that the leader of the council has in effect used public money to ensure that the chief executive’s best interests are served by taking the money and not inquiring any further into those issues.

That is a current example of what is happening across the country in local government. I do not know whether you read “Rotten Boroughs” in Private Eye, Mr Speaker, but there is so much information in it now that it almost needs to be a separate supplement. So much material is coming out but so little of it can get into the public domain, partly because of the pressure put on local newspapers. If they cause trouble with their local council, they may suffer discrimination because there will not be any advertising for local council jobs and they will not get access to information.