Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Certainly, having served for thirty years as a member of a local authority, the requirement that we had during that time to make available to the public the information and papers on which we took our decisions is one that I would like to see mirrored as a requirement on the currently significantly unaccountable local bodies and quangos that, as I said earlier, ought to be and must be made accountable to local democratic institutions and councils. In looking to the future, above all, the level of trust in local government needs to be restored, both at a local level and in relation to trust shown by central Government. There needs to be a clear constitutional settlement that guarantees the role and the legitimacy of local government. I want to make two final points. The first is specific to cities such as Leicester and the other is more general. Leicester and a number of other cities have tightly constrained boundaries, many of them dating back up to a century—some even longer than that. Those tightly constrained boundaries make it difficult for the urban core authorities to deal effectively with the problems of the conurbation of which they are a part. Many of the solutions to the problems—this is particularly evident in transport, but it is also true of other fields of responsibility—are outside their boundaries and therefore outside their control. It is not sufficient to hope that voluntary agreement with surrounding areas, which often have no ownership of the problems and no incentive to co-operate in finding solutions, will be enough. I hope that the Government will agree that areas such as Leicester, and other areas up and down the country where the local authority is at the heart of an urban area, need the powers to require the co-operation of their neighbours in addressing the problems of their conurbation. My second point is more general and I touched on it earlier. In many parts of the United Kingdom, all parties face a real challenge in attracting and retaining councillors of calibre. The role of the elected councillor needs to be reformed. I am pleased by what the Government are saying about that, but they will need to go further. The role of the elected councillor needs to be more than just trying to find something to do so that those who are not in an executive position will not get in the way of decision making. That is also a challenge for the Local Government Association and for the political parties to promote and develop the value of serving a local community through being one of its democratically elected representatives. If we are to make a reality of the regeneration of local democracy, local people need to feel that it is worth while subjecting themselves to an election and all that follows. They need to feel that it is a job worth doing at the end of the process. The White Paper and the Bill that I hope will follow it appear to be steps in the right direction, but we will still need the Lyons review, which will hopefully provide the impetus for further steps in the regeneration of local government. Even after that, there will be much more to do to restore local democratic government to its full health.