Sustainable Communities Bill

I thank my hon. Friend for that extremely helpful intervention. I am delighted to confirm that that is the Bill’s essence, and it encourages me that it has come through so clearly, despite the best efforts of the parliamentary draftsman. The Government know that we have to change direction—or at least they say that they do. The Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs wrote the following recently in The Guardian:"““Our conception of politics has been Whitehall and Westminster based. The environment shows how outdated this is. People don’t want the remote influence of lobbying their representatives through the occasional tick in the ballot box. They want to be players””." He is right. The Chancellor of the Exchequer went even further. In his 2006 conference speech, he said:"““People and communities should now take power from the state…That means a reinvention of the way we govern; local councils not Whitehall should have more power over the way we govern””." So there we have it—from the next Labour leader, and possibly the one after that—localism is the future. Today, we have a Conservative MP adopting a Bill originally promoted by the Liberals and supported—in principle, at least—by half the parliamentary Labour party. It asks a very tough question of this or any Government: ““How serious are you about giving power away?”” Its premise is straightforward. If we accept that community decline is a fact and that it carries a significant and growing social risk, the only way effectively to manage that risk is to give local authorities and the people whom they serve real power. When it boils down to the fundamental question of who knows best, the unequivocal answer from this Bill is that local people know best. After 20 years of centralisation of power, we must accept that it is time to turn the wheel back, to give residents more influence over how to build and improve their communities, and to see local government less as agents of central Government and more as instruments of local people. I think that the Government are serious about taking the first steps in this direction. This Bill urges them to be bolder, and I ask the House to support it.