Sustainable Communities Bill

I thank my hon. Friend for expressing much more adequately than I can why the Bill is important and the way in which several factors have come together to make the Bill happen at this time. There has been a view—and I know that the Government agree—that the Bill is overly bureaucratic and top-down, with the Secretary of State having to sign off all sorts of plans and action points for individual communities. That would appear to go against the idea of devolving responsibility. I do not see the Bill in that way at all. It is very much a bottom-up Bill. Yes, the Government are asked to take note and consider carefully how they disburse their resources, but in reality they cannot save services for individual communities. The Government set the framework and the market decides—sometimes very roughly—which service will survive and which will go, but it is up to individual communities to engineer not just the saving of services but their retention and their growth. Too often we leave matters until a postmaster or mistress is about to move and cannot sell their business, so it has to close. That is far too late. I retain my membership of the town council in Stonehouse, the area in Stroud in which I live, and we managed to save our post office, but we did so by investing in the building and putting the town council next to it. I should say that I was not responsible, because of course I am a lapsed member in the sense that I do not attend nearly enough, but the town council looked ahead to the potential closure and that is why it was able to intervene. That is why I am such a fan of parish and town councils—I have been a member of one for the best part of 20 years.