Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

Putting my CIPFA guidance to one side, we come to a highly political matter that was the subject of significant and constructive debate in Committee. It may be helpful to the House if I explain the purpose and effect of the new clauses and amendments and why we have proposed them. The effect of the new clauses and amendments would be to allow local authorities that have at any time been subject to a scheme for partial council elections—normally referred to as ““thirds””, although that is not always the case—but that are subject to a scheme for whole council elections to revert to a scheme for partial council elections. To use the political jargon, if a council has moved from thirds to all outs, can it move back? I know that there are differences in two-tier areas—the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon (Angela E. Smith), has explained them to me. The Government amendments also amend part 2 of the Bill to require local authorities to pass resolutions for changing their schemes for elections by a two-thirds majority. The same figure applies to districts at the moment. In addition, they extend the permitted resolution period during which a metropolitan district council may first resolve to move to a scheme for whole council elections from 31 December 2007 to 31 December 2009. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner), who represents such an area, pressed that point in the Committee. In Committee, we listened carefully to the concerns expressed by hon. Members from all three parties about the proposal that local authorities that resolve to move to whole council elections should be unable to move back to partial council elections. At the end of an extremely constructive Committee debate, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) withdrew the amendments that would have allowed county councils and London boroughs to move to partial council elections, even though there is no tradition of partial council elections in those areas. We believe that if a council has always held whole council elections—that is the pattern of election that the Electoral Commission recommended and demonstrated to be in the interests of electors and effective democratic processes—it would be perverse to give it the option of moving away from those arrangements. However, in Committee we undertook to give further consideration to whether amendments should be made that would allow areas with a tradition of partial council elections to return to that scheme if they thought that whole council elections were not appropriate in their area. I hope that the House will find that the amendments address the concerns that were expressed in Committee, when the issue was subject to extremely constructive scrutiny. I hope that I have support in saying that a great deal of experience was brought to the Committee by Members of all parties—people spoke as constituency Members, irrespective of their Government or Opposition roles, and some powerful points were made. The debate has been around for 50 years. I do not want to bore the House with details of my bedtime reading, but I am reading the memoirs of a predecessor in the 1950s, who explained that in 1955-56 the Conservative party had an election commitment to, and a debate in Cabinet on, election by thirds. It wanted to ensure election by thirds in order to secure strong executive leadership on the councils. Fifty years later, that position has been turned around by events but the subject is still debated by elected representatives, both in the House and on councils. It is an important issue, and that is why we considered it in the light of the points made by the Committee. We tabled this group of amendments in that spirit. I am glad to see that, if my reading of the amendment paper is correct, there are no non-Government amendments on the subject, so I hope that our point is accepted.