Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hamwee said that she was a grumpy old woman—her description, not mine. I think that we should be careful about accusing people in your Lordships’ House of being old. After all, as the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, will have found, you think that you are getting old but then you come here and suddenly discover that you are young again—but not for long. Grumpiness is a different matter. If people think that I am being grumpy in relation to this Bill, I shall hold my hand up and agree with them. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and my noble friend Lady Hamwee both expressed disappointment with the Bill and thought that it was a missed opportunity. I agree entirely and add that some parts of it will cause a lot of harm if they are enacted in their present form. I sat here in admiration of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Hampstead—at least, the part of it that was a eulogy to Burnley. He said what a fine town it is and how beautiful some of it is. It also now has some pretty good leadership. I am tempted to spend much of my speech pointing out that Burnley’s twin of Pendle is even more beautiful, is an even finer place and has even better leadership, but I might be biased there. I declare my interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council. This is an enormous Bill and it is full of an enormous amount of detail, yet it does not do very much at all to regenerate democratic local government in this country. At the same time, according to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, it has 86 individual provisions for delegated powers. Therefore, we will end up not only with this big fat Bill in law but with a huge great pile of statutory instruments to add to it and goodness knows what else as well. What is it all intended to do? The first part of the Bill is all about what I call external structures or reorganisation, perhaps turning some authorities into unitary authorities. Yet if it is true that unitary government is much better than a two-tier system, why on Earth are the Government being so timid? If it is not true—if it does not make much difference and the costs of reorganisation mean that it is not worth the candle—why are the Government doing any of it? It is extraordinary. I do not know how much of the Bill will survive the change in government when we get a new Prime Minister, but I sincerely hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, will survive the changes and will continue to provide excellent service to this House. She is an excellent Minister and, like everyone else, we hope that she will be fit and well to take part in Committee and in what the Minister today looked forward to: vigorous debate. I think that we will have vigorous debate, which will be good. I want to put the Bill into an historical context. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, I was a member of a local council before the 1974 reorganisation of local government and I can remember what it was like then. When the noble Baroness was speaking, I was thinking back to the days when attending meetings meant that an item on the agenda would be discussed, a decision would be made about what to do and that would be put into effect. So often, that simple process does not take place any more. Everything is far too complicated; there are far too many constraints and far too many strategies saying, ““You can do this but you can’t do that””. Councillors are elected for four years, but getting even little things changed can now take the whole four years or longer. I remember the Redcliffe-Maud report of the late 1960s. That was a royal commission—those werethe days when we had royal commissions. The Conservative Government introduced the changes in the early 1970s, bringing in a two-tier system across the whole country, although in the metropolitan counties we had the metropolitan councils, which were not the most popular or exciting bodies and were done away with in about 1986. At that time, the whole of English local government, outside London, was reorganised on the basis of an Act of Parliament that was about a quarter the size of this Bill. Instead of lots of detailed rules and regulations about how councils have to run their internal affairs, we had the Bain report, which was a committee of inquiry that looked at ways in which councils could run themselves more efficiently internally. That was purely voluntary and yet it was universally taken up across local government because it was put together on a co-operative basis. There was wide agreement on it. Instead of the old system of committees, everyone had a policy and resources committee, a service committee and sub-committees, and that system worked well for quite a long time. My point is that that was done by consensus and by agreement. We did not need the avalanche of detailed primary legislation and even more detailed secondary legislation with which we have now been landed as the Government try to micromanage local government. I do not understand why that is now necessary and why we cannot go back to the system that we used to have. We should trust people. If they are elected to local authorities, if they run local authorities and are senior management of local authorities, we should trust them to do what they believe is best for their areas rather than trying to put everything down in detail. It seems that we cannot do that any more. On the new structures, I echo everything that my noble friend Lady Hamwee said and a great deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said from the Conservative Front Bench. The new arrangements have been in place for seven years. In some places they are still bedding down and people are still getting to grips with the concept of overview and scrutiny, which, in the early years, was not a success; in many councils, it is still not a success, although things are improving. If that is the situation, we should allow people to get on with it and not interfere further. The idea of putting all the powers of a local authority in the hands of one person—the leader—is, in my view, philosophically wrong and practically very difficult. It will lead to a whole series of difficult situations locally when, for example, the control of a council changes. We can discuss that in detail in Committee. The Government have taken note of the fact that many ordinary councillors are very dissatisfied with their role, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, pointed out. The Government have invented this colourful new title, ““front-line councillors””. I can think only of those in the front line being shot first. As a councillor, I do not mind being shot if I have control of the decisions for which I am being shot. However, I object to being in a position of powerlessness, not being able to do things and still getting the blame. Many people in local government find themselves in that situation. Until quite recently, one never had the vast programme of councillor training that exists now. Nowadays, many councillors receive training almost every week; some of them get degrees in being a councillor from, I think, Salford University in the north-west. What is all this about? In my view, it is very simple. It is a means of finding ways in which councillors can fill their time and think that they are doing something as a result of being elected when, in practice, they have far less power than anybody did before—apart, of course, from ““them”” if you are a front-line councillor, or ““us”” if you are actually running the council. There are ways of getting around it. I am on a council that involves all councillors through area committees, which is a very successful approach. But the more the Government try to impose detailed rules and regulations on councils and the way in which they run and site things, the more difficult it is for councils to overcome these difficulties. We are going to have a lot of interesting discussions on the Bill. Local area agreements are an interesting and fascinating question. If I was a member of a compact unitary council, I might find the prospect of local area agreements quite exciting, as they put the council at the centre of the spider’s web of the delivery of local services. In two-tier council areas, I do not understand how the agreements are going to work without severely emasculating district councils. The county council will be responsible for the local area agreement. Certainly in Lancashire, the local area agreement will not be in our area, will not be local and is unlikely to be done by agreement. The two-tier system has worked well for most of the past 33 years. In many parts of the country, it has come to the end of its usefulness and we ought to move towards unitary authorities. Certainly, as far as Lancashire is concerned, I endorse everything about unitary authorities that the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Hampstead, said, but we have been told that we cannot have it. We have to muddle on as best we can with this new system. Issues of local democracy will come up time and again as we discuss the Bill. As councils get tied in to agreements with everybody else—many of them medium-term agreements—and as those agreements are on a county level and not a district level in two-tier areas, it will be difficult for people seeking votes in district council elections to explain just what a difference their election would make. As a result, the electoral process will become more personalised and trivial as time goes on. There are lots of things to discuss. Is this basically a great devolving Bill, a liberating Bill for councils and local people, as the Government say, or is it a centralising Bill, acting against devolution and against liberating people, as some of us suspect? As the Bill goes through Committee, we might find the answer to at least one or two of those questions.