Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I am going to join the ganging-up. I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, to pole position on this amendment. I hope she has an easier ride than some of her colleagues have had. There is a wider issue here about the purpose and future of parish councils and whether or not the mechanism should apply to London. It is not only a London question but a big city one. Although under existing legislation it is possible to have parish councils in Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and such places, I do not know of any big cities that have taken to parish councils. Those metropolitan districts which have taken to them since they were able to hold parish reviews and create new parish councils tend to have created them in the smaller, free-standing towns around the cities. This applies to smaller places, too. Burnley, for example, set up a parish council in Padiham which, despite the politics, has been a reasonable success. Bradford set up a parish council in Keighley, a town which suffered hugely from local government reorganisation in 1973-74. It had been a municipal borough, a free-standing place with a vibrant civic culture—a municipal culture, if you like—but it was deprived of this overnight and incorporated in Bradford. People were told they were now part of Bradford when everyone in Keighley knew perfectly well they were not. They have come to terms with being part of the metropolitan district, but that is different. Being deprived of its local municipal government was a disaster. Two kinds of parish councils have developed over the years: one is the classic local village or rural parish council, what might be called the Ambridge parish council; and the other is the market town, the satellite town within a larger district, which might be called the Borchester Town Council example. The Borchester type has been extended to include bigger places. In my own town of Calne and Nelson, a parish review is pending—we hope the Government will agree to it— which would completely parish the borough. Twenty-five or 30 years, ago we would never have dreamt of having a parish council or a town council in Nelson; now it seems an obvious and logical thing to do. The concept of parish government has been extending into bigger places but, if London is going to have parishes, why not Birmingham, why not Manchester, why not Newcastle-upon-Tyne or wherever? A great deal of hard thought needs to be given to this. In this sense, I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, who is expressing concern that parish councils in places such as London will be different kinds of bodies from the parishes outside. That applies to Manchester, Leeds and Bradford. If we are going to have them, let us work it out properly and give people some really good models to consider; we do not want to set up botched parish councils.