Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 195: 195: Clause 77, page 53, leave out lines 6 to 11 The noble Lord said: We are now firmly into discussion on Part 4, about parishes. I beg your Lordships’ pardon; somebody re-sorted my papers while I was having dinner and caused a certain amount of disarray in the camp. The amendment and Clause 77 are about the Government’s proposals for alternative styles for parish councils. The purpose of this probing amendment is to ask one or two questions. The proposed styles that the Government suggest parishes should be able to adopt should they wish are ““community council””, ““neighbourhood council”” or ““village council””, according to the nature of the community or communities they serve. This seems quite a good idea. The Minister is opening her mouth and gazing at me as though I have lost my marbles. I assure her that I have had nothing more exciting to consume in the past hour than I can get in the Home Room. There is no reason whatever why councils should not be able to do this, but there are one or two potential problems. First, why does it take two and half pages of primary legislation to introduce such a simple change? The Local Government Act 1972 gives councils a similar right to call themselves a town council instead of a parish council. That is done in a couple of paragraphs. This is a symptom of the disease of modern legislation, which I blame on computers, because you can just churn pages out whereas in the old days they actually had to be typed out again. But the insistence that the chairman of a new community-styled council should be ““chairman of the community council”” and so on is, particularly for parish councils, far too detailed and symptomatic of a modern bureaucratic disease. The second question is more fundamental: the potential for confusion if there is a plethora of different names for parish councils. On one hand, the Government are saying that they want people to understand the system better. When we talk about electoral systems, they want a uniformity of the system so that people understand it better; but if you have a range of names within the same area—one council calling itself a village council, another calling itself a community council and another calling itself a parish council, with a couple of town councils and two or three neighbourhood councils in the towns—there is a real chance that people will not understand that these are actually all parish councils. The Government ought to give serious thought to retaining the word ““parish”” in the title of these councils. The terms ““parish”” and ““parish council”” are understood. It would be far better if these other names were used in addition to the term ““parish””, with such titles as ““Trawden Forest Community Parish Council”” or the ““Foulridge Village Parish Council””. It would be slightly more cumbersome, but there is otherwise a real chance that such bodies will be confused with other organisations and that people simply will not understand that these are parish councils, and that a parish council is a parish council is a parish council and they all have the same powers whatever their name. I beg to move.