Local Government

I have taken a position against unitary primarily because of the lack of democratic accountability, and not for any other reason. I am not opposing it simply for opposition's sake. I believe that it is fundamentally wrong to remove decision making from a location close to the people and, to a degree, to centralise it in the county. I have been encouraged in my position of principle by the response to the ballots across Shropshire. The Minister made the point that some independent assessment was made of the quality of questions and responses to the ballots. The ballots were on questions agreed with the Electoral Commission. The hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy) tried to argue that there was an unfairness in the way in which the questions were presented. South Shropshire district council, which was then Liberal Democrat-controlled, put out a 16-page booklet, ““South Shropshire Matters””, along with the ballot paper. The council was in favour of unitary, so the opponents were given a total of two and a half pages to make their case, while the proponents—as it happens, the Liberal Democrat proponents—had 13 and a half pages. Where is the fairness in that? Despite the overwhelming information bias in favour of unitary, the people who bothered to vote—it was a high turnout of 57 per cent. rather than the 56 per cent. I mentioned earlier—voted against unitary. That makes me feel that I am in touch with what people in my constituency want. The greatest support, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) mentioned earlier, has come from stakeholders. The stakeholders obliged to be included in the consultation were by and large public sector bodies paid for out of the public purse, so it is no surprise that they came up with the answer that the Government wanted—they are paid to do so. The whole consultation exercise has been a complete sham. As to democratic accountability, one of the arguments in favour of removing a tier of local government was that it would be more transparent, simple and clear for the people to understand to whom they should be talking about what. Yet under the proposals Shropshire is moving from a two-tier authority in some areas to a four-tier authority. Let me explain that to the Minister in case he has not understood how that will happen. The unitary council will be at the top. The councils have decided that it will not be practical to run some of the committees on a unitary basis, particularly regulatory committees for planning and licensing, so they are going to set up three areas—north, central and south—underneath the unitary tier. As part of their submission, they had to say that there would be local area committees underneath that. We are to have 27 of those; we are to move from five district councils, which managed the regulatory function and everything else in the past, to the new system of three tiers in the unitary authority. In addition, because some areas with significant populations—Shrewsbury and Atcham is a case in point—did not have a town council, a new town council will be established underneath the three tiers of the unitary. Where is the simplicity in that? It fails that basic test of the Government's own making. I want to touch on some of the practical implications of what the Minister is proposing. He said that he understands the imperative—I think that that was the word he used—of setting out clear orders in respect of which officers will be subject to open competition and that he would publish that shortly. I am afraid to say that here we have yet another example of the Government's difficulties in introducing this legislation, which have arisen ever since the Bill was first published. I have already referred to the public involvement in health clauses, which were tacked on as an afterthought; they had nothing at all to do with local government reorganisation. That characterised the passage of the Bill. It has been a second-rate piece of legislation pushed through at the back end of all the other bits of legislation, partly because the Ministers responsible have chopped and changed every six months—I think that we are on the third Secretary of State from the Department responsible. That is causing considerable concern among the very officers who, as the Minister rightly pointed out, need some clarity about their position. They have no knowledge from one week to the next of when the legislation will be enacted. The legislation was originally to be concluded before the election that never was—that pushed it back into the latter part of last year. Then it was pushed into the early part of this year. We were supposed to be debating these measures on 4 February and here we are on 19 February. The boundary committee has told the authorities in Shropshire that if the passage of the measures is not concluded by the end of this month, it will not be able to introduce the boundary changes in time for the elections in May 2009. It is saying—and the Government have endorsed this—that the unitary authority may have to be established on existing county council boundaries, with a doubling up of councillors, because that would be the easiest way in which to proceed. What a way to set about reorganising local government. It is completely shambolic, and it is a direct result of the way in which the legislation has been handled. The lack of clarity is causing considerable frustration among the officers who must deal with this.