Northumberland (Structural Change) Order 2008

I rise with a heavy heart. None the less, I am very grateful to the Minister for the way in which she has opened this afternoon’s proceedings so that we can have a general discussion about the issue. That will take a little time but the orders are all very similar and I hope that, when we consider them individually, they can be dealt with relatively expeditiously. I want to go a long way back. I began in local government in 1965. Two years after I arrived, a royal commission reported on the structure of local government in the shire areas of England. It recommended that there should be a single tier of all-purpose authorities—this is quite interesting—with an average population of between 800,000 and 900,000. The consequence would have been that every shire area would either have to be amalgamated with territory from elsewhere or lose territory. Inevitably, the recommendation was opposed because everyone felt that there would be a loss of identity. There was almost united district council opposition; there was almost united Member of Parliament opposition because MPs identified very closely with their districts, as was entirely reasonable and proper, although there was never quite the same relationship with county councils; and there was remarkably strong opposition from Members of this House, many of whom served in local government. Some of them were simply not going to go to a county hall in some other county’s territory—you could not do that sort of thing in 1964. The result was that a very deep pigeonhole was found for that report, and the whole subject of the structure of local government has been a political football ever since, which is a matter of great regret. What is worse is that, for 40 years, much of the best intellectual capacity and drive within local government has been distracted from the proper provision of services to the public that it serves because of the constant irritation of the possibility of this or that proposal being introduced at the whim of this or that Minister. I realise that I stand here as a shadow Minister and I say ““Heaven help me”” in this situation. At the same time over those 40 years, we have seen an increasing centralisation of resources, of standards and of pressures on authorities to conform. It would therefore be nice if the Minister indicated that this is perhaps the end of the game, at least for the authorities that we are considering today, because without that assurance the exercise is worthless. It is axiomatic that if you ask any group of people in a position of executive authority whether somebody else should do their job, the inevitable reaction is, ““Of course not. We’re doing it very well””. That is a position in which we still find ourselves: local councillors are rightly very proud of what they do. They are dedicated to making the system work. Whatever system the Government impose on them, they will do their level best to make it work. I pay tribute to all the work that was done, particularly by those in the areas which today’s orders affect. They will now find they have a limit to their capacity to serve their communities. These are people who have often given much of their lives to serving their community, and we should honour them. For some people, this is a matter of great sorrow and regret, but it has to be faced. The Minister made two points on which we need to concentrate, partly because they are relevant to the future. First, she used the phrase ““a reasonable level of support””. She decided that 40 per cent was a reasonable level of support. Well, 40 per cent support indicates that 60 per cent might have no view, but they might be opposed—it is difficult to read that. We need to recognise that the Government have judged that this is the way that they want to go, and they are to a certain extent fitting the facts to the theory, rather the theory to the facts. The electorate may make a judgment on that at some point in the future, not in local elections but in a national election. I was interested in the Minister’s remarks, particularly in the light of other proposals which may come forward in the not too distant future. The second point to which I wish to draw attention, because I find it slightly odd, is that, in two of today’s cases, we are creating a situation where people will serve six years without election. That is not impossible or intolerable, but it is interesting because it is beyond a normal parliamentary term. We need to recognise that that is what we are doing: certain parish councils which have been on a three-year cycle and which were elected last year will remain in a valid elected position until 2013. That is the reality. I am grateful to the Minister for her letter setting out the justification for the electoral processes for parish councillors, which rightly raised the interest of, and appropriate comment from, the Merits of Statutory Instruments Committee. We need to recognise that it is an oddity. There is not much more that I want to say. If the proposal for Northumberland is the endgame, whether I like it or not becomes irrelevant: it will be in the best interests of the community. However, if there is any possibility of this subject being reopened, at least in the foreseeable future, it would be better if we were not doing this at all.