Bedfordshire (Structural Changes) Order 2008

I am grateful to the Minister for her detailed explanation of the timing, but we are perilously late getting these orders through. Will she say how perilously close we are? My understanding is that if the orders were not passed today, it would be too late to cancel the elections. That is what I was told. It cannot be right—the orders will not officially be passed until they have been through the House on Thursday—but we are very much at the 11th minute of the 11th hour. Perhaps this is a cheap point, but I will make it anyway: it sometimes feels that central government are very much on the backs of local authorities for not getting things done in a timely fashion, and it sometimes behoves the Government to do the same. This does not look good from the point of view of the local authorities. With regard to elections, it is probably due to my inability to read the order properly, but I was struggling to find the references to when the mayor of Bedford will be up for re-election. I found the piece about the councillors, but I was struggling to find when the mayor would be re-elected. It occurs to me that the current mayor was elected as the mayor of a borough, and that being a mayor of a unitary authority, providing education and social services, is a quite different job. The mayor should have a new mandate. I note that the Minister has breathed a sigh of relief at this order being the last in the current tranche. In many ways, however, it is a first: this is the forerunner of the unitary bids by county towns. We will be dealing with those further on in the pipeline; certainly in my own area of Suffolk we are very exercised by this. Most of us can understand why county towns, particularly historic boroughs, want unitary status—that is perfectly understandable—but it leaves the question, which the Minister has spent quite a lot of time on today, of how one deals with the rest of the county where there is no geographic coherence or sense of identity. On the whole, people in shire counties identify either with their town or with the county, and Bedfordshire has shown that up nicely. I do not feel very much clearer about what criteria will be used when deciding the fate of Ipswich and Suffolk, Norwich and Norfolk or Exeter and Devon. I get a sense that I ought now to understand the ground rules, but I do not entirely feel that I do. Once again we have heard examples of the different ways in which the protagonists have put forward the information about community support. That emphasises the point we have made before, that perhaps in future tranches the Government themselves need to take more of a hold on this so that the claims of support have some validity that we can all buy into. There is a big dilemma in these county town areas. It bothers me that if we decide that the county towns are not of themselves large enough on current boundaries but they then expand too far, they lose the coherence that was the point of the bid in the first place as well as leaving the rest of the county rather stuck. It might be that a trade-off between coherence and size needs to be made here. I sincerely hope that we will have an opportunity to debate that in a more significant way than just when the orders come through. Finally, the noble Baroness has made quite a lot of the question of whether there is enough support to make something work, which is clearly important. It might be naive, but I would so much prefer to have a system of local government that had more to say for itself than a resigned acceptance of the inevitable; which is what we are getting in a lot of these places. I wish that we could have a little bit more than that.