Housing and Regeneration Bill

I have complete faith in my noble friend’s good faith towards local government. The noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, quoted my noble friend’s words of reassurance and I do not doubt that every one of those excellent sentences was spoken with complete sincerity. But we should take seriously the concerns of the Local Government Association and the world of local government about the potential power of the HCA in relation to local government. Of course, my noble friend Lady Ford, drawing from her experience as chairman of English Partnerships, has offered us important reassurance. I very much take what she said about the disposition we can confidently anticipate from Sir Bob Kerslake. Anyone who is aware of his record of service to local government, as chief executive of the London Borough of Hounslow and of Sheffield City Council, will not doubt that he is a local government man and a very good friend of local government. That offers us important reassurance. None the less, the symbolism of the powers proposed in this legislation, and the symbolism and psychology of Amendment No. 13 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, are important. During my political life I have witnessed repeated assaults—indeed, smash-and-grab raids—by central government on local government. These have occurred under Governments of both parties. If ever the fiscal excesses of the loony left justified the extension of Treasury control that occurred in the 1970s and the 1980s, there can be no justification for them now, in economic terms, in the global economy in which we find ourselves. The old arguments that a bit more borrowing by local government would crowd out the capacity of the private sector to invest may or may not have had a grain of validity 30 years ago, but they do not have any relevance now. We have chosen to constrain ourselves, in signing the treaty of Maastricht, to maintaining public borrowing within 3 per cent of GDP, and we have to take account of that constraint, but I would like to see local government spending and borrowing fairly and squarely accountable to local electors. If local electors do not like what their local authorities are doing, if they think they are running up excessively large bills and an excessively large burden of interest, it is open to them to kick them out and elect someone else. That is how our democracy ought to work. The relationship between central and local government is, perhaps, in this sense a zero-sum game. We have seen central government progressively aggrandise themselves at the expense of local government. I have seen too many Ministers of both parties who built their early careers in local government—and no doubt were stout defenders of the rights and the virtues of local government—approach life very differently when they arrive in central government, being overweeningly dismissive of local government. The Treasury has aggrandised itself over central government as well as over local government. It was always unbearable to the Treasury that it was unable to control some 25 per cent or 30 per cent of public spending. Over the years it has made sure that its control has been tightened and tightened. This attrition of local government over some 30 years has been an attrition of our democratic culture. That is an extremely important matter. There has been a better tendency in recent years through modest devolution and restoration of powers back to local government. But what has been given has been measured out in coffee spoons, grudgingly and minimally, and expressed in the condescending language of ““earned autonomy””. When my right honourable friend David Miliband was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government he had a principled view that the democratic scope and dignity of local government ought to be restored. So as we examine the powers over local government proposed for the HCA, we should be sensitive to these matters and recognise that, for all its good intentions—and perhaps for all the necessity for some of these powers—the HCA will be an unelected body and its accountability to the people will be more remote than the accountability of local government. I hope that in her comments on the burden and spirit of this and other amendments relating to the relationship between the HCA and local government, as well as in other public statements where her words may be more widely heard than words spoken in Grand Committee in the Moses Room, my noble friend will unmistakably express the sensitivity which I know she has for the understandable concerns of local government.