Local Transport Bill [Lords]

I should like to make four big points. First, we have to be careful about the use of the term ““political balance””. Although it is possible to ensure that each constituent authority within an ITA area is required to propose representatives who reflect the political balance of their council, it is not possible to construct a system under which all the authorities together are taken as a whole and the political balance of the ITA reflects their total political composition. There cannot be a mechanism for doing that, because there would be nobody to oversee it. There is no way in which we can do it, and we must be careful about that. Currently, under the passenger transport authorities, each local authority selects its members to the transport authority on the basis of the political balance in that authority—and that, I suggest to the Minister, is also how things will have to be done with ITAs. Secondly, it would help if the Minister said that there would be an attempt to balance representation on grounds of population within local authority areas as well. Currently, there are big differences in population among authorities that constitute passenger transport authorities, and the membership of the PTAs reflects that. I hope that that will be carried through. Obviously, Sheffield is the largest authority in south Yorkshire and if we had an extended ITA for that part of the country, I would like that fact to be reflected. We could end up with a mix of met and non-met districts forming a new ITA in which the differences in population size between the authorities would be even bigger. Thirdly, I turn to the issue of votes for unelected members. In the end, the arguments are pretty persuasive. There is no good reason in principle why unelected members should have the same votes as those on the same authority who are elected. Nevertheless, in moving as far as they have, the Government may well have been helpful. In the vast majority of circumstances, no group of elected councillors on an ITA will award the vote to people who are not elected; they would not share their democratic entitlements in that way. The only time when that might happen is when people want to play political games—when, for example, the majority on an ITA think that they are going to lose power and seek to appoint like-minded people to positions as non-elected members and then give them the vote. I think, however, that the Minister has already said that the decision on whether non-elected members should have a vote on the ITA should come up after each local authority election at the very least, so that it could be repeated. Indeed, there was some suggestion that the voting members on the ITA might be able to vote on the rights of non-elected members at any time. That might deal with the problem.