Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I shall speak to the Conservative amendments in this group. I am likely to support them. Since this is the first time I have spoken in this Committee, I declare my interest as an elected member of Pendle Borough Council and, as a consequence of that, of various other bodies. I am not terribly excited by the wording of the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, "““have regard to the desirability of promoting””," which sounds as though it was written by civil servants rather than politicians. However, I understand what she is getting at. Throughout Part 1, I am going to be very critical, particularly of this chapter about promoting democratic involvement in various things and of the petitions section. Since these things get written down, I ought to make it clear that I am not against public involvement in local government. I have been promoting it for the past 40 years, particularly when members of the Minister’s party were denouncing it as being entirely wrong in principle and in practice, and liable to undermine the whole fabric of local government, indeed, the whole fabric of society. It is excellent that the Government are now converted to the cause, but it is bad that they think that the way to promote local involvement is by detailed, top-down edicts of the kind that appear in the Bill. If anybody doubts what I am saying, I shall call my noble friend Lord Tope in evidence. A very long time ago, just after he had been elected as the Member of Parliament for Sutton and Cheam at a famous by-election in 1972, a pamphlet was issued, purportedly written by him, called Liberals and the Community. It was written by three of us who were promoting the cause at that stage and because my noble friend had become an MP, we thought it was sensible to put his name on the cover. Many other Members of the Committee can testify that I have been campaigning on these matters for many years. I was hoping that the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, would be here. He said he would be. Perhaps I shall call him in evidence when he appears. What is Chapter 1 about? The Government want to give local authorities a duty to promote. My noble friend suggests they should ““use reasonable endeavours”” and the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, suggests they should, "““have regard to the desirability of promoting””." There are five pages of detailed legislation on the promotion of democracy. They are about telling people how the system of local government in their area works in the hope that that will get them more involved. They are about producing a map of the local structures. I have no objection to that; it is a sensible idea. In most places nowadays, everything is so complex that very few people have the slightest idea about who is responsible for what. In two-tier areas, it is even worse. There is a plethora of local quangos, partnerships, forums, local authority companies and all kinds of bodies, all of which have something to do and form part of the system of local government. If you asked me to write down the system in my own area, I do not think that I could; I certainly could not get an A grade in an examination on it, because it is so complex. Some parts of it I deliberately keep well away from, because there is a limit to what you can do. I have no objection to the Government putting a duty on a local authority to write it all down, but that does not require five pages of detailed legislation or the extraordinary procedures set down here for how a district will relate to a county and how everybody else will relate to each other. The Government must understand that simply writing it down and saying what the structure is does not create local democratic involvement, which is fundamentally a ““small p”” political process. It is about people campaigning and people caring for their area and getting involved. It is about active involvement. There was an item yesterday on the ““Politics Show”” in the northwest, which most Members of the Committee will not have seen because it was on the northwest bit that nobody sees. The item was about what is going on in the Wirral. They interviewed people who are agitating, running huge campaigns and really getting involved in a big way, because it appears—according to the television programme—that Wirral council is setting about taking a hatchet to a lot of local community facilities. It is closing community centres, libraries and swimming pools; that is what the programme said, anyhow. I have no detailed knowledge of that. So lots of articulate local residents, who are not particularly middle class, are all getting involved, all expressing their anger and all organising campaigns—all very worked up, agitated and involved. The way to really get people involved is to close down things that they value. Then you get public involvement on a big scale. Of course, that is not what the Government think and want—but what should we do about this? What I would really like to do, as I think would the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and my noble friend, is to kick out this part of the Bill and at the very least put it into the review and consultation that the Government are undertaking on community empowerment and citizen involvement, or whatever the latest buzz phrases are. I think that it is citizen empowerment, but I do not know. A lot of this was going to be in a community empowerment Bill, which is no longer coming to us. That is why we have the dregs of it in front of us now. They should take them back, put them into that, look at it all as a whole and reflect on what the proper role is for central government here. If central government promotes ideas and puts out useful advice rather than statutory guidance, encouraging local government to spread best practice, we will get a large amount of this happening voluntarily, and we will get it happening in a much better way than if we simply laid down national rules and regulations. One reason why it will be much better is that it will vary from area to area and from authority to authority. Varying what is happening is the real way in which to find out what is best. You do not find out what is best by laying down national blueprints that everyone has to carry out. You find out what is best by letting people do their own thing on the ground, once you have laid down the basic principle. I do not think that we have any real chance of getting this kicked out. I hope that the Government are listening and will take it back, but if they will not we will have to try to improve it, accepting all the risks but at least making sure—