Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I cannot match the distinguished lengths of service of other Members of the Committee, but I served on local authorities in west Yorkshire for a number of years in the 1970s and, like my noble friend Lord Graham, I have maintained a close interest. To some extent, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and I am not too depressed about the desire of people to get involved in local government, local institutions and so on. If anything, there is a growing desire to get involved, which is not least helped by the internet and the ease of two-way communication. In a sense, we could be on the verge of a step change in involvement. I agree with the Government on the sheer number of bodies which operate at a local level. That is due to the enormous decentralisation of a lot of decisions, which is to be welcomed. The number of things done by national government many years ago has reduced enormously. Clauses 2, 3 and 4 list many of those bodies. I will not read them all because it would take too long, but they include national parks, police authorities, waste disposal bodies, primary care trusts, joint waste authorities, magistrates, various monitoring boards, court boards, youth offending boards, and so on. One of the problems that people face is, oddly, with the sheer complexity of all those organisations, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said. The Government are right in seeking to find a way in which some coherence is offered to people in local communities to explain what all these bodies are and how people who want to can get involved, in a common approach. If 20 or 30 bodies are all putting material out, all in a quite different way, from completely different angles and with completely different levels of professionalism and different degrees of intent, then you get one thing. If a local council or local authority is charged with ensuring that a cohesive approach is presented to people, so they know what all the bodies are and know, in a common language, what they do and how people can get involved, that will be a step forward. Like noble Lords opposite, I agree that there is no panacea in that; it does not necessarily guarantee anything. But the current lack of coherence and the disparate way in which these things are presented or not presented creates a very confusing picture. What tends to happen is that a lot of people get involved in an issue because it happens to be very important to them at that time, but they do not get involved in other things. I suspect that many people get onto local authorities in that way—they used to, in my time. People would get involved in a local action group, become motivated and then get onto a local authority. I suspect that the same thing happens in many other ways. The Government are on to something here. There is a problem and it would make a lot of sense to try to improve on the situation. I suspect that, if local authorities are given the duty to set matters out coherently, in a single manner, on a single website or a related website and have to present to people in a meaningful way, using a common language, how all these bodies are, how they all relate, what they do, how people could get involved and how it affects them, it would lead to a more coherent monitoring of what those bodies do. There would be a lot more comparison; people would notice that one body was getting a lot more people involved than another body, and ask why that was happening. At the moment, nobody sits down and reflects on that. If you are really concerned with magistrates’ courts, you are greatly interested in how they operate, but you do not really ask too much about what is happening with local primary care trusts or other bodies. There is more behind the Government’s objective, as long as one is not carried away by what it can achieve in itself. As I understand the Liberal Democrats concerns, they are that we should not raise people’s hopes too much about what an organisational or institutional change can bring about. The Government are on to something; there is an issue here, and it is best addressed in a coherent way. I, for one, applaud the Government’s efforts to do so in this Bill.