Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

Amendment 34 gives us a brief respite from lists to look at a particular problem with the Bill. I shall also speak to Amendments 37 to 39, which are in the same group in my name. The amendments relate to what could be called over-the-boundary problems. One of the difficulties of the legislation is that it assumes that people who receive services from local authorities or become involved with local authorities do so with the local authority, the health authority or other public authority in the area in which they live—in other words, with public authorities that are organised strictly geographically. Clearly that is not the case. Amendment 34 says that the inclusion in the list of a school should not necessarily be to do with where the school is located. A school in which a significant number of students are educated may be over the boundary in someone else’s authority. Nevertheless, the authority in which the students live should include it in their information about how people can become involved in the governing bodies of schools. This is common sense, but at the moment the Bill does not say that. The same thing is probably even more true of FE colleges, because they have bigger catchment areas, so Amendment 37 applies to FE colleges. Amendments 38 and 39 apply the same principle to hospital services and other health services for people who go to a hospital that is over the border—it is out of their PCT area and the health trust area and is in someone else’s area. I am sure that we can all think of dozens, perhaps thousands, of examples. I put on record two or three, particularly in the Aire valley, which has a boundary between Bradford Metropolitan District Council and North Yorkshire County Council and is quite near the Lancashire boundary and the district council in North Yorkshire—Craven District Council. There is a school there called South Craven School. It is a very successful big comprehensive school, the sort of school that the Government should be praising as a model of good secondary education. It is in North Yorkshire. When it was built, it was in the West Riding of Yorkshire, which included the whole of the Aire valley right up from Shipley and Keighley to Skipton. When local government reorganisation took place in 1973-74, Keighley and some of the surrounding villages were—wrongly, in my view—included in, or hijacked into, the city of Bradford. As a native Bradfordian, I must say that they are not in Bradford; that has caused lots of problems, which I shall not discuss here. The particular cross-boundary issue is that South Craven School, which was built for all those old textile villages that are now largely commuter villages for Bradford and Leeds, is in North Yorkshire. Now, about two-thirds of its pupils come from villages that are still in North Yorkshire, such as Cross Hills and Glusburn, where the school is, and about one-third of the pupils come from villages such as Steeton, Sutton and Silsden, which are now in Bradford. People who live in those areas and who have children at that school ought to be told how they can get involved in that school, even though it is in North Yorkshire and the council drawing up the information will be the City of Bradford. There is another school—I cannot remember its name—in Bradford that serves a similar old textile, now commuter, village on the edge of Bradford called Oakenshaw. The school built for Oakenshaw is now over the border—I suppose that it is in Cleckheaton, technically—in the Kirklees Council area and I am informed that the vast majority of its pupils live in Bradford. Let us think about big cities, such as Manchester. In the urban area of Manchester, which everyone who does not actually live in Manchester thinks is Manchester but which covers the cities of Manchester, Salford, Trafford and part of Tameside, there must be lots of cross-border movement to schools. London is a different matter altogether. No one in London chooses their school according to which borough runs it.