Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

The Chairman’s apologies are entirely accepted. In moving Amendment 51, I shall also speak to Amendment 58, which is grouped with it and is also in my name. Amendment 51 is an attempt to redress the top-down nature of the Government’s scheme. Provisions in this part allow the Government to change the lists of connected authorities by removing them, adding them or doing what they like with them. For some of the reasons that I gave in our debate on the last but one group of amendments, a great deal of the decisions about which authorities should be connected authorities for the purpose of drawing up these schemes of public involvement and understanding should be made at the local level by people on the ground who know what they are talking about and who know the circumstances. The amendment therefore says that the council can amend the local list of connected authorities, and it sets out three criteria that the council should use in deciding which organisations or persons should be on the list. In a sense, I offer these criteria to the Government as a way of simplifying this whole thing. We would be a lot happier if all we had was half a page that described a general duty and described in general terms what the outcome had to be and the kind of organisations that should be involved. We would not have all these detailed discussions and arguments, because fundamentally we agree—certainly the Liberal Democrats agree—that producing a description of local governance and how people become involved is a good thing. The criteria that I have set out are that the organisations on the list should be organisations that are established in the area, that provide services or facilities to people who live in the area, or that provide services or facilities significantly through public funds and therefore not necessarily through their or another local authority. Those may or may not be the right criteria, but they are quite sensible. Amendment 58 is a by-product of this and says simply that projects that are funded by the National Lottery should be included in this scheme. In every area now, a lot of projects get their funds from the National Lottery, and although the funding and governance of them may be open and transparent to the people involved in them and in the National Lottery, they may not be to the rest of us because they are not done publicly or transparently and there is little way in which local people can hold anyone to account for the way in which the money is spent. There is a real problem here, which Amendment 58 simply highlights. The main purpose of Amendment 58 is therefore to transfer powers to local authorities from central government. That is what the Government keep telling us they want to do, but whenever we ask them why they do not do it, they say that they cannot because they cannot trust the local authorities. I invite them to trust them on this occasion. I beg to move.