Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I got the date wrong, by the sound of it, but I remember that there was significant development in local government in 1902. My point is that local government must go on evolving. It has had many different challenges in recent years, and we must try to identify them and respond to them. I know that the parties opposite understand that, too. Amendment 72 would insert a new clause after Clause 5 that required each of the 410 local authorities in England and Wales to carry out impact assessments of the costs and benefits of the provisions set out in the duties. Amendment 135 would insert a new clause after Clause 20 that would require every local authority in England and Wales to carry out an impact assessment of the costs and benefits of the petitions duty. Noble Lords are concerned about the new burdens that will fall on local authorities, and I appreciate these concerns. However, we have fully costed those new burdens, as we are required to do, and they are being fully funded. I will come in due course to how that will happen. Obviously I agree that all government policy must be backed up by sound evidence and revisited at intervals to measure the success of the policy. We are serious about monitoring, but the amendments would place another, significant burden on each council to carry out this work. That would require additional and dedicated staff resources and incur substantial costs. We must be satisfied that the benefits of such specific requirements would be sufficiently great to justify them. I do not believe that they would be for several reasons, but primarily because we will, as a matter of course, review the impact of these duties after implementation. We will seek feedback from a range of stakeholders, including local authorities, on how the provisions have worked in practice. As I have said, in the long term we expect the composition of the councils, PCTs and connected authorities to look different and to have a more representative culture, with a wider range of people interested and involved in active and civic roles. It will take time; it certainly cannot be accomplished in a year. The amendments go very much against what noble Lords regularly profess—that requirements on councils should be light-touch. They would certainly not meet that requirement. Nor do they fit with our Better Regulation agenda not to impose new administrative requirements on local authorities. The amendments are obviously designed, as the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, said, to probe how we have arrived at the costs and how we will measure success. On the costs, one of the main aims of the policies is to make it clearer to the public how principal local authorities deal with petitions, for example. We will monitor councils’ websites and their success in responding to petitions, and we will monitor quantitative data through the citizenship survey and the place survey. On the duty to promote democracy, we are discussing with the Audit Commission how the comprehensive performance assessment can be accommodated within that general framework. We are having serious discussions about how we can measure success. In the regulatory impact assessment, we costed this at £22.3 million a year. That costing was worked out, as noble Lords would expect, with the Local Government Association and local authorities; the figure was not plucked out of the air. The assumption was that it works out at about £86,000 for each county and unitary authority, which provides the equivalent of two employees and a publication budget, and £45,000 for each district authority. That is going into the rate support grant. This is how much we think it will cost to fulfil this duty. I will come on to net and gross costs in a moment, but I may have to write to the noble Baroness as I do not have the information to hand. How will local authorities achieve that? It will be up to them, but we have committed to meeting the costs, and we certainly will meet the costs that arise in relation to that duty. It is new money. The cost benefits will be found in the achievement of what we are trying to do in the Bill overall, which is to challenge local authorities—it is a challenge—to do their business differently and to provide the sorts of services in the future that may be more transparent and responsive to the diversity of needs and ambitions in the community. I am not sure that I have answered all the questions; if I have not done so, I shall certainly provide additional information in writing. On the net cost, we have to put our hands up here and say that the wording is rather loose. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—it is very nice to see her back, although her questions are inevitably forensic—that there is no gross cost. The question that she usefully raised can be answered in that sense. I apologise for that. We will make sure that, whatever form it has to take, we will get it right.