Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman makes his own point. Once again, a Government with good intentions fall down at the point of legislation. We have seen it before: good intention smothered by over-regulation and sometimes a failure to deliver the resources that are needed to provide something—in this instance, a duty for local authorities to promote democracy. Let me offer a challenge to the Minister that I offered to the Secretary of State at the beginning of the debate. If a local authority has been given a duty, what happens if it is deemed to have failed in that duty? What sanction will be imposed on an authority that is deemed to have failed? What criteria will enable someone to judge whether it has fulfilled its duty? If I, as an individual citizen, wished to mount an action against my local authority because I believed that it had failed in its duty to promote democracy, where would I start? What court or tribunal would I go to? I think that my noble Friend Lord Ullswater had it right when he said on Second Reading in the other place that""local councils have been undertaking this work"—" the promotion of democracy—""for decades. From now on, local authorities will have to refer to statutory guidance on how to fulfil this duty. I am sure that it will become one of the numerous performance indicators that waste so much of local authority officers' time in compiling for audit. That is the top-down approach, which really does not empower local authorities."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 December 2008; Vol. 706, c. 877.]" I think that he was quite right. Once again, we have provided an opportunity for those who control local government, those who audit it and those who direct it from above to create a whole new panoply of criteria and performance standards against which a local authority is to be judged on matters with which it has already been dealing and which local people will not regard as being anything like as relevant as other issues that they wish to take up. So I am not impressed by the duty to promote that appears at the beginning of the Bill. That democracy matters at local level is clearly important, and there is one matter on which I think that the Minister and I would agree. If we are to rekindle democracy in this country in the wake of what has happened recently, I do not think that any of us will exclude the contribution of local political parties to what must be done. Apart from our sense of a collective failure of Parliament, I think we are missing something if we do not recognise the change that has come over the nature of local political parties during our lifetime and perhaps the generation before. We have moved away from the mass parties of the 1950s and 1960s, which provided a broad base of understanding of how politics worked locally. All too often now, local political parties are small. They are becoming more and more exclusive. The burden of carrying the local political flag has been falling on the same shoulders for a long time and people have worked exceptionally hard, but the refreshment that they used to receive has not been coming. That refreshment was made up of people who would, in their time, stand for representation on local authorities, understand the political process, explain it to others, and in some cases constitute the base of those who moved into national Government. If we are to re-examine the constitution from top to bottom, and recognise the anxiety that people feel outside, at some stage we shall have to examine the role of local political parties across the board and see what they can contribute to change. If we exclude them from our considerations of the promotion of democracy, I think we will be missing something. The public out there do not feel that we represent them through our political party structure in the same way as they used to. That may be partly due to the nature of change in society and the fact that people have more choice on a variety of issues, but they still find themselves with the same political choice that they had 80 or 90 years ago. By and large, they do not have the same choice in any other sphere of life. If local authorities are to get to grips with promoting democracy, I think that they should look at local political parties, and I suggest that we do so as well. I wish to talk briefly about two other parts of the Bill. Part 5 deals with regional issues, and I share my colleagues' concern that an opportunity to dismantle structure has not been taken. I have been involved in this argument with the Government for some time in respect of their own relationship with local government. Ultimately, the Government have to take a risk with local government, because either they trust it or they do not. The same challenge will occupy the time of my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State should she inherit responsibility when we form a Government. If one trusts local government, one really has to trust it, and that involves a degree of risk. I do not see this Government being able to do that, because although they talk the talk, they do not quite deliver. One example is regional strategy. The Bill was an opportunity for the Government, if they really believed in local government, to do away with the regional tiers and hand back real authority to local councils, but they have not taken it. I wish to touch on two particular examples from my local area: housing numbers; and the difficult issue of Gypsy and Traveller sites. The two new authorities in Bedfordshire following the unitary change, Central Bedfordshire council and Bedford borough council, now have to deal with the planning totals set by the regional spatial strategy. In Central Bedfordshire, that will require 60,000 more houses by 2031. To give the House a sense of scale, I should say that that will require a 50 per cent. increase in population in just 20 years or so in Bedfordshire. The scale of change is extraordinary and much of it is derived not from the pressure of growth in Bedfordshire itself, but from what is happening in the neighbouring growth areas of Luton, Milton Keynes and Bedford. They cannot cope with the infrastructure problems. The eastern region reckons that £1 billion of transport infrastructure is needed to support all this, but there is currently £80 million in the budget for it. Bedford borough council, which is now a unitary authority, will be expected to provide 19,500 more houses by 2021, but it has never met previous growth targets, because there was not the infrastructure and engine of growth in Bedford to produce these things. Those are the targets being set by a regional body that has no real understanding of the pressures and needs of Bedford itself. This should not be happening; Bedford councillors should take decisions on the needs of Bedford people in respect of the expansion in housing. Through this Bill the Government have missed an opportunity to take that approach. The second issue that I wish to discuss relates to the difficult problems of Gypsy and Traveller sites, which everyone in this place knows are an issue. What has happened in my area is that decisions originally taken by local authorities in terms of their suggested numbers to meet need and demand have then been taken by the regional spatial strategy and the numbers have increased—the numbers were increased further last December. Local councils are now trying to find a number of pitches that they never agreed to and, again, local people feel abandoned because they cannot have a say. We all know that the issue is difficult. The local authority will have to provide, but the local authority and its councillors are not accountable for decisions taken that dramatically affect their local communities. The issues in Stotfold and Arlesey in particular, where Conservative local councils have fought continuously in recent times against a very difficult development, emphasise that. When thousands of people in the area protested and wanted to make their opposition to this policy known, they knew that ultimately if their local authority does not move fast enough on the regional spatial programme, the Government have powers to intervene in the planning process, take the planning rights away from the local authority and make the decision over its head. That is an example of how regional top-down control is removing local power, and it is another particular area where the Government do not get it and do not understand why people outside are so frustrated.