Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I am reassured. For the benefit of those of your Lordships who are not as well informed as the Minister, I can say that the Committee of the Regions is in very simple terms the voice of local and regional governments in the EU’s decision-making process. I declare my interest there for very particular reasons. I very much welcome the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, but very few people in local government recognise that it is rather an important treaty to local government. I want to be sure that your Lordships recognise its importance. The treaty gives to the Committee of the Regions as well as to national Parliaments the power to monitor the subsidiarity principle in all European Commission proposals and, if necessary—and one hopes that it will never be so—to take the Commission before the European Court of Justice. That is an important power. I welcome the fact that discussions have already started on a very positive basis between officials of this House and those of the Local Government Association as to how we will work together closely and positively to effect the very short eight-week early warning system to the mutual benefit of your Lordships' House and local government. I felt that the coming into force of the treaty was an opportune moment to mention the importance of that and to recognise that the co-operation between this House and local government can only improve further in the coming months and years. On less happy matters, my noble friend Lord Greaves made reference to some of the changes in local government over 12 years of a Labour Government, changes which he felt were not wholly for the best. I have to say that I entirely agree with him. I have been a leading councillor throughout that period; indeed, I was the leader of a council when it started. We have been beset by targets, inspections, assessments, new regimes and new initiatives. We have a plethora of new bodies but transparency and accountability—particularly democratic accountability—have progressively declined. I wondered whether that was just a view from two old local government hacks, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and myself, so I looked back to some work that I shared in in your Lordships' House as a new Member, in 1995-6, when I had the pleasure and the privilege to serve on this House’s Select Committee on Relations Between Central and Local Government. I looked at its recommendations, which came after 16 or 17 years of Conservative government. Then I had a look at the report published this summer by the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee on the balance of power between central and local government, a report written 14 years later after 12 years of Labour government—and it is almost word for word. It is depressingly similar in its findings. Some relationships have undoubtedly improved, I recognise that, and there is now a better understanding in central government that local government has its own democratic legitimacy and mandate and is important in its own right, not just as a delivery arm for central government. I think that local government is beginning to understand that central government is never going to leave it alone to get on with the job. The House of Commons Select Committee report pointed out that the United Kingdom remains one of the most centralised states in Europe. It stated: ""The relationship between central and local government in England deviates from the European norm in at least three areas—the level of constitutional protection, the level of financial autonomy, and the level of central government intervention. All serve to tilt the balance of power towards the centre"." I shall look briefly at those three aspects. The first is constitutional protection. This is not the time to debate constitutional reform in its wider sense, but the place of local government in that wider debate needs to be recognised, and it seldom is. There needs to be far more clarity and security for the only other elected sphere of government in this country. It cannot continue to be simply at the mercy of the whims of successive central governments. The Local Government Association has proposed two complementary ways that it believes that this could be achieved, and both are at least worthy of serious consideration as part of the constitutional reform debate. The association proposes that Parliament should legislate to impose on central government what it calls a "statutory duty to devolve" as a counterpart to the duty to involve imposed on local government in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. The LGA also proposes that Parliament should legislate to provide that councils should be presumed to have the powers to provide any public service not explicitly reserved as the unique responsibility of a national body in the interests of ensuring uniformity of service. That is another way to say that local government should have the power of general competence, which many of us have been arguing for many years. Speaking from personal experience, I have to say that even with such a power there would still be innumerable restrictions and barriers in the way of allowing local government to do what it wants. Nevertheless, that must be right. Next we come to the vexed question of financial autonomy and local government’s tax-raising powers. I was fortunate enough to be in Strasbourg in June 1997—with the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, if I remember rightly—when the newly elected Labour Government signed the European Charter of Local Self-Government. It was a great occasion; indeed, it had been one of the recommendations of your Lordships’ Select Committee in 1995. We hoped that this might be the start of a new dawn. Article 9 of that charter describes the degree of financial autonomy to which local authorities are entitled. The UK, particularly England, is manifestly still failing to meet that obligation. I would argue that that is this Government’s biggest failure in local government. After 12 years in power with sizeable parliamentary majorities, they have failed completely to tackle the difficult issue of local government finance. After 12 years of a Labour Government, we still have an unfair and regressive council tax based on 1991 property values. Local authorities still raise only a small proportion of their own revenue. Capping is still with us. The business rate remains nationalised. All of this was criticised in your Lordships’ 1995 Select Committee report; all of it was opposed by Labour when in opposition; and all of it is still with us after 12 years of a Labour Government. Thirdly, from the CLG Select Committee report, I refer to central government intervention. Anyone who sat through the various stages of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill needs no illustrations of unnecessary central government intervention. We spent hour after hour dealing with eight pages of primary legislation telling local authorities how to deal with petitions. That has been the bread and butter of local government for all of my 35 years’ experience, and probably much longer than that. We have demonstrated time and again that local government knows far more about that than CLG. That was an example of completely unnecessary interference. I turn briefly to the future. I think that the public sector recession has hardly started. We all know that we face hard times ahead; public expectations and demands on local government will grow, and the resources to meet those demands will reduce greatly. The LGA produced a report, either this week or last week, in which it suggests that £4.5 billion of public expenditure could be saved and urges the Government to announce measures to do that simply by cutting red tape—the endless inspections, the monitoring—and leaving local government to do its job. I believe that local government generally is ready to meet the challenges it will face, but if it is to do so, it must be trusted by central government to get on with the job that it is elected to do. Not for nothing was that 1995 reported entitled Rebuilding Trust. Now is the time to do so.