Localism Bill

My Lords, I share the optimism of the noble Lord, Lord Newton of Braintree, that we are this evening going to come to some sensible consensus on the way forward. I particularly applaud those noble Lords who have tabled amendments this evening, because I think that they are extraordinarily important; they are the very heart of our local democracy and I hope that they are going to receive a very positive response from my noble friends on the Front Bench. I want to make one modest, and, I hope, relatively succinct contribution to the debate based on my experience as a county councillor many years ago but, more recently, as a constituency Member of Parliament. I want to ensure that in disposing of the present regime within which standards are maintained in local authorities, we should not throw out a lot of important babies or even, perhaps the wrong bathwater—that was the analogy used in the previous debate and it is even more appropriate here. As I understand it, my noble friends who are responsible for taking the Bill through the House are carefully considering ways in which standards of conduct can be maintained at local authority level. That has already been hinted at and I very much welcome that. I am very concerned that we avoid the worst features of the present regime applied by the present Standards Board for England. I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, said about the Standards Board for England but, unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I have direct experience of a number of episodes where the present regime has been most unfortunately and unproductively attempting to meet those objectives. All too often, the board has catered for—even encouraged—persecution of whistleblowers. I refer to one instance in Cotswold District Council. I know that many Members of your Lordships' House are avid readers of Private Eye and I have no doubt that they all attend carefully to the ““Rotten Boroughs”” section of that estimable organ, as I am sure it would regard itself. This issue is extremely important because it indicates that some of the problems that we had thought had disappeared—I endorse the long experience of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard—are still there. Put briefly, in this case, one assiduous councillor, doing precisely what electors expect of him, has been proved right in identifying potentially illegal activity, but instead of supporting, encouraging and endorsing his successful attempts to bring illegality into the open, leading members of the council and officers would appear to be determined to use the Standards Board for England as a way of tying him up with a ludicrously trivial investigation. That is not a lone example. I have seen that happen time and again with large and small authorities—from Westminster City Council down to a small council in my then constituency—when apparently disreputable actions of a few leading members or officers of a council have been exposed by a whistleblower, but their reaction has been to seek to silence him or her. Instead of welcoming transparency and remedial action, there have been persistent attempts to silence such dissent by claiming that their activities brought the council into disrepute. I am sure that there will be Members of your Lordships' House on all sides who will agree that if a council, in whatever way, is disreputable, it deserves to be given that description and that it is not the council that is being brought into disrepute by the dissident member but the behaviour of the council itself in whatever way. This has often happened where one political party has been in control of the council—no doubt, any political party—without proper challenge for years and years, but that all too often has meant that the local establishment has tried to use the Standards Board as part of its political weaponry. That is not the intention of the legislation that we are considering repealing this evening, but it is its practical effect. My anxiety now is that we must ensure that any new code, disciplinary framework or right of appeal should take careful account of the bitter experience that so many of us have had of trivial complaints to the Standards Board, which have been used as a means to gag those who are simply undertaking the first responsibility of an elected member: to act as a watchdog for the public interest. I hope that my noble friends on the Front Bench will be able to reassure me that, in the new format or regime or code of conduct or whatever that emerges from the current discussions, we will be watchful of that essential element in our public life.