Localism Bill

I am disappointed to hear my hon. Friend say that. Local people have as much right to take a view on excessive police precept increases as they do on increases in any other sector of local government. I believe that the provisions we have are right. I hope that he is not spurning the offer of a meeting with my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, because he might find it more productive than he evidently fears it would be. A number of other hon. Members contributed to the debate, including my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who eloquently pointed out that he, too, had been the victim of a vexatious complaint. He urged the Government to impose no limits at all on council tax, which should depend entirely on the views of councillors. That suggests that he perhaps does not recall that in earlier days that was the case. What we have is a system of accountability for financial decision making that is a huge improvement on the current top-down version, and one that I would ask him to observe in practice over the next few years. My hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) supported the general thread of amendment (a), standing in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), but as I think we have agreed, that is a matter for a different day. With his customary skill, the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) found a way of introducing a completely different topic to the debate—a topic that I have no doubt he will bring back to the House on many future occasions, albeit perhaps in more propitious circumstances. That brings me to the remarks of the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones). I have to say to the House that there is some history here, because in times long gone, she and I were both members of Chester city council. I therefore know that many of her remarks were made with her tongue firmly in her cheek, as they certainly were in past days too. I just wonder whether there were two missing words from what she said—those two words were ““thank you””—because her entire speech consisted of agreeing that the amendments that we are discussing are exactly the right ones to make and great improvements to the Bill. I notice that the hon. Lady picked out my Liberal Democrat colleagues as being particularly egregious when it comes to making complaints. Indeed, a number of other Members in this debate have considered which political party is the worst. Let me tell the House that 80% of complaints to the Standards Board come from parish councils, on which, by and large, there is no political party representation. That, of course, is part of the scandal of the whole process. When I recently spoke at the annual conference of the parish clerks association—[Laughter.] I have become accustomed to a more exotic style of life. I put it to those at the conference, and they agreed, that had the introduction of the regime been beneficial, the behaviour of parish councils should have improved. What actually happened was a rising tide of complaints and no evidence at all that the regime improved standards. The aim of having a standards board was to improve standards, not simply to generate complaints. I got a hint from the hon. Lady, and also from her hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones), that if they had their way, they would return to a centrally determined quango doing exactly the same thing as the Standards Board. I have to say that hankering after that quango is not the way ahead. If she is concerned about the Bill not being localist enough, she has a slightly peculiar way of showing it. The hon. Lady also mentioned pay accountability and transparency, and I think that she was welcoming what we have done. I want to pick up one of the points that she made. She said that she regretted that councils would not be compelled to pass the same duty on to outside organisations that were in receipt of council funding to deliver their services. I must point out to her that the legislation gives them the power to do that if they choose to do so, but it does not compel them to do so. I would just remind her that that is localism. We believe that that is exactly the right balance to ensure that local authorities have a framework in which they must operate, and a framework that they may apply to others who provide services for them. The hon. Lady also mentioned local non-binding referendums, and she was characteristically generous. May I point out that her suggestion that I might not have survived comes ill from a team that started off with three people in Committee and has now been completely reconfigured, and that she herself is a newcomer to it? Those of us who worked through the Committee and Report stages know the hard work that went in and the efforts that have been made to achieve a better Bill. The Bill will lift the burden of bureaucracy from councils. It will free them up, the better to serve their local communities. It will give local authorities greater control over their governance and less unjustifiable meddling by central Government. The changes made in the Lords take the reforms further, strengthen our provisions and sweep away even more of the deadening prescription and regulation that has for far too long constrained local authorities. I commend all the Lords amendments to the House. Lords amendment 14 agreed to. Lords amendments 15 to 49 agreed to, with Commons financial privileges waived in respect of Lords amendments 23, 29, 40 and 49.