My Lords, before I start, I need to declare my interest as leader of a council, chairman of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and a vice-president of LGA. I commend the Minister for the competent way in which she introduced the regulations today. I am sure we all agree that openness and transparency are as important in local government as anywhere else in public service.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord McKenzie for pointing out that I am mentioned in dispatches today. I am mentioned in the appendix of the first report of the 2014 session by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments in evidence provided by the Department for Communities and Local Government. I hope that the rest of the evidence is more accurate than the bit that quotes me. The very famous news source is the Daily Mail. How reliable does anybody think the Daily Mail is in providing stories about Labour in local government? What it says is entirely untrue. It says that a member of Wigan council was ejected by the police for tweeting. He was ejected because he would not obey the order of the mayor. It was to do with me as leader of the council. The mayor asked him to behave. He refused to do so. What does one do? He just would not follow instruction. That is the basic rule in any form of organisation. If the Deputy Chairman of Committees were to instruct us, we would obey. That is a basic law.
The fundamental question about these regulations is: why? Why are we spending today debating these regulations? There are more crucial issues in local government that we ought to be talking about. Yesterday, the LGA produced a report stating that local government spending is probably underfunded by just short of £6 billion, caused by cuts to government services and increasing demand. Sir Merrick Cockell, the Conservative leader of the LGA, said that local government funding is on a knife-edge, yet all we are doing is passing regulations that increase unnecessary spending in local government, even if only in a small way. Councils should be left to determine how to tackle these issues.
Whatever happened to localism? In 2011, we passed the Localism Act with grand claims about what it would mean for local government. The Secretary of State who introduced the Bill said:
“The Bill will reverse the centralist creep of decades and replace it with local control. It is a triumph for democracy over bureaucracy. It will fundamentally shake up the balance of power in this country, revitalising local democracy and putting power back where it belongs … they managed to fulfil the wildest dreams of both Sir Humphrey Appleby and Mr Joseph Stalin.
That strangled the life out of local government, so councils can barely get themselves a cup of tea without asking permission”.—[Official Report, Commons 17/1/11; col. 558.]
Those were strong words from the Secretary of State. I supported them then, and I still support them, but here we are introducing legislation about openness in every council.
Councils will have different ways of solving this problem because, as anyone who goes to different town halls knows, different town halls will need different solutions. There is no issue about whether members of the public should be allowed to do it. I am very pleased that people want to come and record me and film me. I would be very flattered if that were to happen as a regular thing, but I am sure it will not be after the first couple of meetings. We are stretching the point when we go into such detail about what each local authority will need to do to solve the problem about where people can and cannot film meetings effectively.
It is right that local government publishes what decisions are made, but to make non-compliance with some of this a criminal offence is perhaps going a little bit over the top. This is unnecessary legislation. We are back to the old days when anything that local government does is being determined not in each and every town hall but in Whitehall. I am sorry that we have reached that pass again. I hoped that we had gone beyond it, but, unfortunately, these regulations demonstrate that we have not.
3.45 pm