My Lords, I have worked with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and I know of his long experience and dedication to this cause. However, I disagree with the consequences of what he is asking your Lordships to accept.
We are looking at a system of local government which has not delivered the necessary standards in a whole range of fields. In my life as a politician, I have seen how we have ruthlessly taken power away from local government and centralised it in Whitehall departments. I see present many noble Lords and noble Baronesses who supported that. The reason we did that was because the standards of local provision were in our view inadequate. We may have been wrong, but whether it was my party and the Housing Corporation, which I think was established in the 1970s, or the academies which the Labour Party introduced under the leadership of Tony Blair, the same basic premise
has always applied—namely, that local government was not up to the job of delivering the services to the standard that central government believes in.
We now have an historic opportunity—it is historic, as we discussed on Second Reading—to create locally a standard of service and a scale of delivery which can produce results which reflect local strengths and weaknesses, and which is of a different order from that which exists today. The great dilemma I hear expressed is that, time and again, noble Lords taking part in this debate assume that we are trying to recreate powers for local government as it is. That would be a great mistake and would not command the support that the thrust of this Bill is trying to achieve.
We are trying to create organisations of a scale and resource, and with the leadership qualities, that can compete on a world scale. We are looking at the départements of France, the states of the United States and the Länder of Germany. We know that to maximise the endeavour of this country we must have the ability to compete in a whole range of activities—education, economic generation and perhaps health—so we are looking to attract men and women who command respect and have the capacity and the leadership qualities to change the public perception of local government.
We hear about accountability. What accountability is there in local government today? The noble Lord referred to a “one-party state” but two-thirds of the constituencies that elect another place never change allegiance. The battles are fought in the marginal constituencies. In a vast number of councils in this country, the councillors never change from one party to another. A significant number of councils do not change allegiance either. So if one is talking about changing, the present system does not do it.
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If you are going to move to a new sense of scale and responsibility, the only international precedent of which I have any knowledge is that you have to have one person elected to do the job. We are told that there have been referenda which have not supported this view. That is perfectly true. What were those referenda all about? They were about tiny numbers of people whipped up by the party machines and the local councillors in order to preserve the status quo, and they reflected the total public disenchantment with the process. It is not as though we are changing a much-admired institution. There is not this great body of local enthusiasm for what is going on.
The first step, if your Lordships will follow me, in moving towards a directly elected leadership is to look at that and say, “Well, what we really ought to do is to circumscribe it with all sorts of things called accountability or double-checking or deputy mayors”—whatever it may be—and all those things have the same consequence of trying to rebuild into the new opportunities the constraints that have made the present system as ineffective as it often is. These amendments, understandable though they may be in terms of the way we presently operate, actually tend to consolidate the processes that we have in this country today and not improve or replace them in a way that is necessary.
As every noble Lord will know, over a century at least we have in this House and another place ruthlessly taken powers away from local government. Local government is the creature of central government. Time and again we have changed the pattern, we have changed the structure and we have changed the financial distribution arrangements, and never once has anyone suggested that we should consult the people. We just took the powers away. We changed the arrangements. Never once, except perhaps with London, did somebody suggest that we ought to consult the people. Now we are offering to give the powers back. We are offering to say to local communities, “You design the most effective structure to govern yourselves. You tell us how you think it would best be”. What are we now being asked to do? To start constraining it in order to make sure that we tell them how it can be done and what the limitations are.
I suggest to the House that those of us who believe passionately in recreating a form of local administration that is modern, of a scale and accountable, comparable with the battles we have to fight on an international scale, should not constrain it with the same sorts of problems that have bedevilled the existing structure, which we broadly know has to be replaced.