My Lords, basically this is a decision about whether mayors should be compulsory or whether there should be a degree of local input about whether or not mayors should be directly elected. The history of public acceptance of the concept is pretty hopeless from the perspective of those who favour directly elected mayors, which I do not.
Neither my dear old Labour Party nor the Conservative Party have covered themselves in glory on this issue. I briefly remind the House that the concept of directly
elected mayors came from the last Labour Government. As far as I am concerned, as a very long-standing member of the Labour Party, it came out of a clear blue sky—or a clear red sky. I had never been to any meeting of the Labour Party at any level where there had been a clamour for directly elected mayors, nor had I, in 50-plus years of canvassing—I do not know whether anyone can challenge me on this—ever knocked on a door to be told, “I’d vote for your party if you gave us directly elected mayors”. I think it is a product of a think tank; it is certainly not a product that has at any stage involved consulting the public.
The last Labour Government at least allowed local areas to have referendums before they embarked on a system of directly elected mayors. The results, certainly from my perspective, were pretty conclusive. There were 40 mayoral referendums under the Labour Government’s legislation: 13 local areas said yes and 27 said no. That was a fairly clear demonstration nationwide that this was not a universally popular proposition.
When the Conservative-led Government came into power in 2010, they had seen the Labour Government’s experience of a lack of wild enthusiasm, but for some reason the Conservative leadership thought that it was a great idea, as had the Labour leadership, so they did not allow the public to initiate referendums for directly elected mayors but simply said, “No. You, the 10 cities, shall have a referendum whether you want one or not”. That was the basis on which they legislated. As we all know, and as my noble friend Lord McKenzie already said, the public were consulted in 10 referendums and in nine cases—my maths makes that in 90% of the cases—they said, “No thanks very much, we don’t want directly elected mayors”. Only 10%, or one city, said that it did, and I understand that that city is now not too keen on the concept, having seen it in operation.
So we have gone from a stage of local, initiated referendums under Labour, which did not work very well from the perspective of those who want this system, to compulsory referendums under the Conservatives, which if anything went even less satisfactorily. Now what do we have? We have a system that does not involve the public at any stage whatever and is simply an imposition from national government on the kind of local authority structure, or rather the management structure, that you will have whether you want it or not. If I could draw a graph to illustrate this, it would be pretty clear. The political class, which we talk about these days, of which I suppose we are members here one way or another, thinks this is a good idea, or at least the leadership does. Whenever the public are consulted they say, “No, we don’t, thank you very much”, so what does the political class do? It says, “Well, you’ll have it, sunshine, whether you want it or not”, which is the position that we are at with this legislation.
I simply appeal to the Government—it is a non-partisan appeal to the extent that I freely admit that in part my Government were to blame for all this—that if local authorities are being told, “You must have this hugely significant figure in your area, which will dramatically change how local government works there”, surely at least there must be a degree of flexibility in considering whether the people in the area want it. Surely that is
the most modest of propositions. However, as things stand, whatever the Minister says when she replies—and I am sure she will say, “It is possible in certain circumstances”—in practice we know that this is about compulsory directly elected mayors, and I do not like that idea one little bit on democratic grounds, let alone on administrative grounds. I hope that the House will consider these two amendments very seriously.