My Lords, I declare my interests in this matter. I was born in Carlisle and attended Carlisle Grammar School. I live in Cumbria now and have an interest on the present county council, as the councillor for Wigton.
I have three things to say at the start. First, I am delighted by what the Minister said about maintaining Carlisle’s city status. It means a lot to me. I remember, as a little boy in 1958, attending the 800th anniversary of the foundation of the city.
Secondly, I am glad to know that the lord-lieutenancy for Cumbria is being maintained; my wife, as deputy lord-lieutenant, will be very pleased by that. Thirdly, it is very good to have as a Minister someone with the
great experience and success in local government of the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, dealing with these questions. I hope he might listen carefully to what I have to say about the proposal, which I would oppose as it stands, but I know that is not the way the House proceeds and I shall obviously not do that. But I will make the case for why the Government should take the remaining opportunity to pause and think a bit about what they are doing in the case of Cumbria.
My starting point is simple. I am a passionate supporter of unitary authorities, and have been for a long time, but the proposal for Cumbria, splitting it in two, does two things. First, it removes the strategic role that the county council presently plays; secondly, it divides in two the services that the county council currently provides. These services are vast by comparison with what the districts provide. The county council’s net revenue budget, excluding the schools grant, is of the order of £400 million a year. The six district councils all together are little tiddlers: their spending together is less than £100 million. The order is, in effect, cutting in two the most effective bit of local government in Cumbria.
The justification that this makes for more local government does not stand up to serious examination. The new unitary authority of Westmorland and Furness embraces both the Barrow shipyard and the remote Pennine communities 60 or 70 miles to the north of it. They are as different as heaven and hell. I shall not say which I think is which, but they are totally different. As for the new county of Cumberland, Penrith, to which the noble Lord, Lord Henley, referred, is torn out of the historic county of Cumberland. I always remember Willie Whitelaw affectionately describing his constituency of Penrith as being a place of slumbering calm—we probably need more of that in our lives. That is removed, and for Cumberland, there is my home city of Carlisle, together with what is largely post-industrial west Cumbria. My forecast is that that will be a rather uneasy partnership. Cumbria is a county of great diversity: great beauty mixed with shocking deprivation; a very proud history, with all the problems of modernity.
What I and the majority of my colleagues on the county council think the Government should have done was to go for a single, strategic authority but then allow for maximum devolution to towns, with their rural hinterlands, for local access to services and the capacity for genuinely local decision-making over genuinely local matters. My town council in Wigton should certainly have been expanded and given a greater role.
Given the decision taken, the county council—rightly, in my view—sought to challenge the Government’s plan through a judicial review. After a very detailed consideration in a judgment that took Mr Justice Fordham, who is very eminent in this field, an hour and three-quarters to deliver, he refused leave for a judicial review. It is important to emphasise, however, that this is not an endorsement of the Government’s plan; it is only a legal judgment that the Minister had not overstepped his powers in ignoring his own criteria in deciding on the current plan.
We are now put in a very difficult position in Cumbria as a result of this split. The Minister referred to savings estimated by Allerdale and Copeland—
goodness how they could calculate them, because they know nothing about the main services—of between £19 million and £30 million a year. We were expecting much bigger savings from having a unitary authority—as much as £40 million or £50 million a year. The truth is that we need those savings to reinvest in what are badly overstretched services, and we now will not be able to do that. That overstretch is apparent in all the main services one looks at. Our children’s services are under great pressure. For the last few years, they have overspent their budget every year. For social care, we were forced to put in an extra £10 million last autumn simply to keep a creaking system going so that the hospitals in Cumbria would not be completely clogged up with people who could not be given care in the community. Of course, the consequence of that would have been even longer waiting lists for patients.
People complain about highway maintenance in Cumbria—potholes are a big issue; I am always lobbied about them—but we have no extra money to spend on that. Indeed, the Government have this year cut the highway maintenance grant by some £10 million.
The situation is serious. At the same time, whereas the creation of a single unitary authority would have been a relatively simple matter, splitting the services in two is highly complex. The existing councils, and I hope that the people who support this scheme are prepared to defend this, have already had to put aside some £18 million to spend on management consultants to work out how the new authority will work. I suggest that the Minister inquires about this; a lot of money is being spent on trying to work out how to divide the services we have.
Supporters of the plan argue that we are being ridiculously pessimistic. They say that the two new authorities can form a mayoral combined authority that will deal with strategic planning, can negotiate a growth deal with the Government and could run county-wide services that it does not make sense to split—that is the argument. However, the truth is that the Government currently do not, as I understand it, have any power to force a mayoral combined authority on Cumbria. It all depends on the decision of the new authorities as to whether they want one. From what I know and from what I gather, particularly from my Liberal Democrat friends in Westmorland and Furness, there is no enthusiasm for establishing such a combined authority. Therefore, I think this is a bit of a fantasy.
However, in the House of Commons, when John Stevenson, the Conservative MP for Carlisle, whom I like a lot, asked Secretary of State Gove what the position was, the Secretary of State implied that the Government could force a mayoral combined authority on the new councils. Can the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, clarify that very important point for us? I can send him chapter and verse on what was said in the House of Commons, and I would like to know what he thinks about what his boss said on that occasion.
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The Minister probably understands the risks involved in splitting services. In fact, he wrote to the leader of my council, Stewart Young, in autumn last year expressing grave concern about the splitting of the fire service in
Cumbria and saying that it had to be kept together. There is the option of putting it under the police and crime commissioner, which might be quite sensible, but it demonstrates that there are difficulties in spitting services in two.
One of the answers people are talking about at home to deal with this situation is that one of the new authorities might take statutory responsibility for delivering a whole service across the area of the two authorities, but that simply will not work. I am sure that, as an experienced local government man, the Minister recognises the problems in that. If a budget for a service is overspent, who pays? If the authority that is not the statutory authority thinks its services are being cut because of budgetary constraints, what right of redress does it have? These are complicated matters. Of course the Minister is right that, in an ideal world—particularly, for instance, when dealing with troubled families—we need a unitary authority that brings together housing, children’s services, care and all of that.
I think that we are entering a period of massive uncertainty about how public services in Cumbria will be delivered, and we have a very rushed timetable for implementation of this reorganisation. The order we are discussing will not come into effect until the end of this month, yet the new authorities are supposed to be in a position to be up and running by April 2023—less than 13 months from now. I tell noble Lords, on the basis of my knowledge, that there are no plans in the cupboard as to how this split will be carried out.
Of course, the Government could always think about this. I am sorry if I am going on too long, but these are very important matters.