My Lords, I thank my noble friend for racing through the provisions of this order. I have sat through three SIs this afternoon and it is a matter of regret that each of them has had to have a minor correction. Perhaps if we spent a little longer preparing the SIs before we brought them before the House, we would save all departments some time.
I am possibly in a minority of one, but I am afraid that I am very wedded to the two-tier system. It has served extremely well. My connection to North Yorkshire goes back years. I grew up in an area that, until 1974, represented on my western flank North Yorkshire, on my eastern flank County Durham and, to the north-west, Cumberland. I think that people appreciated and felt
wedded to those areas. I went to school in what was then Harrogate, West Yorkshire, and is now Harrogate, North Yorkshire. One begins to see how confusing it becomes with all these changes, and I believe that there is such a thing as voter fatigue.
I was very fortunate to be returned a number of times—I think, four. I served 18 years for two separate constituencies in North Yorkshire. I want to pay tribute to one of my predecessors, my noble friend Lord Jopling, who looked after me during one of the elections. I think we had some fun at the time, so I hope that continues in elections for constituencies. I also stood in Cumbria in 1987, where again my noble friend was my neighbour, took me under his wing and saved me from some of the errors that I might otherwise have made—which I hope he will not remember and repeat during this debate.
According to Wikipedia, there are 159 district council wards across North Yorkshire. That goes to the rurality of what is the largest, most rural and most sparsely populated county in the country. This has led me to believe that successive Governments—I cannot accuse one particular Government—have simply failed to understand how to deliver public services effectively in rural areas. I do some outside work with the Dispensing Doctors’ Association, as declared in the register of interests. Its headquarters is in Kirkbymoorside, which was in my constituency for the last five years that I was in the other place. Dispensing doctors come into their own particularly in rural areas where there is no community pharmacy. That shows to me the lack of understanding of one particular department of how difficult it is to deliver health services in this regard. We are building bigger hospitals that are further away and more difficult for patients to get to.
I turn to the subject of the orders presented to us by my noble friend. If I understand correctly, we are going to have a situation created from 2023 whereby we have a unitary authority for North Yorkshire. At some undetermined time in the future, it will then be possible to have a metro mayor—and I would like to understand whether the mayor will cover the city of York alone or is intended to cover the rural areas as well. I have great difficulty in understanding how a mayor for a rural area such as North Yorkshire can possibly do that work. I still live in North Yorkshire for a good deal of the time when I am not in London, and I think that it has definitely lost out in the stakes to, for example, the Tees Valley mayor. He is a very effective mayor and gets a lot of funding for a lot of infrastructure and other facilities.
My understanding is that we are going to be told in North Yorkshire that we simply will not get these funds if we then do not vote for a metro mayor. Travelling in what was my second consistency—my last constituency— of Thirsk, Malton and Filey, I was easily driving 200 miles a day. I was trying to co-ordinate the meetings as best I could in the particular corner of the constituency I wanted to be in that day, but it often meant that I could not do interviews on television, because they had to be miles away, in Leeds or, heaven forfend, Newcastle, because there were two different broadcasting areas for one constituency.
My first point is that there is a lack of understanding of how this will work in rural areas, yet great pressure will be put on metro mayors for rural areas such as North Yorkshire that, if we do not subscribe to them, we simply will not get the funds. There is also a misunderstanding. We are asking people to vote—and I have had a leaflet from one of the candidates already for the election this year, which I presume is for the county, yet we are told that the existing district councillors will remain in place until next year. Possibly that makes sense, but it is very confusing. I am told that I must vote for the candidate for unitary this year, but I am told that some of the responsibilities may be taken away and I do not quite understand what the timeframe for that would be. It would be helpful to know how long we expect the unitary to be in place before it is to be taken over by a metro mayor.
I would also like to understand what the consultation will be of local people, when they put their views forward. I am slightly concerned that paragraph 10.3 of the Explanatory Note says:
“The Government’s consultation was conducted online using ‘Citizen Space’, the department’s dedicated platform for consultations, with online capture of responses and an alternative option of email responses or post.”
We should bear in mind that we have probably the most woeful internet capability in many of the dales—in Rosedale, Bransdale and all the North Yorkshire moors, and I am sure that it is the same in the Yorkshire Dales. I hope that there was also a more traditional means, perhaps through newspaper advertisements, for people to respond. If there were only 4,297 responses on the two proposals for north Yorkshire, I draw the conclusion that the vast majority of people simply did not respond. I do not think that we can conclude that there is overwhelming satisfaction with the proposals before us.
I could go on, but I think I have made my point. There is no huge demand for this unitary authority. People work closely with their district council. In my experience, in my surgery appointments, most of what I was asked about, with it not being a big area of immigration and that sort of issue, was related to planning—and most of the planning, as we know, goes through the district council. With those few remarks, I look forward to hearing the response from my noble friend.
7.15 pm