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Mr. Andrew Rowe (Mid-Kent): Bearing on the matter of local and national government, is it not also true that the GLC set out quite deliberately to attack national Government on every possible occasion, even defiling its own listed building with propaganda?
Mr. Dunn: It did indeed do that, and my hon. Friend may wish to develop that comment later.
The important thing to stress in this debate is the need to leave things as they are. I am not just a Conservative with a big "C" but one with a small "c" as well. We have enacted various changes to local government, but I would argue against any further changes to its structure. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will respond to that.
Mr. Tony Banks (Newham, North-West)
rose--
Mr. Dunn:
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment. In many ways he is almost a friend, because I have affection for him, as do all my hon. Friends, for the good that he does for the Conservative party.
In its day, ILEA was the highest-spending education authority in terms of expenditure per pupil; yet it managed to produce the worst results in the country. That is a significant fact to bear in mind when one talks about the dispersal, disposition and provision of services, and the power to administer them.
Mr. Banks:
I hope to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, to answer some of the points that the hon. Gentleman has made, but I should like to pick up on something that he has just said. He said that he is a conservative in the global sense of the word and that he wants to leave local government structures as they are now. Yet all the recent changes to local government have been made by Conservative Governments. A Conservative Government set up the London county council; then they set up the Greater London council and subsequently abolished it. They made changes in 1972 and more recently. It is always Conservative Governments who throw the pieces up in the air to see where they settle.
Mr. Dunn:
That is why I am drawing on our experience to offer a warning for the future. It is true that the Conservatives set up the LCC and then abolished it, as well as ILEA, the GLC and the metropolitan counties. I agree with the hon. Gentleman: there is no blue water between us on that. That is why I want to use this debate to issue a warning about the future.
Local government is about the dispersal and provision of services to local people. The point that I am trying to make is that one needs to ensure that those services are local, and that they are delivered efficiently and cost-effectively by local people to local people.
As a result of the intervention from the hon. Member for Newham, North-West, I am drawn by natural development to refer to the book by Will Hutton,"The State We're In", which I read just this weekend.I was astonished to discover how much of its content has become official Opposition policy. Until now, I was happy to credit the Leader of the Opposition with a certain amount of intellectual independence and originality of thought, but I subsequently found that it was all there in that book. It is Will Hutton who should be leader of the Labour party because all its ideas have been pinched from
that essentially flawed book. Reading on, right at the end of the book I found a chapter on stakeholder capitalism. Have we not heard of that somewhere before?
Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock):
That has a lot to do with the debate.
Mr. Dunn:
Yes, it has, because on page 324 of that book Will Hutton writes:
I do not believe that that is the case. I have found no evidence among Back Benchers to support it, and I do not think that the Government would want to support that view. It is important to note that Will Hutton has made that argument. Why does the Labour party want to impose a further tier of local government? It is not alone, because the Liberal Democrats, too, have a policy on regional government. Why do they wish to impose a further tier of local government upon us?
As I said in the early-day motion that I tabled last week, at present we have parish councils, borough councils, county councils, the national Westminster Parliament and the European Union. Those five levels of government bear down upon the individual local and national taxpayer.If a further tier of local regional government were imposed, six levels of government would bear down on the individual. Once set up, a regional assembly, authority or council will want something to do. If it has something to do, where will the powers come from? Will they be devolved downwards from national Government or upwards from the county council, the district or the parish? Who gains and who loses? We want an answer from the Labour party.
More importantly, if a regional assembly is to have something to do, it will want money in order to do it.Will it simply levy a precept, as I mentioned earlier in the context of the GLC, which means that the precepting authority has no responsibility whatever for the collection of money and is not accountable to the people who pay the precept locally? If the authority was indirectly appointed, it could precept the local council, which could mean that the regional authority would have no accountability locally. If the authority were directly elected, it could be situated so far away as to render it meaningless in terms of access.
Wanting to do something and having the money to do so is a great leap forward in the construction and imposition of a further tier of local government, and Opposition Members must be warned about that. It is a notion that their leader has not addressed: there is a gap in the policy announcements. The Opposition are told by their spin doctors that it is a good thing. The truth is that there would be six tiers of government. What will they do? How will it all be paid for? How will they be accountable? Will they have tax-raising powers?
There has been much debate recently about devolution, which I shall not go into now in detail. I should make it absolutely clear that I mention the subject only en route. Although the prospect of devolution may seem completely non-threatening to us in the south of England, the truth is somewhat different. It is a form of local government. It is an attempt to create another tier of bureaucracy regionally, and it has been deployed by the Labour party in response to the political pressure that it is encountering north of the
border from the Scottish nationalists. But the only logical outcome for Scottish devolution is the creation of regional authorities throughout the United Kingdom. If Scotland were given its own tax-raising authority, Wales and England would surely follow, creating yet another tier of local government.
If we look at the current Labour proposal, which I hope that the House will condemn, we can see the awful consequences. Despite being funded by a block grant from Westminster, a Scottish Parliament would have the power to raise 3p in the pound. An extra 3p on income tax would cost the average Scottish family £6 per week. People with less to spend would have less to save and to invest. It follows from that that the answer to the West Lothian question is regional Parliaments for Scotland and Wales, and regional assemblies for England. That would solve the West Lothian question and redress the inevitable discrepancy in tax between Scotland and England, but it would be a further tier of government, another set of people spending other people's money, and higher taxes would be the result. While Scotland would labour under a tartan tax, England would suffer the red rose tax. Many of my constituents would face six tiers of government--I shall continue to say that until the message gets home--from parish, borough, county, region, Parliament and the European Assembly--all wanting to levy tax and initiate legislation.
Mr. Tony Banks (Newham, North-West):
I welcome the debate that the hon. Member for Dartford (Mr. Dunn) initiated, but from his tone it is quite clear that we are miles away from being able to agree on a more consensual basis the structure and functions of local government,and I wish that we could achieve that, because I find the idea that we should continue to have these old battles acutely depressing.
The hon. Gentleman said that he would start his journey in Lambeth, just walking over the bridge, across the Thames. It was a pity that he walked by county hall and made no mention of the sad state that it is currently in. The Japanese flag is flying above it, the wonderful idea of a luxury hotel has come to nothing, the structure is being stripped out above the listed second floor--the principal floor, as far as I am aware--and an aquarium is being constructed in the basement, for which they still do not have consent. That seems a crazy way to administer one of the great buildings of London. It has been allowed to decline, and the fault for that lies entirely with the Government.
It is interesting to note that, in the latest round of local government reorganisation, the Secretary of State said that the electorate would have a considerable say in the preferred structures for their areas. One thing that he ruled
out at the beginning, however, is that whatever Londoners say that they want in terms of citywide local government, they will be ignored. So much for the listening Government who continually talk about freedom of choice, and who set up league tables for just about everything that is capable of movement, except a league table based on their own popularity or honour.
The Secretary of State gave Londoners the political equivalent of Henry Ford's famous dictum, "You can have whatever colour car you want, provided it's black," although I notice from today's newspapers that that has been changed somewhat. I saw an advertisement for Ford cars in which all the black people have become white. Ford's new mission statement now appears to be,"You can have any colour worker you want at Ford, provided he is white."
"Every English region outside the home counties, together with Scotland and Wales, wants more power to govern its own affairs."
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