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Mr. Norman: I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. Such safeguards are not adequately built into the Bill. It centralises, does nothing to address the real problems of decentralisation in local government and vests powers in local parties and political cliques.
Mrs. Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
The Bill encourages secrecy and deters participation. Then, tacked on to its end, there is the abolition of section 28.
Let me be clear: Conservative Members recognise the need to maintain an attitude of tolerance in our local councils and schools and to maintain a culture of respect for all, no matter what their background, life style or sexual preference. However, section 28 has to be seen against the background of a widespread desire to promote family values and the need to educate all our children on the importance of good parenting in our society. The debate in another place highlighted the fact that those concerns are shared across the whole political spectrum. Church leaders--from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Cardinal Winning and the Chief Rabbi--business men and politicians of all parties have expressed those concerns.
The Government's dogged determination to persevere reflects a dog in the manger attitude and a determination not to listen but to put political correctness over the fears of parents and community leaders. It matters not whether governors of schools have the ultimate right to determine what is taught, concerned parents and council tax payers simply fail to see why taxpayers' money and resources should be used to promote any particular minority life style. That is the issue, and that is what section 28 is about. We regret that the Minister has said that the Government are yet again simply not prepared to listen.
The strength of British local government has been its flexibility, openness, ability to adapt to the requirements of different communities, and encouragement of voluntary participation by men and women of ability. I therefore hope that, in her reply, the Minister will answer very fully the questions that were not answered in the opening speech.
How will the Bill, in practice, protect against the concentration of power in the hands of narrow cliques of party-selected politicians? How will it prevent a cloud of secrecy descending on local council decisions? How will it help accountability? Why does it not provide for pre-scrutiny before decisions are taken?
How will the Bill's provisions be paid for, given that the Local Government Association has already estimated that they will cost £150 million? What will it do to bring back to participation in local government ordinary people seeking to dedicate their spare time to local communities? When will the Government start to live up to their promise of less centralisation and reverse the tide of red tape and regulation on house building, planning and how councils spend their money? What can be done to give communities once again a real sense of ownership of their neighbourhoods and the power to shape and determine their future?
The Government have failed to live up to their promises. That is why I urge hon. Members to vote for the reasoned amendment.
5.43 pm
Mr. Mark Fisher (Stoke-on-Trent, Central): I think that every Labour Member--and, I hope, every Opposition Member--recognises that the Government's aims to provide more efficient and better local government and particularly to promote greater understanding of what local government is doing among people, and more intelligent participation and involvement in it, are laudable and something to which everyone can subscribe.
The Minister very generously gave way in her speech. I can seldom remember a Minister speaking on Second Reading who has been so prepared to engage in debate and to take on board hon. Members' concerns. She and her Department deserve great credit for that generosity, which indicates the openness with which she will approach the overall subject. However, her generosity allowed grave concern on one matter to be revealed very clearly on both sides of the House.
Under the Bill's provisions, people will have less knowledge about what is going on in local government, less access to information and less involvement in local government. That cannot be, and quite clearly is not, what the Government want. I hope that, during scrutiny in the House, the Government will recognise that the Bill works against the grain of what they are seeking to achieve. The Minister knows the Bill only too well, so there is no need to rehearse all the areas that reinforce that point.
Although the full council will be in public--as has been said--cabinet and cabinet bodies will not be required under clause 21 to meet in public, and will have to publish decisions only after they are made. Mayors also will be outside the scope of the Local Government (Access to
Information) Act 1985. Similarly, executives will not have to meet in public and cannot be required to do so by the full council--an extraordinary provision. Also, they will have to publish only after decisions have been made.As my hon. Friend the Member for Blyth Valley (Mr. Campbell) said in a good intervention, those provisions do not prevent good practice by individual councils. However, the point of legislation is that it sets a benchmark for what has to be done. Many councils will not follow the lead of his council's good, open practice. Many will follow the lead of the Bill, and say that they can operate in private. In many ways, that makes for easier and faster decision making and the avoidance of problems for councillors. The temptation will be enormous, and the Bill--as it is drafted at the moment--will give full rein to those seeking secrecy.
Executives will be able to decide for themselves, which means that the present duties on councils to take decisions in public may change. The duties were introduced in the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960--proposed, amazingly, by Baroness Thatcher when she was a Member of Parliament--which gave a great deal of openness to local government. It is a great pity that when she became Prime Minister, she forgot the democratic and open instinct that led her to introduce, as a private Member's Bill, a good piece of legislation. All credit to her as a Back-Bench Member; I wish that she had continued in that way when she was Prime Minister.
The public will lose their right to involvement and participation in decisions before they are made. That very popular former Member of this House, Robin Squire, introduced a Bill which became the Local Government (Access to Information) Act 1985. It is important to remember that those are rights that the public have enjoyed to call bodies to account and to get access to information. The Bill will bypass those rights, which will not exist unless we can amend it, as we ought to.
The Freedom of Information Bill--which we debated at great length and not entirely happily last week--applies to local authorities, but sadly does not help much in this respect. Under the Bill, information can be withheld if, in the authority's reasonable opinion, disclosure would prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs. That is a powerful inhibition to open government and the right of people to know what is going on. The implication is that the Freedom of Information Bill gives legal weight to an authority's opinion in a way that is remarkable and extremely regrettable. It will create a new cloak of secrecy, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) has said.
The Bill in its present form is deficient and will lead to more closed, less well-informed and less informative local government, but all is not lost. It is up to this House to make changes. Cabinets and executives can meet in public, and should be made to do so by amendments to the Bill; that is, unless there is confidential or exempt material that cannot be disclosed. That has always been the case. That provision should be put in the Bill. I hope that the Minister and the Secretary of State will listen to the debate and recognise that there is great concern inside and outside this House. We want open local government, and if the Bill said that cabinets and executives had to meet in public, that would be a big step. Similarly, reports,
the factual information on which decisions are based, options and recommendations should be made public before information is exempt.
Ms Armstrong: It is in the Bill.
Mr. Fisher: I suspect that the Minister knows the Bill better than I do, but I cannot see any strengthening of openness provisions.
What I am asking for can and must be achieved. We cannot let the Bill pass from this Chamber in its closed state. If we can include provisions for the open local government that we need for the next generation, we shall have done something good.
5.50 pm
Mr. Don Foster (Bath): I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher), who has made a valuable contribution to our deliberations in the past few weeks, not least in his valiant efforts on freedom of information. I am pleased that he continued that theme in his speech on this Bill. I agree with every word that he uttered.
We are in a unique and, I suspect, somewhat bizarre situation. The hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) has made it clear that he is deeply concerned about many aspects of the Bill. Judging from the interventions from several of his hon. Friends, I suspect that he was speaking on behalf of all of them. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central--and every Labour Back Bencher who has intervened--highlighted concerns about various aspects of the Bill. Like all my Liberal Democrat colleagues, I have many reservations about the Bill. [Hon. Members: "Where are they?"] So keen are my hon. Friends on the importance of local government that they are out campaigning. Every hon. Member who has spoken, including the Minister, voiced deep concerns about various aspects of the Bill. She said--I think that I quote her correctly--that the Bill is not in the form that the Government wish to see it in.
We are in a difficult position, because we have to decide whether we want to give the Bill a Second Reading. I should make it clear at the outset that, while I have deep concerns about a number of aspects of the Bill, I shall vote for a Second Reading in the hope--I suspect that many others share this hope--that we shall be able to make several amendments during the Bill's later stages.
Above all, I hope that the amended Bill will help to bridge the growing gulf between politicians and the people whom they represent. Sadly, people often no longer trust politicians. They certainly do not join political parties. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has more members than all three major political parties put together. Although there are some notable exceptions, that gulf is as true in local government as in other tiers of government. The turnout for local government elections is testimony to that problem. People value the services provided by local government, but they do not believe that councillors have enough power to do much about them. I very much hope that the Bill will play a part in reconnecting the people to the politicians who seek to represent them.
We have considerable sympathy with various provisions in the Bill and support them fully. The proposed new powers of well-being, the proposed ethical arrangements and the replacement of surcharging--the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells acknowledged that
point--are sensible moves in the right direction. The hon. Gentleman and I disagree on the plans, held up by a decision in another place, to repeal section 28, because the Liberal Democrats support those plans. We also support the arrangements to enable the giving of powers to area committees.However, like every hon. Member who has spoken, we have several areas of considerable concern, not least the number of new powers being given to the Secretary of State, particularly his ability to limit significantly the scope of the new well-being powers. We are particularly concerned about the excessive prescription of matters that are best left to local determination. If the proposals for new structures of local government are not amended, they will concentrate too much power in the hands of a few individuals. Despite what the Minister says, they will create divisions between two ranks of councillor and, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central has said, will reverse the recent huge strides in opening up local government decision-making processes.
When the Bill hit the headlines, all the talk was about mayors and cabinets. The Government were embarrassed by some old Labour councils such as Doncaster and began to find that other Labour heartland councils, such as Liverpool, Sheffield and Islington, were being taken over by the Liberal Democrats. They were desperately keen to find a new, streamlined look for some of their councils.
The public want local councils with the power to make decisions about issues of concern to local people. They are not interested in the fancy wrapping of the council, they just want to know that it is able to get on and make the necessary decisions and has the cash to back them up. People know that, at the moment, their local council has neither the power nor the cash to make a real difference. The bulk of cash for local government comes from Whitehall. Central Government are calling the shots.
I welcome the last-minute conversion of the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells to a belief in freeing up local government, but I hope that he acknowledges that the previous Conservative Government stripped away many local government powers. The sad truth is that the Labour Government have continued that trend. Councillors no longer have room for manoeuvre, because ever more decisions are pre-empted by diktat from Whitehall. Ever more local government funding comes as specific grants. Councils get the cash only if they agree to spend it in the way that the Government tell them. We have also seen the massive introduction of a bidding process for specific grants, which takes up a great deal of officers' time. More often than not, they are disappointed. Research figures show that only one third of all bids made for specific funds are successful. That means that two thirds of the bids are unsuccessful. All that officer and member time is wasted.
The target-setting process is a further example of that centralisation by a Labour Government. Target after target is being imposed on local government. Target-setting can have value and improve the management process, but it is getting ludicrously out of hand. The ultimate in the ludicrous situation that we have reached is that, having imposed targets on local government, central Government throw them in the dustbin. Anyone wanting evidence of that need only look at the written answer that I received from the Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Ms Hughes), on 2 December last year to a question about targets. She said:
- Details of any targets agreed with local government are not held centrally--[Official Report, 2 December 1999; Vol. 340, c. 273W.]
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