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Those were offensive features of the Bill and they were likely, as I think is now agreed on both sides of the House, to undermine the genuine arguments for the creation of regional assemblies. I therefore welcome the amendments and I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), because I know how much work he did on this, and our local Government team in the Lords, which I am bound to commend because it includes my wife, which did excellent work and had to make the difficult decision about what could be secured while ensuring that we continue to have the Bill; and what was secured was extremely valuable. I am also grateful for the support of the right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin) who from the beginning has made it clear that she wanted the Bill to be changed in this way.
Andrew George: Does my right hon. Friend agree that we must praise the achievements of our hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), certainly for the significant concessions that have been wrung from the Government? Although from the perspective of his region my right hon. Friend might see the Bill as being half full, when from a Cornish perspective it may appear half empty, at the end of the day that is a geographical view, not a political difference.
Mr. Beith: I am not sure that I understood my hon. Friend's intervention, but I did understand my own
words when I praised my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton, who used to work for me in days gone by and whose work on the Bill has been as excellent as was his work when he was a member of my staff.The value of the amendments is not only that they remove those offensive features of the Bill, but that they bring a new principle into local government reorganisation in Britain, a principle which would have been welcome when the Conservative Government were going around abolishing counties, creating unitary authorities, and putting people in areas that they did not want to be in, but which they never for a moment entertained and which even today they are ambivalent about—which is why they do not want to vote at all either for or against this set of amendments. They do not want to admit the principle that people should have a choice in these matters. We think that that is a good principle.
Obviously, as my hon. Friends and the right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West made clear, many of us would have liked the choice to include the retention of a two-tier system, although as I shall come on to say in a moment, there are increasing arguments against the two-tier system and in favour of a unitary system. The Government believe that those arguments are conclusive if the additional tier of regional democracy is introduced. It is only an additional tier of democracy; it is not an additional tier of government. The apparatus of government is already there. It is an additional tier of democracy, and one that we believe is necessary because powers are being exercised at regional level.
Another effect of the amendments is to remove the notion that the Bill is either about or will necessarily lead to the abolition of counties. If people in a given area believe that the county is the finest form of government ever known to man—a view that did not use to be held in the Conservative party when it abolished Herefordshire, Worcestershire and the royal county of Berkshire—they can vote accordingly. If my neighbour, the hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Atkinson), believes that what remains of the old county of Northumberland—it is not the historic county of Northumberland, the county for which people play cricket, although not, I am sorry to say, first-class cricket, but the county that exists for many voluntary organisations—is the right structure, he and others who believe that can vote for it, because they will in future be given a choice.
It is likely that the range of options that the boundary committee will put forward if it has any sense—as I used to answer questions for the Electoral Commission I am bound to say that I think there is quite a lot of sense in there—will include an option that comes close to a county-based option, and one that is one much closer to the districts, or possibly, for example in the case of Northumberland, a county-based option, an option close to existing districts and one that falls somewhere between the two.
That is where the argument and discussion will run in a county such as Northumberland. People will be asking whether there should be county-based government involving a lot of devolution to area committees and parish and town councils—the option for which the county council is trying to argue—or whether it would
be much better to recognise that local government can be run with smaller units nowadays because local authorities are not trying to provide services directly as much they used to do. Previously, they had vast staffs, but they are now enabling or contracting out more services and ensuring that a variety of other bodies put those services in place. Thus rather smaller districts are now considered more feasible than Whitehall civil servants, who like dealing with a relatively small number of authorities throughout the country, used to argue.
Mr. Hammond: As the right hon. Gentleman has obviously been close to the Electoral Commission, will he tell us whether he believes that the boundary committee should propose a unitary county option in every case? If so, does he think that the range of population sizes between different unitary authorities that that approach would involve if it were adopted throughout the country would be acceptable? The Minister was not prepared to agree with that proposition.
Mr. Beith: I do not believe that we should prescribe that the committee should propose such an option in every case. It will have discussions in the areas for which it is formulating proposals. There may be no interest in an all-county option in a given area. None the less, I disagree with the hon. Gentleman, as I think that a large disparity is possible in the size of authorities. There is already a huge disparity in size between unitary authorities in cities with large populations and the relatively small unitary authorities of which I should imagine that he is in favour, such as Rutland.
Many countries are not uncomfortable with such disparities and have large disparities in size between their local authorities. In such countries, the biggest local authorities will probably provide the whole range of public services, while smaller authorities can share responsibility with several others by grouping together with them in providing particular services. For example, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) will find that there is no assumption in French local government that every local authority should be of the same size and cover the same population. That is a London view of local government, and those of us who represent different types of area should reject it from the beginning.
The local government system needs to be much more flexible, to involve different scales of local authorities and to recognise that there can be co-operation. If there are two or three education authorities in an area that used to be a county, they will not run two or three educational psychology services; they will need to establish a leading authority, participate in a sharing arrangement or contract out that service to some other body, whether it is a private sector or public sector one, as will be much more likely in such cases. There is scope for a much more radical approach to local government that allows us to keep it as local as possible while ensuring that it does not have so many levels.
That leads me to the unitary issue. It is argued that the choice that people will be given by the amendment—a choice that they would never have had before—is limited to a choice between types of unitary authority. I have referred to that drawback before, but I have become gradually more persuaded of the merits of
unitary authorities as a way of running local government. For example, most of our electors simply do not understand which local authority provides which service and find the current system extremely confusing. That confusion is apparent in my mailbag and in my constituency surgery, and it does not help democratic accountability. Indeed, many people will go to the polls tomorrow thinking that they are voting in respect of the education service in their area and not realising that they might be voting for an authority that has absolutely no influence or role in providing that service.Reference has been made to the large number of councillors needed under the two-tier system. There are almost 70 councillors in my constituency. In the current elections, 12 of them have already been elected unopposed; most of them are Liberal Democrats. In one ward, only two candidates stood for three seats, so there is a vacant seat. It is increasingly difficult to find people to take on the heavy responsibilities of local government. Many would argue that we do not need as many councillors as the two-tier system necessitates.
I said that I had become increasingly persuaded, but I started from a position of being extremely worried about the creation of large unitary authorities when the Conservatives were in power and tried to impose unitary authorities on us. When Lord Heseltine was Secretary of State, he eventually backed off doing so. As the hon. Member for Hexham said, there are areas where it would be very difficult to impose a county-wide unitary authority without giving many people the feeling that it is far too remote from them in respect of many local government services. The two-tier system is a compromise to deal with services that might need to be delivered on a larger scale and those that can be delivered more locally. Smaller unitary authorities offer an alternative route. I am no longer wholly persuaded, however, that the two-tier system has sufficient advantages to outweigh its manifest disadvantages. I have talked to many councillors in the two-tier system who have come round to that view independently of all the discussion about the creation of regional assemblies.
In an ideal world, I should want to resolve the issues separately. If, in the course of the process, the boundary committee managed to come up with a scheme of unitary authorities that was popular in Northumberland, and unfortunately we lost the referendum, some people—even Conservative councillors, if there are any left—might say, "Please can we still have the local government reorganisation that we spent all that time discussing, because we have decided that it is actually the best option?" If so, it will be because people have been able to exercise a choice, and the boundary committee has been forced to consider the alternative possibilities. It should not be allowed to take the easy option of saying, for example, that a minimum population of 200,000 falls within a county structure; it should forced to consider whether smaller-scale unitary authorities could co-operate to enable local government to function effectively. That process could result in a sensible review of local government in areas such as mine. It would certainly ensure that local people have a choice, which they never
had under the Conservatives, and would have been denied if my hon. Friends, with good support from other hon. Members, had not secured the amendments.
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