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Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): My hon. Friend may be about to answer my question, but I shall give him advance warning of what is on my mind. Does he agree that if—this is a real case—a party was elected to control a local authority on an explicit manifesto of removing road humps from the roads in the locality and, as is possible under the provision that their lordships wisely sought to remove, the Secretary of State stepped in to say, "You, the local authority, against the wishes of the electorate, will restore and maintain the road humps", that would be the clearest possible indication of the situation that my hon. Friend describes?

3.45 pm

Mr. Green: My right hon. Friend cites a good example, which, as he says, is from the real world. It involves Barnet and a different arm of the Labour movement—the re-Laboured Mayor of London, who is seeking to use his powers to thwart people's democratically expressed will. As my right hon. Friend anticipated, I intend to move on to the undemocratic nature of the Government's proposals.

Leaving aside the problem that the Government's proposals are fundamentally undemocratic, nobody running a local authority can know what the ground rules are, because decisions are arbitrary. The Secretary of State will presumably announce that the local authority is not doing its job properly in terms of traffic management. He has not told the House on what basis he will reach that decision. Until we know what those criteria are, it is impossible for the House sensibly to support the proposals. As the Bill stands, any governing party would be able to make a decision about whether it wished to leave a local authority in control of its own traffic management arrangements purely on the basis of political partisanship. I would acquit even this Government of trying to behave like that. However, the fact that the Bill would permit that shows that it is in an unsatisfactory state as regards the potential arbitrariness of the application of the Secretary of State's rules.

Secondly, the Government's proposals are unclear. The Local Government Association makes that point powerfully. The Government have resisted attempts to add to the clauses the essential detail that anyone would need to assess whether the relevant national authority would be required to provide more statutory justification for any proposed individual intervention. There is no acknowledgment of the financial cost to any authority facing intervention. Most importantly, what would be the timetable for disengagement? Under what criteria and over what time scale would the Government decide that a local authority had been punished enough and could therefore be given back control of its own traffic management proposals?

Without that degree of detail, it is impossible for the House sensibly to support the Government's contention. We do not know how many people might be
 
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involved in a replacement or when the Secretary of State would consider that the traffic director had succeeded. There is a further complication. If it was deemed that a local authority was unsatisfactory and that the Government-appointed traffic director was more satisfactory, presumably the logic is that the Government would be in permanent control, because they could never know whether the local authority would mess up if given back control. The Minister has given us no clarification on that point.

Thirdly, the new traffic managers would be unaccountable. They would presumably be responsible to the Secretary of State, and it is difficult to imagine how this House, as the place where the Secretary of State is democratically accountable, could be expected to take a detailed interest in the individual traffic management of each local authority. If dozens of local authorities were deemed unsatisfactory traffic managers would the House consider in Transport questions whether democratic accountability was in force? That would simply be absurd, so the Government need to provide an explanation. Traffic directors would be unaccountable to anyone in the local community where their actions would have the most daily effect. People in the community would not only not have any say in who those directors were, but they would certainly not have voted for them. To address the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) about local democracy, the wishes of the democratically elected local authority would be overridden. Members on both sides of the House deplore low turnout at local elections, but announcing that a key duty of local authorities can be taken away on the whim of the Secretary of State is a recipe for driving turnout down even further. If the Government are going to second-guess the actions of local authorities as soon as they do something of which they disapprove, people will feel that there is even less reason to vote in local elections.

The Government's proposals are also objectionable because they are impractical. The Minister said that the Audit Commission's comprehensive performance assessment was an unsatisfactory means of judging local authorities' performance in areas such as traffic management. If that is the case, we should approve it. If it is comprehensive, presumably it assesses the performance of local authorities in every field of important endeavour, including traffic management in the case of those that act as traffic authorities. The Minister will be aware that the assessment has proved to be an effective means of supporting and improving the performance of weak local authorities, and should be used in the first instance—I am glad to see that he is nodding—if an authority faces difficulties in traffic management. As that tool for sensible and practical intervention is already available, we do not need another heavy-handed tool to remove local authority control altogether.

The Department sets great store by local transport plans—local authorities certainly do so—which will be made redundant under the proposals. Even if a local authority is providing a decent service under its local transport plan, the Secretary of State will have the power to step in and override that control. The Minister will be aware that the Department for Transport aims to
 
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make the performance monitoring mechanisms under the local transport plans more effective and robust by introducing a regime of penalties for poor performance and rewards for good performance, which is much more sensible than the proposals in the Government amendments. Finally, on practicality, the Bill does not acknowledge the additional financial and administrative burden that will be placed on a so-called failing authority when reporting to an imposed director.

The Government have, as the Minister said, made a robust response in another place. Lord Davies of Oldham said that they would intervene only as "a last resort" on an authority that was

"manifestly failing to live up to its duties".—[Official Report, House of Lords, 29 June 2004; Vol. 663, c. 169.]

We do not know what manifest failure means, as the Government will not give us details of the criteria against which any local authority will be judged. Without those criteria, it is impossible for the House to accept Ministers' explanation that only manifest failure would lead to Government intervention.

Mr. Forth: May I try to help my hon. Friend? I say that with some diffidence as a newcomer to the Bill. One of the great joys of this stage in proceedings is that those of us who did not have the joy of serving on the Committee can now represent our voters on such a matter, which is of great interest in my constituency. Clause 20, which is under consideration, says:

"If the appropriate national authority considers that a local traffic authority may be failing properly to perform any of their duties under sections 16 and 17",

one of which refers to the following objective:

"securing the expeditious movement of traffic".

That is a hint for my hon. Friend. I presume that the Secretary of State will look down from his pinnacle, judge whether my authority in Bromley is

"securing the expeditious movement of traffic",

and be able to judge on that basis whether to appoint this interloper to decide what will happen in Bromley.

Mr. Green: My right hon. Friend is characteristically helpful, and, as he says, brings a fresh mind to this unsatisfactory part of the Bill. The point that he raises is interestingly controversial: he may or may not be aware that the Transport Committee, in considering that very point, has argued throughout the process of this Bill that relying purely on the "expeditious movement of traffic" as the only measure of satisfactory traffic management is inadequate. It would be possible, although not under the terms of this debate, for the House to debate that. There are those who argue that traffic managers should have as an explicit duty some kind of environmental consideration, and not only the Liberal Democrat spokesman, who may have a different view on this matter from me and my right hon. Friend.

What is profoundly relevant to this debate, however, is that there is not a clear measure to which everyone could sign up, whereby one can say, "This is how we measure whether a local traffic manager is doing a job properly." There are honest differences of opinion about what set of criteria the Government should operate before deciding whether the local authority is doing a job satisfactorily. Even if we examine the particular clauses, the House is not given enough guidance to
 
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accept that the Government have reached a satisfactory conclusion on this matter. The problem is that the safeguards promised by the Government in another place are simply not there. That illustrates a wider problem with the Bill: it has always been an inadequate means to achieve a desirable end—less traffic congestion.

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