Examination of Witnesses (Questions 226-239)
30 NOVEMBER 2004
COUNCILLOR ALAN
MELTON, COUNCILLOR
PAT ASTON,
COUNCILLOR CHRISTINE
REID AND
COUNCILLOR MILNER
WHITEMAN
Q226 Chairman: A very warm welcome for
representatives from the Local Government Association, a week
when the local government finance settlement is going to be announced,
so perhaps the best you will get out of it!
Cllr Melton: We wait with baited
breath, Chairman.
Q227 Chairman: So do we all! For the
record, can I welcome Councillor Christine Reid, Councillor Alan
Melton, Councillor Pat Aston and Councillor Milner Whiteman. Thank
you very much for coming. Tell me, do you think local authorities
are involved enough in this rural delivery strategy?
Cllr Melton: Possibly not enough,
Chairman. We ought to be involved a lot more. We are on the ground,
so to speak, we are local, we are accountable and we know our
patches, and I would hope that in the future there will be a bigger
role for the delivery of rural services via local government.
Q228 Chairman: Why in the future? Why
not now?
Cllr Melton: Well, now.
Q229 Chairman: How are you going to make
this happen?
Cllr Melton: I think, with several
initiatives that have been announced recently, we have an ideal
opportunity to demonstrate to yourselves, to government, to regional
RDAs, that we can deliver and that local government can, through
its professionalism, deliver to the coal face and demonstrate
to our electorate, going back to accountability, that we can deliver
our outcomes and show exactly what we can do.
Q230 Chairman: There is a feeling around—I
do not know whether this is true or not, but perhaps you would
give me your opinion—that the relationship between local
authorities and Defra is not as strong as it might be. It is not
a department that we have a great deal of contact with or influence
with?
Cllr Melton: I will just say,
from my own personal point of view, I have been in this job for
the last five months and I have already had five meetings with
Alun Michael, and I would say that that is the ideal consultation,
and I am thrown in at the deep end, but my colleagues, who have
been here a lot longer than me, might wish to comment on that.
Cllr Reid: The Central Local Partnership,
which you have probably heard of, has a rural off-shoot, and Defra
has been extremely positive in its links with local government.
Local government and also the National Association of Local Councils
have engaged with a whole range of rural local government, and
talking to one of our officers, our lead officer, who was invited
to a sort of Defra away day for Defra officers in order to put
a local government input, we have got strong links at all levels;
so we cannot thank Alun Michael enough for the support that he
has given to us. It is a bit of a pity that it is not reflected
as strongly as we would have perhaps liked in the paper that came
out of government, but, nevertheless, I think John Mills (the
chief policy officer) said to us when he came that this is not
silver service, it is self-service; and I think if local government
is very proactive in how it responds regionally[within the frameworks],
then we have the opportunities, the opportunities are there. If
we have got the ideas, if we have got the confidence and competence
to take the opportunities, I think they are there.
Q231 Chairman: What does he mean by "self-service"?
You have got to make the bid. You have got to make the running.
Is that it?
Cllr Reid: To an extent, yes,
and I think that is fair enough, because the point about it is,
as with everything to do with rural areas, and certainly rural
government, there is no "one size fits all", the variety
is enormous and the variety of solutions is enormous. We are very
grateful for the setting up of the eight Pathfinders, one in each
region, which are very different, each of them aiming to deliver
in a different way. The opportunities for local government
are there to get engaged, and we have just got to take the opportunities.
Q232 Mr Jack: I wonder if you could flesh
out in a bit more detail what you see are these areas of opportunity:
because the Countryside Agency, which has now diminished under
these proposals, was the inventive bit of rural delivery coming
up with all kinds of initiative but never with enough money to
sustain the good ideas. In terms of the economic regeneration
of rural Britain, the RDAs are currently tasked with taking the
lead role; and in terms of priority setting through the regional
forums, the Government Offices have got a key role to play. I
was struggling to find what it was you were going to be allowed
to do. What is it that the Minister thinks you ought to be doing?
Cllr Reid: I think it is going
to be absolutely impossible for either the Government Offices
or the RDAs to deliver small projects on the ground. The point
about rural projects is that they are relatively small.
Q233 Mr Jack: Can you give us an example?
Cllr Reid: The famous one, which
I am sure you have heard of, is from Shropshire, the Waters Meet
Project. Is it Waters Meet or Waters Foot?
Cllr Whiteman: Waters Upton.
Cllr Reid: Waters Upton. I swore
if anyone had to say it again I would explode, it has been spread
so widely. It is a combination of working on housing, on economic
development, on a Post Office shop, a one-stop shop, in one very
small community, working with every agency that delivers those
services, pooling funding to create a very small but extremely
important for its community bit of economic, social and, indeed,
also environmental development which is combined in one small
package. RDAs tend in many cases to be supporting the "big
bangs for their bucks" sorts of developments in urban areas
where they are leading large packages of land, putting together
partnerships and packages, you know the sort of stuff, and I do
not think that they have either the capacity, the knowledge or
the will to deliver small rural projects. So when it comes to
delivery this will have to be sent down through probably either
the local strategic partnerships, which I think are getting stronger
in most rural communities, or the sub-regional partnerships, which
are the delivery arm of the RDAs, and I think in that case it
is local government who will have to do the delivering because
there ain't nobody else!
Cllr Melton: I think also we need
complete community engagement to deliver. Speaking for myself
and people around me whom I live amongst, the words "countryside
agency" and "RDA" (or EEDA where I come from) mean
very little to them, but they can relate to the district council,
even the parish council and the county council, and they also
recognise the people who are responsible for delivery, i.e. local
members; so that brings me back to what I said earlier, accountability.
Q234 Mr Jack: To follow that up, Lord
Haskins had you marked down as a clear and very important group
for delivery. Defra's strategy has moved you away from that, and,
Councillor Reid, every one of the routes to resources that you
identified meant that you were going to have to go through an
established intermediary, a partnership, an RDA, a government
office. In your many meetings, Councillor Melton, with the Rural
Affairs Minister did you register with him that you might like
to be a little bit more in the driving seat with some of your
own resources to deploy or to have access one to one with Defra
for resources for the kind of project which Councillor Reid has
just outlined to us: because the alternative at the moment is
that you are going to have to always go back cap in hand to bodies
that you have just said you do not think are ideally suited to
a rural role, but for whom you have a rural role and you will
have to get the money from them?
Cllr Melton: I have made it quite
clear to the Minister and also to his advisers that, as far as
I am concerned, I would like to think the delivery is directly
from government through to local government. The £100,000
that we have been granted—as I am in a Pathfinder area in
Fenland—we have not seen the money yet, but I am hoping
that the accountable authority, which is Cambridgeshire County
Council, will be able to spend that as it feels fit to spend it
without direction from any of these other bodies that you mention.
Cllr Reid: Can I also say, I think
it is impossible to expect Defra to deal directly with over 400
local authorities; there really has to be some layer in between.
It would have been perhaps better if it had been just the RDAs,
not the Government Offices as well, but the RDAs are the obvious,
if not perfect, solution.
Q235 David Taylor: Can we move it on
a little bit? We were talking about concerns about local government's
role, and I declare an interest as a long time employee of a county
council and a rather shorter period as an elected member of a
shire district. I recognise the truth of what the Country Land
and Business Association told us, that they often observe conflict
between various parts of a local authority which can be damaging
to the needs of the rural economy. I would have seen it perhaps
in a lack of common approach between planning and economic development
and housing in a shire district, for instance. Do you believe
that there is some truth in what the CLA have told us, and are
the local authorities that you represent and of which you are
members adequately rural proofed, even though you are often rural
authorities?
Cllr Melton: I will start off
by saying, as far as planning is concerned, as a former Chairman
of a planning committee and also a Chairman of an economic development
committee, I have felt that for quite some time, but recently
guidance has come out and it has recognised that planning departments
and economic departments should talk to one another. In my own
local authority in Fenland itself we have amalgamated a department
with one super head of service to bring the two together. The
other thing, of course, is you talk about counties and districts.
For my sins, I am a twin-hatter, being a Cabinet Member of the
County Council and leader of the District Council, which is quite
unusual. I call that the perfect partnership, and that does actually
help get through some of the red tape and some of the objectives
that are in the way that you describe, but I will ask Pat to come
in and say a few words on that one.
Cllr Aston: I think people have
to bear in mind that every local authority now has a community
strategy, that across shire areas each district has a community
strategy and it is supposed to nest with the county council's
community strategy, and they are beginning to do that. Also, we
have a link to government: local public service agreements. Public
service agreements have been common in central government between
departments of state and the Treasury. Public service agreements
between local authorities and departments of state are a new thing,
and the first round did not have that many rural targets in it.
As a result, Cardiff University has done some research. We have
copies for you, and we have produced some fact sheets. We hope
that the next round, which is just beginning, will have more rural
targets. In order to do that counties and districts have to work
together. The rules are that all districts must be involved this
time round. Also there are going to be more local targets this
time rather than imposing national ones. So we think that under
this agreement we will have locally arising activity based on
what we actually need locally. It is difficult sometimes to define
these things across the whole of England, because it is not the
same across the whole of England, and we want, therefore, with
the Pathfinders and these local partnerships to have as much flexibility
and freedom as it is possible to get for them. We also want them
to be adopted by the whole of the central government family. This
is not about Defra by itself or the ODPM; it is for everybody
joining in. If you really want to deliver economic, social and
environmental well-being in an area, everybody has to join: the
Department of Health has to join, the Department of Education
has to join; everybody has to join. You can then maximise what
you are putting into an area, and we do that a little bit now,
but we could do it a lot better.
Q236 David Taylor: Would you agree with
me that with two-tier local government—and I would go into
Whitehall and mount the barricades to defend it, I really would—where
one, perhaps a shire, district is under one form of political
control and the county is under another that that is too often
evident in the failure to cooperate at those two levels, because
it can be a real difficulty to establish an effective rural policy
in a two-tier areas where political differences cannot be set
aside in the common interest of a particular area?
Cllr Whiteman: Can I come in on
that, Chairman, as a shire district member. We now have local
strategic partnerships. In the county that I am from, Shropshire,
we are working very well together, the districts and the county
work well together. They are on different political structures,
but that does not seem to make a lot of difference—we work
very well together with the districts and the council—and
I think the delivery will come through the local strategic partnerships
which are working extremely well in some areas, not so well in
others, but they will come together and they will work. I think
that is the way we should do this local delivery from the RDAs
down to the LSPs, and I think that is the level where it will
work with our councils working together in partnership.
Cllr Aston: A good example is
Lincolnshire. We have brought with us one of the Lincoln Council
pieces of paper for you where South Holland District Council was
a leading role in it and took with it the whole of the county,
effectively. Sometimes people over-estimate how political districts
are. They are very political during the year of an election, but
by and large, on a daily basis, it does not get in the way that
much.
Q237 David Taylor: The Countryside Agency
in their oral evidence to us have stressed the absolute importance
of across government definition of what is "rural".
As an accountant, I am attracted by trying to label up things
in nice, neat unambiguous parcels. Would you say that there is
a common definition across all local authorities where you use
the 10,000 in one, or 10,000 and more would be in urban areas
or urban communities? What is your view on this? How important
is it and does it exist?
Cllr Melton: From my own personal
point of view, I do not believe that you can say that "rural"
is one word that you can use in every area. Where I come from,
in Fenland, we are a rural area but based on four market towns.
In neighbouring districts, such as South Cambridgeshire, that
is a scattering, say, of 100 villages all centred around getting
their services from Cambridge City, and you see this right across
the spectrum. In other areas, because we are mainly flat where
I come from and it is an agricultural area, mono crop growing,
whereas in other areas, of course, you have got—which Milner
knows better than I do—sheep farming, cattle and that sort
of thing. So what do you call "rural"? I suppose I look
upon myself as a rural person living in a reasonably small market
town surrounded by small villages. Having said that, somebody
who lives in rural Norfolk way out in the sticks may consider
themselves rural; so I do not think there is any definitive answer
to that.
Cllr Reid: I have been involved
in the Rural Commission since it started, and we have never ever
tried to define "rural"; we have left it to member authorities
to say whether they felt they were rural.
Q238 David Taylor: Is not self-definition
fraught with difficulties?
Cllr Reid: It may be, but it is
less fraught with difficulties than bickering about more rural
than thou, which is what is likely to happen, and it has happened
informally from time to time.
Q239 David Taylor: Finally, Chairman,
on the role of local authorities, we are in a position, are we
not, and I am sad that this is the case, that large numbers of
people come to this place for the first time as Members of Parliament
with a local government background and then immediately go native;
they turn a blind eye or are sanguine about the neutering of local
education authorities, the steady absorption of social service
powers into the NHS, the coerced sell off of council houses in
all types of local authority, and seemingly oblivious to the fact
that the electors out there increasingly see local authorities
as merely agents of central government. Do you believe that that
is true? Do you believe that it is helpful in trying to deliver
a rural agenda; and, picking up, finally, the point that Councillor
Aston made a moment or two ago, if you set large numbers of targets
for authorities that are seen by everyone other than those that
work for them or are elected to them as mere agents of that very
rural part of the country that is known as Smith Square,
Westminster, you are not going to get very far?
Cllr Melton: I cannot certainly
remind my friend and local Member of Parliament that he started
through the same route I did, the Borough Council, District Council
and the County Council and then finally made it here. He got one
step ahead of me, and I often remind him of where he came from,
and I have to say from my personal point of view that he helps
us quite a lot on that and has opened a lot of doors for us. This
is something that I am glad you said and I did not say it, but
it is something I hear a lot across the political spectrum in
my work in the wider LGA family, that councillors do tend to turn
native when they get to Westminster, but people such as myself
have been accused of that in a smaller role from a parish council
to district on to county; so you can say that right across the
board. Pat is dying to say something.
Chairman: I know Pat wants to get in
on this, but having had Mr Taylor made his pitch as Vice President
of the LGA, I think we will move on. We have talked about RDAs.
I think Mr Jack might want to pursue this with you a little.
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