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24 Feb 2009 : Column 13WH—continued
Mr. Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con):
I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to the debate, to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for
Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) on securing it and to endorse the last comments of my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring). He said that it is a mistake to think that big is necessarily better. That speaks directly to the points made by my constituency neighbour, the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), when he adduced arguments of both cost and coherence. At least he had the grace to admit that there would be an up-front cost and that there was a discussion to be had about the payback period. That point was made by several of us in the previous debate on this issue.
Indeed, I endorse the comments by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk about this feeling like a trip down memory lane. It reminds me of Yogi Berra, the baseball star of the New York Yankees, who said, “This is like déjà vu all over again”, not just because the subject of the debate is local government, but because of the Minister who is responding to it. The first time that I came across him was in this Chamber, when he was again trying to defend the indefensible—the actions of another Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), in relation to an adult training scheme. It seems to be his lot in life to have to go round picking up the pieces after various Ministers above him have made a complete mess of things. That was one of those cases of “Never mind the quality, feel the width.” Someone—perhaps it was even me—quoted Stalin, saying that quantity has its own quality. The headline in that case was that the 1 millionth individual learning account holder had been secured, never mind that there was fraud all over the place.
In this case, I have my doubts about the argument of the right hon. Member for Norwich, South about size. After all, when he was trying to push through the police constabulary changes, it became apparent that one of the best constabularies was also one of the smallest—Gloucestershire. It had some of the best indicators in terms of value for money, but also in the degree of compliance with its key performance indicators and acceptance by the public.
Mr. Charles Clarke: Will the hon. Gentleman accept that in my intervention earlier I did not mention size? I think that there are arguments about size to be had, but I did not make the case about size. I made the case, as he said, about coherence and cost. I do not in general believe that bigger is best; I do in general believe that to have one authority providing all the services in a locality is better than to have two or three different authorities doing that.
Mr. Bacon:
I accept that the right hon. Gentleman did not mention size, although he did refer to Greater Norwich, and Greater Norwich would of course be bigger than the present Norwich and would involve quite a lot of parishes in the north of my constituency going into Greater Norwich. They do not want to be part of Greater Norwich. They do not want to be part of Norwich city council, not least because their council tax would probably go up by about 50 per cent. from the already considerable level that it has reached in recent years after many years of Liberal Democrat control of the district council, but also because it is not clear to anyone that Norwich city council knows how to run a bath. Until that becomes clear, no one—no one
with any sense, at any rate—seems to think that it should be given responsibilities additional to those that it already has.
I do not want to take up much more time, but I want to make two final points. One concerns the relationship between the Department for Communities and Local Government and the boundary committee. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk mentioned that the committee did not seem to realise that it could have come up with other options than the one that it did, which speaks to an extraordinary lack of communication between the Department and the boundary committee.
That was made even more manifest in a letter that the Minister wrote on 9 February 2009, which is worth quoting at length. In it, he says that
“the Secretary of State made the request for advice, accompanied with Guidance to the Boundary Committee on 6 February 2008”—
just over a year ago. He goes on to say:
“We included the term ‘in aggregate’ in the request to make clear that any alternative proposals for unitary local government must have the capacity to meet the five criteria across the specified area. The February 2008 request for advice was quite clear in its terms. If the Secretary of State had intended that each part of the proposal had to meet the criteria independently, then she would not have needed to specify that the proposal in aggregate had to meet the criteria as well. If each part of the proposal met the five criteria it would follow that the proposals for the county area as a whole would too. I set this out clearly to the Chair of the Boundary Committee in correspondence I copied to him in March 2008.”
This is the extraordinary part. The letter continues:
“We then had no indication that the Boundary Committee might be taking a different approach until we saw the financial information published by the Boundary Committee on 21 November 2008. Having considered that information”—
this goes back to my point about the unfortunate Minister having to clear up after various Secretaries of State—
“it was not clear to the Secretary of State that the Committee was approaching the assessment of alternative proposals on the basis she had envisaged.”
We are supposed to believe that from February or at least March 2008 right up until 21 November, the boundary committee thought that it was doing one thing and the Secretary of State thought that it was doing another, so for eight or nine months she had not realised that it was not doing what she thought it was doing. It is no good the Minister saying—if he does respond by making this point—that the boundary committee is independent. Of course it is independent. The Electoral Commission is independent. That does not mean that it does not have constant discussion with political parties. The National Audit Office is independent. That does not mean that it does not have constant discussion with the various Departments and Executive agencies that it is auditing; it is in dialogue with them all the time. It is extraordinary that that miscommunication could have been allowed to sit there for nine months. Such confusion between the Secretary of State and the boundary committee is inexcusable. I hope that the Minister does not try to defend it; it is indefensible. The best thing that he could do is simply apologise.
My final point is about the financial condition of this country. We have just heard that the Treasury tax revenues for the month of January are £7 billion below where they were expected to be, compared with last year. Of
course, that will have an impact on local government. It can hardly not, when 75 per cent. of the revenues for local government come from the centre. Local government itself has considerable financial problems. I sat down with the chief officers of South Norfolk district council only a few weeks ago, and it was evident that on any number of fronts, the income stream of the district council was being adversely affected. I am sure that the same applies throughout the country. Planning fees are down. Goodness knows council tax income will probably be lower as more people are unemployed and claiming council tax benefit. There are any number of ways in which local government, through its own income, will be suffering financially.
Even if the right hon. Member for Norwich, South is right about the proposal—I doubt that he is—he at least acknowledged that there was a discussion to be had about the payback. We so often hear about proposals for restructuring and for churning local government and, indeed, central Government structures as though it is the structure and the change itself that produces the benefit. Sir Michael Barber, in his book on the Prime Minister’s delivery unit, “Instruction to Deliver”, says that what matters most is not the structure, but routines and good working relationships, and that is exactly what we have with joint working. My hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk was right to say that that could be extended. It is being extended, and it is working quite well. It could work better. Relationships between planning and transportation at county level and district council planning departments are getting better. They know each other; they know their responsibilities; they know how they interact. That can certainly be developed without a huge up-front cost, for which the payback will potentially be over many years.
The best thing that the Minister could do, after this Horlicks that has been going on for several years now, is gracefully withdraw and acknowledge that now is not the right time to be pushing forward these proposals.
10.29 am
Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth and Camborne) (LD): I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) on raising this issue. Listening to the debate has made me think of the last year or so that I have spent covering local government and reminded me—I am sure that the Minister will sympathise when I say this—that the real danger for those of us covering such issues is that we get sucked into discussing only local government structures and finances and acquire a pointy head. There is a risk that we miss the bigger picture, which is ultimately about the people who consume public services and benefit from their delivery. From the comments that we have heard today, it seems that the only thing that is more disruptive than reorganisation is the threat of reorganisation. Authorities turn inwards on themselves to consider the issues, but they do not stand to benefit from the changes that might derive from any local reorganisation.
There have been failures in the process. As a result, we have not only introspection, but further delays. Until a few weeks ago, people in all the areas affected thought that they could have elections to a new authority as early as June, but those have now been put off again. The threat is that people will lose faith in the whole political process and think, “What is the point of elections?
There are going to be local elections in June, but we don’t know how long the local authority will exist.” There is a lack of certainty.
From the point of view of people working in local service delivery, the appeal of looking purely at structures is even stronger. I took part in a New Local Government Network conference, where I sat on a podium with representatives from the health and police sectors. We talked mainly about how to improve local accountability for public service delivery, but what struck me was that they were vehemently in favour of unitarisation across the country. They said that it would be much easier to deliver public services if those involved knew that they were working on the same boundaries, but that missed the whole point. Coherent boundaries might be more convenient for people working in the police and health sectors, but those who receive services on the front line just want to know that they work, not whether the boundaries completely match up. That is the approach that my colleagues and I take: there should be no dogmatic presumption for or against changes to local government structures, as long as they provide people with improved services. Bigger is not always better, but we must not presume that smaller is always better either.
What stands out for me—I am sure that other hon. Members will have had similar experiences—is that changes can create duplication, even where there is co-operation. Let me give an example. A road runs along Falmouth beach, and the town council is preoccupied with ensuring that it is regularly cleaned because that is where most of the tourists go. However, responsibility for cleaning it lies with the county council. Cornwall county council therefore gives a pot of money to Falmouth town council, which then subcontracts the cleaning of the road to Carrick district council. That arrangement is fine, as long as it works, but it did not work. Somebody came to me and said, “The road’s not being cleaned. Can you help me sort it out?” I ended up going round in circles about three times before somebody would accept responsibility and make a commitment to resolve the issue. Such issues need to be addressed, and local government reorganisation might be able to address some of them.
Unlike the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring), I am not against all change in any form at any time.
Angela Browning: Cornwall has, of course, already become a unitary authority. Is it not the case that its transition costs have already trebled to £60 million?
Julia Goldsworthy: What I do know is that, in the first year alone, the new authority will save £2 million a year simply from the chief executive’s offices, so there is the potential for substantial savings. Ultimately, however, this is not just about money; it has to be about improving service delivery. I supported the unitary proposals in Cornwall because I felt that they were the first step towards giving people a stronger voice and getting more powers for Cornwall. The limitation of the Government’s proposals is that they are purely about changing the structure and do nothing about changing the powers.
The proposals that we are discussing demonstrate that the Government do not really know where they are going. The initial proposals were from more urban areas, and the Government acknowledged that simply
pursuing those would have implications for the rural hinterlands, but they do not quite know what to do about that, so we have a sense of prolonged uncertainty. The Government have missed the big picture. They have been quite clear about how they see the city region structure working and about how it could give larger cities and their immediate commuter hinterlands greater powers, but they have no idea how an equivalent process would work in rural areas. That is the dilemma being played out in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk. The reason why that is causing so many problems is that the Government do not have a vision of what the rural counterpart to city regions is. As a result, many rural areas are being left in limbo.
Another problem is that the Government’s focus is entirely on cost-effectiveness, which is, of course, important, but it should not be the sole determining factor. In the cases that we are discussing, there is a strong argument that the time spent investigating the various proposals and deciding to delay a further decision is a huge waste of resources and undermines the Government’s case for the need for cost-effectiveness—a huge cost has obviously been involved just in considering the change.
Clearly, there have also been failings in the consultation process, and that is symptomatic of some of the unitaries that will come into existence on 1 April. What made things difficult in Cornwall was the fact that the time scale was so tight that it was not possible to consult the public in the way that many people would have liked, and that has caused the new authority problems. In Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, things are almost the other way round: the way in which consideration of the proposals is being drawn out and the lack of certainty make it difficult for people to understand exactly what is on the table and when—or, indeed, if—they will have a new authority. That is causing huge problems.
To draw on points that other hon. Members have made, there have been problems across the board in Cornwall with including parishes in the decision-making process. The implementation executive in Cornwall has representatives from the district councils and the county council, but there is only one representative—the chair of the Cornwall Association of Local Councils—from all the parish councils in Cornwall, and she has only observation rights. We are talking about a process in which councils are expected to push more powers down to a local level and to ask town and parish councils to take on greater responsibilities, so it is completely ridiculous that parish councils are not allowed to participate in a discussion of what form those responsibilities will take. That experience has probably been mirrored in Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, and it is very difficult to deal with the issues involved when the goalposts keep moving.
Other concerns that have been raised concern the extent to which the new authorities and the new ward sizes relate to real communities. There is a question about how effectively a councillor in a rural area could represent 7,000 individuals, which is the case in Devon, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning) said. The scale is similar in Suffolk and Norfolk. It is suggested that there could be one councillor per 5,000 voters in Suffolk and one per 9,000 in Norfolk, if Lowestoft is included. It is obvious that there would be a democratic deficit, which would not help voter engagement with the authority that delivers the services.
The biggest frustration for me is the lack of ambition. The proposals are a missed opportunity. The initial invitation went out to councils that were interested in becoming a unitary authority, but such a process is purely about reorganising services—it is not about greater ambition for local authorities. As the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke) said, why not open a discussion about local government finance? If we truly want to empower local communities and local authorities we must talk about their powers and resources—not purely the boundaries within which they operate. There is an opportunity to be more creative, which would be of real value in a downturn. I strongly believe that the organisations in the best position to respond to the downturn are the most local ones. The present time is a prime opportunity to give them greater powers.
The biggest disappointment, as I have said, is that the Government have missed an opportunity for innovation. The entire process is in danger of stifling any success that we might have seen.
10.40 am
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): I add my congratulations to those of other hon. Members on your presence in the Chair, Mrs. Humble, and on keeping us in order almost all the time. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) on initiating the debate. He is persistent in raising the matter for the third time in the interest of his constituents. I am grateful to him, and I know from my visits to Norfolk that his constituents are grateful as well. It has struck me on my visits to all three of the counties that we are concerned with that there is frustration and exasperation about the handling of the matter. Neither the Government nor the boundary committee for England comes out with any credit.
There is a book by two well known academics, Michael Chisholm and Steve Leach, which I am sure the Minister has, like me, read—he sighs, because he knows it is not exactly complimentary; it is called “Botched Business”. That term is a polite summation of what has happened. What we have heard from hon. Members is compelling evidence of a farce of misunderstanding—I was tempted to say of black comedy—between the Department, and the Secretary of State must take personal responsibility for that, and the commission. The issue has been ill handled and the question of conducting any sensible debate, as suggested by the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke), has been made impossible by the way it has been dealt with. A disservice has been done.
I work from the premise, as did, I think, Mr. Justice Cranston in his latest judgment in the East Devon case, that the process should be driven by the evidence and that the decision should be evidence-based. It should be based on evidence and an adherence to the five criteria, which he restated in the judgment, and there should be a proper and adequate consultation, which he found had been lacking in the Devon case and the preceding cases.
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