The
Chairman: Order. We will move away from the primeval swamp
and the mastodons and get back to the programme
motion. 10.45
am
Mr.
Curry: Humanity moved away from it, Mr.
Illsley, and most of us originated in it if we go back far
enough—to the dinosaurs that your grandchildren, I am sure,
study almost to the exclusion of anything else, as children in primary
schools do these days.
My
hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe said that he can live with the
primeval swamp and the programme motion, so, being an obedient Back
Bencher, I will bow to his demands. However, I hope we can move on to
the interesting bits of the Bill quickly and not faff around with all
the frippery that adorns large parts of it.
Question
put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That, subject
to the discretion of the Chairman, any written evidence received by the
Committee shall be reported to the House for publication—(Ms
Rosie
Winterton.)
Mr.
Goodman: On a point of order, Mr. Chairman. We
Conservatives received yesterday—I assume this applies also to
the Liberal Democrats—an absolute mass of paper from the right
hon. Member for Wentworth. During consideration of the Bill, the
Minister might answer to our questions, “Well, it was in the
documents that were sent.” I simply want to put on the record
that in dealing with the Bill alongside other commitments we have, it
is very difficult to read through these piles of paper in less than 24
hours to find the answers to our questions. I hope the Minister can
give a commitment that any further written material will be sent
expeditiously.
The
Chairman: I am sure the Minister has taken on board that
request.
Copies of the
memorandums that the Committee receives will be made available in the
Committee
room.
Clause
1Democratic
arrangements of principal local
authorities Dan
Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD): I beg to move amendment
37, in
clause 1, page 1, line 10, at
end
insert— ‘(
) the duty of members of the authority as democratically elected
representatives;’.
The
Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the
following: Clause stand
part. New
clause
3—Penalties— ‘(1)
A principal local authority commits an offence by failing to comply
with a duty imposed on it by virtue of Chapter 1 or 2 of Part
1. (2) A principal local
authority found guilty of an offence under subsection (1) is liable on
summary conviction to a fine not exceeding
£100,000.’
Dan
Rogerson: This is my first opportunity to echo comments
made by other Members welcoming you to the Chair, Mr.
Illsley. However brief our deliberations might be, I am sure they will
be all the more focused because of you, so it is a delight to serve
under your chairmanship again.
As the
Minister will anticipate, I will not press the amendment to a vote. I
simply seek to discuss the roles and duties that the Bill places on
local authorities. There was some debate in the other place about the
need to clarify that the democracy that we have the honour of defending
and functioning within is a representative one, and it is important
that the roles of elected members are set out clearly.
On Second
Reading, the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) said that
there is still a lack of understanding in much of our electorate about
what different people do within the democratically elected structures
of our country—just what councillors are responsible for and the
role of Members of Parliament. In the recent European election the
turnout was not incredibly high, and there was, perhaps, a lack of
understanding about just what Members of the European Parliament are
able to achieve and how they interact with the other tiers of
Government.
To that end,
clause 1 sets out clearly the duties placed upon local authorities.
However, I share the concerns of other Members about imposing
unnecessary duties on local authorities. Clearly, these are things that
good local authorities are dealing with anyway and could therefore be
covered by best practice. As my hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and
Camborne said in her introductory remarks, a great deal in the Bill
could be achieved by best practice guidance, encouraging local
authorities rather than imposing duties upon them through legislation.
Subsection (2) talks about how the local authority
has “a
duty to promote understanding of the following among local people...how
to become a member...what members of the principal local authority
do”. That
is very good, but it refers to the body corporate, and we need to
recognise the tremendous role played by local authority councillors,
many of whom are now newly elected and some of whom are on entirely new
authorities. They have a huge amount of work to do in familiarising
themselves with just what they have let themselves in for, working with
new colleagues to set out visions for their authorities.
I cannot
emphasise enough how important it is for us to support local authority
members in their roles within local communities, giving them the tools
they need and helping them to start rebuilding trust in the electoral
system, which, sadly, has been undermined by recent events, or rather,
recent revelations of events in this part of the democratic system and
perhaps elsewhere
too.
Mr.
Raynsford: I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but
I am not persuaded that there is any need for his amendment. The Bill
refers to the duty on the authority to promote understanding of the
functions of the authority and the democratic arrangements of the
authority. Why does that not cover precisely the point he is
making?
Dan
Rogerson: The right hon. Gentleman is right to point out
that there is much that is superfluous in the Bill. As I said earlier,
the duties being imposed on local
authorities should not necessarily be achieved through legislation. I
simply seek to underline the principle that democratically elected
members themselves have an important part to play in the body
corporate—the local authority—and we need to empower them
and help them to do that. Rather than it being the job of the chief
executive to tell people what local authority members are doing, we
should be helping local authority members to do that themselves in
their local communities. Many of them do that. They build up strong
relationships with people in their local communities, organisations and
so on in performing that representative function. I merely want to
raise the principle that it is not so much a matter of giving duties to
the councils—the corporate body—but of how we can help
local councillors develop their role and to convince people once again
that they are electing people who have their community’s best
interests at heart and who can be an articulate voice for those
concerns. The
amendment is merely an opportunity for us to raise certain issues
around the distinction between the role of the local authority as a
whole and those of individual members of that authority, particularly
in a system where some are in opposition and some are in control of
those local authorities. Opposition Members therefore have a crucial
role to play in scrutiny as well.
In response
to issues raised on Second Reading, new clause 3 seeks to set out more
clearly the penalties for any local authority that fails to act upon
the duties imposed on it, giving us a chance to debate what the
appropriate penalties might be. This goes to the heart of something
that I and others hon. Members have already mentioned, which is that we
do not think these are the sorts of things which ought to be set out as
duties under legislation, so the penalties are unnecessary.
Members of
this House and the Government should be working with local authorities
to develop the principles around which this sort of work can take
place, to offer advice and to promote networking. Organisations such as
the Local Government Association and the Improvement and Development
Agency already do excellent work in helping to support local
authorities and local members to do that. That is the route we ought to
be taking. The new clause seeks to promote debate by considering at
what level a penalty should be, but we do not need either a penalty or
the duties. Rather we need to encourage local authorities to be as
proactive as possible in their local communities, rebuilding that trust
in democracy and hopefully heading off any further possibilities of
protest votes going where members of this Committee would rather not
see them go, as sadly happened last week in the European
elections.
I will not
press the amendment to a vote, but will seek the Committee’s
leave to withdraw it later. New clause 3 is a useful point for debate,
but not a serious consideration at this
point.
Mr.
Goodman: In addressing the amendment, it is obviously
impossible not to refer to the clause as a whole, so I will try to do
that as I address the
amendment.
The
Chairman: Order. When I introduced the amendment, I said
we would consider new clause 3 and clause stand
part.
Mr.
Goodman: I am extremely grateful, Mr. Illsley.
I will turn at once to the clause.
It should
almost go without saying that promoting democracy and the democratic
arrangements of local authorities is a noble aim, whoever does it and
whichever body does it, whether it is central Government, local
authorities themselves, other national bodies, voluntary bodies,
members of the public and so on. The simple question we want to put at
the start—it is a question the Minister will hear again and
again as we go through the Bill and which was asked from the Liberal
Democrat Benches a moment ago—is: why on earth do we need this
on the statute book in the first place? Why do we need clause 1 and the
clauses that follow to bind local authorities in doing this?
The former
Secretary of State said last week at Second Reading that this Bill was
a decentralising measure. We read this morning that she is campaigning
for further decentralisation, which does not show much confidence in
the Bill, but there we are. It is very hard to see—I put it as
diplomatically as I can—how real decentralisation and
localisation is compatible with a clause like this that seeks to lay a
new duty on local authorities with the accompanying penalties, to which
the Liberal Democrat spokesman has just referred. In saying something
about our approach to this clause, I am also making observations about
the Bill in general.
When it went to another place,
this clause was carefully considered along with other clauses. The
other place sought to improve the legislation—that is the way it
works. In relation to this and other clauses, the world has moved on
since the Bill was debated in another place. I will not give the long,
sad and dreary description of the ways in which the world has moved on.
I would say in relation to this clause, however, what I would say in
relation to the Bill, that given the events related to expenses in the
last few weeks, and the challenge to the whole of our
democracy—to national Government, to local government, to the
way in which democracy is fashioned and exercised in this
country—the genteel process that was undertaken in relation to
this clause in another place is no longer appropriate. That is why we
have tabled an amendment to delete it, as we have tabled many. We
appreciate that it will not be called but it is a signal of our
intentions. We think that tabling it before recent events was, to put
it mildly, unwise. After recent events, it looks extraneous.
I will not
echo in detail the sensible comments about penalties made by the hon.
Member for North Cornwall, but we are curious to know what penalties
will apply once this is on the statute book. Suppose an ordinary voter
in High Wycombe or in Falmouth and Camborne is dissatisfied with the
performance of their local authority in performing these duties. What
will that person do or, more appositely and relevantly, in how many
cases do the Government anticipate voters or others going to the courts
or elsewhere to charge councils with failing to observe this duty? What
do they think the costs of this clause will be to local government?
Have they made any calculations as to what extra staff or what extra
hours local councillors will need to work to undertake it? As I say,
this
is—
Julia
Goldsworthy: My sense, from talking to my constituents, is
that their key frustration is that participating has no impact on the
outcome. What we see here is a requirement that, if the council does
not fulfil its part of the bargain, it still has no impact on the
outcome, and
even if it does consider the petition, it still might have no impact on
the outcome. So how does the Bill address that fundamental
problem? 11
am
Mr.
Goodman: Petitions are dealt with in a later clause, but
the point that the hon. Lady makes is perfectly apposite to this one. I
am sure she anticipates, as I do, that we will be making the same
simple, good point again and again to the Government, and we will
almost certainly not receive a satisfactory reply.
Why do we
need all this in the first place? The comments made on Second Reading
by the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay)—we ought to
call this the Thurrock Bill—apply perfectly well to the clause.
The Minister might not have had the opportunity to hear them, but I
think she should, because he spoke for much of the House. I will skip
the part about economic prosperity, because that would be out of order.
In his usual understated way, he
said: “Most
people have had enough of all this. Why can we not cut away this
plethora of bodies and focus on democratically elected local
authorities?” I
am not using his words, but we would be free of all these burdens from
the centre. He
continued: “That
is why I say to her that this is complete nonsense, and we have had
enough...all these buzzwords. I say take it back.”
—[Official Report, 1 June 2009; Vol. 493, c.
35.] If I had
said that, I would have been accused quite rightly of going over the
top, but it applies to the clause.
[Interruption.] As if I have ever been
accused of going over the top by my hon. Friends or anybody else. It
applies as much to the clause as to so many other clauses, other than
some harmless clauses that we will come to later and let
pass. We
are having the clause stand part debate, and we are also debating
amendment 37 and new clause 3. Our view in general is that we have not
sought to table amendments to the parts of the Bill that we believe to
be otiose. We will consider amendments from the Liberal Democrats and
others on their merits. They have made it plain that amendment
3—I do not think that they are planning to press it a
vote—is a way of exploring why we need the clause in the first
place. So we look forward to hearing what the Minister has to
say. Finally,
subsection (2) shows the nonsense that we get into when all this is
written on the statute book. It
states: “The
duty...to promote understanding of the following among local
people...what members of the principal local authority
do”.
Why not officers? Once
we start writing members into the statute book, why not write officers
into the statute book, too? This is the crazy logic that one gets into
when trying to codify all this in statute—an approach that the
Government have taken far too often and for far too
long.
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