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Lord Maginnis of Drumglass: My Lords, suppose local government in England was to be fundamentally
 
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reformed. Would the Government even contemplate doing so by Order in Council, or would the political parties and the electorate here expect a proper Bill that could be debated, amended and put to a vote as that Bill moved from stage to stage?

I honestly regret having to evaluate this Order in Council as a deliberately perverse and bad piece of legislation designed to meet only the sectarian demands of the most intransigent elements of Sinn Fein and unable to be justified on any reasonable grounds. Would Secretary of State Hain accept local government for Wales on the basis of tenuous support from only one minority party? Of course not and neither is it a sensible or practical basis for what Northern Ireland needs in terms of local government reform.

This is punitive legislation designed to bully the majority of citizens because their elected representatives have failed to sustain a devolved Assembly. That has happened because the Provisional IRA, or Sinn Fein, is in that Assembly while still engaged in every conceivable form of criminality. Many feel that to work to that baseline means that Northern Ireland is being surrendered to corrupt elements by a Secretary of State who refuses to listen to us.

For many it is the choice between a rock and a hard place. While I may be at variance with those who lack the courage to face up to the lesser of two evils and get back to having an Assembly, I understand and respect their position. I fought terrorism and then, for almost a quarter of a century, I sat with terrorists and their frontmen in local government. They never outgunned me on the ground and they never outgunned me in the democratic Chamber. That is why I would be back at Stormont. It would be a hard and risky road but so much better than this, because ever since we endorsed the Belfast agreement as a basis for transition from outright terrorism to democratic structures, a malleable government have betrayed us. They have consistently made impassable any pathway to normality that would facilitate unionists' rights and traditions. On another occasion I may have time to articulate the full extent of that betrayal. For now, I simply ask colleagues in this House, against the background that I have just defined, to evaluate this legislation.

The critical issue here is the proposal to establish a seven-council arrangement to replace the current 26-council structure. Ulster Unionists wanted significant change. They would have preferred 15 councils—a local authority coterminous with each parliamentary constituency, with the four Belfast constituencies coming together and with constituency boundaries already accepted by the public and parties alike. If pressed, we might have settled for 11. But the seven-council structure proposed will give militant Sinn Fein absolute control over a greater geographical half of Northern Ireland. It will inevitably create a Balkan-type structure that will be untenable for unionists in that part, and I greatly fear that the reciprocal could also happen. Why would any Government want to risk that?
 
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Does the Minister really believe that these changes are not intended to focus large swathes of Northern Ireland towards a southern Irish aspect? He is wrong. That is exactly what some intend. The uncertainty and inevitable resentment that the Government are about to unleash fills me with dread for the future.

If the Government had been sincere, would we not by now have heard the basis on which the first change in local government in Northern Ireland for 33 years was predicated? Is it not an issue worth proper debate in a proper Bill? But no. After 33 violent years, Northern Ireland is being presented with another diktat: take it or leave it. Let us just remember what happened to the 1985 diktat, and be warned.

What infrastructural audit has been carried out? Council staff will have to have working accommodation and, since the Minister told us in Committee that he has no new money, one must assume that existing facilities will be utilised. Twenty-six existing council headquarters will somehow have to accommodate seven new councils. We can envisage the organisational and communication chaos. But no one has a blueprint on how it is intended that this will be resolved.

What detailed financial audit has been carried out? None, if that can be believed. But is the Northern Ireland Office not good at off-the-cuff estimates? In answer to my specific Written Questions, has it not confessed that that is the methodology by which it is intent on destroying—in fairness, I think that it said "reforming"—our grammar and secondary schools sector of education? That matter, vital to the future of our children, is also to be dealt with by Order in Council. No, we are not to be allowed to participate in that game either.

To go back to finance, local government in Northern Ireland accounts at present for only 3 per cent to 3.5 per cent of total public expenditure. After these changes, that will rise to less than 10 per cent. All this talk about efficiency is nonsense. The real spending is done by quangos and that will continue with only a few minor changes. Let us not even mention consultants who are employed to put a gloss on government's indiscretion. Government just hit on a ball-park number and fill in the details later. What a way to run a business.

Of course, we are told that such eminent bodies as the Institute of Directors have backed the seven-council proposal. I have been in local government for almost 20 years, and I have never known the Institute of Directors and all those other noble bodies to interface with local government on either a regular or a casual basis. We really ought to wonder why the Ulster Unionist Party, the Democratic Unionist Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Alliance Party oppose a seven-council arrangement. Will the Minister tell us whether the more progressive elements of Sinn Fein are actually in favour of this seven-council proposal? This might just be like the Government's "on the run" fiasco and not quite what Sinn Fein wants.

Is it not relevant that the Northern Ireland Local Government Authority, representing all political parties, opposed seven councils? And is not the Society
 
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of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers, or SOLACE, working agreeably in partnership with NILGA on the basis of its position? The Government have no real clothes on this issue and are operating against the expressed wishes of all those bodies and a clear majority of the Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

I conclude by referring to issues that concern the Government's own local government watchdog, the Local Government Staff Commission, to which it has not had answers. Those issues relate to the human rights aspects of the review of public administration. We are not debating them specifically here, but, I promise, they are inextricably linked.

What specific proposals have the Government made concerning the transfer of staff between the present councils and the new establishment, and from the Civil Service into the new establishment? Have the Government even the remotest idea how they plan to populate the new council with staff from two sources—those moving from within local government and those transferring from the Civil Service, quangos and agencies? How will they deal with displaced staff and, taking into consideration Section 75 and New TSN, how will the location of new councils be decided?

I could continue but, as the Government have not thought through their tactics and as they do not really have a strategy that relates specifically to the issue before us, where is the point? I will bet a pound to a penny that the simple issue of the recruitment and interviewing of chief executives, for example, is not thought through. Will recruitment be a ring-fenced process or will it be done by public advertisement?

This order is a travesty. I regret that this House has not been able to take the ultimate punitive action on this matter. It is time that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland stopped to listen. It is time that he stopped digging up the cricket pitch on which the game of peace and democracy is to be played out.

7.45 pm

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville: My Lords, I begin by apologising to your Lordships' House that I was not present in Grand Committee when this order was debated and considered. I have already done so in writing to the Minister though he may not yet have seen it. However, the debate in Grand Committee provided a useful quarry for questions on the controversial decision that Her Majesty's Government have made which is incorporated in this order. In the Minister's final sentence before he moved the order in Grand Committee on 18 April, he said at col. 442 that there was far more background than he had given in his short introduction to the order, so I do not apologise for asking some more questions. I realise that they may have been answered in the letter which he sent to us all, but which I did not see before Grand Committee. I have just spent two days in the Republic with the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body and therefore do not have the letter about my person.

We have to ask the questions because the Minister was confronted by one party in Northern Ireland asking for seven councils while the other parties asked
 
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for 15. Given the judgments of Solomon which all Northern Ireland Ministers from Great Britain have to make in Northern Ireland affairs, there have to be good reasons why the Minister, unlike Solomon, did not split the difference at 11. My first questions are devoted to the background to the elimination of 11 as a solution, especially when it was vouchsafed in the Explanatory Notes that 71 per cent of those who had expressed an opinion in response to the second consultation had voted for 11 or fewer.

The Government have laid much stress on these percentages, but they look a little threadbare when it transpired from the Minister's reply to the Grand Committee debate that only 113 of 1,032 consultees who responded to the second consultation had expressed an optimal preference for any of the three choices of seven, 11 or 15 councils which the Government had offered them. That leaves 919 responders who made no choice at all. That imbalance somewhat reduces the significance of the percentages. Moreover, the Minister, in explaining why it was wrong to add up all the three percentage figures which the Explanatory Notes had a little ambiguously afforded, never explained why, on his exegesis, another 11 per cent, as identified by my noble friend Lord Glentoran, were left over, as the Minister's percentages as defined in Grand Committee add up to only 89. It is not for me to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, but as a Northern Ireland Minister I would not have the calculations so opaque on a politically highly sensitive subject. I am sure that there is a good explanation, but it would have been even better if it had been initially and immediately transparent. As to the 919 consultees who had no opinion, I wonder what their opinions would have been if they had been required to give one.

However, I appreciate that the Minister's determination of seven councils did not depend entirely on the percentages. His decision depended also on the spread of wealth. He said in Grand Committee:

"To get as even a spread of wealth as possible, on a property basis, of the seven councils was therefore an aim".

He went on to say in the next sentence:

"Seven councils deliver that better than any of the other options that were looked at—the 11 and the 15".—[Official Report, 18/4/06; col. GC 456.]

I remark neutrally that that is an odd order in which to utter those two sentences. I would logically have uttered them the other way round. Was the Minister really saying that there was no way in which you could have configured 11 councils, which I acknowledge has potential geographical complications, which would not have produced an even spread, around 9 per cent, of Northern Ireland's property wealth?

Let us however give him the benefit of the doubt on that—I assume that that is what he was saying—and assume that seven councils offered a better chance and more potential options in terms of configurations. He said that his aim was to get as even a spread of wealth as possible, on a property basis, for those seven councils. A precisely even spread would have
 
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been 14.29 per cent of Northern Ireland's property wealth per council, but even with the geographical complications, you could logically have achieved that or something like it from more than one permutation of the present 26 district councils, especially as you are not obliged to follow their boundaries absolutely precisely. What maximum deviation from 14.29 per cent did the Minister allow his officials in making their recommendations? In the event, what is the difference between the poorest and the richest potential council in the distribution of the 26 councils that he prescribes in Article 3 of the order? What is the difference between the poorest and the richest in the second-best option in the distribution of the 26 councils?

I realise that I am asking these questions at a late stage in the process, though I can plead that I have been participating in eight other Bills so far this year. I make no apology for the questions, because the Minister, who is a thorough Minister, will have asked his officials those questions himself, given the discrepancy in preferences expressed by the political parties. But, given the real hazards of Balkanisation and the alienation that results, which have significance for the people of Northern Ireland and not just for the political classes, he has a responsibility to be fair. He must forgive us if some of us recall how spectacularly wrong the Government were in their expectations of the outcome of another piece of regional paving legislation in England in which he participated. It led to a referendum on November 4 two or three years ago whose result was known in Whitehall for several months thereafter as "4/11".

Finally, am I correct in assuming—here I follow up on my noble friend Lord Glentoran—that if this order goes through tonight there will be no opportunity after 15 May, assuming other legislation goes through next week, for the Assembly to give the Government the benefit of its views?

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