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Baroness Harris of Richmond: My Lords, I apologise to the Minister for missing the first few seconds of his opening remarks. Fortunately I did not miss the beginning of his main points.
I wish to place on record my great support for my noble friend Lord Smith of Clifton in his amendment to this order. As we have already heard, the Local Government Association of Northern Ireland and the majority of Northern Ireland parties are against the order. Notwithstanding what the Minister said at the beginning, these are the people who talk to the general populace of Northern Ireland. That is an important point to make.
I too understand the importance of reducing the size of local government. I think we all do. It is too big at the moment. However, the reduction to seven councils is just too small. As we have also heard, this is a serious constitutional matter. Doing this through secondary legislation gives us no real opportunity to change it in any way at all. Coming here tonight and discussing the opportunity of reducing the number from what it is at present to what we would prefer, which is 15, is all we can do. It is deeply disturbing.
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Mark Durkan, speaking in another place earlier today, referred to the Balkanisation of Northern Ireland. I have already heard that tonight from a number of noble Lords, graphically from the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke, referred to it as well. At the meetings of the British-Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body yesterday and on Monday in Killarney, we heard how communities are being polarised. This can lead only to an exacerbation of that. It is a deeply worrying state of affairs. This order would create great harm in Northern Ireland.
This crucial legislation should be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, as the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, said. I simply do not understand the rush to complete it so quickly. Why could this not wait until the November deadline set out by the Secretary of State? Perhaps the Minister can tell us what the urgency of completing this so quickly is about.
Noble Lords have addressed the constitution of local government. Local government should be close to the people it represents. It should not be so huge that it becomes remote. That is especially important in Northern Ireland, where sensitivities are so very fragile and the need for trust and closer working within and between communities is crucial to ensure harmonious working. Enormous councils will not do anything to bring the communities together. I remember when the Government were trying to regionalise England. This is like trying to regionalise England, and look what happened there.
I was a local councillor for 25 very happy years. I lived in a very rural area of North Yorkshire, and local councillors in my district, which was the main one for delivering services, came from great swathes away in the dales of the county. It was impossible for some of them to get down to meetings in the winter, and I worry, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, said earlier, that the size of the councils can be far too great to enable people to get to the heart of their local communities quickly.
Councillors need to know their areas and wards intimately. There is a great danger if the councils are too large. What matters to people is the interest in purely local matters. That will vanish, because it will only be strategic decisions that councillors will consider they have to take.
Finally, I would argue that reducing to such a low number as seven from 26 is a step too far, too soon and too disruptive. I urge the Government to take great heed of my noble friend's Motion.
Lord Rogan: My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, I apologise for not being present in Grand Committee when this issue was being debated. I endorse the words of my noble friend Lord Maginnis of Drumglass and wish to follow with a few remarks of my own.
This order provides the backbone to the first major review of local government boundaries in Northern Ireland since 1972. While neither I nor the Ulster Unionist Party oppose such a review, we do indeed oppose the rushed nature of this legislation and the
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Government's attitude towards consultation, as well as the unacceptable lack of scrutiny afforded by this Order in Council procedure. For such a fundamental change in the organisation and machinery of local government, a more in-depth and thorough legislative process should have been utilised, with adequate time allocation for debate and indeed amendment, even if the implications of denying the people of Northern Ireland a role are ignored by the Government.
A further point to note relates to consultation. It appears pointless to me even to consult on such a fundamentally important change in the local government landscape, if, even when the Northern Ireland Local Government Association, the organisation that represents local government councillors in Northern Ireland, believes there ought to be 15 local authorities, and the Ulster Unionist, Social Democratic and Labour, Democratic Unionist and Alliance parties oppose the Government's proposals for seven local authorities, the Government are still content to push through such weak proposals with the dubious support of just Sinn Fein/IRA.
As the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, mentioned, this harks back to the same situation we found ourselves in with the ill-fated on-the-runs legislation. One can only hope this order suffers a similar fate. It carries no public support and the political support of one party. Furthermore, it is a matter that should be considered and, most importantly, scrutinised by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
I find it incredible that this order is coming from a Government who only a short time ago issued a statement in which the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland declared that,
"that view is shared by the people of Northern Ireland".—[Official Report, Commons, 18/4/06; col. 19.]
This order fails the test of both of the Government's principles, and it is a shameful exercise.
Moving on from the bigger picture and problems of accountability and scrutiny, this order, on a more specific level, is running a considerably dangerous risk which will have damaging and long-lasting implications for the future of local government. The order is concerned with setting up seven super-councils, which will lead to the boundaries being more crudely drawn than if we adopted the 15-council or even the 11-council model. In my view the order is providing the perfect foundation for the Balkanisation of Northern Ireland, which will result in an imbalanced and factionalised political landscape. Is this not the one thing that we should be seeking to avoid at all costs, not least for the future generations of the people of Northern Ireland?
We are all concerned with the efficiency of local government and the fundamental importance of delivering effective and engaging services to the communities that are represented, but these services will simply flounder if there is not true cross-community power sharing, on all the rungs of the democratic ladder. As I am sure the Minister, the noble
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Lord, Lord Rooker is aware, Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 places a statutory duty on all public authorities to,
"have regard to the desirability of promoting good relations between persons of different religious belief, political opinion or racial group".
I fail to see how these underlying and interwoven principles will be possible with seven "super councils", each of which will be dominated by one political grouping and will lead to stagnation, unengaging local government, which, most importantly of all, will prove ineffective and unconnected to the historical civic identity of the people they will claim to represent.
I have sought to raise a few of my concerns with this order and I conclude with the important fact that I, and indeed, the main political parties in Northern Ireland, and the people of Northern Ireland, are not opposed to reform of local government. But this order is not a reforming measure. As the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, said, it is rushed legislation. It is a crudely drawn gesture to appease Sinn Fein/IRA and would be exposed as such if it were properly debated and scrutinised in the appropriate domain; namely, the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Lord Rooker: My Lords, I am grateful for noble Lords' contributions, one of which may have been marginally—slightly—in favour of the Government's proposals. That means that the debate was not much different from Grand Committee. I shall do my best to answer the points that have been made.
In terms of the detailed questions, particularly those that were rightly put by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, I can do no better than to suggest that he look at the second consultation document, published last March in relation to the six-month consultation. There had already been a two-year consultation on the issue, set up by the Assembly. There is an interesting aspect of the chapter on the evenness of the rating base. Lots of configurations involving the existing councils were looked at—a couple of dozen variations of between five and 16 local government areas, using the exiting local government districts. A sample of more than 30,000 house sales over two years, reflecting the market, was also used as the basis for the analysis. As described in the document, that configuration of seven and eight new council areas presented the best options for an even distribution of the underlying property base. When all 25 configurations were ranked on evenness or spread of wealth, those with 10 or fewer were better than those with more than 10. The report goes on to indicate the other aspects that were looked at in terms of the national geography and the cohesiveness of the communities. As I said, this document was published last March, presenting the seven, 11, and 15 options. But it was not a case of seven, take it or leave it. There were three examples of seven, three examples of 11 and three examples of 15 even in the document published last March. That was the kind of configuration.
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The suggestion that this was done on the back of an envelope—though I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, was saying that—is not true. Initially, several thousand configurations were looked at by the researchers, whose research was published on the web early last year. None of that research, to the best of my information, has been challenged, and I have just had it confirmed. They were trying to find the most even options. I am not saying that the wealth base is the be all and end all, but it was a major factor in examining how one constructs a local government structure, because other factors were taken into account.
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