Clause 36 - Best value grant: parishes
Local Government Bill
9:45 am
Mr Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold, Conservative)
That is helpful. I assume also that it applies only to England. I understand that only 41 parishes currently satisfy the best-value criteria to qualify for the £30,000 grant to cover the audit and corporate costs of carrying out work relating to the best value functions; for example, performance bands and management reviews, and the functions helpfully read out by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West, contained in the Local Government Act 1999.
How much money has the Minister's Department set aside for the next three years to deal with the provisions of subsection (2)? Is the Minister constantly reviewing which parishes should receive best value status? Is an announcement likely soon on more whether more parishes will be given best value status?
I have a slight problem with parish meetings, because many parishes are small hamlets; sometimes a group of only two or three houses. Would it usually be relevant for them to have best value status? Even if it were relevant, would they be willing to manage the increased duties? Will the Minister confirm that the best value status lasts for only a year? If not, how long does it last, and how can parish councils plan for what they have to do?
Is there a mechanism for parishes to review whether they have reached the objectives set out in their plan when applying for best value status? What are the criteria for determination of best value, and is there a regional basis for awarding best value? Will the Minister give a fuller explanation? He unusually failed to give one when we last debated parish councils. Even if only the best value parish councils are required to take on extra duties, it follows that others are taking on fewer duties. I presume that those others must be the local district or borough councils. What will happen to their budgets as a result of devolving duties down to the parish councils?
We fully approve of as much power as possible being devolved down to parish councils, if the parish councillors feel able to take on those extra duties. It is entirely in line with our policy of devolving down to the lowest possible level, but I should like to hear from the Minister how it is expected to work.
We approve of best value councils, with the best being encouraged to do even better, but how will the mechanism encourage the laggards—those at the bottom of the pile—who do a pretty lousy job on behalf of their communities? How will the mechanism encourage them? Will there be some form of twinning, or will the best value councils be able to give advice to poorly performing parish councils?
Finally, I reiterate what I said at an earlier sitting. We hear not only anecdotally but from our constituency correspondence that a number of parish councillors are resigning because of the increasing complexity of the tasks being imposed on them. We must be mindful of the fact that we want to encourage a broader spectrum of the community to become parish councillors. If parish councillors do not wish to take on those duties, the duties should not be forced upon them.
The auditing regime that is envisaged may be a problem, because a large part of the £30,000 grant will be spent on the increased complexity of the audit requirements. I suspect that those increasingly complex audit requirements will be beyond the grasp of some parish councillors. If they feel that things are going on that they cannot fully grasp, one should not be surprised if they feel disinclined to continue to be parish councillors or, indeed, decline to stand for the parish council in the first place. That would make the system work a little less well than it does at the moment, so I wonder whether some of the measures are counter-intuitive. I should be grateful if the Minister gave us a reasonable explanation of how the provisions will work and say what new functions parish councils would have to carry out.