Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill
11:29 am
Sir Simon Milton: I strongly endorse that by reference to my own council, which has an LAA highly regarded by our Government office. We have explicitly local neighbourhood arrangements through our local area renewal partnerships. They tend to be in the deprived parts of the borough. We have a very polarised city, and very wealthy wards as well as the most deprived in London are in Westminster. We need to ensure that our local area agreements are expressed at a local level. Otherwise, they are not really worth having, because they are not going to get the outcomes that we desire.
There is a danger of getting too hung up about the mechanics. Councils will make it happen in their areas based on local knowledge, local traditions and local people. We have neighbourhood arrangements in six areas, but we do not have them in the other 14 wards of Westminster, because they are not needed. That is where we have different mechanisms to ensure that we are engaging with local people. In those six areas, we now have elected neighbourhood forums. For one of them, the turnout was equivalent to the turnout for ward council elections. People are getting involved and taking them seriously.