Clause 3
Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill
12:15 pm
Alistair Burt (Shadow Minister (Communities and Local Government), Communities and Local Government; North East Bedfordshire, Conservative)
I should be grateful if the Minister bent his mind to a couple of issues arising fromclause 3. I draw attention to subsection (1), which states that
“The Secretary of State may give a direction under section 2 only where he believes that it would be in the interests of effective and convenient local government to do so”
and to subsection (7), which states:
“An invitation or direction under section 2 may be varied or revoked.”
Will the Minister clarify what he means by effective and convenient local government? The powers are broad ranging and sweeping. I ask because we have determined that although he might be constrained to limit his power of direction in terms of geography and time, he has not given a clear sense whether his power of direction will be coupled with any locally derived consent that he will prescribe should be measured by a referendum or in any other way. We are still left with a Bill that gives him very wide powers. Phrases such as
“effective and convenient local government”
lead us to think how controlling and centralising the Government have been of local government, and of the sense out there about the Government’s powers and local authorities’ relationship with his Department and the wider electorate.
In recent years, in conversations with local government representatives, it has become increasingly clear that the power of the assessment and audit process and the number of targets and quotas that local government must meet have become so onerous that local authorities are no longer looking outward to the electorate. Instead, they are looking upward to the Departments and the bodies that regulate and inspect them. Individual chief executives will complain, but the evidence is plain from the inspection regime, some of which the Minister intends to cull using the Bill. There has been an incredibly damaging effect on the relationship between central Government and local government, and between local government, its electors and councillors. The overwhelming sense now is that local government exists to further central Government’s agenda—it is there to deliver what the Government want to see happen at local level.
Part of that relates to the financing of local government, which returns us to a theme of our discussions with the witnesses who came before the Committee, and indeed with some who did not come before the Committee. Because the relationship between local and central Government is so intimately tied up with financing, it would have benefited us to listen to what Michael Lyons has in mind for the future financing of local government.
We contend that if the definition of effective and convenient local government still means essentially that local government delivers what central Government want, with considerable pain for local government if it does not, there is a risk that the Government will not find the support that they are seeking for their proposals because public suspicion that everything is controlled from Whitehall will not be diminished.
If individual officers are asked to do work that is not prescribed in the assessment process, or if things need to be done by the local authority that have no particular tick box and will not be looked for in the comprehensive assessment process, they know that the time that they spend on it will be time wasted from dealing with the things that the Government have asked them to do. Individual officers know that they are rated as much on how their department has delivered what the Government wanted from it as on their service to the public. In the event of a conflict, they know where their duties and loyalties lie—with the people who are paying the bills, and those assessing their careers and how they are delivering. The whole notion of
“effective and convenient local government”
leads one to ask, “effective for whom?” and “convenient to whom?” We are seriously concerned that, without any limiting powers or the matter being considered during our deliberations on the power of direction, the phrase reinforces that sense of the centralism of local government and its power.
I return to the briefing that we had from Unlock Democracy, which, if I may remind the Committee, is the coming together of Charter 88 and New Politics Network. I know that certain of my colleagues have moved quite a long way in their politics in recent years—a matter of some delight and joy to me—but associating the Conservative party with Charter 88 is probably a little far-fetched. That group cannot in any way be suggested to be a form of Tory stooge body, or anything like that. When Unlock Democracy says in its briefing that,
“The UK is the second most centralised country”
in the EU, as
“94 per cent. of all tax revenue in this country goes through central government; the average in the European Union is... about 50 per cent... In the long run as long as central government raises the overwhelming majority of the money spent by local authorities then Councils will be beholden to central government... Central government will want to direct how money is spent, or, in the words of an old saying, ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’”
it reveals the sense out there that local government has to respond to the demands of central Government and that their relationship is breaking down. That relationship, in which strong-minded local councils have a degree of autonomy, with the ability to say no to Government, to be backed up by their local electors and, sometimes, to be wrong in their judgment, has been seriously circumscribed in recent years. We have played our part in that—we understand that. But before we hear the rigmarole about the power of central Government, let me state clearly that we have learned from this process about the dangerous breakdown in relationships between councillors and their electorate and between councils and central Government. That is why we are so concerned about this issue now.