Clause 24
Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill
6:45 pm
Philip Dunne (Ludlow, Conservative)
Having forewarned that I might like to speak during clause stand part, I would not want to disappoint the Minister.
I want to pick up on the word used by my hon. Friend the Member for Poole: “consent”. That gets to the heart of the difficulty with the clause that I alluded to earlier. Where an area has a disparate disposition of assets, with some councils that are relatively well off and some that are in debt, much the best way to avoid a sense of unfairness residing within the population is simply not to impose a unitary structure on those councils against their will—that is, for the Secretary of State not to impose such a structure against the will of the people as well expressed. The debate on that issue highlights that fact. The Minister himself made the point well in his earlier remarks that the Government do not intend to impose a structure unless there is a broad cross-section of support. It says that in the invitation to bid, and that is an appropriate way to proceed.
When the Minister considers all the issues arising from our debate, I hope that he will recognise that financial disparity is a critical one. It is particularly relevant for those areas where local authorities have not sold the housing stock. Bridgnorth district council, which, he may be surprised to hear, is run by a Conservative administration, decided only last year not to dispose of housing stock. Having consulted tenants it decided that that was the right thing to do for its area, when it might have been thought that the authority’s natural instinct would have been to realise the asset. That is not a party political point; it is about fairness and a sense of injustice, for if the local council housing were sold by a unitary authority and the funds spent to improve housing in some other part of the county, it would be regarded as a very unfortunate consequence of restructuring local government.