Clause 2
Sustainable Communities Bill
11:00 am
Phil Woolas (Minister of State (Local Government & Community Cohesion), Department for Communities and Local Government; Oldham East and Saddleworth, Labour)
I think that my hon. Friend will like my next sentence, if he did not like my minor premise. My conclusion is that the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill and this Bill, including new clause 2, are intended to say that if communities are to be sustainable in the way that is now defined, devolution must not stop at local authority level but must be passed down to communities, to neighbourhoods, to community groups and so on.
The caveat that the Government place on that is that the locally elected councillor, not the council, is the ultimate arbitrator. He is the conduit. If a local authority and its partners are not engaging in consultation in the way that clause 108 and the back-up schedules describe, which new clause 2 describes imperfectly and new clause 4 describes nearly perfectly, we would have legitimate levers and powers to say that the actions in the example that my hon. Friend has given are not acceptable. That is not devolution from Whitehall to city hall, but centralisation from community to city hall, which is the opposite of what everyone intends.
The difficulty, like the argument about subsidiarity, is that there is always disagreement about the level at which a decision should be taken. The knowing smile from the right hon. Member for West Dorset reminds me of his point on Second Reading that money is power and it is where the money is that counts. The framework that I am trying to set up is designed to ensure that the desirable objective is realised.