Clause 2
Sustainable Communities Bill
10:00 am
Nick Hurd (Ruislip - Northwood, Conservative)
May I be the first to welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Cummings? You are our third Chairman and, I trust, the last.
I want to propose new clause 2, but first it might be beneficial for the Committee to revisit some of the objectives and key principles underlining old clause 2. It required the Government to produce a long-term national action plan to combat the real social problems associated with community decline, which were well aired on Second Reading. The clause is non-prescriptive about what should be in the national action plan, but it makes it clear that it must have a difference and be a genuinely bottom-up action plan driven by recommendations of local communities. While emphasising that principle, we were going very much with the grain of the Government’s rhetoric about devolution.
There is no shortage of helpful quotes from past and future leaders of the Labour party and the Government in support of the principle. The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has said:
“Most of the solutions will be rooted in local communities.”
The Minister has said:
“It is for local people and their elected representatives to determine how best to ensure that their community is sustainable and thriving”.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is on record as saying that people and communities must now take power from the state and that that
“means a reinvention of the way we govern”.
The proposals in clause 2 go very much with the grain of the Government’s policy. It was specific in setting out some mechanics for that local engagement, because we felt that the outside world viewing the Bill—we are very aware of how much interest there is outside the House—wants comfort that the talk about local engagement and community involvement is actually real and backed up with some mechanics to give it credibility.
The original clause framed the deliberations of the Secretary of State by requiring him or her to have regard to the list of
“indicators set out in the Schedule”
on page 8 of the Bill. There was a presumption that the Secretary of State would include in the plan the recommendations submitted by councils, unless she felt that they were incompatible with the objectives or that they were unnecessary for the promotion of the sustainability of local communities. That was the original clause, and I have referred to some of the key principles and philosophy driving it.
The Government signalled quickly in both the debate and subsequent negotiations that their problems with the Bill centred around their concerns about the workability of the process that we had set out and the freedom of manoeuvre for a Secretary of State trying to implement national policy, as well as managing the process of devolution. Those reservations were expressed, although it was extremely disappointing for most members of the Committee that, when it came to showing their hand, the Government’s first set of amendments were clearly wrecking in nature.