Clause 3
Sustainable Communities Bill
3:15 pm
Oliver Letwin (West Dorset, Conservative)
No, Mr. Cummings, it is a speech.
They are the usual suspects. What emerges from these meetings are often valuable, useful documents but, exactly as the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central said, they are highly inaccessible to most of our constituents. They are not written in language that most would recognise, they are not about subjects that most are worried about directly, although they may have an impact on their lives indirectly, and people do not read them. I have never conducted a poll, but I bet if I went round west Dorset I would not find more than a few dozen people who had ever read these huge documents. If they did read them, and tried to influence them, they would hit exactly the obstacles that the hon. Gentleman described.
The village plan is completely different. Normally the meetings take place in someone’s front room, dining room or sitting room, or perhaps in a village hall. Probably quite a large part of the village population crams into that small space. Quite often I have involved myself in meetings with a quarter or a fifth of the total village population. If I can put it this way, they are real live people. They live in the village and know about the village and care about it. They are exactly as my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood described them. They are the quiet voices. They are not people who normally participate in democratic politics or anything else that is formal or official. They go about their business and their lives and then they get involved in the village plan.
What we are trying to do here is to move from the one to the other. We are trying to get to the point where people are not simply being consulted by an outside body on something abstract, foreign and alien, but are being involved in talking about things that matter to them as local residents and which they have a collective sense they are influencing. The output of a village plan is something that the village owns. I am not a good enough poet to describe it, but it makes a moral difference to the feel of the village.
Everything that flows from the village plan after that is influenced by the tone of that document and the decisions that differ greatly from village to village. If something comes up that is wholly unexpected to a bureaucracy, it is not surprise to me or to the people forming the plan because they are a different set of people. They are looking from the bottom up and not, however well-intentionedly, from the top down. That is what we are trying to achieve here. We are trying to get the point where, whatever mechanism the Minister produces, when a local authority tries to find out what would most help it to create a more sustainable community, instead of going to the usual suspects and receiving the formal views and proposals, it can find out what real live ordinary people who are concerned about the place they are living in think.
That will be a revelation to many, including many conscientious and excellent local officers, for example, who because of the nature of their work are sufficiently detached from what is really being felt that they do not have any idea of it. That revelation will be a profoundly important consequence of the Bill. It may well lead local authorities to propose things that are nowhere in their political manifestos and have never been formulated as part of their strategic plans, but have emerged from talking to their populations in a way that has not happened before.
I understand that clause 108 is intended to have a similar effect but the way in which it is cast means that on the ground we will see the same old stuff, more or less. Lots of things that may be useful will emerge, but they will not be like the things that we are trying to achieve. They will not be like the village plan. If the Minister could have that image in his mind as he seeks a way through—I do not think that any of us want to stand by the exact drafting—it would be a huge bonus. We might get a clause that begins for the first time to build into statute the idea of people doing something that is very difficult to describe, but that one knows when one sees it—real local participation, not consultation. There is all the difference in the world between participation and consultation.