Contribution
It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Vickers. I commend the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for bringing this important subject to the House today. It is great to see MPs from across the House here in Westminster Hall, although with 400-odd Labour MPs and quite a few in the south-east these days, we might have expected more than one to come to speak in favour of this flagship Government policy—it is not entirely apparent to all of us why it is a flagship Government policy, but there we have it. Let us be frank: the hon. Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb) made an unconventional pitch to the Whips Office, but it was a pleasure and privilege to hear his very well reasoned and well thought-out case, obviously based on many years of experience.
There are two big things going on at the same time that quite often get conflated: the creation of mayoralties and the bringing together of different local authorities at unitary level, which we call local government reorganisation—LGR. The two things often get conflated, but today we are talking primarily about the second. I will be honest: we can make arguments in favour of unitary authorities, in favour of two-tier authorities, and in favour of three tiers—we can make all sorts of arguments—but if we are going to have this change, how we divvy up and carve up areas makes a huge difference. In my area, East Hampshire district council and Hampshire county council have been working hard on putting forward a good proposal.
One of the reasons this matters so much—previous speakers have raised this point—is the very high-cost items that will go into these new unitary authorities, principally adult social care and the high needs block, or SEND. In order to fund those costs for people at either end of the age scale, we need quite a lot of people in the middle. We need working-age adults contributing, and businesses contributing their taxes as well.
The hon. Member for Crawley talked about housing. One of the points that has not yet quite registered with everybody is the way that housing development planning will change. It will be on a different level, which will be further away—more remote—from the areas that are affected and could involve quite a lot of rebalancing of where housing goes. The hon. Member expressed the opposite view, but my fear is that in this new set-up, there will be the risk of more encroachment on to rural areas, because in the dominant urban areas, they will see less physical constraints for more sprawl out from those urban settlements.
The other point that I am not sure has quite permeated the public discourse is about identity. People often identify with the county and the town or village they are in. We have not yet given names to any of the new unitary authorities that might be created in the county of Hampshire, but they are almost certainly going to end up being, to some extent, artificial constructs—in the same way that, back in 1974, a lot of new identities were created, which was sometimes a difficult thing for people to deal with.
Whatever the pros and cons of different forms of local government, there is always a difficulty in the short term. Whenever anything is changed or reorganised, as anyone who has worked in business knows, there will be a great argument for, for example, moving the sales force to a regional level or back to a national level. Along the way, however, a lot of cost is incurred and effectiveness is eroded because people’s attention is moved from the key task in hand to what is happening in the organisation. Buildings have to be sold and redundancies made. All sorts of things affect operational effectiveness.
There is then still the question: what, ultimately, is the balance in terms of cost saving? I think that we are all grateful to the hon. Member for Crawley—I will call him my hon. Friend—who set out that it is really quite difficult to find material savings unless it is at a big scale. So many of the proposals that are coming forward are not at that scale—often for good reason, because it is difficult to create a meaningful identity in such a big area. There will, however, be some economies of scale. If bin collection is taken from the lower tier and put into the unitary, it should be possible to do that on a lower unit cost. There will also, however, be some diseconomies of scale, because some things will come from the upper tier and be moved into a smaller unit of geography, creating a diseconomy. I have no idea what the balance of those two things is, but we seem to be launching into this massive change—wholesale reorganisation—without knowing.
On the point about the upheaval along the way, whatever the end state is, I promise that in year one, there will not be a saving. There might eventually be something to look forward to, but we have enough economic troubles that I find it stunning that the Government should be considering entering into something that will make their fiscal task harder, at least in the short term and possibly in the long term.
I have tabled a number of parliamentary questions that have been answered in the name of the Minister before us today. Those answers have all been elegant, but they have not been illuminating. The charitable explanation came from her hon. Friend the Member for Crawley: maybe the Government just do not know what the data are. That might be true. It might also be true that they have a working assumption, but we are not being told.