Contribution
My Lords, I note that the Statement says:
“We will deliver a new constitutional settlement for England”.
That is a very ambitious claim. What we have in the White Paper is a great disappointment by comparison. There is a deep confusion between what is “local” and what is “regional”, which are used interchangeably and loosely throughout the White Paper. We are promised “regional Mayors” who will, we are told, also be “vital local leaders”. They will take part in the Council of the Nations and Regions alongside Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Ministers; they will also sit on a separate Mayoral Council with the Deputy Prime Minister. There is no link with Parliament here, I note, nor any link to Gordon Brown’s proposal to reform the Lords as a second Chamber to give us a role in representing the nations and regions in UK-wide debates. This looks to the Liberal Democrats like a plan designed in the Treasury both to save money, by shrinking local democratic institutions, and to convert elected mayors into agents of central government, spending funds that they hope to obtain by negotiations with the Treasury—the integrated settlements—without taking into account the importance of embedding democratic government in local and regional networks.
Chapter 4.1 of the White Paper begins:
“England is made up of thousands of communities—towns, cities and villages”.
It then proposes to squeeze those thousands of local communities into somewhere between 30 and 40 combined authorities, with fewer than 100 unitary authorities beneath them, each containing between 500,000 and 1 million people. That is not a unitary system; it is a new two-tier system in which strategic decisions will be taken by the upper mayoral tier—in effect, by one elected person. Local democracy rests on the relationship between voters in their communities and the councillors who represent them. It is the bedrock of democratic politics and of political parties, which draw their campaigners, their members and, often, their recruits into national politics from these local activities. But here is a proposal to cut further the number of elections and elected councillors and to remove them to a much greater distance from those they try to represent, with 15,000 voters or more in each ward.
England’s voters tell pollsters that they deeply mistrust Westminster politics and trust their local representatives more. This measure risks deepening public mistrust of democracy further and weakening political parties; it asks voters to identify with one elected mayor overseeing some millions of people and quite possibly elected on little over a quarter of the votes cast. I remind the Minister that, in July’s election, five parties won more than 10% of the national vote in England. First past the post risks producing some remarkably unrepresentative mayors elected on perhaps 27% or 28% of the vote.
We will need to strengthen the really local tier—the town and parish councils—to compensate for this shift of power upward. I could not find any discussion of parish and town councils in the White Paper. Did I miss some passing references? No other democratic state in Europe, North America or Australasia has such a thin framework of local and regional government. England will remain the most highly centralised state in the democratic world.
Chapter 4 declares:
“There is clearly an appetite for reorganisation in parts of England”.
We are given no evidence of such an appetite among the public. We have had multiple reorganisations in the past 50 years. Now we are going to have another one, which will cost additional money—as all reorganisations do—and disrupt services during the transition. Has the Treasury budgeted for the costs of transition? It then goes on to propose that there should be new rules on remote attendance and proxy voting for councillors at meetings. This is not surprising, given the size of some of our new councils. In the new North Yorkshire Council, it takes some councillors 90 minutes or more to drive to council meetings, so remote attendance and proxy voting are necessary. That is not local government or local democracy, however.
Lastly, in chapter 5 we are told:
“Established Mayoral Strategic Authorities will be held to account for the outcomes associated with their Integrated Settlement”
by “reporting to central government”. That is mayors acting as agents of central government, not responding to local and regional issues. The Government seem to want to rush through this reorganisation without waiting for local consultation or the agreement of other parties. This is not the best way to deliver a long-lasting constitutional settlement for England at a time when trust in our local democracy is lower than it has been for a very long time.