David Simmonds

I am going to make a little progress, if I may. The key point is to ensure that our local authorities can set out their governance arrangements in a way that reflects the needs of their community. The Government have already accepted the argument that we need to ensure a degree of nuance in the Bill for rural and coastal communities, and this is another example of exactly that argument. On parish governance, I know we do not all have parish councils in our local areas, but they are a significant feature of civic life across the country and many of them run important local facilities such as leisure centres and car parks. It is clearly important to ensure that their role is enshrined, especially at a time when this Government’s wider agenda of local government reorganisation is leading to a significant transfer of services to parish councils from districts due to be abolished, so it is welcome that the Government are moving forward on that. On the final two groups of amendments we are debating this afternoon, the so-called agent of change principle is the idea that a new arrival in a community should bear the cost of consequent changes on its gaining planning consent: if somebody opens a new music venue or builds a new residential development, that should not be at the expense of existing and long-established uses. Many of us as constituency MPs have had experience of when, for example, a property developer creates a new residential development and seeks to close down an existing venue such as a local pub—I had an example to do with a bus garage—because they are concerned about the impact it would have. Clearly those established uses with prior consent need to have a degree of priority, and that has already found its way into law in Scotland. We believe that it is reasonable to recommend that the Government take this forward and ensure that those existing uses have sufficient protection in the Bill that they are not subject to the unfair impact of new and subsequent arrivals seeking to pass the costs of mitigating the consequences of their activity on to them. Finally, Lords amendment 98 is about the Secretary of State’s powers on changes to strategic authorities. It was hotly contested as the Bill made its way through Committee that it contains chapters and chapters of new powers for the Secretary of State to direct mayors or combined authorities, which very much speaks to the point that this is centralising legislation. While it introduces a new layer of local government, it none the less results in central Government having significantly more powers to levy a precept, to create a new housing development, to create zoning to ensure development takes place, and to bring together groups of local authorities and assume some of their responsibilities. All of those now fall much more strongly within the purview of the Secretary of State issuing directions from Whitehall about how things should happen locally. It remains the Opposition’s position that, as supporters of and believers in devolution, we should not simply pay lip service to it in the title of the Bill, but ensure that those measures have the consent and support of the locally elected politicians whose mandate gives them the power to make those decisions on behalf of their community. We remain determined to push ahead in favour of that principle of consent and ensure that local communities continue to have champions who speak up for them in this Chamber.