Lord Blunkett (Lab)

I am putting the proposition that Clause 59 and Schedule 27 should not stand part of the Bill. I was very grateful to my noble friend and her colleagues last September for the modest amendments they moved to what was then Clause 57 in the Commons —Amendments 152 and 153. They at least gave some credence to the Long Title of the Bill, which includes the words “community empowerment”. It is quite hard to believe those words when you are disempowering the people you are talking about. I am absolutely certain that there will be excellent high-quality expertise in the department and people who know a great deal about local government, as well as my noble friend. However, when I went into the Cabinet in 1997, I found that that no one above grade 7 in the Department for Education and Employment had ever had anything to do with education. Not one single person had taught in a school, college or university, or had been an administrator of education. We had to do something rapidly about that. If you do not know how local government works, it is not surprising that you get technocratic tidiness. There is nothing worse than bureaucratic tidiness, where people are told what to do when you talk to them about empowerment. I feel that this is a philosophical issue. I have always tried to be a communitarian. I often failed in education—we were in such a hurry to transform the life chances of children that we were very top-down. However, I have kept in touch with Robert Putnam at Harvard and I still believe that we should build our democratic structures from the bottom up. It is the only way in which we will counterweight globalisation—and, by the way, disillusionment and disgust with democracy. Once people feel that they have some small power, they start to learn how to use it—I realise that that is a dangerous thing. This afternoon, I propose that enforcing a particular model of democratic process—of course it must be democratic, open and transparent, and have probity and fiduciary duties—is completely contrary to the intention of the Bill and, I would have thought, that of my noble friend. So, I am putting my neck on the block this afternoon just to say: please stop it.