Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)

My Lords, democracy starts with local engagement. As the saying goes, all politics is local, and people start by worrying about their own local community. We talk about pride of place in government policy, but place is not usually the whole of Yorkshire, for example, or even the whole of North Yorkshire; place is your local community. What this Bill assumes is that a local area in governance terms is roughly half a million people, and a combined strategic authority should perhaps be somewhere between 1.5 million and 4 million people. There are nearly 50 independent states, members of the United Nations, with populations smaller than half a million. There are two European states, Malta and Iceland, with populations below that, and Luxembourg is not that much larger. When we get to the equivalent of combined authorities, we are talking about Denmark, Estonia and Latvia: states that seem not only quite capable but have extensive local government structures underneath them—and they work. I looked with interest at the closing ceremony of the winter Olympics the other week, at which the mayors of the various localities and the local region were all present. They have several layers of local government, which is the norm across the rest of Europe, and what this legislation is intended to reduce as far as possible. Local politics is essential to maintaining popular engagement with democracy, party politics and public life. People care about bins, allotments, public toilets, playgrounds: things that, ideally, are not left with strategic authorities and mayors, who would be roughly equivalent to the President of Finland—to whom I was listening the other day—in terms of the number of people they are responsible for. Let us be realistic about that and recognise that, unless we have active town and community councils at a lower level, with elected representatives who know those who voted for them and who are known by those who voted for them, we will lose an essential part of a liberal democracy to which my party—and, I hope, everyone else here—is committed.