Douglas Carswell
Main Page: Douglas Carswell (Independent - Clacton)(13 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Simon Hughes
Tempting, but completely irrelevant to the Bill. I will talk to the right hon. Gentleman about that on another occasion.
The Bill has six substantive parts and one additional part which is about EU fines, a slightly esoteric subject about which I know there is controversy. I shall deal briefly with what seem to me to be the good things and make the occasional plea for the Government to go further.
On local government, the power of general competence is welcome, but I hope the siren voices suggesting that there should be frequent exceptions are resisted. We need to make sure, as I have heard the Secretary of State say, that we give councils the power to act except when the law says they cannot. That is what the measure should be about. Getting rid of the Standards Board is popular and right. Introducing a better system for making public how senior pay is decided will raise confidence among local communities. The right of councils to choose their own committee structure is welcome: many councils will want to go back to a committee system to involve their back benchers more. Making sure that councillors play a full part is especially welcome.
One thing about which we on the Liberal Democrat Benches have some concern is the shadow elected mayor proposal. I know what the coalition agreement says and I know that the coalition is committed to holding a referendum in the 12 largest cities outside London. I am not dissenting from that, but we ought to allow those cities to have that debate and then, if they vote for directly elected mayors, so be it. There are arguments on both sides.
On local government finance, the Government are starting down the right road. I welcome the fact that there is to be a much greater power of discretionary relief for businesses, and a new power for small businesses. Those are important matters. The big change has not yet happened and is far too controversial to be hidden away in such a Bill, but eventually I hope we will come to a much better form of local government finance generally. The Secretary of State knows that my colleagues and I believe that something like local income tax and, for land, something like site value rating, will be a much fairer system. I realise that that is too much to bite off and chew in the first Bill, but progress is being made in the right direction.
Mr Carswell
I do not wish to intrude on that celebration of the Bill’s sound localist credentials, but might the Bill be more effective—and offer more real localism, rather than lip service to it—if it offered to devolve control over revenue, something that has been Lib Dem policy for many years? Does my right hon. Friend not agree that the Bill should disperse power over local government finance to the same extent that it does the power over planning?
Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)
I start by drawing attention to my interests as declared in the register.
I endorse the view expressed by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) about the importance of localism being matched by provisions that ensure that overarching, overriding national priorities are met. He made that comment in the context of housing, but it applies even more widely. That should be the basis of localism, to which almost all of us subscribe as a concept, but it must not lead to national responsibility for crucial services and to people’s needs being ignored.
The first question that the Government should be asking is why the Bill, which ought to command widespread support because the principle of localism is widely supported, has generated such a tide of concern and suspicion. Having read through the large number of submissions that I and, no doubt, other Members have received in advance of today’s debate, I found the absence of any papers giving unqualified support to the provisions very telling. The tone was very much “Yes, but”, and that applied to a striking number of them. The more one dug down into them, the more one realised just how serious and extensive were the buts—the concerns and objections that were raised.
How have the Government got themselves into this position? They have done so partly through their own actions, as we highlighted earlier in Question Time and in other contexts. The Secretary of State and his Ministers might like to proclaim the virtues of localism, but they find it very hard to remain virtuous and they wade into any debate when they see the opportunity. Like St Augustine, the Secretary of State says “Let me be localist, but not yet” when a local authority makes provision for refuse collection that he does not agree with, pays its officers more than he believes they should be paid, makes arrangements for parking charges that he does not agree with, or issues a newsletter—or fails to do so. The Housing Minister became involved in Liverpool city council’s decision to demolish a terraced house once briefly occupied by Ringo Starr. All those decisions are clearly about local issues and should be taken locally, and Ministers should have a self-denying ordinance to keep quiet about them. If they did, they would be taken more seriously as advocates of localism.
Mr Carswell
Does the right hon. Gentleman draw a distinction between someone expressing an opinion on what an outcome should be and micro-managing through statutory instruments what it should be?
Mr Raynsford
As the hon. Gentleman will realise if he reflects on this, there is a continuum that makes it difficult to identify where one stops expressing an opinion and where one tries to produce the outcome that one is advocating. Front Benchers should remember that they have responsibilities and that their comments are often interpreted as a wish to see an outcome.
The drafting of the Bill is very unhelpful to the Ministers’ cause of trying to win support for it. I challenge anyone, even the most experienced parliamentarian, to have an easy evening’s read if they try to wade through its countless clauses and schedules. Its drafting—overwhelmingly by way of amendment to other legislation, and with the absence of detailed provision in many of its clauses, which, we are told, will be supplemented by regulations—makes it difficult to have a full feel for what exactly the Government intend. We understand their aspiration, but what will be the detailed implications? That is far from clear, and inevitably lots of suspicions abound that while their intentions may be good the outcomes will not be.
Whether we are talking about how neighbourhood plans will be shaped or how the new insecure tenancies that the Government are imposing on social housing will operate, we do not know the full implications because no provisions have been published or, in the latter case, because the consultation concluded only today, so of course we do not know what the details will be. That suggests a Bill put together in a hurry, without adequate consultation or proper consideration of some of its provisions. If ever a measure cried out for pre-legislative scrutiny, this is it. It is a tragedy that it is being rushed through without proper consideration of its detailed implications and of how the Government’s good localist intentions—I give them that—will work in practice.
The lack of certainty over the Government’s plans and over the effect of the Bill is obvious throughout. On the theme of localism itself, the Government have put an emphasis on neighbourhoods. That might imply a commitment to neighbourhood decision making, or to devolution to a local authority or, in London, to the Mayor, but what happens if those bodies come into conflict? What happens if the Mayor pursues an objective with which the borough council or the local neighbourhood does not agree? There is the added problem that in areas without parish councils the neighbourhood forum that may come into existence under the Bill will not have a recognised form of democratic accountability. Who will prevail when there is a conflict between the various bodies?
Clauses 168 and 169 will allow the Mayor of London to designate any area in London as a mayoral development corporation, which will take over the local authority’s planning powers. Let us imagine that the Mayor of London changes—an election will be held next year. What if the new Mayor is not from the party of the Government? He might look at house building performance in Bromley, for example, and decide that not enough homes are being built there. He might say, “I see some interesting powers in the legislation and I propose to set up a mayoral development corporation in Bromley to get more homes built there.” Under the provisions of the Bill, with which Ministers will be familiar, the Mayor has to consult on his proposals, but he does not have to act on the views of the consultees if he does not agree with them. In the consultation, he would no doubt hear screams of protest from Bromley council and the residents, but he would also hear many people in London saying that they want more homes and that he should do his utmost to build them. What would happen if the Mayor presented a request to the Government to bring in an order to give effect to a mayoral development corporation in Bromley? As I read the Bill—I challenge Ministers to tell me if I am wrong—the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), would face the delightful proposition of enacting the order, because the Bill says that the Secretary of State must act on any such request from the Mayor, even if the local council and the local neighbourhood do not like it.
That brings us back to the tension between competing views of localism, on which, I am afraid, the Bill is entirely silent. If I were a Minister, I would not want to be tied to introducing something on the say so of a mayor who might have very different objectives from those of the Government.
Some provisions in the Bill, such as that one, are slightly bonkers, but others are seriously damaging. The housing and planning provisions will destabilise the planning and housing process at a time when, above all, we need confidence and certainty to get the new homes that we need. The housing market was badly hit by the recession and recovered strongly in early 2010, but the Government’s maladroit and unlawful interference in the planning system has undermined that confidence. The market is now tottering along on the bottom, there is no confidence, and millions of people know that the prospects of getting a decent home at a price within their means are terribly short. The Bill’s ill-considered and untested changes to the planning regime will make an already bad situation worse.
The unwanted changes to social tenancies and the weakening of protection for homeless people are misconceived and should be opposed. Before the election, the Conservative party pretended that it had no plan to introduce those measures, and the Liberal Democrats would have denounced the idea of introducing them as part of a coalition.