Localism Bill

Graham P Jones Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Stunell]

It is neither our intention nor what is provided for in the Bill.

[Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

May I extend that question? We are going to have neighbourhood forums in respect of neighbourhood development plans, and there is also an issue to do with community budgets and the Government asking for community groups to come together to spend local money—that was recently proposed by the Department for Communities and Local Government for deprived areas such as mine. Will such matters be the responsibility of the new standards arrangements? They will not fall under parish council responsibility; rather, they will be dealt with by the district council or the Government. How will they fit in with the standards arrangements?

[Andrew Stunell]

I think the hon. Gentleman might be confusing different processes. The Standards Board regime applied to councillors at parish, district and county level. We are sweeping away the Standards Board and making sure that local authorities put in place sound and sensible provision to safeguard the integrity of themselves and the members who serve on them.

To return to the question of my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler), district councils do not have to monitor parish councils. They do need to have in place arrangements to deal with allegations of misconduct by a parish councillor, but how they do that is up to them. We will expect district councils and parishes to work together to make arrangements as simple as possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

I want to return briefly to the local code of conduct and how it will work. We all know that the Standards Board is going—and I, for one, am not sorry to see it go, but I would like to see something put in its place. We must have some form of security. I think that the Minister failed to answer my question, so I will put it again and give him the opportunity to intervene if he wants to. This legislation establishes neighbourhood forum groups that will shape and influence planning policy. Residents will be drawn almost at random, or it will be the usual people who get involved in community activities who will come forward. Surely they must be accountable in some way, according to some form of standards. They cannot simply operate in a vacuum, in which things can simply happen and then there is no way to hold them accountable for their decisions.

Last week the Department for Communities and Local Government announced the Community First programme, offering £30 million of grants to 597 of the most deprived wards. Here the Government are asking for neighbourhood committees to be set up. In my constituency, Peel ward, one of the most deprived in the country, is to receive £17,000 in each of the next two years as part of the Community First programme. The residents were told last week that they will have to set up a committee to spend what is essentially public money, yet there is no accountability. The Minister is totally unclear about how local authorities will deal not only with elected members in local authorities, but with unelected members who will be involved in some of the decision making that will help to shape public policy.

[Andrew Stunell]

I wanted to hear the rest of the hon. Gentleman’s point in case I was missing something fundamental, but I was not. I hope that I can return to the point later. I can assure him that there is nothing in the Bill that changes the requirement for any body that receives public money to spend it in a lawful way, and with integrity. If it is a charity or community group, the Charity Commission and other regulatory bodies will kick in. He is erecting a substantial mountain out of a very small molehill.

[Graham Jones]

I thank the Minister for his intervention, but I think that his answer is more smoke and mirrors. I am asking where the judicial framework is, and his answer is that there is none, but there is a legal framework, within which we all operate. If that is the case, why do we have standards in public life? It is because that is a judicial element that governs and reflects the service that we all give—but we encounter problems when people make decisions that are not in the best public interest, but in their own personal or prejudicial interests.

[Robert Neill]

Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that every voluntary organisation that receives public funding should be subject to a standards regime? Surely he would accept that although neighbourhood forums, for example, propose the neighbourhood plan, there are other safeguards, in terms of the referendum, consistency with the local authority’s strategic plan and national policy, and a test of soundness, to deal with such matters. A standards regime would be grossly disproportionate in such cases.

[Graham Jones]

I am grateful to the Minister for trying to clarify that. Many of the organisations to which the Government give money have robust frameworks, but we are talking about a group of individuals who might, in the example of Peel ward, live on an ordinary street near me. They are not subject to the controls, charters, rules or regulations of any organisation. They are outside that, and not part of any judicial framework, so I do not think that he is right. I accept that there is a grey area between who we give money to and how far we should hold them to account in public life. None the less, when someone who lives two streets away from me and is not involved in any organisation can get involved in spending £17,000, might misspend it and cannot be held to account, there is definitely a void. I take the Minister’s point, but I am raising a concern that he has failed to answer.

[Robert Neill]

Surely the hon. Gentleman accepts that the local authority remains the accountable body, and the normal district audit and other regimes apply to it. I appreciate the sincerity of his point, but I earnestly urge him to think again, because he is missing the point, which is not as grave as he might think.

[Graham Jones]

I appreciate that, but, having a lot of experience in local government, I think that the Minister is missing the point: there is no judicial framework, so somebody can go out and do something, and if there is a complaint by another member of the public about those actions there is nowhere for it to go, so the complaints that we get now could continue. If that is going to happen in planning policy, we will have some problems, so we need a substantive framework and an opportunity for people to bring into public debate the decisions that the individuals on those bodies make.

Further to that point, I am concerned that there is no robust framework for standards, and again I bring local government experience to that point. A lot of vexatious complaints are politically motivated—[Hon. Members: “Yes!”] I hear the cheers from Government Members; I do not know where such complaints are coming from, but they certainly did not come from the Labour side in my local authority. Regardless of that, those who have worked in local authorities know that many complaints are politically motivated, and they need to be removed. That is a serious and substantive point, and simply having a non-elected chair but an elected committee is not acceptable. When we look around local government, we find that even that has failed. There needs to be an unelected, unaccountable—sorry, accountable—[Interruption.] I hope the record is corrected. There needs to be an accountable but non-elected body, because that, more than anything, will stop a lot of vexatious complaints. The Government would be doing themselves a favour if they introduced such a framework into local government.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I shall comment on a couple of amendments, but, starting with amendment 15 and following the remarks of the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) on the Standards Board, I was a councillor for six years, from 2004 to 2010, and once during that time I was taken to the Standards Board but found not really to have done anything wrong. The local authority dealt with the matter internally, but the person who brought it did not like the decision and tried to take it to appeal, and that is the point: it was about a planning issue.

Councillors stood in the ward I represented in Leeds on manifestos saying that they would protect certain characteristics of villages, and, when a planning application was made that totally undermined that, they wrote a letter of objection. The person who made the planning application took them to the Standards Board, saying that they were making a prejudicial complaint. That person used the board as a bullying tactic against councillors, and it happened time and again.

Nobody in this Chamber would say that people should not expect anything except the highest standards from those in public office. Everybody across the Chamber agrees with that, but the provisions brought in by the Standards Board were taken up by members of the public. Those people wanted to force the issue with a councillor, and they did not just make their life a misery; they cost them, personally and financially, a fortune.

[Graham Jones]

I was a victim of a vexatious complaint, on a very minor technicality, to the Standards Board. It was politically motivated, and, although I will not say which party chased it, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that such things are very annoying.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who makes my point. The complaint against him was politically motivated, whereas the one against me was made by somebody who was trying to get a particular decision on a planning issue and, effectively, trying to bully councillors not to get involved. There were several such cases, and whether someone has such politically motivated Standards Board cases, or whether the case comes from a slightly different angle, depends on which part of an authority they represent and the biggest issues there.

I do not want to get into which party takes the most people to the Standards Board, but I feel that the Labour party has been slightly unfair on our coalition colleagues. In the city of Leeds, Labour councillors formed a queue around the block to take others to the Standards Board. Indeed, one Labour councillor in Leeds, whom I am to going to name in the Chamber, took many people to the board over things that he considered to be a problem when Labour was in opposition, but now his party is in power and he is still not getting the information he wants, he is still pursuing the complaints. Even his own leadership say that they cannot keep control of him.

Do not get me wrong: the mindset behind establishing the Standards Board was correct. Credit should go to the previous Government for setting it up to demand the highest standards, but in reality and in practice that is not how it has worked, and it has become a useless tool that stops people writing in a manifesto what policies they would like to pursue. The board has been twisted and manipulated.

The former Mayor of London was taken to the Standards Board over a comment he made, and luckily he received the ruling that it had been made in his personal and private life, but what ruling was given to us councillors? It stated, “If someone comes up to you in the pub, you must say, ‘I am sorry, I am not a councillor.’” Come on, let us get real. Either we engage with our public, talk to people and understand things, or we become part of a robotic system in which the public are further distanced from us.

I guess that the vast majority of Members engage locally with their constituents, going down the pub, talking to people in the high street, getting information from what people feel is happening on the street and talking to them about it. Local councillors cannot do that any more, because unless they declare at the outset, “I am not discussing this with you, come to my surgery at this time,” they run a risk, and that represents a big disconnect from and disservice to the public. That was an unintended consequence of the Livingstone case, but whether we agree with his comments or not, that is not the issue, because they occurred in his private life, and the case should never have gone to the Standards Board.

We do have protection of the public: it is called the ballot box. That was always my argument as a councillor when it was said that someone was going to the Standards Board. There is a ballot box, whereby people can be voted in or out, and if someone were seen to be wholly corrupt it would not matter whether they were in the safest seat in the country, they would be voted out.

[Graham Jones]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I will give way. I think I know what is coming.

[Graham Jones]

I agree with the thrust of what the hon. Gentleman says, and I do not want to be controversial, but let us take the Community First programme in my constituency’s Peel ward, where residents are going to spend public money, or the neighbourhood forums. They are not elected. Where is the ballot box for those people?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

But there is something called the Serious Fraud Office—the fraud squad—and there is a law of the land, so we do not need to pursue such things through the Standards Board. If people misappropriate public funds, they can be reported to the police and there can be an investigation. Sometimes we double up on legislation to try to say to the public, “Look what we’re doing,” but in reality they have ended up with less influence and power, because things have become bound up in an operation that has not helped at all.

[Graham Jones]

If my community group decides that it is going to spend money on a project for which it has ownership, or on a project down the road for which there is no ownership within the Community First programme, and it then decides to skew the funding to what suits its needs, not somebody else’s, how does that fit in? That is not illegal, that is not fraud, but it is against accepted standards in public life.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I invite the hon. Gentleman to intervene again on me. Who is awarding the grants to those people to spend that money?

[Graham Jones]

The Government are.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Yes, but the money comes from the council, and that is the point: it comes from the local authority to start with.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Jones]

It actually comes directly from the Department for Communities and Local Government.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Through local communities and local government, projects are being identified—[Interruption.] I give way to the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

I shall address my remarks to the amendments relating to referendums—Lords amendment 112 and the excellent counter-amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith)—and to the Minister’s remarks about council tax referendums.

It occurs to me to wonder how our counterparts in the United States Congress or the German Bundestag might look at our debate. It is about the Localism Bill, yet we seek to prescribe almost every last detail of how and when a locality might consult its people on an issue—whether that consultation should be binding or non-binding, how far it extends, and what exactly should be the trigger of signatures or the turn-out required. An alternative way of doing this, even if there were certain minimums, would be to allow localities themselves to experiment on what works best for them and to consult their residents as they wish.

I agree with the Government that the Bill introduces an improvement—at least a small one—in relation to a council tax referendum, in that when a local council comes up with a proposal for a level of council tax, it is somewhat better that central Government might require a referendum on that level rather than merely disagreeing with it and putting in place one that central Government happen to prefer. The local authority is the single body that is setting the council tax, then central Government come in with a successiveness tax test, and then there has to be a referendum.

I am concerned about how the Bill interacts with the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011. The way in which the police precept is set has some very special aspects relative to other local government precepts. The first of these is that the police precept is a pretty small proportion of the overall council tax, so setting a percentage increase above which it is required to have a local referendum acts as a far greater disincentive to placing a precept above that than it does for local government, because the proportionate cost of having a referendum for the police precept is far higher—perhaps up to 2% of the police budget. That makes it extraordinarily difficult for a police body to attempt to go beyond what central Government have set as that trigger.

Overall, I am concerned that setting these referendum requirements undermines the incentive to vote for local politicians who want to stand on a lower-tax basis. If central Government are in any case providing an automatic safeguard so that even if there is an enormously left-wing council that wants to push up the council tax by a huge amount, that reduces the incentive to vote for politicians who believe in lower taxes.

[Graham Jones]

I remind the hon. Gentleman that my left-wing Labour council is setting a 0% council tax level for the forthcoming year.

[Mark Reckless]

The hon. Gentleman’s Labour council, like every other council in the country, has set a 0% council tax level because this Government, who believe in localism, have come in with an offer they cannot refuse.

I was a councillor for four years, and I am afraid that such measures do not just reduce the incentive to vote for parties of the centre right: it sometimes leads to good Conservatives taking offsetting measures to give themselves greater scope for freedom from central Government. My own council of Medway had virtually the lowest unitary tax in the country outside the Scilly Isles, yet when we attempted to put in a tax increase that was very slightly above the standard percentage cap that was set, we were not designated but put under the process whereby action would be taken against us the following year if we did not pull our socks up. In fact, our increase was far lower, in absolute terms, than increases of similarly sized councils elsewhere.

The problem is the fear of being capped—of not knowing what the level will be next year—and possibly even the fear of being forced to have very expensive referendums with very embarrassing results for the local politicians, particularly if they do not succeed, and for which their locality has to pay for in any event. That may lead some councils, even good Conservative ones, to put up council tax by more than they otherwise would in a particular year so that they have a higher base and there is less concern that they might get capped in a future year in needing to put through a substantive increase.