Local Government Standards Regime

John Glen Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Robert Neill]

What we can do to help my hon. Friend in that regard is to promulgate the good practice and what is perfectly permissible. I know from my time as a member of a planning committee that it was perfectly standard practice in many authorities, and it should be perfectly open anywhere, for site visits to take place. It is probably best that members of the committee and the officers go together. That is what is usually and sensibly done, so that they all go in a group, and because the officer is present, there can be no suggestion of improper contact between the members of the committee and—let us say—the applicant or an objector. That can be sensibly done; many authorities do it; and those authorities that do not do it, and think that it cannot be done, should be told that it can and should be done.

Frankly, most of us would hope that with the new approach to empowering members, officers would look for ways to say, “Yes, we will enable a site visit to take place if members wish it, with the proper safeguards in place to make sure that there can be no accusation of impropriety.” It happens in many places, but the fact that it is not generally known that it happens is perhaps a real concern, as my hon. Friend suggests. Perhaps it is something that the Government need to think about doing, perhaps working with the Local Government Association and the local government community in general to ensure that that sensible good practice is rolled out.

It is interesting that my hon. Friend raises the issue of planning, because it comes back to the point about members being told not to meet developers. One of the few things on which I agreed with the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone—there was not much on which we agreed, as hon. Members will know—was that he had a very sensible and proportionate approach to dealing with planning applications that came before him. By their very nature, they were very often strategic applications, potentially involving large sums of money and important social impacts.

When he was Mayor, Ken Livingstone met applicants under those circumstances, he did so with an officer present and everything was properly minuted. Although I have accused the former Mayor of various things over the years, nobody would ever have questioned the total integrity with which that process took place, and indeed it continues under his successor, Mayor Johnson. It was a sensible and proportionate thing to do; Mayor Livingstone was right to do it and Mayor Johnson has been right to continue doing it. However, if they had listened to the sort of advice that my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset referred to earlier—the advice given to his colleagues, or that we have seen in some of the documents that I have referred to—they would not have done it and those meetings would not have taken place.

Actually, very often the involvement of members in planning applications can be constructive, provided that it is done with total probity. There are plenty of examples of how the engagement of the ward members has enabled a scheme to be refined or adjusted in such a way that what was potentially unpalatable to a community can be made palatable, and actually the application can be improved by the involvement of the local members. Consequently, such involvement is not only something that should not be obstructed but something that ought to be positively encouraged as a matter of good practice. So I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point about planning.

The other issue that seems to have arisen recently, and that I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to deal with when he responds to the debate, relates to pecuniary interests. I was rather surprised to see advice that is being given to a number of councillors, that they should be regarded as having pecuniary interests in effect because they are council tax payers. Again, that advice is all set out in legal documents, which I could happily quote, but if that advice is not nonsense then I do not know what is. Once more, I must say with a sense of frustration that that sort of advice or idea is exactly what I spent two and a bit years of my life as a Minister trying to get rid of, and I feel that perhaps I have failed and that perhaps it is my fault, because I did not make that message clear enough. I hope that that is not the case, but what I have described today is happening in a number of local authorities. In addition, I regret to say that when I looked at some of the e-mails that I have received on this subject, I see that such practice seems to be based on a view taken collectively by a number of monitoring officers.

Like most professions, monitoring officers are not without their collective bodies. They are worthy people; I met some of them on a number of occasions when I was a Minister. However, that does not mean that they always get these ideas right, and the idea that simply because someone pays council tax they should be regarded as having a pecuniary interest is another idea that I hope the Minister will make clear today was never the intention of Parliament. Hopefully, this debate will give us an opportunity to send out a message—to officers that such advice is wrong, and to members that they should not feel constrained by such advice. The idea that someone would have to get a dispensation for every member of a council in effect, so that they could vote on the council tax in their area, is a nonsensical interpretation.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

Reluctantly, I have to point out the situation in Wiltshire. A local Labour councillor contacted me saying they had received an e-mail from the ethical governance officer. It said that the current legislation referred to councillors having

“a disclosable pecuniary interest in any matter to be considered”.

The reference to “any matter” was essentially used to justify people not voting on anything, which is utterly absurd. When I responded to the councillor, I said that common sense was required, and I do not think that my advice and input were welcome. However, it is ludicrous that the legislation has been interpreted in such an unhelpful way.

[Robert Neill]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a sad irony that Wiltshire, having got the structure right and achieved a sensible, light-touch, proportionate structure, seems none the less to have been giving out advice on a specific point that is clearly wide of the mark. That issue needs to be raised with monitoring officers generally.