Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority Order 2017

Lord Tebbit Excerpts

Thursday 2nd March 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has encouraged me to say a brief word about Huntingdon. The Minister will not know that I spent my early years in Huntingdon, a very important historic town which has always been subsumed within other authorities, especially Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. In view of what the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has just said, I would just ask the Minister how far the consultation extended to Huntingdon. Is there a record of what the population said and whether it was in favour of this combined authority? To me, it is just another case of some of our traditions being overwhelmed by the convention of creating these combined authorities.

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Lansley characteristically spoke a lot of good sense about the reorganisation of local government in East Anglia but also exposed some of the difficulties there. For example, I share his concern that there should be, going forward now, four tiers of local government. It seems just a little too many. I just wanted to make plain, as a resident of Bury St Edmunds, our determination not to be caught up in this aggrandisement of East Anglian government. We are pretty content with the way we run things locally ourselves and would really like to be left alone to do things in our own way. We have a very effective council with some very effective ways of getting the savings that can come from collaboration without going through the nonsense, if I may use the word, of legislation to combine authorities.

There is no reason why they should not work from the same headquarters or have the same chief officer in more than one authority. There is no reason why you should not be able to go, as I can in Bury St Edmunds, to your local government headquarters and immediately be put in touch with the official who is responsible for the matter that concerns you and sit down together and sort things out. It also enables them to have, in that headquarters building, people responsible for different parts of the authority’s functions: for example education and services for younger people. Those officials have developed the habit of meeting together in the canteen there, and discussing matters and understanding them fully. Sometimes, informal good governance is rather more effective than finding ourselves with four tiers of government through statute.

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise for coming in slightly late, as the lifts were running slowly. I was inspired to speak because although I seldom agree with the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, I very much do on this occasion, for which I am sure there is rejoicing around the House. I wanted to challenge, or comment on, the position of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. I speak as a resident of the city of Norwich, of whose council I was formerly leader, and as someone with strong relationships within that city. I was therefore involved in the discussions—at one remove, obviously and properly—on the inclusion of Norfolk and Suffolk in a greater East Anglia authority. The problem for us, which I regard as a very unfortunate legacy of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, is the imposition of the requirement of an elected mayor to be concomitant with a combined authority.

In Norfolk, there were several, rural Conservative authorities—and I am sure it may also be true for many in Suffolk—which were very happy to have a combined authority with an elected mayor who would be Conservative, for ever and a day, representing, to some degree, lower-rate and lower-services authorities. That is their choice. That is not the same for urban authorities such as Norwich, which are effectively regional capitals with the revenues of a rural district council, which have always provided services from leisure to employment—half the jobs in Norfolk are in Norwich—for the whole of the county. We would worry about having an elected mayor over one county, or two counties, of a permanently different, rural complexion—being Conservative would worry me less—running the cities. Those medium-sized cities are the core of economic growth in this country, now and to come.

Secondly, we have a strong sense of place; I believe that some of the alienation that we have seen in politics is because we are losing that sense of identification with place, which the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, referred to. Norwich was for 800 years a unitary authority and then, at the stroke of a pen in 1974, that was abolished, with no respect for place, history or local opinion. Many of us are still fighting to get a more sensible, coherent, democratic, accountable and effective local government system. I have a plea to the Minister, following what the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, said. Yes, we are working well in LEPs, which shows that authorities of different persuasions can work together, but we do not want an elected mayor whereby one person, presumably male, will be able to override the views of perhaps 300 elected councillors, at whatever tier of government, who are in touch with their communities in a way that one person cannot be. One person speaking for two counties—which are some 120 miles long—would be absurd and inappropriate.

What we need in Norfolk—it may be true for Suffolk; I cannot speak for Suffolk—is transport connectivity. It is something that the rural authorities want and something that Norwich, King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth also want: to build decent economic infrastructure. We cannot get that if an elected mayor does not necessarily share those ambitions, because they come from a very different local heritage. I respect the rights of those rural district councils to have a different perspective on what they and their communities want from local government. What I fear is that, by insisting on an elected mayor over a county, or even two counties, as the price of a devolution package including transport connectivity, we will not get the focus on economic productivity and growth that, bluntly, only the cities—whether Southampton, Portsmouth, Norwich, Plymouth, Exeter or whatever—can provide.

That is why I beg the Government to disassociate combined authorities from the imposition of the Heseltine elected mayor. We do not want grand leadership; we want collaboration and working together in consensus. That is the best done—in the very words of the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit—by local authorities, councillors and staff working together in a collaborative way. The way that the Government are going is not healthy for local government, for a sense of local place or, ultimately, for democratic politics, which should grow from the bottom up. That bottom-up approach is now being undermined by back-door reorganisation in ways that do not fit the needs, views and wishes of local communities.