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Second reading debate of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill

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Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con): I am looking at clauses 3 and 4. Could the Secretary of State explain what business it is of a local authority to “promote” matters to do with the criminal justice system? In clause 3, for example, she requires local authorities to promote independent monitoring boards to do with prisons, courts boards and youth offending teams. Clause 4 states:

“A principal local authority has a duty to promote understanding among local people of...the functions of a lay justice”.

Surely the separation of powers that her Government seem so keen on would contradict what she has put into these provisions.

Hazel Blears: I am surprised that the hon. and learned Gentleman does not recognise that the implications of the criminal justice system have a real impact on local communities. These bodies are not separate entities. To follow through his point, he is saying that the local authority should have nothing to do with the police system or the health system. People live in communities, and all these bodies have an impact on their quality of life. It is very important that local authorities should seek to help to recruit people to become magistrates and school governors—to take on all those civic roles in life. If he feels that these things are entirely separate, independent and not interrelated, he is not living in the kind of community that most of us live in….

Following up the points made by the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), the Bill is just one element of a wider Government drive to try to ensure that local people have every opportunity to get involved in local decision making, not merely within their local authorities.

Mr. Garnier: We are in danger of having a fairly sterile argument, because the Secretary of State clearly does not understand the point that I made to her. If she thinks that it should be the duty of a local authority

“to promote understanding among local people of...the functions of a lay justice”,

why should it not promote understanding among local people of the functions of the Church of England or, in her particular area, the Methodist Church? Why does
she not draw a distinction between what is a proper function of a local authority and all the things that she refers to in the Bill?

Hazel Blears: People who commit offences or get involved with the criminal justice system live in places and communities, they interact with families, and they have an impact on neighbourhoods. That is why it is important to try, for example, to encourage people to get involved in youth referral panels, and it is entirely proper for the local authority to encourage that to happen. Far from my not understanding the hon. and learned Gentleman’s point, I would say he does not understand how modern communities work in this day and age the length and breadth of this country….

Andrew Mackinlay: My right hon. Friend will regret giving way. If she looks at the O fficial R eport tomorrow, she will see that all this about economic prosperity boards tying up with some other bodies is gobbledegook.
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Most people have had enough of all this. Why can we not cut away this plethora of bodies and focus on democratically elected local authorities? That is why I say to her that this is complete nonsense and that we have had enough; we want to get rid of this plethora of quangos and joint bodies, and all this linking up and partnerships—all these buzzwords. I say take it back.

Hazel Blears: I do not regret giving way, because it always good to have a healthy debate. All I would say to my hon. Friend is that I do not know how much discussion he has with the various bodies in his local community, but the people who run the health service, the police service and the council in my community feel that there is great benefit to be had from working in partnership, from pooling their budgets and from having more joined-up services, and that that provides a better service to local people.

Mr. Garnier rose—

Hazel Blears: No, I am not going to give way.

Mr. Garnier: I am not going to ask the same question as the hon. Gentleman.

Madam Deputy Speaker (Sylvia Heal): Order. The hon. and learned Gentleman knows that whether or not to give way is entirely up to the Minister.

Hazel Blears: Now, I was —[Interruption.] There is lots of democracy in this Chamber; I have been speaking for quite a long time.

I was just making the point about transport, because it is important. Transport sometimes sits separately from other issues associated with economic development, and if our funding streams and capital allocations are not aligned with the decisions that we need to take to encourage economic development, we do not get the most out of the resource that is available to us. So, again, the approach we are taking is a positive way forward.

Mr. Garnier: This is not a humorous matter, although there have been some humorous moments this evening. Before we move on to the final parts 8 and 9 of the Bill, which deal with construction contracts, could the Secretary of State give us a running total of the number of additional bodies, quangos, boards—

Andrew Mackinlay: Partnerships.

Mr. Garnier: And partnerships. How many such bodies will this Bill create? How many such bodies will it replace—or will it add to others that currently exist? What is the total public expenditure cost of the Bill?

Hazel Blears: I have no doubt that the hon. and learned Gentleman will be pursuing that question on a regular basis while the Bill is being discussed on the Floor of the House and while it goes through Committee. I tried to make the point as kindly as I could earlier, but if he thinks that the world is still made up of a series of entirely separate, isolated and dislocated public services, he is not in touch with the communities out there. For a 1 Jun 2009 : Column 36 young offender who has difficulties in his home life, finds it hard to access training and cannot get an apprenticeship or a job, we need a series of local public services to come together in order to be able to provide the response for that young person in an integrated way—that is the way of the world these days. Hon. Members might wish to go back to the mythical halcyon days when everything was done separately in silos, but they are looking back through rose-tinted glasses. That is not the world of today, and the hon. and learned Gentleman is out of touch with reality— [ Interruption. ] I have answered him. He may not like my answer, but I have answered him….

Mr. Garnier: Column 82 intervening on Keith Hill (Lab) The right hon. Gentleman might think that this is a rather impertinent intervention. He has said that, as a Minister, he at least thought about the legislation that was being enacted. One problem that concerns me about this Bill and so many others is that Ministers bring them to the House apparently without having thought about their contents or their implications. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on thinking about the Bill with which he was concerned. He might well have changed his mind since; that does not matter—at least he applied his mind to it.

Keith Hill: I hear the hon. and learned Gentleman, but I would not for a moment accuse my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench of presenting this Bill without having given it the most serious thought and consideration. I am sure that that applies to all the Ministers we have seen here today, including the Secretary of State, and not least to the Minister for Local Government, who will respond to the debate and on whom I am determined to offer the greatest possible blandishments in the course of my remarks…

Mr. Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con): I sympathise hugely with what the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) has said. I was much amused, but
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equally horrified, by the journey made by the inspectors from Bristol as they travelled around, ostensibly inspecting where the visitation of development should be placed in his neck of the woods. I sympathise with him not simply because he and I have race courses in our constituencies, but because he described the utter absurdity of this Government’s activities in that area of public policy. That absurdity is highlighted and reinforced by the title of the Bill. Others have mentioned it, but it is worth repeating. It is the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. Let us forget for the purposes of my remarks the aspect of the Bill to do with construction and concentrate on whether it will produce or encourage local democracy or have any effect on economic development.

The provisions in the Bill to set up economic prosperity boards remind me of some sort of Soviet plan or communist China—the direct command economy systems that we thought had died out in the 1980s before the collapse of the iron curtain. But no, this absurd Government, in the final days of their death throes, are coming up with the language of the communist era and the idiotic hope that by passing laws that mean nothing, they will achieve something.

It was notable that the Secretary of State could not be bothered to tell me, when I intervened, how many artificial quangos, boards and other forms of public authority she was creating, or how many they would replace. I suspect that they will not replace any, and that there will be a doubling or trebling of the number of absurd bodies created by this absurd Government in their dying days.

I remind the House that this Government are past masters at the misuse of language. Here we have the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. I remember in 1998, as the shadow Minister for what was then the Lord Chancellor’s Department, having to face up to the current Secretary of State for Transport, who in those days was a Minister in that Department. He was introducing to Parliament something called the Access to Justice Bill. If any piece of legislation did more to deny access to justice, I have yet to see it.

Since then, an avalanche of Bills have been passed by Parliament, at the behest of this Government, with names that wholly misdescribe the purpose and intent behind their contents. They have all been the size of a telephone book, and the current Bill is no exception. They have all had many pages, schedules and clauses. Looking at the back of them, one finds that they all repealed huge chunks of legislation passed in the recent past by this Government. I find it difficult to admire a Government who continually behave as though passing Bills were the answer to all our problems and do not concentrate on the issues that need to be dealt with.

The fatuous nature of the Bill is highlighted in its early stages, as I pointed out to the Secretary of State. Clause 1, “Democratic arrangements of principal local authorities”, states:

“A principal local authority has a duty to promote understanding of the following among local people...the functions of the authority...the democratic arrangements of the authority”

and

“how members of the public can take part in those democratic arrangements and what is involved in taking part.”

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Those are perfectly laudable aims, but it strikes me that they are not the priority ambition of a local authority. Sensibly, and at an economic public outlay, its priority ambition is to deliver public services at a local level.

We do not need an Act of Parliament to tell a local authority how to give a civics lesson, yet the early part of the Bill is designed to do precisely that. When I intervened on the Secretary of State to ask her why it is thought appropriate for a principal local authority to have a duty to promote understanding of the functions of other bodies, which are not local authorities—I cited independent monitoring boards established under the Prison Act 1952, courts boards and youth offending teams—the answer was a stream of new Labour garbage.

That was followed by an inability to explain clause 4, which states:

“A principal local authority has a duty to promote understanding among local people of... the functions of a lay justice”—

a justice of the peace or a magistrate. There are plenty of people beyond a local authority who can sensibly tell the people in that local authority area what a lay justice does,

“how a member of the public can become a lay justice”

and

“what is involved in being a lay justice.”

That is not a function of a local authority. Yes, individuals, citizens and residents in a local authority area, some of whom may be local authority members, can have an interest in what a magistrate does and what is involved in being a lay justice, but surely it is not a function of a local authority, whether a district or a county council, to promulgate the sort of thing in clauses 3 and 4.

Let me use some local examples to deal with the revisions of regional strategy and other matters in part 5. As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Peter Luff) has said, the local citizen, resident and elector is most closely touched and affected by a local authority’s work through planning matters. I assure the Minister for Local Government and his colleagues that my constituents in Harborough are far more concerned about planning matters than discovering from Harborough district council or Leicestershire county council what a lay magistrate does. I also assure the Minister that, if he came to my constituency, he would be left in no doubt about my constituents’ views of several things and what the Government could do with them.

The biggest local planning problem that currently faces my constituency is a plan dreamed up by the Co-operative Wholesale Society, which, by an extraordinary coincidence, comes from Greater Manchester, like the Secretary of State—I put that to one side. It owns 5,000 acres of reasonable, albeit not prime, agricultural land, which it has farmed since just after the first world war. In the past 18 years, since I became a Member of Parliament for the constituency, it has attempted three times to build on it. I understand why it wants to do that, because, at the moment, one gets more money from building houses than from farming. However, if people are to behave as good neighbours, they should take account of their neighbours’ concerns when they decide to build additional housing.

We are considering not an eco-village of 2,000 or 3,000 people, but a massive new town of 40,000 people—twice the size of Market Harborough. That great town will be plonked—parachuted into the middle of rural
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Leicestershire—between Market Harborough, to its south, and Leicester, immediately to its north-west. The Co-operative Wholesale Society doubtless reckons that, given its close relations with the Labour party and the use of the word “eco” stuck in front of “town”, it has a swimming chance of getting the town of 40,000 people up and running.

If we are to have local democracy, economic development and sensible construction, the Bill will not appease my constituents if the eco-town plan goes through. We have agreement in Harborough district and with Labour Members who represent the city of Leicester—I am delighted to see the hon. Member for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby) in his place—and the affected Conservative Members, who are me and my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan). This is not all that unusual, but we even have agreement from Liberal Democrat district and county councillors. We also have agreement from the best run county council in the country, Leicestershire, which is run by Mr. David Parsons—I hope that he is returned with a thumping great majority on Thursday, along with an increased number of Conservative councillors. We also have agreement with the citizenry—the voters, the electorate—of those parts of Leicestershire that will be most directly affected by this appalling scheme.

But what has happened? The Government pay absolutely no attention to cross-party or individual objections, nor does the Co-operative Wholesale Society, which has behaved with the tin ear of some petty despot, as it seeks to railroad the plan through, with the connivance of central Government, to the detriment of my constituents.

Mr. Gummer: Will my hon. and learned Friend add to the list of ridiculous expressions the phrase “eco-town”? What kind of eco-town can result in 40,000 homes being built in an area that is currently rural? That is not an eco-town; it is an eco-outrage. Only this Government could call it an eco-town.

Mr. Garnier: I entirely agree. Only the Co-operative Wholesale Society could jump on that bandwagon in the hope of having a third shot at building on that site. It tried to build a new town when I first became a Member of Parliament. Its plans were accompanied by lots of pretty brochures and pictures of butterflies and birds and so forth, but the plan was exactly the same as before. It did not involve such an intensive amount of building or such a huge operation, but none the less, that was the plan. When that plan failed, the Co-operative Wholesale Society withdrew it. In 2007, the society came up with something called a sustainable urban extension, or SUE. It wanted to build a projectile of buildings from Oadby and Wigston, the suburban borough in my constituency that is right up against the city of Leicester, into the area concerned.

The Prime Minister returned from China in late summer or early autumn of 2007—he had been Prime Minister for just a few weeks by then—having spoken to the leadership of the People’s Republic of China, where I understand the planning laws are rather different. He returned with an enthusiastic desire to build something like 10, 12 or 15 eco-towns, which would no doubt be similar to the eco-cities that he saw in China. The hapless Housing Minister—I have forgotten who it was; there have been one or two since—was invited, in that polite way that the Prime Minister has, to provide him with a list of 10 sites from a wider list of 50 or so sites.

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My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire has had problems with an eco-town in his area. As I said a moment ago, the hon. Member for Leicester, South and I have also been battling hard together with our colleagues and neighbours to ensure that the idiotic scheme does not go through. However, the scheme has now become involved in murky politics, deals and everything other than proper planning and the proper assessment of the evidence. As my hon. Friend has pointed out, there are also district councillors who are itching to say something about a scheme that will destroy their districts, but they are precluded from saying anything because the Standards Board for England will jump on them and say, “Ah, you’re now parti pris and therefore may not carry out your local democratic function of being a representative of your own electorate.” That is absurd and Kafkaesque, and it must stop.

There are two other hideous blots on the landscape of Harborough that will not be improved by this Bill. The first is the random depositing of wind farms in my part of rural Leicestershire. There is a case for wind farms and for developing alternative sources of energy, but these things need to be done in the right place. If we destroy something that is beautiful simply because we can—and, incidentally, because we have a subsidy from the East Midlands Development Agency to do so—we will be doing so for the wrong reasons and in the wrong place. It is more difficult than pulling hens’ teeth to get common sense out of this Government, the East Midlands Development Agency or the developers of such projects. I fear that there is nothing in the Bill that will make my constituents’ lives any easier.

A further planning matter that is not going to be sorted out by the Bill or dealt with in an enhanced demographic way relates to East Midlands airport. The airport is not in my constituency; it is in north-west Leicestershire. In May 2005, just as the general election campaign was beginning, the Government thought that it would be a good time not so much to bury bad news as to announce it. They announced a change in the air routes of the flights into the airport from the west to the south and to the east and, guess what, the airport—which is owned by the Manchester Airports Group; a strange connection, that—is now hoping that a night flight will come into the airport over my constituency in rural south-east Leicestershire once every 90 seconds.

East Midlands airport wants to promote itself as the freight hub of England, and good luck to it. I suggest, however, that it—and the Co-operative Wholesale Society of Manchester—must do things for my constituents, rather than doing things to them for its own exclusive economic benefit. All the profits from the airport tend to get sucked back into Manchester. None of those profits seem to come to my constituents, so far as jobs, beneficial environmental circumstances or access to the airport are concerned. We get the downside, while Manchester seems to get the upside, in terms of money and of a reduction in council tax bills, because the Manchester Airports Group is owned by the local authorities of Manchester.

This might sound like a rant, but I am desperately—

Sir Peter Soulsby: Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?

Mr. Garnier: Of course I will.

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Sir Peter Soulsby: Before the hon. and learned Gentleman sits down, will he return briefly to the powerful case that he was making against the proposed eco-town in his constituency and on the bounds of my constituency in the context of the Bill? He made a powerful case which is, as he has said, supported by members of all parties on the county council. He was right to remind the House of that this evening. Does he agree that two particularly absurd contentions lie at the heart of the Co-op’s assumptions about the proposed eco-town? The first is that car ownership in the area could be held down to one car for every two households. The second is that some 60 per cent. of the people who would live in the area would be employed in the area. Both contentions are absurd and would have potentially disastrous effects on the infrastructure in his constituency and on the transport infrastructure and regeneration in mine.

Mr. Garnier: The hon. Gentleman is entirely right. The Co-op’s proposal is that only one car would be allowed for every two households—I have no idea whether people would have to share a car and ring their neighbour to ask whether they could use it on a particular day—and that 60 per cent. of the people living in the eco-town would work in it. Those suggestions are utterly absurd and wholly unrealistic. It gets worse, however, because the Co-op wants—at someone else’s expense—to ram a tram line from the middle of my constituency straight through some of the roads in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. Various tram stops and park and ride systems have been proposed, including one park and ride facility at Coles nurseries in Scraptoft to serve the Thurnby, Bushby and Scraptoft areas. But guess who had not been told about the proposal—Coles nurseries. That must be local democracy at work à la new Labour.

I really despair when a Bill such as this is given only four sittings in Committee; it has to be out of Committee by 18 June. Given the kind of infrastructure projects that the Government want to encourage, the term “democracy” is wholly meaningless in this context. I urge all right hon. and hon. Gentlemen and Ladies who are elsewhere to return to the Chamber soon, so that they and those in the Chamber can vote this wretched piece of legislation into oblivion, along with the Government.