Shropshire Unitary Local Government orders debate
In a debate on the Bill to establish a new unitary authority in Shropshire, Philip Dunne argues the democratic case against it.
1.22 am
Mr. Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con): Today is a dark day for democracy in Shropshire. According to the Government, Shropshire has an excellent council. It has just had its four-star rating confirmed for the second year running, and it is improving strongly. I do not know how it can do that if it is already top-rated, but apparently it can. I regret to say that this change is being proposed for no other reason than to put into effect a party political plan to reduce the number of Conservative councillors and, potentially, Lib Dem councillors-Opposition councillors-in Shropshire.
At present, the two-tier system provides representation close to the people. With one county council and five district councils, we have a total of 244 councillors in Shropshire. That will be reduced to 75 under the proposals. We shall go from having one county councillor representing approximately 4,000 people, and one or two district councillors representing between 1,000 and 2,000 and a bit people, to one unitary councillor representing 3,000 people. So most people will lose the opportunity to be represented by at least two-in some cases, three-councillors, and will instead be represented by only one.
My constituency, the eighth largest geographical constituency in England, will change from having 58 district councillors and 15 county councillors-a total of 73-to having about 20, depending on what comes out of the boundary committee proposals. Inevitably, by definition, there will be less local knowledge available to those councillors and therefore less local representation. That point was made forcefully by my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski). The decisions will be taken remotely. The base for the new council will be in Shrewsbury, which is some distance from my constituency. Some people will have to travel for more than an hour just to attend a council meeting- [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch) suggests that that is already happening in Herefordshire, and I take it that he is not particularly happy about that.
Mr. Keetch: The old Hereford and Worcester.
Mr. Dunne: I have taken a position against unitary primarily because of the lack of democratic accountability, and not for any other reason. I am not opposing it simply for opposition's sake. I believe that it is fundamentally wrong to remove decision making from a location close to the people and, to a degree, to centralise it in the county.
I have been encouraged in my position of principle by the response to the ballots across Shropshire. The Minister made the point that some independent assessment was made of the quality of questions and responses to the ballots. The ballots were on questions agreed with the Electoral Commission. The hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy) tried to argue that there was an unfairness in the way in which the questions were presented. South Shropshire district council, which was then Liberal Democrat-controlled, put out a 16-page booklet, "South Shropshire Matters", along with the ballot paper. The council was in favour of unitary, so the opponents were given a total of two and a half pages to make their case, while the proponents-as it happens, the Liberal Democrat proponents-had 13 and a half pages. Where is the fairness in that? Despite the overwhelming information bias in favour of unitary, the people who bothered to vote-it was a high turnout of 57 per cent. rather than the 56 per cent. I mentioned earlier-voted against unitary. That makes me feel that I am in touch with what people in my constituency want.
The greatest support, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) mentioned earlier, has come from stakeholders. The stakeholders obliged to be included in the consultation were by and large public sector bodies paid for out of the public purse, so it is no surprise that they came up with the answer that the Government wanted-they are paid to do so. The whole consultation exercise has been a complete sham.
As to democratic accountability, one of the arguments in favour of removing a tier of local government was that it would be more transparent, simple and clear for the people to understand to whom they should be talking about what. Yet under the proposals Shropshire is moving from a two-tier authority in some areas to a four-tier authority. Let me explain that to the Minister in case he has not understood how that will happen.
The unitary council will be at the top. The councils have decided that it will not be practical to run some of the committees on a unitary basis, particularly regulatory committees for planning and licensing, so they are going to set up three areas-north, central and south-underneath the unitary tier. As part of their submission, they had to say that there would be local area committees underneath that. We are to have 27 of those; we are to move from five district councils, which managed the regulatory function and everything else in the past, to the new system of three tiers in the unitary authority. In addition, because some areas with significant populations-Shrewsbury and Atcham is a case in point-did not have a town council, a new town council will be established underneath the three tiers of the unitary. Where is the simplicity in that? It fails that basic test of the Government's own making.
I want to touch on some of the practical implications of what the Minister is proposing. He said that he understands the imperative-I think that that was the word he used-of setting out clear orders in respect of which officers will be subject to open competition and that he would publish that shortly. I am afraid to say that here we have yet another example of the Government's difficulties in introducing this legislation, which have arisen ever since the Bill was first published.
I have already referred to the public involvement in health clauses, which were tacked on as an afterthought; they had nothing at all to do with local government reorganisation. That characterised the passage of the Bill. It has been a second-rate piece of legislation pushed through at the back end of all the other bits of legislation, partly because the Ministers responsible have chopped and changed every six months-I think that we are on the third Secretary of State from the Department responsible. That is causing considerable concern among the very officers who, as the Minister rightly pointed out, need some clarity about their position. They have no knowledge from one week to the next of when the legislation will be enacted.
The legislation was originally to be concluded before the election that never was-that pushed it back into the latter part of last year. Then it was pushed into the early part of this year. We were supposed to be debating these measures on 4 February and here we are on 19 February. The boundary committee has told the authorities in Shropshire that if the passage of the measures is not concluded by the end of this month, it will not be able to introduce the boundary changes in time for the elections in May 2009. It is saying-and the Government have endorsed this-that the unitary authority may have to be established on existing county council boundaries, with a doubling up of councillors, because that would be the easiest way in which to proceed. What a way to set about reorganising local government. It is completely shambolic, and it is a direct result of the way in which the legislation has been handled. The lack of clarity is causing considerable frustration among the officers who must deal with this.
Mr. Keetch: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Dunne: I hope the hon. Gentleman will excuse me if I do not. My time is very limited.
I want to raise again the point about officers' grades being open to competition. I look forward to reading the proposals that the Minister will publish shortly. I understand his argument about the need for fairness to individuals and his view that the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981 should apply, but this is not unique territory. In the corporate world companies take over other companies of both similar and differing sizes, and TUPE applies in those cases, but in those cases the best person for the job gets it. In some cases none of the incumbents gets the job, and a replacement is recruited from outside. I see no reason why that should not apply to the most senior grades in this instance. The directors of each major service area in particular should undergo an open process, so that the population at large can feel that it is not just a stitch-up by the county council-which, I am afraid, is the impression that they have had.
The council will continue to face challenges when it becomes unitary. It has been argued that this proposal is about financial resources and efficiency savings. Over the past 10 years, the Government have allocated funds to match their own priorities. As a result, the allocation of funds to areas such as education which are the responsibility of a unitary authority, and organisations such as the police which are funded through council tax, has been heavily skewed towards inner-city urban areas which, by coincidence, happen by and large to be represented by Labour Members of Parliament. Such allocations have been justified by a plethora of data to do with deprivation, crime, social needs, health inequalities and so on. With much of that I have no argument-I think it appropriate to take such matters into account-but a degree of balance is needed.
Operating services in rural areas costs money. In those areas, it costs more to deliver many of the services for which local authorities are responsible than it does in urban areas. Waste collection, for example, is relatively straightforward if populations live within a few miles of each other, while school transport is obviously more expensive when people are having to be bussed long distances-many more of them, because fewer are able to walk.
The provision of elderly care is much more expensive in rural areas, particularly when efforts are being made to move care closer to the community-which I support-and to establish a network of district or other specialist nurses to provide services in people's homes. That is much easier to do in an urban environment. Not only is it easier to recruit people to do the work, but they can use their time much more effectively if they can walk or drive short distances from one patient to the next. In some areas in my constituency, a district nurse can deal with only five appointments a day because so much of her time is spent travelling from one person to the next. If the Government had taken those issues into account, much of the justification for the unitary proposal would not have been necessary.
Let me give the Minister a couple of examples of the splendid work done by councillors in my area who are fighting for their local communities. Many of them may well not wish to become councillors in a unitary authority, because of the time commitment that that would involve. I want to single out Joe Meredith, currently serving his third term as chairman of South Shropshire district council. He is fighting for the post office that is under threat in his village of Ashford Carbonnel, and for two schools that are under threat of amalgamation. His deputy leader, Councillor Jackie Williams of the Kemp Valley ward, is doing a valiant job while her chairman is indisposed, fighting for her post office and school at Lydbury North which are threatened with closure.
Those stories could be repeated right across my constituency, and in other parts of Shropshire. Many of these valiant, public-spirited people might not continue their lives in public service because they do not wish to do so within a unitary environment, which would be a great loss to the fabric of public life in this country.
1.35 am
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Philip's other contributions to the debate
Mr. Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con): Unfortunately, the Minister does not have the benefit of having taken the legislation through Committee. I was privileged to serve on the Committee, and I asked the Minister for the Environment, as he is now, about consultation. It was made clear to us that the consultation would take into account the views of the public, because it was acknowledged that they constituted a stakeholder in the context of the invitation to bid. That concession was eventually squeezed out in Committee.
The Minister for Local Government rightly said that local ballots took place in three districts in Shropshire-two of them in my constituency-but they should have been given due weight. Although he says that some of the questions were not suitably balanced, I must tell him-
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. There must be a distinction in this House in debate between an intervention and a speech. Interventions should be very brief, because otherwise we lose the whole sense of the debate.
John Healey: Those ballots were given due weight, as the hon. Gentleman suggests they should have been. They were not given overwhelming weight. They were given weight in the context of making the judgment about whether there was a broad range of support sufficient to give us confidence that if we were to press ahead with implementing these reforms they would be likely to succeed.
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Mr. Dunne: I am listening carefully to the Minister, and I hear his assurance about it not being a county council takeover and his reference to a refreshed senior management team. Will he kindly confirm to the House in which grades of senior management the roles will be subject to open competition and where there will not be automatic reappointment of a county council officer?
John Healey: I expect to be able to confirm that formally shortly, but my intention would be to see the appointment to every chief executive post subject to open competition. I would expect to be able to make that a requirement. It is right that we should set the expectation that other of the most senior officer posts will be open to re-recruitment and competition. In some councils, however, there may be good reasons why they may want to keep particular postholders in post. I also intend to set out arrangements for that shortly.
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Mr. Dunne: It will not have escaped my hon. Friend's notice that the Act that allows the orders to be put in place is, by supreme irony, the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. Part of the Act tries to encourage the public to participate by becoming members of foundation trusts and so on, to engage the public with the public sector. In respect of the part of the Act dealing with local government, the Government blithely ignore the consultations that they have undertaken.
Robert Neill: My hon. Friend makes the point well. I know how much he has fought for his constituency in Ludlow, just as my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) has taken a great interest and fought valiantly for local interests.
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Mr. Dunne: I agree that local communities should have a say; that was precisely what was offered to the local community in my constituency, which has two districts. A ballot was undertaken for South Shropshire district council, and a majority-56 per cent.-of people were opposed to going unitary. The then leader of the district council, a Liberal Democrat, decided that that had been an example of the community voting with its heart and not its head, and tried to deny the validity of the ballot. Does the hon. Lady agree with that assessment?
Julia Goldsworthy: My understanding of what I have read about the polls undertaken in some of these council areas is that they were not referendums. The series of orders that we are discussing reveal a variety of degrees of warming to the principle of whether this could offer improvements at a local level, but we are seeing common themes in terms of practicalities. The Government should be doing certain things to try to improve the process.
