It is a pleasure to be under your chairmanship, Lady Winterton, as we discuss what I know you also believe is an important subject—local government reform. It is extremely important to the whole of Cornwall. I hope to speak for only a few minutes, to allow other hon. Members to participate as well. It is important to everybody in the county.

It might be helpful to provide some context. I shall take the past 20 years as a convenient period, because it straddles 10 years of Conservative rule and 10 years of Labour Administration. For the first 10 years I was a councillor, and for the last 10 years I have of course been the MP for South-East Cornwall.

The first 10 years were an interesting time. We suffered the poll tax and then the interim tax known as council tax, which many of my constituents still suffer. We endured the sell-off of our council housing, so that we now have virtually none available in the county for those who require it. We experienced water privatisation, which has given us the highest water bills in the whole country—some £200 a year more than anybody else. Our agricultural industry grappled with the BSE fiasco. Some schools had a preponderance of outside toilets, as well as classrooms that were not weatherproof. Cancelled road schemes caused major congestion for our tourist industry. Threats of hospital closures brought thousands on to the streets, and the deregulation of our buses has left us with virtually no public bus transport in the county.

When we were told 10 years ago that things could only get better, we had no doubt that that was the case. But now we see no change in council tax, which is still going up. We are still enduring water charges, despite many petitions, debates, letters and meetings with Ministers. Thankfully, we have not had BSE, but we had foot and mouth, and the latest fiasco, the single farm payment, has hardly assisted our agricultural industry. Our hospitals remain threatened, and even today we are concerned about whether they will continue. Our public transport remains decimated. I must acknowledge that we have had some school building, that two valuable road schemes are in progress and that we have had some very modest progress on social housing, but now, of course, we have the spectre of no NHS dentistry.

One might therefore imagine that the people of Cornwall are not exactly best pleased with how they find themselves, after 20 years of overriding centralisation by two Administrations. The greatest feature of that has been the central diktat and the centralisation of decision making, controlled by endless rounds of debilitating bidding for almost everything under the sun, targets that have skewed performance and wasted billions of pounds, and bureaucracy in every public service so that we are paying more and more for less and less.

Plans for the reform of local government therefore have a hollow ring for many people who just want central Government to butt out and restore real local government. We need 21st-century administration, a modernised funding structure and a new relationship between central and local government built on understanding, respect and trust, with a recognition that each has a distinctive role but neither has a monopoly on wisdom. The task is not to be underestimated, and only radical, fundamental change will do.

To endure the upheaval, change and additional work required in any reform process, the reward must be substantial. Its essence must be devolution; a devolution of responsibilities and above all of resources and decision making. That must happen from the very top to the bottom, with powers devolved down from central and regional government, regional quangos and the counties to the lower tiers. It clearly cannot be achieved overnight but there must be agreement that it is the direction in which we must travel, and some sort of milestones or timetables must be established.

It would be premature and inappropriate to go into great detail about how that can be achieved, and in any case it must be tackled by those who will be affected locally by any change. Change must not just be imposed on them once again by an overbearing central Administration on a “we know what’s best,” one-size-fits-all basis. I wish at this stage merely to emphasise that only a proper return to locally elected, accountable bodies will satisfy the people of Cornwall. I have tried to indicate in the past 20 years how they have been affected and how they have suffered, and I hope that the Minister appreciates that the decision to be taken in the next few months is extremely important.

We have for 20 years endured interference, maladministration, the decline of services, increasing tax and charges and excessive bureaucracy. Frankly, the people of Cornwall have had enough. We want a strong, accountable strategic authority for Cornwall responsible for dealing with our economic regeneration; inadequate public transport system; dearth of affordable housing, local health care services, local schools, post offices and shops; underfunded community facilities and much more. The existing structures are simply inappropriate. They are wasteful and have too much duplication and overlapping. There are many examples of that, such as in the waste services, whereby the district councils are responsible for collection and the county council for disposal, and in parking, which is in conflict on and off-street.

There are too many quangos with no elected representation. Current problems with our primary care trusts and health services are a supreme example. It has become too time-consuming to do things; there is too much consultation between inefficient bodies, so it takes far too long to achieve anything. Most of the time, the services are not directly responsible for what local people want and pay for.

Cornwall is distinctive. Its history, culture, geography and well defined community mean that Trelawney’s army has in every sense had to march on many occasions more recent than a few hundred years ago. People have been out on the streets to protest against the poll tax, to save threatened hospitals, to oppose rail service cuts, to restore bus services and to save their post offices and small schools. Yes, they have also come all the way up here to invade Twickenham and support Cornish rugby—and at this stage we all ought to congratulate the Pirates for their victory on Sunday.

The Government have a real opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to localism, which we hear about all the time—not by some anaemic, sterile, bog-standard unitary authority but a full-blooded devolution of powers and responsibilities to forge a new partnership between central and local government. That will benefit both parties, but above all it will provide a real response to the people of Cornwall who have suffered for too long from external and remote decision making that has caused so much misery.

It is an enormous pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed), whose remarks I thoroughly endorse. I fully appreciate that the Minister will be constrained by law as to what she can say in response to the points and questions raised through today’s debate. She also has the pleasure, as I think if it, of having the box set—the full parliamentary team for Cornwall—here to listen to her words in a moment.

The underlying theme of what we wish to convey to the Minister and the Government today is that we do not want to see simply the delivery or imposition of a Government agenda in Cornwall as a result of this great opportunity. We should be working with Ministers to ensure that Cornwall is enabled to provide a Cornish solution to our problems. That may mean having a different solution from those that may apply in different parts of the country, and I hope that the Minister will be reasonable and flexible where that is concerned. I have in fact recently written to her colleague, the Minister for Local Government, to seek a meeting between ourselves, the county council and other councils in Cornwall who are supporting the bid in order to take some of these issues a stage further forward. I hope that the Minister will encourage her colleague to accede to that request.

The key issues that we need to have addressed are currently threefold. First, because pain inevitably comes with reorganisation—and there will be a great deal, particularly for those councils that are abolished, and the jobs and democratically elected positions that will be lost as a result of that reorganisation—there is enormous anxiety and a tremendous and, I would argue, a gathering opposition to the proposal in Cornwall at the moment. We must listen to that and take great account of it, but it is critical that we ensure that that pain is balanced with significant gain along the lines that my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cornwall has just explained. In other words, we need a demonstration that the Government are prepared to devolve strategic decision-making powers to Cornwall in the fields of health, economic development, planning, police and other services.

Unless there is at least some indication that the Government will meet that ambition—and be prepared to talk with us about those issues, so that those ambitions can be taken forward in future negotiations—I fear that this process will stall very quickly in Cornwall. As I am sure the Minister fully appreciates, we have strong ambitions for the future of Cornwall. In fact, we believe that the city region agenda should apply to Cornwall. We are in fact the rural equivalent of a city region, and we hope that chapter 4 of the White Paper will apply to Cornwall.

Secondly, the current bid has plenty of opportunity for disagreement, and that is currently being fully exploited by its opponents, particularly on subordinate matters about the numbers of members, where the boundaries of community networks may apply and so on. My real point for the Minister is: some of those subordinate issues—about numbers and boundaries, and the devolution within Cornwall to community networks, parish councils and others—are ones on which we could so easily be tripped up, given the opposition to them, that it is important that the Minister gives us real clarity and that flexibility can be applied. It would be helpful to receive clear advice on the extent to which the Government are prepared to allow flexibility in the bid document that was lodged by Cornwall county council. The council would like to explore the extent to which the proposals in the document might change in the coming months without invalidating the bid.

My third point relates to the 12-week time period. I share the concerns of some district councils that are gathering in opposition to the bid, which argue that there should be a longer period of consultation. There is good reason for optimism, but I fear that a short consultation period will give opponents of the reorganisation of devolution and local government in Cornwall more grist to the mill and a greater chance of success in generating strong opposition to the bid, as we will not have the opportunity to explore the flexible, alternative solutions that are required to enable us to make a positive bid for Cornwall. I hope that the Minister will indicate whether there is any flexibility in the consultation period.

I shall speak briefly as the Minister needs time to respond. I thank her for agreeing to allow flexibility in the timings. I passionately believe that Cornwall has a great future and that the people of Cornwall are better able to determine their future on the many issues that they face than people elsewhere. Many of the issues are unique to the county due to its geography, its isolation from London and its high poverty levels.

I welcome the fact that the White Paper has provided the opportunity to change the way that Cornwall is governed. It is great news that that has happened and that the Government have begun to recognise that local solutions and local strength of decision making are important. I suspect that Ministers agree that there has been too much movement over the years in the opposite direction towards centralisation. The Minister should understand that there is excitement about this move. There is willingness in the county to grasp the opportunity and we want to see the process move forward. There is huge support for that.

I want to stress strongly that Cornwall’s proposals are built on a notion of natural communities. They are communities of interest in which people come together; they understand the community in which they live and work and they understand its shared interests. Double devolution, which is proposed by the Cornwall bid, is a significant part of that process. The first level of devolution is to provide Cornwall with a stronger voice in its affairs and with those who govern it at national and regional level. In the county, there is no sense of a shared community interest in the artificial bureaucratic construct—it was originally Conservative, more recently it has been Labour—of the wider, south-west region. Bluntly, telling anybody in a street in my constituency that they share an agenda with people in Swindon will ring no bells whatever.

The first part of the bid is to say, let us have a greater say in our future, with our particular identity and interest and our relative isolation from London. We want to devolve down some of the powers that are held at regional level, the best example of which is the arcane, bureaucratic, objective 1 process, now the convergence funding process, that we have to go through for agreement on European funding. Half a dozen Departments and the region can all have a say in decisions on relatively small amounts of expenditure that are specifically allocated to the community of Cornwall. The process has not had a good track record; there have been some good projects that were supported in Cornwall, but some pretty dodgy deals, not supported in Cornwall, have slipped through the net, blown up in the faces of the region and Departments and caused huge embarrassment. I could point to other examples, such as the strategic housing agenda on which I have commented today, where willingness on the part of central and regional government to let go and allow the process to take place would make sense. That process would be based on the natural community of interest in Cornwall.

However, there is a second natural community of interest, in the more local community in which people live—in the villages and towns of Cornwall. Here we have to go back to another major Conservative mistake. The 1974 changes to local government boundaries merged, by placing together different towns in single districts, communities that in practice operate relatively separately. Within Cornwall, yes, but there is no reason why Newquay should have been put together with St. Austell in a borough council, or Truro with Falmouth in a borough council, and the same applies to the other main towns.

The bid that we are discussing, which is probably unique in the country, is not only about creating a unitary authority; it is about devolving down to local communities as well. Much as the district councils may argue that it is centralisation, the truth is that it is to go below the district councils, so that local services are delivered at a more local level and are more answerable to the local community. I am referring to some 16 major towns and the surrounding rural communities across Cornwall. This is not just about a unitary authority bid for Cornwall; it is also about handing power down from county hall and the district offices to the local communities across Cornwall. That is why I am so excited about the bid. It is why I think that it is very different from many of the other bids around the country and why I hope that the Government will warm to what I hope will in future be a model not only for Cornwall, but for other parts of the country.

I congratulate the hon. Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed) on securing the debate. He put his case in a very reasoned manner. There is no doubt from the contributions that he and his colleagues have made that a passionate debate is taking place in Cornwall and that there is great commitment from hon. Members to the unitary structure.

I take issue with the hon. Gentleman on one point. He said that there had been no change in his area in the past 10 years. He perhaps contradicted himself, because he went on to list the areas of investment by the Government, which no doubt have made a difference to his constituents. I take issue with the idea that there have been no improvements in health. If he looks at health outcomes throughout the country and in Cornwall, and the additional investment and staff in the health sector, he will find that his constituents have benefited from that.

That aside, I want to use the debate to set out how we have reached the current position and how we intend to make our assessments, and then respond to the comments about the truly devolutionary nature of what we are doing. I welcome the comments that have been made. The hon. Gentleman made the point that things should not be dictated from on high. However, this has been the only opportunity that I can remember within a local government reorganisation for the bids to come from councils themselves. The Government issued an invitation to bid, and local authorities came forward if they wished to bid to make their areas unitary and to have a different structure. That is truly devolutionary and follows the principles in the White Paper. The hon. Members for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor) and for St. Ives (Andrew George) raised that point.

This is very important. When we talk about leaders of councils now, we do not in fact talk about the leader of the council. Under the White Paper and the legislation going through the House, they become the leader of the place. Their powers, responsibilities and influences are significantly greater. We are looking for much stronger strategic leadership across the authorities. I welcome Opposition Members’ comments on and support for that approach.

Hon. Members will be aware that, acting under our wide prerogative powers, we published alongside the local government White Paper last October an invitation to local authorities to make proposals for unitary local government. We are now holding a stakeholder consultation on 16 of the 26 proposals that we received. In due course, and subject to the will of Parliament, the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill will provide us with the powers to implement any of the 16 proposals that, having regard to the outcome of consultation, we decide meet the criteria set out in the invitation. Clause 21 allows us to implement, after Royal Assent, any proposal received before that date.

I am grateful for the Minister’s generous comments about the genuine wish in Cornwall for change and progress on a better form of local governance. However, my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and St. Austell (Matthew Taylor) was trying to get across what we see as the different nature of the bid from Cornwall, in that we hope that it will be not just a bid on a par with existing unitaries and the aspirations of other parts of the country to have unitaries, but a bid for a new form of local strategic authority. I would welcome anything that the Minister could say about meeting local government leaders, Members of Parliament and representatives of other organisations from Cornwall to take forward that agenda of something slightly different and greater than a unitary authority.

The hon. Gentleman pre-empts my comments. I will come on to that point later. First, let me make it clear that I am always happy to meet to discuss those issues. Either I or the Minister for Local Government will be happy to meet the hon. Gentlemen and the county council representatives on the issue. However, I am somewhat constrained in what I can say today because we are in a legal process. For reasons of propriety I cannot debate the merits of specific proposals. I hope that that is understood. I am not being evasive at all. Bids have gone forward in the decision letters and we are now in that consultation period in which decisions have to be taken, so I have to be careful about what I say.

In the debate, I was asked whether there was flexibility around the bid. Any council that made a proposal during the consultation period can develop that proposal further. We have also made it clear that council chief executives can meet our officials during the consultation period to discuss their bid. Therefore, there is flexibility. The important thing is that we discuss the bid and ensure that we get the right bid and that it works well for that area.

The hon. Member for St. Ives asked whether there could be flexibility in the length of time. As much as I like to be flexible, there are some things that I cannot be flexible on. I cannot be flexible on the time limit. Final decisions have to be taken within the agreed time frame. The consultation ends on 22 June in time for implementation by the end of July. Having heard the arguments from the hon. Gentlemen so far, I do not think that they need any extra time to put the points that they have made.

I am reassured to hear that there will be a degree of flexibility. Some of the proposals include flexibility around Departments that are not directly under the control of the Minister’s own Department, such as the Department of Health and the Department of Trade and Industry through the regional development agencies. Will the Minister include in her comments details about what is going on between other Departments to allow for that flexibility to extend beyond the Department for Communities and Local Government?

I hope that the hon. Lady will forgive me, but I think I made it clear that I was not able to discuss specific instances within the bids. I think that her question goes into that particular area. If we look at the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill, we will find that there is far greater co-operation between Departments under that Bill than there ever has been in any other local government Bill that I have seen before the House. As a former councillor and former local government officer, I very much welcome the Bill. It seems to me that it extends the remit far more.

Going back to the specific bid, chief executives can meet with my officials and Ministers are happy to meet with Members and councillors as well. It is better that those discussions take place under that remit because we are constrained in what we can say now, as I made clear earlier.

We published the invitation in response to the views that we received about the future of local government. It became clear that in many cases the two-tier system has the capacity to be confusing, inefficient and involve additional costs. There are additional risks and challenges in a two-tier system that also cause duplication and inefficiency.

There was, and still is, as evidenced by the number of bids that we received, a real drive to say that we can do things better and differently. We can be more focused, stronger and more strategic. We can look across the piece and not just at narrow interests to improve outcomes for local people. Allowing restructuring was our response to that, and that was made clear by the number of bids that we received. In reaching decisions, we had to take into account all the relevant information—the submitted proposals, any supplementary material submitted by the proposers themselves and other available relevant information.

We have written to all councils that submitted bids, setting out the reasons and the basis on which decisions were reached. All 26 proposals were carefully assessed against the five criteria that we set out in our invitation. The judgment we had to make was which councils were most likely to meet the specified criteria. In the light of the comments made by hon. Members earlier, I think that it would be helpful to say what those criteria are. The proposals have to be affordable, and that is very clear in the invitation document. The change to a unitary structure must represent value for money and must be met from councils’ existing resources. The proposals must also be supported by a broad range of partners and stakeholders.

In addition to affordability and support, the proposals must provide strong, effective, accountable and strategic leadership. They also should deliver genuine opportunities for neighbourhood flexibility and empowerment. The point was made strongly by hon. Members that the council must be at the heart of the community and involve local people in decision making.

I think that, before we were interrupted, I was talking about the devolutionary principle. This process is not top-down from the Government; it is very much bottom-up. That is why the invitations were issued and why we are consulting. We never sought to impose changes.

The emphasis is on local authorities, and good local authorities really want to effect change in their area and to make life better for their citizens. I was particularly pleased to hear from the hon. Members for St. Ives and for Truro and St. Austell about the ambitions that they have for their areas. What I can say to them, which I think may help, is that unitary councils can help to fulfil those ambitions. One of the issues that they raised with me is that consideration on all these matters must be across Government and that it is a Government decision. The decisions have to cover all local services.

Generally, the White Paper has opened the door for a new devolutionary approach and the key to that approach is getting the right authorities and the right bodies in place so that, if new powers are to be devolved, those structures and bodies, showing strong leadership, are in place to ensure that that can be done effectively. That discussion is taking place in terms of civic cities. I must say that there are no specific proposals at present, but the unitary strategy for Cornwall might well enable that door to be opened and that discussion to happen. That is a discussion that Opposition Members will be having with officials. I appreciate their longer-term objectives in that area, but this is a truly devolutionary measure that is going forward.

I hope that, with no further interruptions, I have addressed the comments and the issues raised by Opposition Members.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-three minutes to Six o’clock.