House again in Committee.
moved Amendment No. 112:
112: After Clause 60, insert the following new Clause—
“Voting at elections of elected mayors
(1) The Local Government Act 2000 (c. 22) is amended as follows.
(2) For section 42(1) (voting at elections of elected mayors) substitute—
“(1) Each person entitled to vote as an elector shall have one vote and the elected mayor is to be returned under the simple majority system, unless there are three or more candidates.
(1A) If there are three or more candidates to be the elected mayor, voting shall be by means of preferential voting in which electors may list the candidates in order of preference.
(1B) If there are three or more candidates to be the elected mayor, the elected mayor is to be returned under the alternative vote system in accordance with Schedule 2.”
(3) In section 43 (entitlement to vote), omit subsection (2).
(4) For Schedule 2 substitute—
“SCHEDULE 2Election of elected mayorApplication1 This Schedule applies where there are three or more candidates to be an elected mayor of a local authority.
Method of voting2 Each voter shall have one transferable vote.
3 (1) A voter must place the figure 1 against the candidate he or she wishes to vote for (the “first preference”).
(2) A voter may indicate the order of his or her preferences for as many other candidates as he or she pleases by placing against their respective names the numbers 2, 3, 4 and so on.
Procedure for counting4 (1) The returning officer shall examine the papers and shall sort them into parcels according to the first preference recorded for each candidate, rejecting any that are invalid; and he shall count the papers in each such parcel and shall credit each candidate with a number of votes equal to the number of valid papers on which a first preference has been recorded for that candidate.
(2) If the vote for any one candidate equals or exceeds the votes of all other candidates combined, that candidate shall be declared elected.
(3) If no candidate has been declared elected, the returning officer shall exclude together the two or more candidates with the least votes if the total vote of such two or more candidates does not exceed the vote of the candidate next above, otherwise he shall exclude the candidate having the fewest votes.
(4) The papers of the excluded candidates shall be transferred to whichever of the continuing candidates is marked by that voter as the next available preference, and the votes thus transferred shall be added to the first preference votes of those candidates.
(5) Any paper on which no further preference is marked, or where there is uncertainty as the voter’s intention, shall be set aside as non-transferable and the total of such papers shall be recorded.
(6) When the vote for any one candidate equals or exceeds the votes of all other candidates combined, that candidate shall be declared elected at that stage.
(7) If when a candidate has to be excluded, two or more candidates have each the same number of votes and are lowest on the poll, the candidate with the lowest number of votes at the earliest stage in the count at which the candidates in question had an unequal number of votes shall be excluded.
(8) If two or more candidates are still equal and lowest, the returning officer is to decide by lot which of them is to be excluded at that stage.
(9) “Next available preference” means a second or subsequent preference recorded in consecutive numerical order for a candidate who has not yet been excluded, passing over earlier preferences for candidates already excluded.”.”
The noble Lord said: This small group of amendments deals with some important matters. Amendments Nos. 112, 171, 172 and 255, tabled in my name, would replace the supplementary vote with the alternative vote. The other amendment in the group, in the name of my noble friend, is rather more ambitious. She will speak to it in due course.
Amendment No. 112 would replace the existing system of the supplementary vote for mayoral elections with the alternative vote. My other three amendments would use the alternative vote, rather than the supplementary vote, for elections which the Government proposed for any elected executives. We have not discussed elected executives yet, so the amendments pre-empt the question whether we will have them, but it seems sensible to discuss the two voting systems together. The third area in which the supplementary vote is used is London mayoral elections. My amendments do not cover them, because they are subject to different legislation, but I would in spirit make the same change in their case, too.
The supplementary vote is a rather cack-handed voting system, which the Government cobbled together when they set up elections for mayors and the Mayor of London. It is election by a traditional “X”-voting system. After the first vote, people are given the opportunity of marking their second preference with an “X” in a different column. The two candidates with the most first-preference votes progress to the second round. Any second-preference votes for those two remaining candidates are then transferred to them and added to their total, giving the result of the election.
In moving the amendment, I should perhaps have welcomed the Minister to what I think is her first discussion in Committee on electoral systems. There will no doubt be many more to come. They are all great fun.
The supplementary vote differs from the alternative vote in that candidates are numbered one to five by voters and votes are simply transferred until somebody has gained over half of the votes cast. That system is used for the election of the leader and deputy leader of the Labour Party, so it has achieved a certain amount of fame recently. It is used also in elections in this House, so it is not without some background. If it is good enough for the Labour Party, it should be good enough for mayors and elected executives; and if it is good enough for the House of Lords, it should certainly be good enough for mayors and elected executives.
What are the problems with the supplementary vote, and why did I say it was cack-handed and cobbled together? First, it seems to cause unnecessary confusion. The number of spoilt ballot papers is significantly higher than usual, certainly higher than in normal elections: around 3 per cent in the first-preference count and around 8 to 10 per cent on the second count, not including those that cannot transfer because they would go to the wrong candidate. I had difficulty researching previous elections by the supplementary vote. I asked the Government what the situation was, but they said that they did not collect data. It is time that somebody started.
Secondly, the supplementary vote is not efficient, and there is a very high drop-out rate on the transfer to the second round; it can be as high as 80 per cent and is typically 60 or 70 per cent. Although people are offered a second vote, in general most of those votes do not count. They are not used because people use their second preference for somebody who has already dropped out, and the vote is then lost. Your second vote only counts if it goes to one of the candidates in the top two; therefore whether your second vote counts is accidental, which is not an efficient voting system.
Thirdly, the supplementary vote distorts choice. As I have said, whether your vote is counted on the second ballot is accidental; therefore, that must distort the result. I have been doing a bit of research and have just two or three examples.
The 2005 Torbay mayoral election was unusual because there were 14 candidates, despite which the turnout was only 24 per cent. However, 15,000—62 per cent—of the votes were for candidates not in the top two. Of those, nearly 12,000—almost 49 per cent—were not transferred. As a transferable voting system, it was a flop.
In the election for the mayor of Hackney in 2002, 76 per cent of votes did not transfer to the second round; the rate was almost as high in the next election, four years later. There were a huge number of rejected ballot papers in Hackney: 619 were rejected because of voting for more than one candidate as the first preference; 209 were unmarked or wholly void for uncertainty; and 4,400 were rejected in part. The system was not working properly. As I have said, up to 10 per cent of papers tend to be rejected as void or spoilt at either stage.
In the Mansfield mayoral election earlier this year, nearly 8 per cent of ballot papers were spoilt. There was a great scandal at the level of spoilt ballot papers in the Scottish parliamentary election; however, the same level seems to apply in these mayoral elections. That cannot be a good thing.
Those are typical. I will not detain noble Lords with statistics on lots of other places. Typically a high proportion of votes are not transferred and quite a lot of people who want to vote spoil their papers inadvertently. About 10 per cent of ballot papers are spoilt. Around two-thirds of second-preference votes are not transferred. Therefore, the system is not efficient.
The alternative vote is easier to use; it gives maximum choice and is easy to understand because anybody can number. It is an efficient system in that a high proportion of the votes are transferred until somebody is either elected or is named the runner-up.
I do not know why the supplementary vote was invented. Most electoral systems are a matter of principle—what they are based on—the purpose that they exist for and the outcomes. We can argue about first past the post, the alternative vote and various kinds of proportional representation but those arguments are about principles, purpose and outcomes. The supplementary vote is a defective system and is not fit for purpose. It does not work, and that is the main argument against it.
I beg to move Amendment No. 112, which would introduce the alternative vote instead of the supplementary vote for elected mayors.
My noble friend’s amendment referred to the use of the supplementary vote for electing mayors. My modest amendment—I do not see it as ambitious contrary to what my noble friend said—seeks to introduce the single transferable vote to local council elections.
On these Benches, we are dedicated advocates for the single transferable vote and like to bring it up at every opportunity. We have always made the case that in a well functioning democracy every vote should have equal weight. In first past the post elections, this evidently is not the case. Lest I be charged with naked self-interest, there are parts of England, south-west London, for example, where first past the post works very much in favour of the Liberal Democrats, but that still does not make it right.
The single transferable vote provides an opportunity for political parties to get more people elected from underrepresented groups, such as women and the black and minority ethnic population. It has never been more important to improve that representation.
The Government have the example of Scotland to see how the single transferable vote has worked and will be able to assess the difference it makes to how Scottish councils are governed. We also have proportional voting systems in operation for the Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, the European Parliament and the London Assembly; therefore, it is not new. I would like the Government to consider the single transferable vote as an option for English local government elections as they have done in Scotland.
I am always lost in admiration for how the Liberal Democrats manage to produce a proposal for proportional representation at every opportunity—not just one version, but at least two, and I am sure there will be a third. We are not in favour of proportional representation. We are in favour of the simple majority. Therefore, I will not be supporting these amendments but could not resist saying how much I would want to oppose proportional representation.
The Liberal Democrats should feel pleased at the progress made over the years in considering change. I go back long enough to believe that the changes proposed, even by the Government and certainly by the Liberal Democrats, in the past few years have been outlandish and far-fetched.
However, we are in a period where experiments have taken place, experience has been learned from and, as I understand it, the various systems are being reviewed, which is likely to provide some guidance. It is so patent to see a political advantage in a system. Probably the reason that the Labour Party resisted major change is that the existing system favoured it. Before anyone talks about chicanery or corruption or anything like that, one has to understand that the method and manner whereby an electoral system can bring party-political advantage have been there from time immemorial. You win some, you lose some.
To give my own illustration, in 1964 we won Enfield council by 31 to 29; four years later, we lost by 51 to nine. That reflected substantially the change in the mood of the people of Enfield. Over the past 40 or 50 years, we have been not only recognising the illogicality of the existing systems but genuinely seeking to engage the electorate much more than in the recent past.
As always, I listen to the experience and point of view of colleagues who have worked in local government. I confess that I was always a first past the post man in anything. However, I am beginning to change. Like most people of my age, I think that too much change and too quickly is not good for my system, so I would like to hear what the Minister has to say.
I thank my noble friend very much for his comments and for giving me the opportunity to offer a few words from the Government—I do not know if clarity is the word—on this very interesting subject. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for welcoming me to my first House of Lords debate on electoral systems. I have what may be a guilty secret to share: I have been rather enjoying the debate. It could be a mistake to admit that.
As I am sure the Committee would expect me to say, every voting system has advantages and disadvantages. The Government acknowledge that there are arguments both for and against the various proportional voting systems, and we have introduced new voting systems for the devolved Administrations as well as for the mayoral elections in local authorities. As we know, mayors in local authorities are elected by the supplementary vote system. We have also proposed in Part 3 of the Bill that the supplementary vote system be used for electing an elected executive. More widely, the elections conducted in the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Greater London Assembly use the additional member system, and for the European Parliament the list system is used. In each of those cases there was a good reason to adopt the voting system that is now in place.
Noble Lords seek today to change the system for electing mayors across England from the supplementary vote system to the single transferable vote system. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, also wishes the directly elected executive to be returned via the additional member system. He has set out why he considers those systems are advantageous. However, the Government do not believe that now is the time to make changes to any of the electoral systems in England.
The noble Baronesses’ amendments were described as both ambitious and modest. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, set out why they wish to see the single transferable vote used for elections to principal and parish councils. However, that would mean that the first past the post system would no longer be used. One of the advantages of the first past the post system is that it ensures a direct relationship between those who are elected and the electorate within a specific geographical area. This system has historically been used to elect councillors to all local authorities. By tying members to a geographical area, a ward or a division which is constructed to reflect the identities and interests of communities, first past the post ensures that citizens know who represents them and, very importantly, representatives know whom they are representing. We believe that that is a significant advantage of the current system.
The Government are, however, carrying out a review of the new voting systems used in the UK for the devolved Administrations, the European Parliament and the London mayoral and Assembly elections. I hope and believe that this review will pick up the issues of confusion, transfers and spoilt papers to which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, pointed. We are of the view that it would be inappropriate to pre-empt the findings of this review by encouraging the introduction of changes to the voting systems in the Bill.
As my right honourable friend the Prime Minister stated in another place:
“We will fulfil our manifesto commitment to publish our review of the experience of the various voting systems introduced in 1998”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/7/07; col. 818.]
The review should be completed and published by the end of the year. Given my remarks, I hope that noble Lords will consider not pressing their amendments.
I hesitate to turn this into a seminar on voting systems but I think that it is necessary to point out one or two of the Minister's comments which I do not think are quite accurate. First, on behalf of my noble friend who is proposing STV in local elections, it is rather odd that the Government are not going to allow some councils that might want to move to STV as a pilot scheme to do so, particularly as most of those councils are currently controlled by a majority of Liberal Democrats and would almost certainly go without overall control under STV. In terms of political advantage, I would have thought that the Minister would be grabbing our hands off, but never mind.
The Minister also said that STV would do away with the link between the geographical area, the councillor and the electors. That is not true. STV requires multi-member electoral areas, which we have, as we discussed, in many areas in local government. They might be a bit bigger than three-member wards or they might be three-member wards, but the Scottish local government system has just moved from single-member wards towards those with two, three or four councillors. They retain as much of a link as I have in my ward, where two colleagues sit on the council with me. Whether I get elected by STV is a different matter, but who knows?
The other inaccuracy was that I am not proposing that the supplementary vote system should be replaced in favour of either the additional member system or STV; I am proposing that it should be replaced by the alternative vote system. That is not a proportional representation system; it is a different way of electing a single person. I hope that those are helpful comments.
I shall also reply very briefly to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham. Again, we are not proposing proportional representation for the election of mayors because you cannot divide one mayor between different people; it is just a different way of electing the mayor. I ask her whether she and the Conservative Party support the supplementary vote system or whether they would like to abolish it and go back to first past the post for elections of mayors. We already have a different system for electing mayors. My submission is that it does not work; the system was bust before it started. It ought to be replaced with a system that actually does what the supplementary vote system sets out to do.
The noble Lord, Lord Graham, said that we had lots of outlandish electoral systems, but I do not think that the one which I am trying to abolish—the supplementary vote system—exists anywhere else in the world. It is not outlandish in a technical sense; it is an invention of this country and it is time that we uninvented it.
I hope that this was a useful discussion. There is a problem here: the supplementary vote system does not work properly. It has all sorts of problems. Whatever system is used in future for mayors and for any elected executives that ever get off the ground, this system is not the answer. I hope that as part of their review the Government will seriously think about it. My question for the Minister is whether this review of electoral systems includes a review of the supplementary vote specifically. Will the supplementary vote be included in the review when it comes out later this year? It is good to hear that that will happen later this year.
I can explain the terms of reference to the noble Lord if that would be helpful. The review is looking at the electoral systems used in the UK for the National Assembly for Wales, the Scottish Parliament, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the European parliamentary elections and the Greater London Assembly and mayoral elections. It is also looking at the international experience of voting systems which mirror those used in the UK. It will look at findings of the Jenkins report, the Independent Commission on Proportional Representation, the Richard commission, and the Commission on Boundary Differences and Voting Systems. I hope that that helps.
Hidden in the middle of that were the words “mayoral elections”. I therefore take it that the noble Baroness's answer was yes. We look forward to that later this year and to renewing the discussion then. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendment No. 112A not moved.]
Clause 61 agreed to.
Clause 62 [Executive arrangements for England]:
moved Amendment No. 113:
113: Clause 62, page 33, line 6, leave out subsection (2)
The noble Baroness said: I will also speak to Amendments Nos. 113A and 125. This group, which also contains Amendments Nos. 121A and 126, covers two separate issues. I apologise to the Committee if I have contributed to the muddle—there was an attempt at degrouping last night, which does not seem to have stuck. Some of issues were over whether one of the amendments was acceptable, but I do not think that that should prevent us from debating the principles involved.
The first of the two issues is whether an authority should have complete flexibility and a complete menu of choice in the arrangements that it puts in place to undertake and discharge its functions. Our Benches think that it should. Earlier in Committee, my noble friend Lady Scott referred to Henry Ford saying, “Any model as long as it’s black”. To continue the analogy, there are one or two different models here, but not the whole range of vehicles. We believe that local authorities should have the choice. The Government talk a great deal about freedoms and flexibilities and about devolving decisions and so on. In short, why do the Government feel the need to prescribe?
The second issue is about what the 2000 Act calls “alternative arrangements”. I find that terminology bizarre, because those arrangements were the norm; when they became characterised as “alternative”, that in some way debased and devalued them. It is only so-called small councils, serving populations of fewer than 85,000, that have been entitled to operate the so-called alternative arrangements, which are closer to the old committee system than the executive/scrutiny model. In practice, these arrangements are not now quite the same as the old committee system. Why are the Government so intent on blocking that system? What is the problem? I have not heard any arguments for the structure itself being inherently faulty. I do not recall hearing arguments at the time of the 2000 Act that it was such a bad structure that it should be restricted to small councils. Ensuring that small councils need not go through the upheaval of creating an executive/scrutiny split and enabling them to continue in their old ways was something of a concession. However, it is becoming the accepted wisdom that those old ways have something wrong with them.
In the debates in the Commons committee, the Minister talked about the “devolutionary and pragmatic approach” taken in 2000. As far as I can see, he did not argue why that was right or wrong then or whether it was something that the Government gave in to. As I was very much involved, I happen to know that the figure of 85,000 was the subject of some trading between the Government and these Benches; we got it up from the original figure to increase choice at local authority level. A lot of what we have heard is not argument but assertion. I hope that tonight we hear argument—about the merits or demerits of that system and of giving local authorities greater choice than the Government seem prepared to accept—not simply assertion, which has tended to be the case in a number of answers to earlier amendments. Ministers have said, “We don’t agree with the noble Lord because we don’t agree”, instead of taking us through all the arguments and enabling us to understand how the Government arrived at their conclusion.
Of the other amendments in the group, we might have tabled Amendment No. 125 as a consequential amendment. However, this is now one of those God and Robert Browning moments. Browning is said to have said, “When I wrote this, God and I knew what it meant. Now only God knows”. If the Minister feels that it is difficult to respond, I will have considerable sympathy. I beg to move.
I support my noble friend Lady Hamwee in her attempt to introduce more flexibility and choice in the models of governance available to local authorities. I want to make a number of points. The experience of the last few years has shown no particular appetite among the public for the elected mayoral model, which suggests that the general public are wary of the prospect of the concentration of power in the hands of one individual. The public are being rather wiser than the Government. Certainly until now the majority of referendums held on the mayoral model have resulted in no support for a mayor.
There are some practical difficulties, which are not insurmountable, but about which the Government need to think carefully before going too far down the road of forcing local authorities to choose the mayoral model. There is a real possibility that in many areas, at the time of election, there might be a particularly contentious local issue—it might be not even council related, but something like a hospital closure. A mayor might get elected on the back of a single-issue campaign. There is nothing wrong with that, except that under this model that person will then have complete control of the local authority, with a budget of many millions of pounds, and yet might well have had almost nothing at all to say about other council services.
Nor is there any evidence of a great groundswell of support for mayors once the referendum has decided that there will be a mayor. My noble friend Lord Greaves, speaking to an earlier amendment, referred to the situation in Torbay. There the turnout for the mayoral election was 24 per cent, and there were 14 candidates. The level of popular support for the winning candidate—for the person who exercises all this executive authority in that area—was very low indeed. The Government need to understand that someone is not a strong leader because they or the Government say that they are a strong leader; they are a strong leader partly because of the way in which they govern in their area, but also partly because they have a level of popular support. With the low turnout and all the problems that we have heard about from my noble friend Lord Greaves about how the supplementary vote system works, there is a real problem for people identifying with the mayor.
I urge the Government not to get too carried away with the London example, because London is not typical. Around the country, there are few figures as prominent and well known as Ken Livingstone is here. The political realities and the cultures of local authorities vary enormously across the country and reflect the history of the area. A wider range of leadership models enables councils to choose a model that better suits their culture, ethos and tradition.
Another practical difficulty worries me, to which I hope the Government have given some thought. Under the old committee system in particular, people rose through the ranks, in effect. They chaired sub-committees and then they chaired major committees or held Cabinet positions. All those jobs provided testing grounds for them where they learnt their craft and where colleagues and the public could decide whether or not they were suitable people. Under the new system it is difficult to see where the mayors of tomorrow will come from. Where will they get their experience when there are no other executive positions on offer?
I strongly support my noble friend Lady Hamwee in saying that there is no evidence from past performance that the leadership models impact directly on the quality of local government produced. In recent years, central government has thrown a raft of inspection regimes at local government, all of which have shown an improvement across the board, with no evidence to link that to the style of governance. I could be cruel and point out that the governance model chosen for Stoke-on-Trent’s council resulted in its performance plummeting.
I support the amendment and urge the Government, if they really want to be taken seriously on devolution, to give local authorities more choice over the single most important issue facing them—their style of governance. If the Government are not prepared to let go and give local government that choice, I am afraid that all their words on devolution will be seen as meaningless rhetoric.
Amendment No. 121A in the group seeks to do very much the same as the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—to restore to local government, if it wishes, the possibility of a committee system. That is ruled out by the Local Government Act 2000, except in local authorities with populations of 85,000 or under. Neither of the Ministers was here at that time, but I assure them that it was a very hard-fought battle that ended up with a limit of 85,000—no more than that—for local authorities to be allowed to maintain their committee system.
It would be a flight of fancy if anyone believed that the Cabinet model or the elected mayor model worked to the benefit of all councillors. It is of enormous importance to people in the Cabinet, who now earn enormous sums of money for being there—rightly, in view of their extra responsibility. But to think that overview and scrutiny is the perfect role for ward councillors who are not in the Cabinet or not associated with it would, frankly, not be exact. It is not a great job and it carries with it no power of decision. Many people elected to local government believe that they will go in with an ability to influence decision-making.
Practically all overview and scrutiny is retrospective. In my local authority, there is a very short timescale for calling in a decision before it is made. That is one way of looking at a decision, but the decision is in the hands of either the Cabinet member—as is mostly the case—or the Cabinet. A back-bencher’s role in that is limited. It is also true that decisions are not scrutinised before they are made to anything like the same extent as previously. People used to deride the committee system and say, “Oh, it was only a rubber stamp”, but I can remember many occasions when it looked as if committee decisions were about to go through but came under very sharp scrutiny from back-bench members who knew exactly what they were talking about and who could make a committee chairman extremely uncomfortable because he had not taken into account a lot of the detail.
I do not imagine that all local authorities would want to go back to a committee and sub-committee system. I do not imagine that they would necessarily want to adapt an executive to have a supporting committee system. But why should local authorities not have the option of doing that? Why should they not have the option of making sure that their back-benchers are included in a way that is satisfactory to them? We are going around in hoops and loops trying to make sure that this has happened. The right to call in decisions will do something simply to rectify what cannot happen under the present system of bringing matters forward. One was always able to do it, but now it is not possible and we have to have different ways of doing it.
There are many structures and we need to look at all of them. This structure was denigrated and ruled out at the time. We should expand our systems of administration to allow the committee and sub-committee system to come back as part of the arrangements that local authorities are allowed to adopt.
Not for the first time today I have been educated in the current practices within councils. I have never hidden the fact that I am a yesterday’s man in terms of involvement in local government. I attend my party meetings and I meet my local councillors, who all have my respect. We are reflecting on whether the existing system is working. Colleagues involved in it are telling me that it does not. As an observer of the situation, I have no evidence that it does not.
I realise that there are two tiers of councillors—those who are at the top table and those who are not—but my knowledge of my local councils is that those councillors who are not at the top table are keen to get there. They have opportunities of demonstrating to their colleagues that they are able or more able to serve at the top table, because that is where the power lies. The breadth of change, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, referred, is that those who have Cabinet responsibility have been remunerated considerably. I come from an era when I did not get a penny. I soldiered on, always thinking that I ought to get a penny, but I never did. I have no hang-up regarding those who carry responsibilities of not only taking decisions but defending them afterwards being paid for that. That is the way that the system works here—people who have responsibility are paid for it and are answerable.
The thrust of the Bill from the beginning has been to try not only to elevate the concept of leadership, with a capital “L”, in relation to the mayor, the leader or the chairman, but to change the atmosphere and the environment of leadership. We can all think back over previous years when there was a good man or woman in local government who, in the first instance, had the respect of their colleagues and, in the second instance, demonstrated their abilities to the public.
On balance, I am in favour of trying to ensure that there is powerful leadership in the council. That does not mean that people who do not have ebullient personalities are debarred from leadership, because quality of leadership comes in many shapes and sizes. It is not always the best speaker or debater who is the best leader, because the leader not only has to speak, but also has to weld the team together, create the best policies and be the best public relations man or woman.
The system that we have in existence, for good or ill, is still at a very early stage—only six or seven years in. I do not detect a groundswell among councillors, and certainly not among members of the Labour Party, that there is something inherently wrong in the present system, but I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say, because she will be equipped not only with a point of view, but with experience and evidence to back it up.
My Amendment No. 126 in this group would tackle the problem in a slightly different way by simply removing the 85,000 limit—which is an odd historic limit anyway going back eight or nine years—and allowing councils to have what are called alternative arrangements but which I would call, following the language used in the House of Commons debates, “an enhanced committee system”. Nobody is suggesting going back to the old systems in every detail. What we are suggesting is a system based on committees or a hybrid system. There is no reason why a hybrid executive and committee system cannot work. Indeed, many councils have one because they have area committees which take quite a lot of executive decisions. That is allowed under Section 18 of the 2000 Act. We will discuss that when we reach later amendments.
It does not matter whether there is a groundswell across the country. The important thing in a devolutionary era is whether people in an authority feel strongly that they want to change the system and have the ability to change it in the way that they think will deliver the best local government. The Government sometimes talk as though they are the ones advocating good community leadership, efficient councils, good delivery of services and lots of local vision and everyone else is going back to the 19th century. There was plenty of local vision in the 19th century. It is simply a question of there being different ways of achieving the same things. Why should people on the ground in their own councils not make those decisions? We have heard so much devolutionary rhetoric but now that we are getting on to some major issues, the devolutionary rhetoric seems to be scuttling away under the floorboards.
We will discuss the role of councillors later so I will not go into that now. When the word “committee” is raised, people talk about horses and camels—a camel being a horse designed by a committee. That may be true but what are committees for? Nobody would employ a committee to design a new house or—I was going to say transport system but perhaps that is wrong. Design is something best done by professionals who go away and do it. Then it comes back and, like the Olympic logo, you say, “Yes, this is wonderful”, or, “This is a load of rubbish”. If you are sensible and it is a load of rubbish, you kick it out. That is how good design is done. You would not employ a committee to design a horse. Let us look at some other analogies. What is a donkey? A donkey is a horse designed by bureaucrats. What is an elephant? An elephant is a horse designed by self-important leaders. What is a giraffe? A giraffe is a horse designed by policy wonks in Downing Street.
Take that as you wish, but what are committees good at? Committees are good at discussion. We are in Committee now and we are discussing things. It is far easier to involve members of the public in council decisions if you have good functioning committees because there is a forum where people can take part in the discussion. If they are run properly, are efficient and are given or develop choices, they are actually quite good at making decisions, particularly at local level where they are acting on behalf of the community. Nobody ever agrees on everything—there are always different interests and different points of view—but a good functioning representative committee can make the decision in open session in public. People may not like it, but at least they are able to come along, listen, take part and see that decisions are being taken democratically. If decisions are made by one person, how on earth does that process happen? If there are single-party executives on councils—I have to point out that I am a member of one—it is not satisfactory.
I am, for my sins, the executive member for housing market renewal in Pendle. As part of the housing market renewal pathfinder, the council gets about £9 million a year to invest in the area, which is a lot of money for an ordinary, small district council, so we wanted an executive member who was responsible for it. I said that I would do it, but only on the condition that I could have a committee. I now chair the housing market renewal committee. People can come along to the forum. If they do not like our decisions, they come and shout at us. When we have real choices to make, people come and tell us what they think. It is all done in public and the debates are reported in the local newspapers. This year, I have even insisted that we have members of the opposition groups on the committee. That is the scrutiny element of committees that the noble Baroness spoke about, which is so important.
The old committee system was not wonderful in all places. In some places it worked very well and in others—such as Lancashire County Council, of which I used to be a member—it was not all that good. But a huge amount of scrutiny took place. That was the function. Far better scrutiny took place under that old system than takes place in the artificial, manufactured way in which overview and scrutiny committees work nowadays.
I am not saying that all the new arrangements are bad and that they do not work in many places. They do. We are saying that people should be given the choice to do what is best for their council in their circumstances and to evolve the structures that they want. If the Government really believe in letting go, that is what they have to do.
This has been an important debate as Clause 62 is part of the main architecture of the Bill. I am grateful for all the contributions. I was particularly struck by the excursion of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, into some of the wider issues, because he was exploring, in different ways, some of the tensions between leadership and scrutiny. We shall talk about some of those issues on later amendments.
Clause 62 provides for changes to the executive arrangements that local authorities in England can adopt. It does that by amending Section 11 of the Local Government Act 2000. The three executive models that we propose will be set out in the Bill. I hope to meet the challenge that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, raised about providing evidence, not assertion, on why leadership is important and why we have chosen this route.
Amendments Nos. 113, 113A, 121A and 126 all have the same effect, which is to reject that route and, in different ways, to seek to maintain the status quo, enabling any council, regardless of size of type, to operate any form of governance arrangements as they see fit, including alternative arrangements or other arrangements which do not involve any form of executive.
I shall try to explain our thoughts on Amendment No. 125 to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, when I reach that point. Briefly, as I understand it, it seeks to preserve for England the option of all members of the executive being elected to the council, but I shall have a slightly longer answer to give on that. I shall not reiterate what the amendments seek to achieve but will move on to the debate about the system of governance that we are proposing.
The first thing that we can all agree on is that the challenges facing local councils are different from what they were five or 10 years ago. It is not just that the pressures are intensifying or that resources have to be spread wider. As was summed up in the Lyons report, councils are no longer just agents of service delivery. What Lyons said, and what the councils themselves are saying, is that there is more to the local council than simply ensuring that schools are good, hospitals thrive and the streets are clean. It is not just about meeting new challenges that we could not have envisaged 10 years ago, such as climate change, mitigation and anticipation, and all the changes that they imply, or the pressures of ageing. It is about the role of the council in envisaging and developing the shape of the place. It is a good phrase because, although it is slightly elliptical, we all know what the making and shaping of a place means. It is a broader vision that requires different sorts of leadership. In order to underpin this change of culture, about which my noble friend who is not in his place was talking and which we set out in the White Paper, we collected evidence over a period about the real impact of leadership on best value and effectiveness. I shall come to that shortly.
As we stated in our White Paper:
“Places need clear vision and strong leadership to deal with constantly changing economic, social, environmental, and cohesion challenges”.
The New Council Constitutions: Findings from the 2005 ELG Sample Survey showed that the arrangements that were introduced by the 2000 Act support visible and effective leadership. It was an independent report that was updated in June. It showed that since 2000 there have been changes. Councils have taken on the new freedoms. There are three sets of new freedoms. Some have taken on all of them and others have made cautious progress. Nevertheless, there has been a shift towards more concentrated leadership. The final report of the Long-term Evaluation of the Best Value Regime showed clearly that leadership is the most significant driver of change and improvement in local authorities.
That is one set of evidence, but we also have another very recent set of evidence. At Second Reading, we published a report, Does Leadership Matter. It was a thorough academic report undertaken by the same research team led by Professor Gerry Stoker. The evidence is very comprehensive but it boils down to this:
“There is general agreement that the aim of enhancing effective leadership has been met and that the new executive arrangements have bedded down well, thus providing more visible and effective leadership and quicker decision-making which is in turn associated with better service delivery ... Taken together, our findings show a consistent relationship between on the one hand, authorities with a stable political leadership and authorities that have over a period of time given the full range of powers to their leaders and, on the other hand a better service performance and greater citizen satisfaction”.
On the one hand we have the challenge of doing things differently because we need to, but we also have the evidence that building on what came in 2000 is a movement for a greater concentration of power. That is the direction of travel and the evidence suggests that it is working.
We believe that the key to success in local government is strong and accountable leadership. We have come forward with what we think is necessary. All the surveys of stakeholders, councillors and officials demonstrate four things: the new arrangements show that decision-making is quicker; the role of the leader has become stronger; the leader of the council has a higher public profile; and the council’s relations with partners have improved.
We are in no way pushing the mayoral model to the exclusion of the other three set out in Clause 62, but the mayoral models are perceived to be out-performing the non-mayoral authorities when it comes to effective local leadership. They get higher marks across a whole series of criteria. They also get higher overall approval ratings. More than 50 per cent of councillors and nearly 75 per cent of officers also believe that under the new arrangements the executive has become more effective in articulating a vision.
I would not dispute that the best leaders can be successful in any system, but the executive governance arrangements that we have set out are most likely to lead to and support strong accountable leadership. I think that we have reached a point in local government history and in national and local government where we need to take more decisive steps, which is what the Bill will bring about.
Noble Lords have spoken with great eloquence, but with a little scepticism too, about the old committee system. It found few friends. Even Simon Milton has been quoted as being critical of the system and saying we would not want to return to it. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said that it was not perfect. From reading the deliberations in another place and from what people said, it was virtually invisible to most people. Nobody knew who were on these committees. When I was working in the voluntary sector it was extremely hard to find out whom one should approach and how, or what the process was.
Perhaps I may invite the noble Baroness to have discussions with her colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, who was chairman of the education committee of Lancashire County Council. She was one of the best known politicians in the county; she had a presence and was highly respected throughout the county. I give that as one extremely good example, but what the Minister is saying is not actually true.
If we had had a Labour council and Josie Farrington in East Sussex things might have been very different. She is an outstanding example.
Very few people knew what the remit of the committees was. In the other place, a whole raft of arguments was given from first-hand experience about the obstructive nature of some of the committees and the obscure nature of some of the work. I do not want to denigrate the committees, nor, God forbid, the people who served on them, because they worked very well over many years. But the 2000 Act recognised that things had to change. The noble Lord seemed to suggest that they worked better for smaller authorities—the fewer than 85,000—than for larger authorities where there was a bigger challenge. We began to explore the tension between leadership and scrutiny. That is the balance expressed in the White Paper and the Bill. Yes, we have to have stronger leadership, but we also have to have greater powers of scrutiny. This is an opportunity for the ward councillors now to develop their own profile in a way that has not been possible before. We shall come to the role of the overview and scrutiny committees and the community calls for action, and so on.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said that the committee system brought on trained people but I fail to see why that cannot be developed under the existing and future system. Many of the overview and scrutiny committees themselves are turning into policy and development committees as they review the work of the council. As my noble friend said, it feeds ambition.
In the three models that we have set out—the leader and Cabinet executive, the mayor and Cabinet executive, and an elected executive—we are allowing for choice, but within a set of principles that say that we require stronger, more visible and more accountable leadership. That is required in modern local government and that is where the strength lies. This is an area on which we disagree, but I hope that we can tease out some of these issues during our deliberations.
I turn briefly to Amendment No. 125, which seeks to preserve the option of a council being able to elect all the members of the executive. As we have previously discussed, the new leader and the cabinet model, which the Bill introduces, removes that option. In future the cabinet will be appointed by the leader. We shall debate that on the next amendment. In this way, as I have explained, we think that coherent and stable leadership is more easily created.
Noble Lords might have asked why Welsh authorities appear to retain the option of electing their leadership group—I know that I am giving the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, even more ammunition for a future exchange. Clauses 62 and 63 seek to modify the 2000 Act provisions in relation to English authorities but we intend to leave unchanged the detailed provision in relation to Wales, as that is obviously a matter for the Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Government.
While I suspect that we may not agree, I hope that, with that statement of principle, I have been able to provide at least more than an assertion of why we are doing what we are.
I thank the noble Baroness and wish to continue the debate with a few further points. First, I want to put on record that no one on these Benches is suggesting that leadership is not important. As someone who worked for some years undertaking assessments of councils for the Audit Commission, I was always absolutely clear that the highest performing councils were those with the most effective leadership.
The point at issue is that the 2000 Act brought in some changes to the governance of councils. My own council at the time, Suffolk County Council, made an early move away from the committee system towards a cabinet style because we felt it a better system of governance. At that stage, it was our decision to make, based on our assessment of what was best for our area.
That philosophical point underpins the fundamental problem that the Liberal Democrats have with the Government’s position. The Government say that the various challenges faced by local authorities are so dreadful that they absolutely must have strong leaders—super-people, who will appear to lead councils and sail through all the challenges—but that none of those people can be trusted to decide how their own areas should be governed; they can only have a range of options from central government. The Government seem to have a Janus-type attitude, saying on the one hand, “We want strong, powerful councils” and, on the other, “You are not sensible enough to choose your own model of governance”.
If some systems of governance have clearly better outcomes than others, councils will move to those themselves having seen the benefits. They should not have to be required by central government, through legislation, to adopt a particular style. It is difficult for the Government to say to local councils, on the one hand, “We trust you and want you to be strong”, and on the other, “We do not trust you enough to decide how you run your own affairs”.
I am sure that we will continue this subject through the subsequent stages of this Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, suggested that I wrote down “Too soon to change”, and then I wrote “Exactly!”— for the benefit of Hansard, there is an exclamation mark after that.
My noble friend Lady Scott has made the point well that effective leadership is not the same as so-called strong leadership. Leadership can be shown not merely through the Government’s formal leadership models; there were some good examples of it under the old style. We are told that the new models will help with—it is so full of jargon—place-shaping. The noble Baroness’s description of that as moving away from local administration of services dictated centrally made me think, “Yes, that was what we had before there was so much dictation from the centre”. I agree with her analysis that there is a problem there, although not with her solution.
As my noble friends and others have said, there is further debate to be had on the role of the ward councillor, so I wish to make only one further comment. It was suggested that, currently, where a strong leader is identified, the council’s relations with its partners have been improved. I find that a curious concept. If relationships with partners depend on there being an individual to whom they can relate, that is a poor state of affairs when we are talking about public services. As I say, I am sure that we will come back to this area.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for explaining my Amendment No. 125. I knew that I had a good reason for tabling it. I was confused when I looked at it again today and thought, “Aren’t we letting the Welsh do their own thing?”. That would be the right thing to do, but my analysis of it in the first instance was better than I had realised. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendment No. 113A not moved.]
moved Amendment No. 114:
114: Clause 62, page 33, line 19, leave out “the executive leader” and insert “one of the following—
(i) the executive leader, or(ii) the authority.”
The noble Lord said: This amendment appears on its own because it deals with a specific issue: who appoints the executive of a council when there is a leader and executive model. Section 11(3)(b) of the Local Government Act 2000 is exactly as set out in my amendment. I am merely trying to maintain the status quo.
The Government are trying to suggest that the executive, in a leader and executive model, should simply be appointed by the leader of the council. When, or if, this provision goes through, and when it is reported to councils that this is what they have to do, there will be astonishment in the land. The idea is that the whole council will not be able to choose the members of its executive or cabinet body—I hesitate to use the word “committee”, but I do not know what executives are, if not committees—and will only be able to appoint a leader, who will then appoint the members of the executive. Some councils may do that at the moment under the 2000 Act, or they can elect the executive, probably at their annual meeting.
I do not know of any council with the model that the Government suggest. I am sure there are plenty, but they are perhaps not councils that I know about, which would suggest that they are not ordinary district councils. Most of the councils that I know about around the country, where I have colleagues with whom I communicate quite frequently, tend to be district councils or metropolitan district councils. People will be astonished at the idea that a council’s constitution cannot provide for a system in which the executive—by far the most important body in the council now—is appointed or elected at the annual meeting.
When this was discussed in Committee in the House of Commons, there was some fascinating debate. The then local government Minister, Mr Woolas, a Nelsonian gone to other pastures, said—and I paraphrase him—“Well, it does not really matter, because councillors will get round it anyway, won’t they?” That is, they will come to their own arrangements, and things will carry on much as before, which may be the case. In my council, if we had a model where the leader appoints the executive, the leader would be appointed only on the terms that the executive is agreed by a much wider group of people than himself or herself. That is how a lot of councils will work; many get round what they saw as restrictions in the 2000 Act arrangements in such a way. They are probably making themselves more efficient and approachable, and better councils with better leadership, as a result. This will be regarded as an absolutely astonishing provision. People will think that the Government and this Parliament have gone mad if it goes through. I beg to move.
I support my noble friend’s amendment. The 2006 census of local councils showed that 41 per cent of those with the leader and cabinet model had adopted the approach proposed in the Bill; in other words, the leader appoints the cabinet in only 41 per cent of councils operating that system. That means that 59 per cent have a model that will be outlawed by this Bill. Again, that runs counter to all the devolutionary rhetoric of the Government. The Minster has talked about how much local government has improved under the new models. Since the majority are operating this system, it is difficult to see why the Government want to get rid of it. It is hard to see their rationale.
There are issues, particularly in areas where election by thirds will continue. Some councils will continue to exercise that option. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that political control would change but that, unless the leader himself is subject to a vote of no confidence, the council will not have to make any changes to the cabinet. Furthermore, the provision will be seen as a nail in the coffin of the back-benchers who, as we have heard and will continue to hear, feel disempowered by successive government policies. My noble friend is absolutely right that, if they feel that the opportunity to even have a say over who is in the cabinet is taken from them, people in local government up and down the land will be mystified.
I am only half in support of the amendment. It is worth thinking more about it. I come from an authority where the leader appoints the cabinet. There is quite a lot to be said for the fact that a leader who has been elected by the council should then be able to pick those whom they believe will do the job best. I accept that it is possible under an election system within a council for people to stand, be put forward and voted on. However, a leader must have confidence in the people with whom he or she serves. There are enormous advantages in being able to say to your colleagues, “I would like you to be part and parcel of this team”. It is ultimately a team. If the team does not work, and there are scratchy issues because somebody has been elected into it—forced in by other colleagues, as it were—there can be difficulties in how it operates.
I said that I was only half supporting the amendment, but there is probably a rationale for saying, “If you don’t want to do it that way, don’t”. You can have another way of doing it, and the authority can elect a cabinet as it elects the leader. I understand that that is what the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is doing, and see some sense in people having an alternative. My own preference would be to leave it as the Government have.
I am grateful for the noble Baroness’s support—I think it was actually slightly more than half. I was going to quote her outstanding example of Kensington and Chelsea as having a leader who elects the team. As we all know, her colleague the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, runs the council of a county the size of a small developing nation, and it has this same model. So, although the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, says that it is astonishing that we brought this provision forward, I do not think that it is. Indeed, 41 per cent of councils having followed this model is a significant number; I was going to quote that statistic myself. Across the Chamber, we will have disagreements on principle, but much of the logic of what we are trying to do will follow from Clause 62.
As reflected upon in the previous debate, there are ways of enabling leadership. Leadership does not happen by accident, and part of the logic we are faced with in this part of the Bill is that of building visibility and accountability—building what the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, called the team—so that people know who is taking the decisions and why they have chosen their routes across the different services, or whatever. I obviously cannot agree with the amendment, although I understand the spirit in which it is moved. However, in all the ways in which we have set out the notion of strong and prosperous communities, we have always explained why we would change the status quo and seek to make it possible for the leader to appoint the other members of the executive. This is one of the three freedoms identified in the research that I spoke of earlier. It is to enhance the effectiveness, coherence and collectivity of the leadership that they will be visible across the local area and, in so doing, encourage better leadership.
I do not see how the provision is a disincentive for ward councillors. The aspiration to become part of leadership is there in any case. However, it also shows that it is possible to grow leadership in different ways. Another piece of evidence I would like to refer to is the conclusions of the report on the state of English cities, published in 2006. That evidence shows that entrepreneurial leadership is absolutely crucial to finding new economic futures for cities, businesses and residents. All that inclines us towards thinking that we must have a more predictable system which plays to and identifies strengths. Enabling the council leader to build a team is the right way to go.
I am afraid that I am unable to accept the noble Lord’s amendment. I hope that he will feel able to withdraw it.
Can the Minister clarify a point for me? My understanding of the current system is that it is perfectly possible for leaders to operate the system now proposed. They do not need this legislation to do it. A council currently has a choice between a model in which the cabinet is elected by the council and one where it is chosen by the leader. I make no judgments about the relative merits of those two systems; for me, the important thing is that the choice remains. We have a problem with the removal of that choice under the Bill.
The noble Baroness is quite right. As I said, it is in the logic of the situation that we are trying to enable leadership to be stronger. We see this as part of that process.
I object to the continual assumption that those who do not agree with the Government’s polices and models are in favour of weak leadership.
Let me correct that impression. I never said that, and I do not believe it. I simply have some different ideas about how to enable leadership, and maybe about the imperatives of the conditions facing local government and the nation. I certainly would not parody the noble Lord’s position by saying that he was in favour of weak leadership.
I am grateful for that. I was being provocative, but there is an assumption throughout that, when the Government say “strong leadership”, that is what matters, as though opponents are not in favour of good leadership. We ought to be talking about the nature of leadership, and the Government’s view is oversimplified, to put it fairly simply. We are talking not about strong or weak leadership, but about good and better leadership. If that is what the Government mean by strong leadership, they must understand that there are different ways of doing that. Different ways may be appropriate for different councils, different communities and so on. For the Labour Party, of all bodies, to appear to dismiss the concept of collective leadership is an astonishing ideological U-turn that I do not subscribe to. It is perfectly possible to have consensual leadership, co-operative leadership, collective leadership or collegiate leadership and for it to be very good leadership indeed. If it works really well, it is better than having leadership by one person. The noble Baroness talked about entrepreneurial leadership. I keep trying to avoid talking about Pendle, but a good example of entrepreneurial leadership is the council’s incredibly quick decisions to invest in new buildings in the middle of Nelson as a joint venture with a local company.
That must be my phone. I beg the Committee’s pardon. It must be somebody from Pendle ringing to say, “Come on, get on with it”. If I can find out how to operate this thing—this is hopeless; I should curl up and die. There, I’ve switched it off. I apologise.
I shall say two more things. I agree that leadership does not happen by accident, but nor does it happen by imposing structures. It happens by good people getting into leadership positions and working together to make the structure work. Any structure that is adopted will have advantages and disadvantages, yet it has to work. I fear that the structures that the Government are proposing will be quite brittle when things get to crisis point.
My second point relates specifically to this amendment. It is okay if there is a group in overall control and it appoints the leader, who is elected by the council. The leader will probably appoint the people who have been negotiating within the group by one means or other. That will work. In a council with no overall control, as is often the case, that approach does not work quite so well. Who is on the executive will be a matter of negotiation between two or more of the parties or groups on the council. That is underpinned by the numbers on the council and by who sticks their hands up to vote. If that decision is taken away and put in the hands of one person, particularly if that person will be there for four years, everything can break down fairly quickly and a series of crises might result, because the system is not resilient or flexible enough to cope. I ask the Government to look at that. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
moved Amendment No. 115:
115: Clause 62, page 33, line 28, leave out subsection (6)
The noble Lord said: Am I on again? This is the first amendment in a long group about the proposed model for elected executives. This is an important issue in the Bill and will be a sticking point. There is considerable controversy about it. We are talking about it, yet I wonder whether it will happen very much. I wonder how many councils in the country will want to get involved in an elected executive model. I think I am on fairly safe ground in saying that there are not very many. From reading the interesting discussions in the House of Commons, we understand that a lot of this came from Stockton-on-Tees, which looked at the possibility in the 2000 Act to move to an elected executive and expressed an interest in it. It seems that it was given the advice that it was rather difficult and the Government had not thought it out, so the idea got stuck in this Bill to set out a perhaps more coherent, and certainly more comprehensive, model of how we might have an elected executive.
Amendment No. 115 is one of a number of amendments I have tabled to try to remove all the references to elected executives from the Bill. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, who found even more references than I did and has helped to produce a thorough list of things that need filleting out of the Bill. No doubt there are others that we have missed. The principle is that we would like to remove the references to an elected executive being a model because it is, frankly, daft. We can talk about the details of the Bill, but this is a matter where we have to say that the proposal being put forward is simply silly.
What is it? It is a proposal that a group of people, a political party or any other group of people can put forward for election across an authority a slate consisting of a proposed leader and a number of other members of the executive. As I understand it, between three and 10 people would stand for election and, having been elected, would form the leader and executive of the council. I think they would be councillors, although I am not very certain because the Bill states that the Government may make regulations to what extent they will be councillors. Presumably they will be councillors and will be called Councillor Bloggs or Councillor Ali or whatever. They will be elected across the district, so they will not represent wards. They will have no direct link of the kind that the noble Baroness was talking about, which is the link between a councillor and the people who regard him as their councillor and go to him when they have a problem or something to say. We all think that is important in whatever electoral system we want.
Who wants it? It is rumoured that Stockton-on-Tees may want it, or perhaps one or two leadership people in Stockton may want it, but it is not clear who else does. According to the report on the Public Bill Committee in the House of Commons, when the witnesses from the LGA were giving evidence they were asked where the demand came from and who put it forward. It is reported that the witnesses looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. They did not know, so it does not seem to have come from representatives of local government.
What effect would it have on the council? It would have all sorts of effects. There would be two kinds of councillors, so the problems that we have in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly with the additional member system would be repeated and would probably be much worse. The divisions that exist in many councils at the moment between executive and Cabinet councillors and back-benchers would inevitably be exacerbated because there would be councillors with no wards. It could unbalance the numbers—although the extent to which it would do that is not very clear—and produce a council that is not representative. If people voted differently or if there was a close vote under the supplementary vote system a slate could get in with perhaps only 35 per cent of the vote across the borough, whereas in individual ward elections quite different people might be elected because the votes would pile up in individual wards rather than being spread across the authority. There are all sorts of questions to be asked about electoral systems, and we will come on to them.
Finally, there is stand part on Clause 67. Clause 67, which is printed on pages 42 and 43 of the Bill, sets out in great detail how the executive will be elected. When the debates took place in the House of Commons, a number of people—my honourable friend Andrew Stunell was particularly prominent— pooh-poohed the idea that the size of the executive had to be fixed before the elections took place. The argument was that people might well have a choice of a small executive of three or four full-time people or a big executive of perhaps 10 people who would be part-time and would operate in a very different way, and that that choice could be put before the people.
The Government responded to that, and we now have the extraordinary stuff on pages 42 and 43 about the different kinds of election there might be. It is not that there will be a choice of the people standing, but that the council will decide whether it has to be a definite number of people, can be a number of people,
“the same as, or greater than, the specified minimum membership, but ... must not be greater than the specified maximum membership”,
or,
“must be 3 or more”.
The whole system is a muddle and quite extraordinarily complex. Few people if any are going to take part in it—there might be two or three councils putting themselves forward as pioneers but my guess is that they will come scuttling back like Stoke-on-Trent, saying, “The Government got it wrong. Can it be unscrambled?”.
I hope this House might take these provisions out before the Bill goes back to the Commons, and ask the Government to seriously think again about what is an incredibly flawed proposal. We are not there yet—we are in Committee, discussing it in detail—and on that basis I look forward to the Minister’s reply and what she can possibly say to justify this extraordinary nonsense. I do not want to blame her for it, but she has to defend it. I look forward to the debate. On that basis, I beg to move.
I have a number of amendments in this group and also support Amendment No. 115. I agree with the noble Lord; this is one of the most extraordinary proposals in the Bill. It is also extraordinarily inchoate. I start by drawing the Committee’s attention to the amendments that I have tabled. Rather magnanimously, Amendment No. 152 is an admission that if there were an elected executive, it ought to be able to increase in size if it needed to. The amendment would allow it to do so, though I hope, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, that by the time we get to the end of this Bill there will be neither sight nor sign of an elected executive.
Amendments Nos. 154 to 156 and Amendment No. 159 would all remove references to the elected executive and elected leader. Amendments Nos. 168 and 169 cancel out the references to an elected executive in new Section 40D. Clause 76 provides for supplementary provision for the dates of the years of the election of mayors and executive members, and the amendments would remove that as well.
The arguments against an elected executive are manifold. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has laid out a number of them. The questions that arise from this are also extensive. First, where in the world has a system such as this been used before? Secondly, how will this elected executive be supernumerary to the council? That is what it looks as if it will be under new Section 40C. Thirdly, how can councillors be elected to an elected executive if they have not been elected? Presumably the elected executives have to be elected at the same time as the elections. Do you stand as both an elected executive member and a councillor, or can you stand for just one? If, as I understand it, you stand as both a councillor and a member of the elected executive and you are then elected, do you have to then stand down as a councillor? If so, a by-election is caused.
Where on earth does this get us? It presupposes that there are insufficient people on the council suitable to be senior executives on that council. What does that say of the confidence that people have in their council and councillors? Why should local authorities be hoicking around trying to find people suitable to run education, housing or finance who cannot be found from within the council? That is what it amounts to. You will have to find specific people to adopt specific roles and then try to have them elected on a slate. What happens if you then want to extend that executive? As it is, you have to go with a certain number to have them elected. If anyone is subsequently appointed to the Cabinet, does that leave them as second-class citizens because they were not elected as a member of the executive?
It is the most extraordinary proposal I have seen. I have not seen any justification for it, nor have I heard through my local government networks any support for it whatever. Presumably the Government have ideas as to how this should work and what its value would be, yet it is hard to see what that is. My amendments try to ensure that it does not see the light of day.
I find myself in something of a quandary on this because I agree absolutely with the assessments of my noble friend Lord Greaves and the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, that this has to be one of the daftest proposals that has ever come forward. In the interests of consistency, having argued all the way through Committee for choice, part of me thinks that this should remain on the table so that any local authority daft enough at least has the option to choose it. Since we have been talking about leadership so much tonight, there is a question about the leadership of the Government. By putting this option into the Bill, with all its unworkable elements, I am not convinced that they are exercising their leadership responsibilities. They are tempting local authorities into choosing a model with all these inherent flaws.
I am mystified by the genesis of this option, too. My noble friend Lord Greaves referred to the allegation of Stockton-on-Tees being the birthplace of this. I am mystified as to why some chance remarks by one local authority have led to pages and pages in a Bill, whereas on the previous amendment we were discussing a model which is currently used quite well by 59 per cent of local authorities being thrown out by the Government. I fail to see the logic of the Government’s position on that.
I must confirm a couple of facts to check that have I understood this correctly. If the leader goes, does the entire slate then go too—so that everyone goes, whether the leader went under a bus or simply became ill or resigned? Does that also apply to each individual member of the slate? What happens if a member of the Cabinet is seen not to be performing well? Does the leader have the option of sacking and replacing them, or do we again have to have a fresh set of elections? Under this model, can members put themselves forward both as members of the slate and as ward councillors? If they are elected to take Cabinet office, will they automatically have to resign immediately from their ward council role, causing an immediate by-election? What is going to happen if, as a result of by-elections, there is a change of political control? These questions highlight just some of the potential flaws in the system.
I am in no doubt about where the noble Lords opposite stand on our proposals. Their position is rather unfair, and I am glad that the noble Baroness acknowledged this. Having berated us for being so draconian, they now tell us, when we come forward with the choice of three executive models, to take one away because of what has been said about it. I can best answer the questions that have been raised if I address the stand part debates, which will enable me to take the Committee briefly through the clauses themselves. Many of the amendments that have been brought forward in the filleting process that has been so expertly and jointly carried out by the parties opposite relate to the same issues and are consequential.
This is a new, innovative model. There are international precedents and we should not turn our backs on the experience of the directly elected executives in Switzerland and Portugal. Indeed, it was the Geneva council that inspired our interest in the model. Essentially, this is a new model, which has the potential to deliver visible and accountable leadership. It is very similar to the elected mayor model but powers are put in the hands of a slate. This is not a new concept in British politics; a slate reflects the notion of a team rather than an individual. In this model there is a complete separation of powers between the executive and front-line councillors, which will enhance the competence of the councils to challenge the executive. It will also do another job in representing the local community. So it is not as daft as it has been described.
Perhaps I may now address the stand part debates. Clause 67 amends the Local Government Act 2000 to provide for the new model. Clauses 69 and 71 are consequential to that and ensure that there are provisions in relation to executive members and the elections to the executive. How will that work? Clause 67 makes provision in relation to elected executives by inserting new Sections 40A to 40C into the 2000 Act. New Section 40A provides for the leader and other members of the elected executive to be elected by all local government electors in the authority’s area. It requires that elections for an elected executive take place on the same day as ordinary council elections, as for elected mayors. Yes, to answer the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, new Section 40A provides that members of the elected executive, once elected, are treated as members of the council for the purposes of enactments to be specified in regulations, subject to all the normal rules of qualification, disqualification and so on, just as with the elected mayors.
New Section 40B makes provision for the election of the slate. Anyone wishing to be a member of an elected executive—
Perhaps I may ask one question: will they be members of the council in terms of voting in the council? Will they sit in the council chamber and vote with the other councillors?
Yes. They are full members of the council.
As an interruption has taken place, perhaps I may ask a question. This slate of people could be put together by the ruling party when going up to the election, but presumably rate payers could put together a selection of people whom they would like to elect. You could end up with a leadership consisting of people who were completely away from the majority of the elected council.
That makes it even barmier.
But there is no reason why anyone should. It is unlikely. We are looking for local parties to put forward their own slates, of which there may be more than one.
New Section 40B makes provision that anyone wishing to become a member of an elected executive must be included in the list of persons who are seeking to be returned. The council can specify whether or not the elections for elected executives should be contested by proposed executives consisting of the same number of members or whether to allow the elections to be contested by proposed executives of different sizes. That is what the noble Lord was referring to in the table that specifies the different sizes. There is a minimum and a maximum size. In fact, the Local Government Act 2000 determined the maximum size as 10. But where a council specifies the minimum and maximum number for proposed elected executives, it will also be able to specify a minimum number below which the membership of the elected executive may not fall without triggering a by-election. I shall come on to what triggers a by-election in a moment.
New Section 40C allows a person to stand as both a councillor and a member of the proposed executive—that answers the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham—and makes provision as to what should happen in the event of a councillor being returned as a member of the executive. If elected, a vacancy will arise in the office of councillor and it will prompt the need for a by-election. So, yes, if a member of the slate also stands as a ward councillor and is elected as a ward councillor, a by-election will at that point be triggered. It is the same situation as arises when a person is returned at the same time as both an elected mayor and a councillor. Like an elected mayor, an elected executive member will have been elected by all the electors and therefore should act in the interests of the whole council area, not just in the interests of a specific ward or county division. Clauses 69 and 71 are consequential on that.
I apologise again for interrupting. I hope that the noble Baroness was not suggesting that all the existing councillors who represent wards and divisions in England represent only their wards and their divisions and do not look at the interests of the whole area. That would be outrageous.
I am not suggesting that. In this model, we are making a distinction between the executive, which represents the whole area, and the ward councillor, who represents his ward. Of course the ward councillor will also take an interest in the whole area but, in the executive model, there is a difference in the function of the executive and the ward councillor in that sense.
I am sorry. I speak as a member of an executive who has got to know lots of others. Surely the vast majority of people who are in executives and in cabinets in local authorities, whatever model it is, represent their ward just as much as they represent the whole area. What are known now as front-line councillors or ward councillors, particularly in regard to their overview and scrutiny functions, are councillors for the whole area. It has always been the case that councillors have different responsibilities; they represent the people who have elected them and they represent the council in the whole area. There is no real conflict in this. The Government are introducing conflicts and tensions that they cannot get rid of at the very heart of local government.
I stick by what I have said. I am certainly not disputing what the noble Lord said about the present arrangements.
Clause 69 includes within the definition of “elected executive member” the members of an elected executive. The legislation provides that the other categories of members that come within the definition of elected executive member could be—would be—members of some new form of executive created by regulations under Section 11(5) of the 2000 Act. That section provides for other forms of executive models, which we will discuss later. We do not have any plans today for any extra executive models, but the power is there. Finally, Clause 71 inserts into the 2000 Act new Section 42A, which extends the preference voting system to the election of an elected executive.
The amendments are both significant and consequential. Essentially, Amendments Nos. 122 to 124, 140, 152, 154 to 156, 158, 159, 162, 167 to 169 and 194 are all consequential amendments, for the reason given by the noble Lord. I have explained why we have put this model in place as an option that supports the notion of visible executive leadership in a novel way. Removing the model would remove a choice. The Committee has asked where the model has come from. I have explained that there are some European models but, as the notion of a slate is not new, we also responded to suggestions from Stockton that this model was worth looking at and trying. In order to be inclusive and to offer choice, there was no reason why we should not put it on the face of the Bill as another option.
Noble Lords have argued that the processes are unworkable and that it makes no sense to have a system under which, after the election, there might be several by-elections for councillors if candidates on the successful slate also stood as ward councillors. In fact, the system is simply an extension of the 2000 Act, which provides that, if a person stands as both a councillor and an elected mayor, he has to stand down. Again, there is nothing very new about this. We have taken it forward in the notion of an elected executive, elected on a manifesto for the authority as a whole. Everyone aspiring to office will be identified. It provides greater clarity and I believe that the model is entirely compatible with the direct and democratic role of ward councillors.
I do not have time now to go into the processes in detail. I will be happy to explain at length to noble Lords how we think the model will work, in conversation or in writing. I hope that noble Lords will feel that they can live with this and not press their amendments. We will come back to this issue.
I would like some advice. We are in the midst of one of the most important debates that we shall have on this part of the Bill. Either we are allowed to carry on and keep the next business of the House waiting, or we could stop and come back to it. I feel extremely uncomfortable that we are not going to be allowed to continue with the debate on the amendments, because there are many questions left unanswered. I would be grateful for the advice of the Clerk on that.
It is possible for us to adjourn in the middle of a debate, if the Committee wishes to do so. With nods all around, that is what I will do. I beg to move that the debate on Amendment No. 115 be adjourned.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
I beg to move that the House do now resume. In moving this Motion, I suggest that the Committee stage begin again not before 8.40 pm.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House resumed.