Legislative Statement on the Proposed National Assembly for Wales (Legislative Competence) (Local Government) Order 2009 (Peter Black and South Wales West Liberal Democrats)

Legislative Statement on the Proposed National Assembly for Wales (Legislative Competence) (Local Government) Order 2009

July 14, 2009 12:00 AM
By Peter Black in Plenary

Peter Black: Thank you, Minister, for bringing this proposed LCO before us today and for the briefing that your officials gave earlier-it was very helpful and useful. I welcome the proposed legislative competence Order that we have before us insofar as it goes. The 2003 review into community councils, which is referred to in your statement, and which you intend to implement through these powers, is unfinished business from the first partnership Government. It was part of the commitments in the agreement between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, so I welcome that we are now going to try to get the powers to implement some of the outstanding proposals included in it. I do not want to pre-empt the other outstanding reviews, although I will, of course, have views to express on allowances and the other issues when they are brought before us. This is an attempt to bring down powers, as opposed to an opportunity to discuss how those powers are going to be used.

I want to make what I consider to be an important point about the general scope of the proposed LCO before us. Darren Millar asked whether the proposed LCO is premature. I think that it is not so much premature as unambitious. I say that because, from the statement that you have given to us, Minister, I note that you have some ambitious targets and ideas, but those do not seem to work their way through to what you are trying to do in the proposed LCO. I will pull out a few issues. You say that you want to remove barriers and disincentives to people standing for election to community councils and unitary authorities in Wales. You want to ensure that both community and unitary authority councillors are drawn from the widest range of people possible and are more typical of the communities that they serve. You want to ensure that local councils reach out and engage with all sectors of the communities that they are set up to serve, and to improve the quality of our democracy. How can you do that if you do not reform the voting system? In the proposed LCO, you have specifically excluded the local government franchise, electoral registration and administration and the voting system for the return of members in an election from matter 12.9. It seems to me that if you are genuinely serious about engaging people, widening the number of people who get involved in local government, and making local councils more relevant and representative of the community, then a fair voting system is the way forward. I am not just saying that from an ideological Liberal Democrat point of view, because it has been proven in other parts of the UK, such as Northern Ireland and Scotland, that if you do that you get councils that are more representative of the community. You also get councils in which there is greater consensus and scrutiny is more effective, because the party divisions that have bedevilled local government in many parts of the UK do not apply to the same extent.

The other issue is that we are under the shadow of the assurance that you gave in relation to reorganisation of local government that nothing will happen until after 2011. I think that everyone is expecting something to happen after 2011 in relation to reorganisation of local government. If the powers that are already available to you as a Government to reorganise local government are used in the future to create bigger councils without fair voting, any reasonable person might think that an element of gerrymandering might be involved in order to re-establish Labour's stranglehold on local government. That would be unfortunate and not how we should move forward.

I had also hoped that you would have taken the opportunity to get the widest possible powers in relation to legislating on local government. However, yet again, you have not done that, because you have not tackled this issue of fair voting and have shoved it on the back burner, presumably until we have the next coalition negotiations in 2011. That is no way to run Wales or to plan for the future in terms of organising how we are governed in this country. Therefore, will you reconsider the exclusion of fair voting from this proposed LCO? If you genuinely have the ambitions that you set out in the statement, I would hope that you would take that on board and put your money where your mouth is.

Peter Black and South Wales West Liberal Democrats