'CORRUPT!' - MPs RAGE at Labour's 'DESPERATE' election changes as attempt to minimise losses

[00:00:00]Thank you, sir. Julian Sir Julian Lewis.

[00:00:02]>> Uh, thank you, Dr. Madison, and I'd like to preface my remarks by saying I have a high personal regard for this minister.

[00:00:09]I'm sure that she would never personally wish to do anything unfair or politically partisan, but there are very good reasons why when changes are made to anything to do with constituency arrangements and democratic arrangements, they are normally carried out under the authority of an impartial body. And I believe and I suspect my colleagues on these benches also believe that if a body like for example the boundary commission had been in charge of this particular operation, the results would have been very different because a coach and horses has been driven through anything to do with local, cultural, historic and um uh should we say uh orientation um amongst communities All those ideas have been totally disregarded. Now, uh I'd like to congratulate my honorable friend for harbor on securing the debate, but I must say to him and to you, Dr. Murrison, we are going to need a much longer debate than this if we're going to do justice to the enormity of what is proposed here. my honorable friend uh laid out the fact that uh totally inappropriate areas were going to be subsumed and swallowed up by the city of Leicester. This is exactly what is happening in relation to the city of Southampton and the naked land grab of huge areas of the New Forest East constituency. uh wards which are known collectively as the wide uh coupled with another land grab uh of wards from the um test valley burough council wards that are contained within the uh constituency of Romy and uh when this first was proposed and I must emphasize this fact it was first proposed long after the general election [clears throat] it was not in Labour's general election election manifesto. And yet Labour quite rightly thought it proper to put in its general election manifesto the fact that they were going to have elected mayors and strategic authorities. But this abolition of historic uh burough councils, district councils and county councils uh and this merging of them was nowhere flagged up in advance of anybody's vote. And the government likes to trumpet the fact that it is so strongly in favor of devolution, of political power, of listening to what local people want. Well, I've got some data for the government because ever since uh this outrageous proposition that Southampton should take over vast areas of um uh my constituency, splitting the constituency, splitting the New Forest apart, uh tearing the wateride away from the New Forest um to which uh the wide inhabitants have looked for hundreds of years as being part of their community. Ever since that happened, uh, a petition online has been gathering signatures. Now, this is a relatively local issue to a part in the South of Hampshire. So, you might think that if you were lucky, you might get five or 6,000 signatures to such a petition. I checked at 10:00 exactly this morning. There are 22,812 signatures so far. And when you take the paper signatures uh into account as well, I'm sure the total is well over 25,000.

[00:03:57]What sort of issue must there be for 25,000 people in a local area to say that they utterly reject the tearing apart of the new forest in this way and its takeover by the city of Southampton, which as we've heard in other scenarios that have been quoted earlier in the debate, uh uh is in a far worse financial position uh than the uh people who live at present under the New Forest District Council.

[00:04:26]Egyp are accustomed to being. I have many more points that I would like to make. I'm not going to make them out of consideration to my colleagues. I'm just going to make one final point and that is this. We have tried we really have Dr. Mirror to engage in a sincere way with the government. when uh the original minister, the um honorable member for Olden West wrote to us uh he set out what appeared to be reassuring criteria. Those criteria were no duplication unnecessarily, no fragmentation unnecessarily and that the building blocks of the new unitary authorities would be the areas covered by the existing burough and district councils. uh unless by uh as an exception there was a very strong reason for interfering with boundaries. And yet the only reasons that have been given have been vague uh comments about maximizing economic prosperity or something like that which you could say in justification of any change no matter how politically outrageous. I am sure that if this minister had as it were full strategic authority to make a bad pun over this policy uh we would not be experiencing what we are experiencing.

[00:05:47]There is total outrage about this matter. It needs to be put right and I hope the government can be persuaded to think again.

[00:05:56]>> Amy and Hines.

[00:05:57]>> Uh thank you Dr. M. Great pleasure to see you in the chair and I congratulate and thank my honorable friend from Harbor for securing this important debate um today. It was also a great pleasure to hear from our honor everybody's honorable friend from Strangford. It is not the first time Dr. Murrison that he has come here and said I know that Northern Ireland isn't covered by this minister but perhaps our experience can be instructive or boy was he right today. There are two key questions and he highlighted the importance of the first which is why do this at all with all the attention it will take will take away from other priorities at a time when we're about to have huge changes coming to the system particularly for special educational needs and disability the cost involved as my right honorable friend said uh the question that literally no one was asking and the answer that was not put in the labor manifesto but even if you do accept that there can be reorganization the question is on what basis and this plan Dr. Morrison in Hampshire in East Hampshire uh will break up uh communities will take away uh local identities and put people into new artififices. In my case in East Hampshire taking the people of Hornine and Clanfield and Roland's Castle and putting them into a new super council area centered on Portsmouth and the rest of East Hampshire going to this vast uh area called Mid the Mid Hampshire uh unitary authority and all Dr. customers and all for uncertain or quite likely negative return. What does that mean in plain English? It means local people end up paying more. And the government, as my right honorable friend from the New Forest uh mentioned, set out clear criteria for what the uh what a reorganization should be, a focus on sustainability of highquality services, a minimum scale of 500,000. That number didn't come from nowhere. It was a serious piece of work done by Price Waterhouse uh Coopers about minimum scale to deliver services and crucially that the building blocks of the new organization should be existing districts and burers and it was on that basis that local leaders engaged in the process. It wasn't that they were clamoring for it. It wasn't that people leaders in Hampshire were knocking down the door of MHCG saying please reorganize us but they engaged in good faith in the process. Um Nick Adams King, the leader of Hampshire County Council, set out a summary of conditions for change that any new structure must be sustainable financially, operationally and democratically. It must be capable of delivering highquality services resilient enough to manage demand in adult social care, children's services and SCEND. And crucially, it must have a balanced tax base. and must also reflect real communities and not create winners and losers by stripping growth, infrastructure and income from one area to shore up another. And I don't think I could put it any better than that. But that is not what has happened. There were in Hampshire three different options with three with different sets of rationale for them. Obviously the fewer unitary councils in theory, the bigger the cost savings. Um but Hampshire County Council, the my district council in East Hampshire uh preferred the the middle option which was to have four uh authorities a balance between delivering savings uh and reducing uh risk and there is a big there has been a big disagreement about the analysis of those different options between different people looking and crucially we do not know we do not know Dr. Merson what the government's own analysis is of the different options for how you would carve up Hampshire uh and why they chose the one they did. We do know that of the different local authorities, two on the mainland are smaller than the 500,000 minimum. And of course, the aisle of whites uh smaller again, although of course there are unique circumstances there. We do know there are substantial costs. We do know there will be some economies of scale from things moving from a district level to a county to a unit level. There will also be diseconomies of scale from things moving from the county level to the unitary level. And those are the biggest things. They are the things the biggest cost pressures in our system.

[00:09:58]People worry in operation what this will mean for housing and of course all the local plan work that was going on was done on the basis of the existing district councils and that now does not work. They worry about the loss of local knowledge. Parish councils are concerned about the implications for them and crucially there is this question about identity and cohesion. I already mentioned Hornine Roners Castle and Clanfield being split off into Portsmouth. of course is also true as my right honorable said uh uh for parts of the new forest and for test valley and for Winchester. Um this minister herself has spoken in the past of how identities grow up over time. These are entities which have been in place for at least 50 uh years now. And of course then other organizations start to organize themselves, charities, other public sector organization organize themselves around these district and burough uh uh boundaries and it becomes inconvenient for them. If the government insists on proceeding, it needs time. It needs sober assessment for local authorities to come together to find consensus on the way forward. It is not a trivial question. It is about some of the most important things in our lives. The the care for our aging moms and dads, the care for the children with the highest needs and the highest uh vulnerabilities.

[00:11:12]And it is a long-term decision. This is not something which is going to have an effect for three years or five years.

[00:11:17]This is a decision which will have an effect for decades. We need to start with knowing on what basis the government made the decision they did.

[00:11:26]You can't very easily argue with it if you don't know what it is. And the letter that's already been mentioned from the 16 council leaders based a very reasonable ask uh to to that we should know what the depart department's own analysis and feasibility assessment was until I say to the minister simply please show us your workings.

[00:11:45]>> Peter Bedford. Thank you very much for your chairmanship and I too would like to congratulate my honorable friend for bringing this important debate before us today and the passion in which he opened the debate.

[00:11:57]Um however I wish to focus on the one issue that has filled my inbox since the proposals were first announced and that's the government's approach to reorganization in Leicester and Leicester. Um, chair, reorganization must be done with the consent of local residents, a point that many honorable friends have made on this side.

[00:12:16]Unfortunately, the government, which is so enthusiastic about consultation, appears to be unwilling to give the final say to the very people that matter the most, the people that sent us to this place. Of course, some members opposite may believe that changes to local government boundaries is small pride, perhaps inconsequential, but I say to them, look at the strength of feeling from our constituents on this issue. The people of Midwest certainly do not believe this is a trivial issue.

[00:12:44]Many constituents from villages like Burl tell me they left Leicester City because, precisely because they wanted to be part of a village community away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

[00:12:56]They said they no longer felt safe in a city increasingly associated with crime and decline and they wanted their children to grow up somewhere they could walk safely in the streets and feel part of a close-knit community. They simply do not want to be back within Leicester City area. Similarly in Glenfield, particularly those residents who live beside the former West Western Park Golf Course, a picturesque and ecologically diverse and rich reserve, they fear that expanded Leicester City Council would concrete over it in an attempt to push development still further out into Glenfield's green and pleasant land than repurposing the abundance of Brownfield sites already within the existing city council area. Furthermore, my constituents in Lester Forest East and Kirby Mxlow tell me that they fear if they are absorbed into the city, their priority, their rural priorities will simply be overlooked in an urban focused administration. And frankly, who can blame them? And perhaps most damaging of all, Dr. Merson, a constituent from Bronston Town, someone who already lives beside the city boundaries, told me that they had seen firsthand the decline of the city and they want nothing to do with it. My constituents should be under no illusion. I will not accept under any circumstances an attempt by the government to force our beautiful villages into the Leicester City Council area. And that is why Leicester Conservatives as my honorable friend uh mentioned launched a petition on this matter. Indeed uh my honorable friend for for Harour Obian Wigson and my honorable friend for Rutland and Stanford presented that petition of over 10,000 petitioners from the villages that surround the list city council area. that shows the strength of feeling across our communities. And that is also why I tabled an amendment to the English devolution bill to ensure that before any local government organ reorganization takes place, residents themselves must be consulted by referendum. That was not taken up by the government. This is because uh Dr. Merson, decisions about local government boundaries should be made by local communities, not by ministers or civil servants in Whiteall who have very little understanding of the character and identities of our local communities.

[00:15:14]And let me be absolutely clear, if this government seeks to place any of the villages that I represent under the agreement of Leicester City Council, I will fight tooth and nail to oppose that. And while other parties not here today are silent on this matter, I want my constituents to know that I'm on your side on this immensely important issue.

[00:15:36]Yeah. Yeah.