Clause 4

HC Deb 17 July 1972 vol 841 cc43-57

CHAIRMAN

Mr. John Pardoe (Cornwall, North)

I beg to move Amendment No. 139, in page 4, line 8, leave out 'by the council'.

Mr. Speaker

With this Amendment we are to discuss Amendments No. 265, in page 4, line 8, leave out 'by the council from among the councillors and insert: 'either by the council from among the councillors or by the local government electors for that area'.

No. 140, in line 8, at end insert: by the council, or, if the council so decides, by a poll of the local government electors for that area in accordance with such regulations as shall from time to time be made by the Secretary of State'.

No. 970, in line 8, at end insert: 'except where, by established practice, the Lord Mayor or Mayor is elected from outside the body of the Council every fifth year'.

No. 157, in Schedule 2, page 205, line 37, leave out 'by the council'.

No. 159, in page 205, line 39, at end insert: 'by the Council, or, if the Council so decides by a poll of the local government electors for that area in accordance with such regulations as shall from time to time be made by the Secretary of State' and No. 217, in Clause 24, page 13, line 21, leave out 'by the Council'.

4.15 p.m.

Mr. Pardoe

Amendment No. 139 is in the name of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Montgomery (Mr. Hooson), as are Amendments Nos.140, 157 and 159, and Amendment No. 265 is in the names of my right hon. and hon. Friends and myself.

Our Amendments are basically to do the same thing. My hon. and learned Friend was looking at the matter from the point of view of Welsh local government and I am looking at it from the point of view of local government in both England and Wales. The question is how the chairman of a council—whatever he may be called; the head of the local authority—should be elected or chosen Subsection (1) says: The chairman of a principal council shall be elected annually by the council from among the councillors. We seek to introduce into that rather narrow definition of how the local government leader should be chosen a rather wider choice for local authorities.

The present system of selection can be described as Buggins's turn. The trouble is that almost any councillor, no matter what his talents or merit, would eventually become chairman of the council or mayor under the old system. There is a good case for ensuring that that system is ended, and that local councils at least have a choice of introducing an entirely new system.

An important part of any organisation, whether a company, political party or local authority, is the man at the head. Who is the head of local government? I guarantee that if local electors in the majority of council areas were asked the name of the head of local government in their area they would not know. No kudos attaches to the name. There are those who write off many of our mayors as simply coat hangers for the regalia of office. That is a tragedy for the institution of local government.

The qualifications a man or woman who wishes to head a local authority should have are open to question. We obviously do not want a man who wants to rule a town in the narrowest and more power-seeking sense of the word "rule". At the other end of the scale, we do not want a man who wants the mere distinction of the office. Unfortunately, there are all too many such men. We want someone in between the two. What do we have in all too many cases? Here I quote from a pamphlet, "The Mayor and Aldermen and Councillors", written by Professor Brian Keith Lucas, who will be known to many hon. Members as a great authority on local government. He described the present head of local government as a Father Christmas figure, who has become in many authorities a figure of fun, ridiculed for his pomposity and self-importance. This comic figure of the cartoon and caricature is no doubt unjust to a great many hardworking and sincere men and women who after years of inconspicuous and unpaid service have at last reached the mayoral chair, but there is enough truth in it to lead us to ask whether this is really the ideal pattern for the head of great local authorities responsible for millions of pounds of public money. That is the basic question in the Amendments. The present system ensures that the chairman of a local authority, the mayor or whatever he may be, has no real responsibility apart from chairing the monthly council meeting. Indeed, the system is designed to deprive the chairman of any real power or authority. It is a kind of rot a system in which the principle of Buggins's turn operates.

I do not believe that the head of local government can ever exercise real authority on behalf of the electors unless he is seen to have, or to call in aid, the authority of democratic choice, and that is what the Amendment seeks to give him. He has no authority within the council nor over its services.

What do we want to do with local government by the Bill? Although there are differences separating the three parties and almost every individual Member on the basic realities and purposes of local government, I suspect that we are all united in wishing, first, that we could create more interest in local government; secondly, that more people would think local government important enough to vote in its elections; thirdly, that there were more contests. I realise that in areas where local government is fought on primarily political lines, which is not the case in my own county of Cornwall, there tend to be rather more contests than in areas where elections are almost entirely a matter of one independent against another.

Lastly, we want to bring into local government far more people of real ability. The Bill sets out with these aims. However, it is extremely suspect in this matter and I have real fears that those who go for responsible offices in local government will not be of a sufficiently high calibre or of the calibre we want so as to get more interest in local government elections, to persuade people that local government is important not only for them to vote for but for them to stand for.

We should dramatise the rôle of local government. We should focus attention on the person who is the head of the local council. It would be foolish to suggest that our present system, under which we shear the head of a local council of virtually all power and authority, is necessarily the best. In France ever since Napoleonic times the mayor has been a person of power, influence and authority within his community. He means something to electors.

The head of a State in the United States is the governor. He is directly elected, not necessarily from among those who are already members of the local State senate. He can be elected from any of the electors in the State. Under that system, attention is focussed on the problems of local government and on the governor. In New York, whatever we may think of the succession of mayors who have failed to cope with the appalling problems of that terrible dustbin of a city, the direct election of the mayor, as in other American cities, focuses attention on the local problems and dramatises the democratic element in local government.

These Amendments do not seek to force anything on local authorities, as they would still retain a choice. All that we are asking the Government to do is to say to local authorities "You have the power to decide whether you will go on with the old system, which has been tried for years, whereby you choose from existing councillors the chairman or mayor, with everybody having a turn, or you can decide to have an entirely new system. This is your decision. If you like, you can decide to have your mayor or chairman directly elected by the electors."

I go further and say that this is symptomatic of our desire that local councils should have the power to decide their own constitution. It may sound a rather horrifying thought when one considers the variety of constitutions that would arise throughout the country; but why not? What harm would this do? There is no reason to suppose that we have the best constitution for local authority that man can devise. The constitution may be experimented with, and I suggest that experiments by local authorities would help considerably to produce a better model and a better standard.

I shall be interested to hear the official objections from the Government. I suspect that they will not be isolated objections from a Conservative Government, but of the kind which would be raised by virtually any Government in power and by the political establishment. However, this is the first time that the matter has been raised in the House. There will be the objections that the political parties, where the parties are a major force in local government, would put up the same people that they would have put up anyway. There would have to be a longer term than one year. Clearly, it would not be possible for the chairman to exercise the amount of authority which I am saying he would gain from the direct electoral choice of the people unless he had a term of three or four years. That is the assumption on which the Amendments are based.

I hope that the Government will for the first time put forward their reasons for not wishing to go along with this interesting suggestion. I presume that they will not accept the Amendments. This suggestion would dramatically increase the interest which local people take in their local authorities and local elections.

Mr. R. C. Mitchell

I hope that the Government will resist the temptation to accept the Amendment, which embodies a dangerous suggestion. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe) has studied American local government. If he has done so, I am sure he rapidly came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for the weakness of American local government is the variety of constitutions and the differences of organisation.

God forbid that we should have a series of Mayor Daleys in Britain. The hon. Member seemed to favour the idea of the "boss mayor", the leader of the council who is directly elected and all-powerful. The last thing I want to see in local government is the type of American system which is now in operation in, for example, Chicago. Far from being democratic, that system is very much the opposite.

There was some confusion of thought in the hon. Member's speech. In nearly all local authorities, certainly in the great cities and boroughs, two different people are involved, one being the leader of the council and the other the mayor, or titular head. In most places the mayor changes every year and selection is based on seniority, which is something I have been fighting against for a long time. However, the function of a mayor in a councilis, first, to control the council meetings and, secondly, to attend certain civic duties and wander around making after dinner speeches in his robes. That is a useful purpose. He is a different person, and needs to be so, from the leader of the council, who either by himself, depending on the type of council, or in co-operation with many of his colleagues is responsible for policy making. I suspect that in some of our local authorities we have something approaching the "Mayor Daley", the leader of the council who has been there a long time, but he is not usually the chairman or mayor.

I see what the Liberal Party wants from these Amendments. From a Liberal point of view it might be a good idea However, to have a popular election of a leader who would be in office for three or four years would be dangerous and lead to far more undemocratic local government than we now have. I hope that the Government will resist these Amendments.

Mr. George Wallace (Norwich, North)

The hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe) and my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. R. C. Mitchell) have put two different points of view. I rise to put the ideal compromise to the whole situation.

The hon. Member for Cornwall, North did not mention Amendment No. 970. The City of Norwich has many ancient privileges which I am glad to be reassured will be retained. We have a custom and a motto in Norfolk called "Do different". In every fifth year the council by agreement approaches someone from outside the council who has rendered distinguished service to the district over the years to be the Lord Mayor for that year. This tradition is followed with great care. From time to time various prominent people have occupied the office and added great dignity to it with great effect. They have included a famous gynaecologist, and the present Lord Mayor is a well-known trade unionist with an international background, who has been elected from completely outside the council.

4.30 p.m.

In no case has the privilege ever been abused. There has been complete control, and the system has added dignity to the office. There has also been a valuable side effect. By this means we are able to operate our own local honours list, honouring people who may not be generally known apart from their workfor the public and to whom we are thus able to give some recognition. For instance, some years ago it was desired to render some mark of respect to a lady who had done great work on behalf of old people. She died before she could be appointed, but her husband, who had done similar work, was appointed. This is an ideal system, and I hope it will be accepted by the Government, so that every fifth year some prominent person from outside the council is appointed, the mayor being selected by agreement on other occasions. In Norwich there is no major row between the political parties on this issue.

I recognise that the Amendment moved by the Opposition in Committee aroused one great fear. It was that it would result in the undemocratic situation which—let us face it—arises in both political parties when there is a dead heat on the council and the party in power up to that point selects someone from outside the council to maintain its majority. I do not support that sort of thing, but I strongly support the system we have in Norwich by which a prominent citizen is selected. Here is a proposal which the Government could reasonably accept and which goes part of the way to meet the argument of the hon. Member for Cornwall, North. Judging by the nods which I am getting from the end of the Bench, my hon. Friend the Member for Itchen would not disagree. I ask the Govern- ment carefully to consider an idea which has already worked successfully.

Mr David Stoddart (Swindon)

As an exercise in gimmickry, the Amendment suggested by the hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe) is not bad, but as an exercise in common sense and logic it stinks. The powers and duties conferred by the Bill are given to the council, and the council alone, and what I am concerned about is that there should be no division in those powers and that it should not be thought that there is any division in those powers.

Let there be no mistake: our whole concept of Government and local government rests on a corporate body having power and on no one person having power. Any proposal to alter that arrangement, even with the consent of the local authority concerned, could drive a wedge into a system which has served us well for a long time. Let us imagine a situation in which a council had foolishly decided to have a mayor who was elected by people outside the council and in which he had personal power. On many issues of controversy there would be a dispute between the council and that man who had been given separate powers by the people. We have heard of Prime Ministers appealing to the people over the heads of Parliament and his party, and we know what trouble that can cause. From my considerable experience of local government I know that such divisions can arise, and they cause a great deal of heart-searching.

It must be understood that local authorities appoint a mayor or a chairman not to give him power and not particularly to give him free drinks or free meals, but to guide them at their meetings. They give him no especial power other than that of controlling their meetings, and that is his principal duty. Councillors elect a person from among themselves because they assume that he has some experience of council work, will know the councillors through having served on the council, will know their whims and quirks and will be able to deal with them reasonably if they get out of line. They elect someone who knows the score and is able to make a contribution from the chair. Someone appointed from outside would not necessarily have that experience and would not necessarily have the confidence of the councillors whom he was supposed to control.

I see many dangers in the system proposed by the hon. Member for Cornwall, North. He mentioned the United States system. The American system simply would not work here. Certainly I should not want it. I have seen it working in some towns and I should hate our towns to be run on the same lines. I should not like to see the mayors of our towns responsible for appointing police chiefs, for instance, so that one day a man was a constable on the beat and the next the chief constable. But that is what may happen when one man has this power.

I know that the hon. Member for Cornwall, North is not advocating that, but what he is suggesting could be the thin end of the wedge to ending our system of local government in the most unlikely event of the Liberal Party becoming the Government. As a great lover of the British constitution and with great respect for the existing system of local government and for the job that authorities have done since 1888, a system which has proved its worth over a long time, I do not want it to be changed by the sort of gimmickry solution that the hon. Gentleman has proposed.

Mr. John Silkin (Deptford)

I rarely disagree with my hon. Friend the Member for Swindon (Mr. David Stoddart), but I find myself reluctantly impelled to do so on this occasion. I regard the Amendment not as an exercise in gimmickry but as an exercise in studied moderation. I am astonished that the hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe) did not take his views a little further.

Why not elect the Leader of the Liberal Party, for example?

Mr. Pardoe

We did.

Mr. Silkin

Perhaps because he would have lost his deposit. If the Leader of the Conservative Party were to be elected, I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman might not be returned. If we were all to elect the Leader of the Labour Party, he would certainly be returned, and to the seat at present occupied so illustriously by the right hon. Member for Crosby (Mr.Graham Page).

The truth is that this Amendment is concerned with altering the whole of the British constitution, in so far as it affects local government, in the form of a small, theoretical Amendment. What was needed was for the hon. Member or some of his colleagues to have been present in Committee dealing with this Bill. I wish that they had been. We had 51 sittings in which they would have been able to contribute their wisdom—

Mr. Pardoe

The right hon. Gentleman seems to be issuing a word of criticism upon members of my party, saying that they would not have wished to sit as members of the Committee. The members of the Parliamentary Liberal Party always wish to be present on every Committee. It is the studious intention and corruption of the two-party system which prevents them from doing so.

Mr. Silkin

The hon. Gentleman is on a very bad point on this occasion. This was a large Committee, and the Liberal Party was entitled, as of right, to approach the Committee of Selection and ask to be included. Whether this is so, it is a great pity that members of that party were not present during our deliberations, even in the Public Gallery. That might have helped. Had they been present they could have put forward these new and interesting ideas about the whole change in local government, and I have no doubt that we would have listened with considerable respect and interest. I am afraid that this will not do. There are Amendments down in the name of the hon. Member a little later which, he will be delighted to hear, I might be willing to support, but not this one.

As for the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Mr. Wallace); that will not do either. It will not do because I can suggest a compromise on his compromise. Let the illustrious son of Norwich or wherever he may be who wants to become Lord Mayor in the fifth year stand for the council and stand his turn with everyone else. If he is as illustrious as my hon. Friend thinks he is then every fifth year he may be elected.

Mr. Wallace

That sounds all very well, but supposing the unfortunate man does not belong to the right political party? He has had it.

Mr. Silkin

If he is as illustrious as all that I have no doubt he will get all-party support. There are precedents when members of the minority party have been chosen as mayors or chairmen by the majority party. It depends very much on how illustrious the citizen is. But in any event there are other ways in which a local authority can honour its distinguished sons. There are things such as public dinners, making a person a freeman, and so on. An illustrious citizen of any local authority does not need to be made lord mayor, mayor or chairman to show that he is illustrious. For those reasons, although I would not advise my hon. Friends either way, they must please themselves, I think I have made clear to the House which way I have decided.

Mr. Graham Page

I must mildly reprimand the right hon. Member for Deptford (Mr. John Silkin). Throughout these 51 sittings in Committee and the Report stage so far he and I have played this cool. Although we still find ourselves in agreement on many things across the Dispatch Box, he should not try to stir up party anger with the Liberals on an occasion like this. All that is being suggested in these Amendments, apart from that of the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Mr. Wallace), is to make the election of a mayor in England and Wales or the chairman of a district an American mayoral or presidential type of election but only if the council decides to hand over its duties to the public.

The hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Pardoe) frankly admitted that his purpose was to "dramatise the headship of the local authority" "Headship" sounded rather tribal to me. Perhaps on occasions the election of a mayor looks rather tribal. If the House were to accept the idea that the local council should ask the public to elect its chairman, then, logically, the House should ask the whole electorate to choose Mr. Speaker because the mayor is first and foremost the chairman of a statutory body.

Under the Local Government Act, 1933, and the London Government Act, 1963, the chairman or mayor is elected by the council from among the aldermen or councillors or persons qualified to be councillors. In Committee it was almost unanimously the view that we should alter the law in that respect and that every member of the council including the most important member, the mayor, should be elected by and be responsible to the public. It is arguable that as he is the head of the local community we should let the local electorate decide who should be its civic leader. It may be said that it is a reasonable extension of local democracy, with full safeguards, because the council could prevent the public from doing it if wants to do it itself.

4.45 p.m.

The chairman is not just the first citizen, a civic leader, he is also the chairman of the council, a statutory body with executive responsibilities for essential services and he has a casting vote in that body. As the hon. Member for Swindon (Mr. David Stoddart) said, he is there to guide the council at its meetings. These Amendments would divorce him from the council and set him up merely as the ceremonial and social head of the community rather than as chairman of the council. That is not to say that the social and ceremonial aspects of the chairman's work are unimportant. They have a crucial importance in the choice of a chairman. I doubt whether the public is in so good a position as members of the council to judge whether candidates for the chairmanship or mayoralty possess the necessary qualifications to be both a good social and ceremonial leader and a good chairman.

Some practical points also arise. There is the cost of the elections. If we adopt the first of the Amendments, there would have to be an election of the council and then a second election of the chairman or mayor. This leads me to Amendment No. 265, which partially solves that delay point but at the expense of the Amendment made to the Bill in Committee. Under Amendment No. 265 the chairman or mayor of a council is elected annually either by the council, from among the councillors, or by the local government electors for the area. I assume that means that someone would decide before the council elections which way it was to be done so that the whole thing could be held at one and the same time. This could only make sense if it is intended, as the hon. Member for Cornwall, North admitted, as the means of introducing something entirely new to the constitution—the American style of mayor, a glamorous figure with his own executive powers who overshadows the council. As the hon. Member for Swindon said, very well, this would be contrary to the traditions of our system of local government.

Mr. Pardoe

And a good thing too.

Mr. Page

The hon. Member says "And a good thing, too", but we are not endeavouring in the Bill to alter the whole constitution in that way. For my part, I think it would be a sad day if we ever do.

The hon. Member for Norwich, North put forward an Amendment which I appreciate is aimed at safeguarding the position of places like Norwich, which has established a practice of electing every few years, as lord mayor or mayor, a person who is not a councillor. In Norwich this is not a practice which is exactly hoary with age; it has only been adopted over the past 20 years, and in face of what was decided in Committee, what I believe will be the wish of the House, that every member of the council should be directly selected and directly answerable to the local electorate, it would be unwise to make this exception.

The reason for resisting Amendment No. 970, in the name of the hon. Member for Norwich, North, springs from the principle of democracy. It in no way reflects on anybody who is now, or who in the past has been lord mayor of that city. Districts with borough status will be able to honour their non-councillors under the provisions of another part of the Bill by making them honorary freeman. We have now accepted the principle that all members of the council shall be directly answerable to the electorate. It would be the extreme of inconsistency to breach that principle in the case of the person who procedurally is the most important person on the council.

Mr. Pardoe

I should like to make one or two comments about what has been said in this short debate. The hon. Member for Swindon (Mr. David Stoddart) said that this was an exercise in gim- mickry and stank. In my view the only thing that stinks in this House is the pool of stagnant Conservatism that runs round certain Members on the Opposition benches.

This is a new idea, and this is the first time it has been aired in this House I take the point put forward by the right hon. Member for Deptford (Mr. John Silkin) about the division of power—he thinks an unhappy division—between the council which is supposed to be the fount of all wisdom and the directly-elected chairman or mayor, but I regard the division of power as an essential factor in a democratic system.

The point has been made that with a two-party system there is often a situation where there is virtually no choice because the individual concerned does not happen to belong to the right party in the area in which he lives. If a man is a Conservative and lives in Durham there is no hope of his ever becoming mayor or even of getting on the council. [Hon Members: "Oh."] In my view the Durham Council is a self-perpetuating body of an incredibly incompetent sort—rather like the Surrey County Council, which I regard as the worst county council in the world. What we need is a way in which individual electors can break out of the two-party arrangement in an area. I feel that we could break through this situation if we were to set up a tribune of the people by means of a direct election.

The hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. R. C. Mitchell) said that I was confusing the two things. He thought I was confusing the mayor—who is simply a chairman of the council who presides over council meetings, goes to dinners and makes speeches—with something else. But here the hon. Gentleman gave the game away. He indicated that such an all-powerful super-boss of the cities already existed—that we have him because he is put there as part of the party caucus; in other words, as leader of the majority group on the council. This is quite true.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Mayor Daley. That is an easy name to throw out in this connection. I will not mention the names of certain local government bosses who have been in the newspaper recently because it would not necessarily be right to use parliamentary privilege to do so, but I am not at all sure that I would not rather be run by a council headed by Mayor Daley than by some of the names which have been mentioned recently in our newspapers. If we are talking about the American scene we must mention not only figures like Mayor Daley, but also La Guardia, Governor Stevenson, rather than Governor Reagan, who may perhaps not be an ideal example. The system can throw up some first-class people.

I do not accept the Government's answer that this idea must be thrown out because it would totally change the whole concept of English local government. As I interjected in a Minister's speech a little earlier "And a good thing too!" The fact is that local government is not democratic, it does not adequately represent the interest of people at local level, and I believe that by superimposing this system of direct election of a tribune of the people, the system could be made far more democratic than it is at the moment.

Since in a sense this is an exploratory Amendment in which I was seeking to discover the reasons why the political establishment were against this extension of democracy, and since we have now heard those reasons, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.