Local Government Act 1972 (Amendment) (Hansard, 23 June 1981)

§ Mr. Reg Race (Wood Green)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to amend the Local Government Act 1972 so as to permit employees of a local authority to stand for elections to such authorities. The House does not often have the opportunity on two consecutive days to discuss the subject of the disqualification of individuals from standing for public office. For that reason, I feel somewhat like the dustcart after the Lord Mayor's show—to use the old working-class phrase—following yesterday's debate.

The Bill that I invite the House to approve will allow local authority employees who reside in the area where they work to stand for the local authority. That introduces a major point of principle. Yesterday, the Home Secretary and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) expressed concern about the way in which disqualifications were put into statute by the House. The Home Secretary said: The question of the disqualification of any group of citizens, or of any individual, is of the highest importance. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sparkbrook said: Unreasonable disqualifications are wrong. Indeed, they are more than wrong, they are a matter of major constitutional significance".—[Official Report, 22 June 1981; Vol. 7, c. 32–33.] Both right hon. Gentlemen referred to disqualifications from standing for membership of the House. The principle that they enunciated yesterday should also be applied to consideration of local government elections.

I invite the House to agree that it is entirely unreasonable to expect hundreds of thousands of local authority employees to be debarred from standing for the local authority where they work. Under the Local Government Act 1972 there are large numbers of disqualifications. Some of those are entirely reasonable.

I want to stress that my Bill in no way changes the other disqualifications under the 1972 Act, such as the disqualification of undischarged bankrupts or the disqualification of those persons surcharged more than £500 by the district auditor within a period of five years prior to the date of the election. It does not cover disqualification of those persons convicted in the past five years and given a prison sentence of not less than three months without the option of a fine, or any other residual disqualifications embodied in the Representation of the People Act 1949. My Bill addresses itself solely to the principle of local authority employment and whether those who work for a local authority should have the right, if they live in that area, to stand for the council, be elected, and serve on its committees and on the full council.

There has been some change in the attitude of the House to those matters since the 1972 Act. In 1974, when London Transport came under the direct aegis of the Greater London Council for the first time, the House agreed to amend the Local Government Act 1972 to allow employees of the London Transport Executive to stand for the Greater London Council, whereas under the 1972 Act they would have been debarred from so standing and serving. That shows the extent to which the House in 1974 was prepared to alter the 1972 Act to prevent large numbers of people from being unreasonably excluded from standing for a local authority.

138 I should draw the attention of the House to the fact that under the existing statute teachers employed in Inner London Education Authority schools can stand for election to borough councils in outer London and the Greater London Council, provided that they seek election to seats outside the ILEA area.

Hon. Members may wish to know how many people are affected by the disqualification. Disqualification affects about one in seven of the total number of local government electors in the United Kingdom. That estimate was made during the passage of the Local Government Act 1972 and demonstrates the size of the problem that we face. The people who are so disqualified range in employment from the chief executives of borough and county councils down to the humblest lavatory attendant, refuse collector or street sweeper employed by an individual local authority.

I should mention briefly some of the objections that may be raised by hon. Members when considering the proposed Bill. The first is that if local government employees were elected to office on a council they might unreasonably influence their own pay and conditions. That does not seem to affect many hon. Members when we discuss Members' salaries. Nevertheless, it is a view that has been expressed about local government. However, since the mid-1940s, most of the serious and major negotiations on local authority pay have taken place not at local authority level but at national level, between representatives of the Government through the Civil Service and the Association of County Councils, the Association of District Councils and the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, which is the body that decides the pay and conditions for most local authorities.

The second principal objection that may be levelled is that employees may unreasonably influence the policies of the local authority. My answer is that a conflict of interests between a local authority employee in terms of his or her membership of an authority and his or her employment arises only at the highest level.

There is a conflict of interest between the position of a chief executive, chief officer or deputy chief officer of a council. Clearly, they, who must develop the policies of a local authority on instruction from the elected members, could unreasonably influence the policy of that local authority if they became elected members. For that reason, the Bill excludes those individuals. I want to ensure that local authority electors are given a choice about whom they elect, and also that large numbers of people should not be debarred from standing for membership of a local authority.

We do not exclude many people who have a direct pecuniary interest in the affairs of a local authority. We do not automatically exclude estate agents, even though they may have a pecuniary interest in some of the contracts into which a local authority enters. In my view, the way to deal with the problem of local authority employees is to bring into play the register of interests. Section 94 of the 1972 Act deals with the problem of members' interests in contracts.

This is not a party measure. It would not automatically increase the number of candidates for a particular political party. I believe that a large number of people whose support covers all parties represented in this House would welcome the opportunity to stand for election to a local authority. It is therefore important to try to increase the 139 number of people who are interested in serving on local authorities. For all those principal reasons, I commend the Bill to the House.