My Lords, it is with great pleasure that I move the Second Reading of the High Streets (Designation, Review and Improvement Plan) Bill. It has already received cross-party support in another place, and I am keen and confident that it will receive an equally positive reception in your Lordships’ House. It is a necessary Bill to maximise the chances of high street renewal with the assistance of local communities and the support of central government under the leadership of informed and empowered local authorities. I happily declare something of an interest in this as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
I am a proud champion of what is termed “muscular localism” by my honourable friend Jack Brereton, the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South, who has ably taken this Bill through another place. He and I, who between us have considerable local government experience, share a passion for active local government working in dynamic partnership with local businesses and communities. In Birmingham I was proud to play a leadership role in commissioning and developing the internationally acclaimed and award-winning Big City Plan, which aimed to shape and revitalise Birmingham city centre, putting the city’s sustainability, culture, creativity, technology and enterprise at the heart of its future plans, innovating the transport and street scene, attracting £14 billion of committed private sector funding and building upon our historic successes, not least in preserving and enhancing the Jewellery Quarter as a place of active manufacturing, artistry and craft. Importantly, it meant rescuing the Bullring from the concrete cage and reviving it as a prosperous, accessible and welcoming marketing and retail area.
What we learned as we progressed with our compelling vision was that others quickly bought into what we wanted to be and wanted to be part of that journey, so we were able to preserve and enhance the iconic Rotunda—I am grateful to Urban Splash, which came on board thanks to the framework and clear sense of direction that we had given—but, equally, we invited partnerships with an openness to ideas in delivering the overall imperative of Birmingham living up to its civic motto, “Forward”.
It is because of the lessons I learned as a champion and practitioner of informed, active and collaborative local leadership that I am passionate about getting this Bill into statute. It comes with money attached. Those with local government experience will know that this is not always the case when government asks things of local government. Crucially, it comes with a duty on the Secretary of State to do a lot of legwork for local government in collating and crafting guidance from across all government departments and utilising national data resources and best practice lessons from past high street schemes.
This means that much smaller authorities than Birmingham can access the kind of expertise that we in Birmingham had the wherewithal to commission separately. It means that the lessons from the Government’s high streets task force, which has helped numerous councils of all colours, can be shared with all local authorities in a one-stop shop of government guidance.
My Lords, I should begin by mentioning that I am a current member of the Built Environment Committee, which is engaged in considering the state of Britain’s high streets.
The Bill that we are discussing today has excellent intentions and I strongly support it. It proposes that local authorities should have a watching brief over the health and development of a high street in their area and that they should have a development plan that should be reviewed at least every five years. At the best of times, this requirement should serve to reaffirm the good practices that one would expect well-run local authorities to be adopting as a matter of course. However, nowadays is not the best of times, and the authorities will struggle to fulfil the injunctions of the Bill in meaningful ways. Many of them lack the personnel to conduct proper appraisals of local problems and to formulate plans to address them.
There was a time when local authorities could be expected to react with enthusiasm to this Bill. They were endowed with planning departments that typically contained a full complement of architects, surveyors, town planners and other professionals, and they were responsible for, among other concerns, overseeing the stock of council housing and adding to it. Such housing provided shelter for a large proportion of the population.
The policy that gave the right to buy to council tenants was initiated in 1982 during the Thatcher era. It divested the authorities of much of this housing stock, and they were prevented from replenishing it. The planning departments lost much of their personnel and their sense of initiative.
The present Government have aimed numerous poorly funded initiatives at addressing the decline of the town centres and high streets. Many of these fall under the so-called levelling-up agenda. The current web page of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, which is from July 2023, lists a bewildering variety of funds aimed at urban regeneration. I have counted 15 of them. The overview on the web page states:
It is advisory, which means you do not need to go to five minutes; you can go shorter than that. Every one of the previous speakers was below five minutes. It is not mandatory but I remind the House that we have speakers who will speak later on this afternoon, when other Members who have already spoken will be at home.
My Lords, I warmly support this Bill. As set out by the noble Lord, Lord Whitby, in his introduction, high streets have faced numerous challenges in recent years for a variety of reasons, notably the falling consumer demand for retail shopping, the increase in online shopping and the presence of out-of-town retail parks and shopping centres. In many towns this has led to shop closures, declining footfall and a loss of appeal of the high street.
This House’s Built Environment Committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is currently undertaking an inquiry into high streets in towns and small cities. I have been privileged to be a member of that committee, along with the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth. Our committee has received more than 60 submissions of evidence from many organisations and individuals and heard from a large variety of oral witnesses. Views differ on what should be included on high streets to meet the needs of the whole community while, at the same time, supporting a thriving local economy. It is clear that this will very much depend on local circumstances. Each high street or town centre is different. Correspondingly, local authorities will have different views as to what improvement plans would be most appropriate for the designated high street in their area.
The Local Government Association was the only organisation that gave evidence to our committee to specifically refer to this Bill. It also commented ahead of the Bill’s Committee stage in another place. It has raised concerns that the Bill is legislating to give local authorities responsibility for something that they increasingly have limited control over, due to the impact of national policies. The LGA particularly emphasises permitted development rights, introduced in 2013, which allow changes of use between offices and residential uses. These were extended in 2021 to allow change of use between the very wide range of use class E properties and residential units. The LGA argues that these development rights should be revoked because they undermine a council’s place-making and strategic planning ambitions; property owners can change or remove high street uses without needing to seek planning permission from the council. In the context of this Bill, the LGA surely makes a good point.
My Lords, this Bill is about high streets. In my early life, I had the enjoyment of a great high street. Although I was born in the small Lancashire village of Grimsargh, from which I take my title, when I was seven my parents moved to the seaside resort of Southport. My local high street was therefore Lord Street, Southport. Lord Street was developed in the early part of the 19th century, and has all the merits of that vigorous Victorian age. It is straight and wide, it has covered arcades each side, and it is tree-lined throughout. One feature of Lord Street is the Westminster Tea Rooms. If you ever go to Southport, I thoroughly recommend it; everyone in the House would feel very much at home there. The story goes that the young Louis Napoleon, when in exile in England, took a flat off Lord Street. When he became the emperor of France in the 1850s, he remembered Lord Street, and called his architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann to say, “Remodel Paris. I want a central boulevard like Lord Street, Southport—only bigger”. Thus was born the Champs-Élysées—arguably the greatest high street in the world—all based on Lord Street, in Southport.
It is difficult to verify the truth of this story, but it does show the importance of high streets. We all love a good high street: it cheers us up, gives us pleasure and enhances local pride, as well as being good for business. A recent survey by the Nationwide Building Society showed that 72% of people judge the vitality of an area by its high street. I therefore welcome my colleague Jack Brereton’s Private Member’s Bill to help high streets. Jack was the cabinet member for regeneration, heritage and transport on Stoke-on-Trent Council before becoming the MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, and therefore has a great grasp of all these issues. The Bill is sponsored in the Lords by my noble friend Lord Whitby, who of course was a great leader of Birmingham City Council and is still a very successful businessman, as well as having a continuing interest in these matters.
My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am afraid I bring a somewhat different perspective from that of the earlier speakers. It reflects the views that I presented in much discussion on the levelling-up Bill. The last thing our local communities, particularly the most disadvantaged, need is more meddling and more statutory requirements laid on them from Westminster, without the resources to deliver them. As the noble Lord, Lord Mair, pointed out, the Government are offering money to draw up the plans but not to deliver them. It is not within the power of your Lordships’ House to put down an amendment to demand that there also be funding from the centre, but, were it within our power, I would be very tempted to do so. I direct this comment particularly towards those on the Labour Front Bench: should they be in the position of implementing the Bill, I hope they would look at providing such a financial provision.
We need Westminster to get out of the road of local communities: to stop sticking its oar in and give people the power and resources to make decisions locally. One example from the framework of the Bill is that artificial time periods for review are set out here in Westminster, saying, “You will review this every five years”. But it may be that local circumstances are different: maybe everything is going swimmingly and everyone can see it, or maybe something is going wrong in another area and resources need to be moved. That is an artificial imposition from Westminster.
I note that we are in a situation where councils overwhelmingly need a long-term funding settlement—they face a £4 billion gap over the next two years—to protect their statutory services and to provide what is needed on the high street, such as cleaning and maintenance. They are under enormous pressure because there is simply not the money, and this is just one more imposition being laid on.
My Lords, I broadly welcome this Bill, promoted by my honourable friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South. I congratulate him on bringing forward this initiative, but I have some doubts as to whether his Bill is the panacea he believes it to be. The question of the decline of the high street is multifaceted and complex. It has not happened just recently; it has been going on for many years, and I believe that it was started by the move to establish out-of-town shopping complexes. They provide convenience, of course, with a multiple choice of outlets, ease of parking and much more. I am not against them by any means, as they hit a good note with shoppers, whose aspirations and needs were changing in any event. The customer in general had less time and a busier working life to browse the high street.
If one couples this with the increasing financial burden of rates and rents on small shops, together with the withdrawal of banks and building society branches and the lack of adequate and convenient car parking, along with online shopping, the writing has been on the wall for some considerable time. Slowly, the high street has become the home of coffee shops and charity outlets. In my local towns in the north Midlands, there appears to be a constant and rapid turnover of outlets starting up and then rapidly closing down again.
Parking is a very serious problem, especially for the elderly and less mobile. In Ashbourne, for instance, which is the gateway to the Peak District, the town lacks a bypass. The locals have been crying out for one for years, but to no avail. Currently, all the heavy lorries travelling to and from the Buxton area, from the limestone quarries and elsewhere, have to drive through the centre of the town. There is no other way. This causes dreadful congestion and parking problems that rebound on the high street shops and shoppers.
In numerous cases, local authorities appear to be more interested in closing or curtailing parking facilities to make way for residential developments. Of course, they need the money. The rates and rents in the high street are far too onerous, and it is a very brave soul indeed who opens a high street shop these days.
My Lords, it is common ground across your Lordships’ House that many of our high streets are in a mess. Whether this is symptomatic of our rundown country, who of course knows? We see boarded-up shops and closed pubs and post offices—and, obviously, the sub-post offices have not been helped by the Horizon scandal. We now see often an excess of estate agents and—dare I say it?—antiques shops.
I cannot compete with the noble Lord, Lord Horam, and the Champs-Élysées, but I can say that not every high street is in a mess. My own high street in Tisbury still has a thriving butcher and bread shop as well as a small supermarket and a hardware store and two thriving pubs—so all is not lost in Tisbury.
Our high streets have continued to deteriorate over the past 20 years, despite a number of initiatives by the Government. It was as long ago as 2011 that Mary Portas came up with her 25 recommendations to deal with the problems of our high streets. If you look at the list of recommendations, you will be hard pushed to say how many of them have been effectively implemented. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitby, indicated, and the noble Lord, Lord Mair, touched on, a number of funds have been established: the future high streets fund, the town centre fund and the local growth fund—to name but three. Have they really done anything significantly to improve the status of our high streets?
Rather like the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the Labour Benches, my party will not oppose the Bill, but it fails to address, as a number of noble Lords have indicated, the two key problems. First, there is the planning system, which the noble Lord, Lord Mair, touched on. There have been successive extensions to permitted development rights, which are a serious block to local people’s abilities to create the sorts of communities in high streets that they want. The noble Lord, Lord Mair, referred to the continuous changes to and increased use of the national use class order, which again restricts the ability to control the content of the high street. As he indicated, class E buildings can now be redeveloped as residential properties in the high street without any resort to the planning situation.
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High Streets (Designation, Review and… · Order Paper · Order Paper
The same will be true of lessons from the levelling-up fund, the towns fund, the future high streets fund, high street heritage action zones and many more. All of them are commendable and helpful for the authorities that have enjoyed them, but they all need to have their lessons institutionalised for all authorities so they can share that best practice.
It will ensure that councils are fully aware of the range of powers available to them and of their usefulness, including perhaps unfamiliar ones such as rental auctions, from the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. The Bill will share best practice, and I emphasise that it is about guidance, not prescription.
The support of the Government is imperative, but the Bill recognises the important role of local government, the vital contribution of localism and the mutually beneficial rewards of good public-private partnerships. Everyone recognises the challenges that our high streets face. The long-term rise of out-of-town and online shopping and of online banking, taken together with the short-term crisis of the Covid lockdowns, has changed what high streets can be. It is no longer an option to tread water and hope that something turns up. There needs to be active planning and, in some cases, enforcement. High streets blighted by low footfall and vacant properties accelerate that decline—and decline has proved to be the perfect ground for anti-social behaviour, which in turn keeps more and more local people and outside visitors away from our high streets.
The Bill will require all local authorities in England to designate at least one street, or a network of streets if appropriate, as a high street in their area, and to develop improvement plans for the designated streets. There will be no upper limit on how many streets a local authority can designate. As some local authorities will have a larger number of high streets, as we have in Birmingham, it will be important for councils, local authorities and communities to have flexibility around where they focus their efforts. However, I must reiterate that government funding for drawing up improvement plans will be limited to three high streets per authority.
Once in place, improvement plans will need to be reviewed at least once every five years. Our high streets need to be dynamic places, and the improvement plans will need to be dynamic too. Indeed, while most local authorities will likely work to the five-year period, it might be that some local authorities will more regularly consider whether the plans need updating or refreshing. For example, there is a material change in the make-up of the high street where a new opportunity comes along. I repeat that the Rotunda in Birmingham was saved and vastly improved because of an unpredicted scheme coming forward that was inspired by the predictable development impetus of the Big City Plan. Strategic plans are a magnet for outside interest and inward investment.
Consultation will play a key role in the development of the improvement plans, with local authorities required to consult on the designation of high streets as well as on the plans themselves. The process of designating high streets and creating improvement plans will likely be just as important as the plan itself, because the plans will be the result of robust consultation and conversation between local communities, local businesses, property owners, including places of worship, and local authorities, ensuring community buy-in and support for their particular designated plan.
The Bill will also interact with the planning system, as local planning authorities will have to take into account the relevant high street improvement plans when making planning decisions. Further details will be for the Secretary of State to set out in the guidance, but it is intended that the process should be as streamlined as possible, under efficient guidance and support, to ensure that no net burden is added to the planning system.
There can be no doubt of the pressure currently faced by local authorities up and down the country, and I appreciate that the fear is that an additional and time-consuming task will be required of them. But, actually, the Bill will help to provide a predictable policy framework and a pool of information and best practice that will improve the efficient focus of existing workstreams. That is exactly what the improvement plans will be: a framework and an accelerated journey towards best practice.
There will be an expression of local will that external parties, such as private enterprises, will be able to see clearly and act on. This will help facilitate public-private partnerships, which are key for growth. I know this from the experience of putting together Birmingham’s Big City Plan, which combined the best of the public and private sectors to better the lives of the people of Birmingham. And, of course, in supporting this Private Member’s Bill, the Government have shown a commitment to funding the improvement plans for up to three designated high streets.
It is not just about cost. Clearly fiscal wherewithal is crucial, but it is about local authorities having the agency and flexibility to drive informed change in their local area and benefiting their local communities. The Bill and the guidance that will follow will be just that—flexible and informed—and will give the information and flexibility to local authorities to drive forward the change that our areas need, recognising that the needs of one place will be different from the needs of another, while emphasising the need to develop a compelling sense of place, anchored in the points of difference that make each of our high streets special and attractive and dear to us all. One improvement plan may focus on cultural assets, others on shop-based artisan manufacturing, while others might focus on improving footfall and dwell time for the local visitor economy.
The Bill builds on work already delivered by central and local government to address the decline of our high streets, making sure that local authorities have the comprehensive strategies in place to regenerate their high streets with community support, while ensuring that they effectively use the powers that are already at their disposal. The Bill will be another tool in the armoury of local authorities to drive forward high street regeneration. It provides businesses and enterprising souls with a magnet, a predictable framework and a clear signal that unpredicted offers are welcome for collaborative and dynamic partnership work. I beg to move.
“In the Levelling Up White Paper, the government committed to setting out a plan for simplifying and streamlining the funding landscape and to help local stakeholders navigate funding opportunities”.
This testifies to the difficulties and expenses incurred by local authorities in making applications for funding.
A common testimony of local authorities is that insufficient resources are available for developing a bid, which may be accompanied by a judgment that it is not worth their while to do so. Even if these impediments were overcome and if the money for regeneration were amply available, a more fundamental impediment could block the progress. Local authorities lack sufficient influence over the activities in high streets to address the problems of urban regeneration.
Few occupants of commercial town centre properties are also their owners. A figure of 12.8% has been cited for the proportion of private individual landlords and owner-occupiers. The ownership of the majority of properties resides in the portfolios of real estate investment trusts and other private interest companies, such as insurance and pension funds, where individual properties feature as lines on a spreadsheet.
The rent payable to owners places a heavy burden on the retailers. The burden is heaviest in times of economic recession when the income from trading is reduced; it may force the retailers into bankruptcy. There is little direct engagement of the property owners with the tenants. Although both parties are charged with the upkeep of the properties, there is little incentive to enhance them since much of the benefit from doing so will accrue to the other party. When properties fall vacant, there seems to be little urgency on the part of owners to find new occupants, and there may be good reason for this. The principal characteristic of a property from the point of view of an investment fund is its capital value, which is tied to its rent. To reduce the rent in an attempt quickly to attract a tenant will destroy that value.
Short-term letting to independent retailers may be unprofitable. Among the inducements to a new tenant there are liable to be deferments of rent and contributions to fitting-out costs, which cannot be afforded easily by small independent retailers. Whereas, in the past, retail leases could be for as long as 20 years, they are now expected to be of a limited duration. Moreover, the high rates of failure among small start-up enterprises deters property owners from accepting such tenants.
The planning departments of local authorities face an intractable problem in motivating a collection of remote and disengaged agents to co-operate in any plans they might have for urban renewal and regeneration. Matters were quite different in the early post-war years, when urban reconstruction was an urgent priority. Much of our modern environment was created in that era. One can conjure up an image of a post-war architect or planning officer airily waving their hand over a tabletop model corresponding to a large derelict area that was set for redevelopment. The tabletop would be covered with small, white rectilinear boxes representing buildings in the modernist style. The person demonstrating the plan might have been dressed in an imitation of the sartorial style of the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known commonly by the pseudonym Le Corbusier.
We have come to regret the depredations of the cheap modern architecture that accompanied this post-war redevelopment; we should remember its vigour and ambition, which we might wish to recapture. We look for contemporary examples of such enterprise, but they are rare. Some of them are the result of private sector initiatives. The Built Environment Committee has witnessed one such example recently, which is from a firm that began working on town centre redevelopment some 30 years ago. The firm is based in the Sheffield area of South Yorkshire. A typical example of what the firm has achieved has been the redevelopment of an extensive site of a derelict steelworks. This degree of enterprise is rare and it cannot be relied upon to achieve the reconstruction that is called for. Only by engendering the same spirit of enterprise within many local authorities can a major transformation be achieved. It is appropriate to remember that once, in the not-so-distant past, they did embody such a spirit.
The Bill will require local authorities to have regard to an improvement plan when exercising planning functions. How, if at all, would this relate to permitted development rights, and will such rights that allow significant changes of use without planning permission potentially impede the effectiveness of a council’s improvement plan required by the Bill? When the improvement plan is reviewed within five years of its publication, as required by the Bill, that review will presumably be by the council itself. When assessing the effectiveness of its own improvement plan, the council will have to take into account any changes of use under permitted development rights during the previous five years. Those changes of use could be very significant and, outside the council’s control, have adversely affected the council’s improvement plan.
Regarding financial implications of the Bill, the Government have allowed £26 million, the bulk of which will be for all local authorities in England to prepare and review up to three improvement plans for their designated high streets. Is this enough funding? Our committee has heard compelling evidence of local authorities being increasingly deprived of funds; they are already finding it difficult to allocate resources for planning and applying for the many government funding schemes, as referred to by the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth. Moreover, this £26 million probably covers only the costs of preparing the improvement plans; it almost certainly does not cover any significant costs of the actual improvement. In practice, this means that in preparation of improvement plans local authorities will be restricted to confining their plans to relatively unambitious, low-cost improvements.
I commend to noble Lords the excellent book, recently published by the RIBA, High Street: How Our Town Centres Can Bounce Back from the Retail Crisis. One of its authors, Dr Lucy Montague, from the Manchester School of Architecture, is a special adviser to our Built Environment Committee’s inquiry. She and her colleagues undertook a three-year study of over 100 high streets, which highlighted the importance of broader policies, such as town centre first planning policies. The book is refreshingly optimistic about the future of the high street, arguing that the crisis on the high street is a misleading term. There is indeed a crisis in big retail, and town and city centres dependent on multiple retailers have certainly suffered, but the authors argue that the high streets more reliant on independent retailers and emerging new sectors have a brighter future.
In summary, this is broadly a very positive Bill. By requiring councils to designate a priority area and propose high street improvement plans, the Bill has the potential to pave the way for future government policies specifically to support that designation and those improvement plans. The Bill may be less useful in isolation if other government policies are not introduced or modified in alignment with the Bill. Nevertheless, the Bill’s principal objective is to create thriving high streets, and this is to be warmly applauded.
The object of the Bill is to preserve and enhance high streets as places of economic benefit and growth. I particularly like that it has all-party support, and I congratulate my colleague Jack Brereton on achieving that—he has done better than most Prime Ministers in recent times. It brings all local people together, including local businesses. It develops an action plan. There is the possibility of some government funding. It gives local authorities fresh responsibilities, but it is not too heavy-handed. It is, by design, flexible and light.
The Local Government Association, I am disappointed to say, believes the scheme is unnecessary. I think that is a bit of “not invented here”. The fact is that it is necessary to emphasise the importance of local businesses to high streets, and I think their views should be taken into account more than they have been in the past.
I said that I spent my teenage years in Southport. I now live in south Fulham, and a perfect test case for the Bill will be the Wandsworth Bridge Road, which goes through south Fulham and is a vital artery. It is perfect for the sort of action area specified in the Bill. It is a great Bill, and I hope it is adopted throughout the country.
It is interesting to think about what the guidance will say. There is a question of powers but there is possibly some ability to use the guidance for an issue that was also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Mair: permitted development rights. Your Lordships’ House has heard from two noble Lords not currently in their place—the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Crisp—who highlighted the terrible nature of the housing that has been developed under permitted development rights. Some 100,000 dwellings have been created since 2013, but many lack fire safety standards, adequate ventilation and natural light—imagine housing without natural light. They do not have the facilities, such as schools and health facilities, that are needed. The Government have ruled out giving councils control over this within these zones, but is it possible to put anything in the guidance that might help to address this issue?
I will particularly focus on privatisation, because public land ownership in Britain is in crisis. Since the late 1970s, half of all of what was public land has been sold off: 2 million hectares in total, or 10% of Britain’s total land area. Can the Minister—or the Labour Front Bench in the future—comment on whether the Government would consider making a recommendation in the guidance that there be no further privatisation of public space in these high street plans? That is absolutely crucial to our politics.
I am going to declare an interest here, because I believe that our high street should be a place of political activity —something that privatisation has often led to the exclusion of. My declaration of interest is that I was with Occupy London on day one, when it was driven out and unable to occupy what many people think of as a public space, Paternoster Square—a long-term historic political space in London. Now, of course, it is owned and managed by the Japanese group Mitsubishi Estate, which was able to close that square off, and Occupy London ended up in front of St Paul’s instead.
I hope that we might see some guidance on this. I hope that we might also see in the guidance whether the Government are going to provide all kinds of prescriptions to make sure that we protect small independent businesses against large multinational companies.
Finally, I will put on the record that I did really struggle with this—but eventually I decided that, however limited and controlling from Westminster it is, it provides a little bit more in the way of resources to local councils. So it is not my intention to seek to slow the progress of the Bill, despite the very deep concern of the Local Government Association and local authorities.
In addition, specifically concerning this Bill, with a considerable amount of pressure being placed on local authorities, coupled with their restricted resources, I find it difficult to believe that they will be either willing or able to put into practice the plans promoted in this Bill. Both national and local government have come up with all types of ideas for some considerable while to try to halt the decline of the high street, but the decline continues nevertheless. I hate to be negative, but I cannot see this Bill altering the situation. It is yet another ambitious and well-intentioned initiative to complement a number of previous ones, and I am afraid that it will serve to add a further layer of bureaucracy to an already overstretched system. I do support the Bill and I wish it well, but I simply do not have the confidence that it will achieve its aims.
Secondly, we have the issue of council expenditure. As noble Lords have indicated, the Government are allocating the money to develop and draw up the plans, but not to implement them. All the speakers on the Bill have reservations as to whether this will produce any actual implementation. This is in the context of the overall shortage that local authorities are currently looking at—I think the LGA indicates that there will be a £4 billion shortfall for local authorities over the next one or two years. Inevitably, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, indicated, that will lead to cuts in street cleaning and maintenance because, increasingly, local authorities are able to focus their finances only on essential services, which those do not count as.
So, as I have said, we on these Benches are not opposing the Bill. It is a very small step indeed to deal with a very large problem. I might say cynically that perhaps that is why the Government are supporting it.