Cornwall Labour Party

PLATFORM FOR CORNWALL
February 2008

INTRODUCTION

Cornwall Labour Party have produced the LABOUR PLATFORM FOR CORNWALL:

• to remind people of what Labour policies since 1997 have done for Cornwall.

• to highlight what Cornwall stands to gain from current and future Labour policies.

• to set out what people in Cornwall most urgently look to a Labour government to provide.

• to point to ways of adapting and applying Labour policy locally so that it answers to the particular nature of our local needs.

As such, we offer it to the people of Cornwall as a statement of what Labour has to offer them on the matters that concern them most closely.

We offer it to Labour councillors and Labour candidates at every level, as well as to individual Party members and supporters, as a help to them in putting across Labour’s case.

We offer it to Labour in government, as an attempt to show how national policies can best be developed and adapted to tackle the problems and serve the needs of people here in Cornwall.

Government will be listening to us, and we in turn will go on listening to the concerns of the community around us.

The Labour Platform has already been widely debated within Cornwall Labour Party. We welcome further comments and suggestions, which can be sent to us either through local Labour Party representatives, or via this website.

1. WORK AND THE ECONOMY

In Cornwall as elsewhere the bedrock of Labour’s achievement lies in what the Labour government has done for work and the economy. Anyone who doubts that should ask themselves what Cornwall since 1997 would have been like without the minimum wage, without tax credits, without Sure Start, without the two-thirds fall in numbers unemployed, without the £700 million of European investment…

Of course there is plenty still to be done. Cornwall is still a region at the margins: that is why European funding – concentrated and sustained here through the efforts of a Labour Government – has been vital to our ongoing recovery. The seasonal character of holiday-industry work highlights a need to learn from experience about targeting tax credits. Our dispersed settlement-patterns mean that sporadic threats to local employment have to be handled with a special concern for their impact on people and communities. Cornish wage-rates – still too low by UK standards – need to be brought closer to national average levels.

Already, though, Labour has achieved a stable enough base to be working towards the next phase of development in the Cornish economy. Here the aim has to be to promote jobs that are of higher quality, more diverse, and more sustainable.

Building on what the Combined Universities in Cornwall have done in producing more local graduates we need to increase the range of graduate employment within Cornwall, and to move on, once for all, from our traditionally low-pay economy to one based on skills fully used and fully rewarded. Labour’s progress towards this is dramatically marked by the fact that, for the first time on record, more young people in their early working life are settling in Cornwall than are leaving it. Yet too many of our qualified young people still do go away to work, and stay away.

Part of the answer must be greater diversity. Some may argue that tourism, which accounts for so much of Cornwall’s GDP, has to be a first priority for development. But a “one-crop” economy is always a high-risk economy – especially if that one crop depends on the climate. Tourism, like other traditional sectors, will have its own share in development, becoming, increasingly, a high-skills undertaking.

But Cornwall in the 21st century needs a range of 21st-century industries, offering long-term prospects to its newly-skilled young. A broader manufacturing base will be a valuable element in the new pattern. Social enterprise and co-operatives, well-adapted as they are to Cornwall’s traditionally flexible and independent workforce, must be promoted and supported. Projects which address the need for new forms of energy, or help in other ways to meet the coming crisis in world resources, will offer key growth-points. All of our economic activities, old and new, will need to adapt in their own ways, to offer quality work to a quality workforce.

To establish that ”virtuous circle”, we have to get various parts of our infrastructure more firmly in place. Some are specific and local: filling the gaps in broadband coverage; adding to work already done on upgrading the A30. Others – the development of Falmouth docks and Newquay Airport (and of internal and external transport links generally) – will call for decisions on large-scale capital funding. Here, specific questions about sustainability will sometimes have to be balanced with the need to keep the lives of whole communities sustainable.

Easy or popular answers will not always be possible. But in big infrastructure projects of this kind it matters that local people should get their say not just in the planning process, but in the long-term arrangements for sustainability and accountability which ought, as a matter of course, to be part of the outcome. In that way, new employment opportunities can bring with them a strong community involvement.

Most essential of all will be expanding and improving provision at every level of education, across a whole range of skills. Just two examples out of many are the expertise in human resources, accountancy and management which a modern, year-round tourist industry demands, and the training in construction skills which the hoped-for expansion in house-building will need.

At the same time, Labour will continue to protect the most vulnerable people within the new Cornish economy. We will stand up for decent conditions and pay for local workers.

We will seek to ensure that agency workers are treated on the same terms as directly employed workers. Whilst there is a role for agency workers in the labour market, they should not be used by employers to cut labour costs or erode the hard won pay and conditions of the permanent workforce.

All this will not be achieved overnight. Medium-term support for the Cornish economy will still be needed. Some will come from the European funding already secured, though our long-term aim must be the day when Cornwall is able to do without it. The decision to use the latest European allocation primarily for large-scale infrastructure projects makes good sense, but Labour in Cornwall wants to see more public and local involvement in deciding about these.

Again in the medium term, relocating public-service agencies offers a well-tried way of stimulating local economies. Thanks to IT, this has never been easier. New public sector employment in areas like Cornwall can be a valuable part of the regeneration mix. It can, where necessary, be led by some transfer of existing jobs into the county (though not in such numbers as to place major demands on local housing or other services). Local representatives need to press Government rather more on this. The Civil Service thinking that defines such relocated agencies as “remote capture units” has to be sharply contested

The world economy in its present state offers Britain no favours for getting on with the work described here. But the strong national economy which Labour has built up does equip us better than most countries for weathering any global downturn. The Cornish economy, powerfully advanced by Labour over the past eleven years, still presents challenges which only a Labour government has the record, the capacity, and the will to meet. Nobody else can offer Cornish voters these things.

2. AFFORDABLE HOUSING

The clear commitment made at a national level by Gordon Brown to provide an additional 300,000 houses annually, and to foreground the supply of decent affordable housing offers Cornish people their best hope in a generation for addressing this, the most urgent and intractable of Cornwall’s problems.

Only around 11 per cent of homes in Cornwall (compared to the UK average of 19 per cent) were built as council housing. Our council and social housing stock was further eroded by the “Right to Buy”. Only in very recent years has new building in Cornwall kept pace with this erosion – and that still not in every area .

Keeping pace with demand has been made harder by rising house-prices, often responding to higher incomes elsewhere in the country. These have also reduced affordability in the Cornish rented sector. The dearth of affordable or rentable properties is aggravated by the high proportion of second homes and holiday lets (over 10% of all housing, but up to 80% in some areas).

The gap between average earnings and average house-prices in Cornwall threatens to produce two separate communities: people on the “housing ladder” and people with no hope of getting there. This is socially divisive, and damaging to both groups alike. Scarce or poor housing, besides driving people to migrate, frustrates delivery of health and education programmes to those who need them most. All this is unacceptable to Labour.

Slackening demand in the housing market will not, of itself, do much to improve the lot of those excluded from it. If it happens, Labour will not let it distract from the main matter: our commitment to build affordable housing in numbers that match the need.

Our notion of “affordability” has to take account of local incomes, mortgage-costs and rents. It must offer the prospect of decent housing to people on average incomes who find Cornish house-prices beyond them, and to the still too large numbers of people in Cornwall who are low-paid. It has to be about housing standards, as well as house-prices. Affordable housing should be of good, sustainable quality on all fronts – materials, energy, appearance, infrastructure, space and siting, It might be most helpful to think of it as “quality housing to meet local needs”.

The current mindset which sees ownership as the only goal worth pursuing has been unhelpful in Cornwall, as rising values have fuelled the “buy-to-invest” mentality. Schemes for renting which give long-term tenants their own kind of security, might help to correct this. In any event, equality of housing opportunity can only come from a vibrant social and rented sector offering decent homes for all. One way to promote this will be to make sure that, as a matter of course, new developments offer a mixture of housing tenures, types and sizes.

Housing associations and private developers, then, will still be playing their part, but Labour expects local authorities to be key players in delivering affordable homes. They have to be given all the relevant financial, planning and building powers. And they should be required to use them to provide the number and the range of affordable homes which their communities need. Labour’s new Housing and Regeneration Bill (going through Parliament with precious little help from opposition parties) sets in place much of the framework needed for this to happen.

Councils must act effectively to maximize and achieve new housing targets. Those already proposed in the South-West Region’s spatial strategy, and in local community plans need to be revisited with the government’s national target in mind.

This may or may not involve the County Council issuing a named target-figure for new affordable homes in Cornwall. But the Council will need to produce:

– strategic assessments and plans for affordable development,

– strategies for achieving the highest proportion of affordable homes in each new building project,

– priorities for matching the differing needs of different localities with the kinds of affordable development best suited to them.

This last takes matters to very local levels. In North Cornwall the main demand is for low-cost housing to buy; in Carrick, for more rented homes. Coastal and inland areas often have contrasting patterns and problems. Specific towns and villages given over to second homes and holiday lets have their own needs. Clearly, even under unitary local government after May 2009, Cornwall will require some more local element in its planning mechanism. Within it, the voice of those directly affected by lack of affordable homes must strengthened. The work, though, is too urgent to be put off until then: these and the following requirements have to be put as challenges now to County and District Councils.

Planning rules that obstruct Councils in reaching their affordable housing targets will need to be changed. Others, which enable developers to evade strategic requirements, must be tightened. For example, developers who have met the minimum requirements for affordable provision should not be allowed to expand their proposals later without adding to the affordable element too.

Across all its dealing with plans for affordable housing, the County needs to cultivate a habit of negotiating robustly with developers. (Not every local authority in Cornwall has managed to do this.)

The Council also needs to overhaul its own procedures, so that an affordable scheme which has won planning approval cannot be blocked later by refusing permission to put in the required main services. (This – which has been known to happen – makes it harder to believe in their commitment to affordable housing.)

Some market-led distortions will call for radical responses. In places where affordable housing is scarcest, the quickest, most effective answer may be to build council houses. But that needs to be done with an eye to creating sustainable communities. Harbourside ghost-towns and clifftop ghettoes only reinforce what the market has done. We have to turn it around.

Unoccupied second homes still enjoy a 10% rebate on their Council Tax. This must go, with the proceeds being ring-fenced as additional revenue for affordable new building. Such ring-fencing is made necessary by the County Council’s recent equivocation over the use of money provided by an earlier reduction in the second-home rebate. Holiday lets are, in some ways, harder to deal with. Planning restrictions and business rates are all too easy for owners to evade. Yet they have a clear responsibility to the local housing stock, and to the local infrastructures on which they rely. This needs to be reflected in a special charge levied on all such properties (again, ring-fenced for local housing needs).

Radical action is needed, too, over the much more fundamental matter of the supply of land. This should not exclude development of green-field sites, where the case for affordable building there is compelling. Suitable public sector land, when sold, should go to affordable housing projects, rather than the highest bidder. Community Land Trusts, managed by town and parish councils, should receive the support needed to involve local communities in this key part of their own development.

Affordable homes should be affordable in perpetuity, their numbers maintained, and steadily increased. Besides enabling new buyers to take over on similar terms, arrangements for selling-on must offer a revenue-stream for future affordable housing, without leaving sellers helpless in the wider housing market. Shared equity schemes and favourable mortgage terms might achieve this – provided they do not just work to keep house prices high. Mutual home ownership, linked with Community Land Trusts, avoids the pitfalls, but may not be feasible in every area.

Increasing the number of homes for affordable rent is also vital for meeting people’s housing needs. Target-figures for this sector too must be planned into proposals for mixed and sustainable housing developments.

A main concern for many tenants and would-be tenants is the state of the current housing stock. Here, Labour in government has done well by Cornwall. Nationally it has invested over £20 billion to bring over a million homes up to decent standards. Against this background, tenants’ self-management schemes in Cornwall have greatly improved the housing stock – and people’s lives. The County Council and its unitary successor should learn best practice in this regard from districts like Carrick.

The same awareness that affordability involves quality as well as price informs the Labour government’s Code for Sustainable Homes and its Warm Front programme for pensioners.

Labour in Cornwall will work to keep Councils up to the mark on the challenges involved in a successful affordable housing programme (particularly those on which they have performed less than well in the past). We will seek a bold approach to the regulatory changes and market interventions which such a programme demands. We will strive to ensure that the extra money pledged by a Labour government is spent to best advantage here in Cornwall.

3. EDUCATION

Labour’s investment of EU and matching funds in new buildings and world class facilities, together with positive co-operation between partner universities and colleges (and the NHS), have changed the landscape of higher education in Cornwall by establishing the Combined Universities at Tremough and the Peninsula Medical School. These developments enable Cornwall to play its own part in a knowledge-based global economy. We look to see the Combined Universities develop into a University of Cornwall, taking full responsibility for qualifications, research, discovery and ideas, and delivering these, as needed, to all parts of the county.

We need a strategic plan, built around proposals for the use of EC funding, to provide the skills and training to meet Cornwall’s needs, as these can be identified, over the next two decades. The Combined Universities should play a major part in providing the local input for this – not least because of their concern with both career-related disciplines, and those with broader cultural relevance. Vital as training is, training as an integral part of education has to be our goal: we want graduates who both know how to do things, and understand the difference that new knowledge can make.

An important early goal should be to build the Combined Universities’ capability for science education, matching in other subject-areas the impressive development of the Peninsula Medical School and the Knowledge Spa at the Royal Cornwall Hospital. This could usefully be stimulated by moving one or more government scientific institutions to Cornwall, or by creating new ones here, answering to newly-perceived environmental needs and their technologies.

Institutions not federated within the Combined Universities which contribute to HE and FE provision (the Open University and a dozen or more schools and other centres) will have their part in any such overall strategy. Support should be forthcoming for the latter group in particular to consolidate and extend their work – this makes sense in relation to Cornwall’s pattern of small, widely-dispersed centres of population.

At the same time, Labour is strongly aware of the need to think about education in Cornwall, from the primary and pre-primary stages onward, as a single undertaking. Labour’s commitment to expand Higher Education access is of a piece with its drive to raise spending per pupil in our schools (already doubled since1997) to private-sector levels.

All that, in its turn, is of a piece with Sure Start, whose 30 Children’s Centres across the county have improved life for so many young families. Or with the Family Learning intervention programme – greatly valued in some of Cornwall’s most deprived areas, for the support it offers to children and their educationally disadvantaged parents or carers. Or with the new measures promised in the Labour government’s Children’s Plan to help parents take a more active role in their children’s education. Our vision is about freeing the capabilities of all our people.

Labour’s record of investment in education bears out the practical nature of that vision. We will not forget in a hurry how the education system was starved and demoralised under the Tories, so that Labour has had to multiply tenfold the money spent on school buildings alone. Continuing progress to raise standards, further investment in new schools and sports facilities, an expanding Higher Education sector in which two out of three students now receive grants, are things to which Cornwall can look forward with confidence under Labour, but under no-one else. (Having a County Council which manages to leave almost £20 million of the money allocated to it for education to lie idle in unspent balances does not help, of course.)

4. A GREENER PLACE

Learning to take more care of our planet will matter a great deal for all of us in the coming years. Cornwall – a place well worth taking care of – has a chance to be at the leading edge of the developments that will be called for.

Some of these will underwrite the future for our longest-established industries. Both farming and fishing have significant export potential, but the secure basis for their prosperity – and for their main contribution to the quality of life in Cornwall – has to lie in the growth of local markets for high-quality, pollution-free Cornish food. Wherever possible, Labour will seek to establish and develop such markets.

Our sources of renewable energy (wind, wave, solar, geothermal) offer real prospects of progress towards carbon-neutrality. Care for our relatively pollution-free environment can set standards and provide models for other areas. Apart from the wider employment opportunities which it offers, carbon-neutral economic growth can make Cornwall a heartland of the UK’s new environmental economy. Labour policy in Cornwall should aim at making these aspirations a reality, with the welcome support given to the Hayle Wave Hub a model for future actions.

There is real goodwill in Cornwall towards these goals, but government will still need to set much of the agenda. It will also need to make sure that environmental and energy-saving responsibilities are built into all our planning, from the upgrading of internal and external transport links to the much-needed reshaping of St Austell town centre. When Labour’s housing policy insists on energy efficiency in every new house, it gives very much the right signals. Giving weight to this and other green concerns, even when (as with transport) these have to be balanced with different needs, will serve Cornwall well.

In immediate practical terms Labour will support local plans to reduce carbon emissions, and will press for an urgent increase in recycling in Cornwall to at least UK average levels. This seems to us to be a sounder response to the problem of waste disposal than the single, centralized incinerator proposed by the County Council.

Clean beaches around our coasts are a success story of the past few years. But there is still something wrong with a system in which the care of these national assets is a charge on local domestic water bills. These bear heavily on people with low incomes, and a fairer arrangement is urgently needed. Quite simply, bills from South-West Water are unacceptably high compared with those in other areas

Labour’s forthcoming Marine Conservation Bill is a far-reaching measure which will be important to Cornwall. It will bring together laws on marine and coastal planning, fisheries management, the licensing of offshore developments, and the protection of natural resources. Much local consultation has already gone on; before the Bill reaches its final form, the Labour government will welcome further constructive suggestions.

Balancing long-term environmental concerns with the immediate needs of those who use that environment in their daily life and work means, inevitably, that the outcome will be different from one which tries to please everybody. What matters will be to get it right. Labour will not lose sight of that.

Central to the new arrangements will be a new Marine Management Organization. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will almost certainly have equivalent bodies of their own. Cornwall’s unique involvement with the sea, based on our having a longer coastline than any county south of Argyllshire, creates a strong case for a devolved Cornish MMO. Whether that happens or not, it is going to make good sense to locate the national MMO headquarters outside London. Cornwall pre-eminently would be the right place to put it.

5. PENSIONS AND BENEFITS

Cornwall’s lasting attraction as a place of retirement, has meant that we have a high proportion of people of pensionable age. Longer life-expectancies mean that this is likely to increase. The low-wage and seasonal character of much economic activity has made the wider range of benefits and credits a vital component in the well-being of many local people and their families. Labour government since 1997 has done a great deal to make this network of support effective; no-one should assume that it will be safe in the hands of any other party.

But the system itself can be dauntingly complex, especially to its most vulnerable users. Simplified delivery of pensions and benefits, so that people find their entitlements easy to identify and straightforward to claim, has to be a more urgent goal of Labour policy in its next phase.

At County level, there is something we can do about it now. District best practice in addressing the needs of benefit claimants (largely developed by a Labour Councillor in Penwith) should, under the new “unitary” regime, become the norm across the whole of Cornwall. Nothing less will be acceptable.

6. HEALTH AND SOCIAL SERVICES

Increases in NHS funding for Cornwall under the Labour government have been massive and consistent at around 9% per year. When the local Hospitals Trust still managed to post a multi-million deficit, Labour Party members made much of the running in the campaign to defend hospitals and services, while the Liberal Democrat County Council were either unable or unwilling to mount effective pressure.

The immediate problems of the local NHS were addressed with some success thanks to some sensible government decisions (which Labour Party members were given the chance to inform), and to new and better management of the County’s NHS Trusts. But the process scarcely allowed for the independent review of needs and resources for which campaigners had been asking.

There is deep attachment to the NHS in Cornwall; people want a service that is patient-led, but not market-led. Labour will continue to strengthen community involvement in shaping local health services, building on the heightened public awareness and commitment that have grown out of recent campaigning. We will urge government to use the model of NHS membership trusts (not necessarily confining it to Foundation Trusts, or to the acute sector) to achieve large scale public involvement in planning and monitoring health services in Cornwall. We have noted with real satisfaction the early indications that both Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS and Gordon Brown’s suggestions for an NHS Constitution include ideas of this kind.

Labour in Cornwall will support better local access to health care, including day treatment facilities, and the use of local hospitals as valued resources to meet local needs. We welcome the creation of the new dental school in Truro. Plans should be set in order now to create placements for its graduates within the NHS in Cornwall, as a lasting solution to the scarcity of NHS dentists here.

Cornwall County Council’s adult social care services have been cut since 2005. Where a funding case has to be made to government in terms of Cornwall’s distinctive age-profile, the Labour Party will play as full a part in that as it did over Health Service concerns.

But the crisis in adult social care involves local government stewardship, as well as central government funding. In this regard, it is disturbing to note that, with the Liberal Democrats at the helm, Cornwall County Council’s assessment rating by the Commission for Social Care Inspection has fallen since 2004 from three stars to one, and is now in the bottom fifth for the country as a whole.

The whole situation should be addressed with a thought-out, long-term strategy, beginning with an “audit of need”. From that, we should go on to strengthen community involvement in shaping local services. The county should develop more community and children’s centres, alongside more co-located services for adults. And “joined-up” working between health, social care and other services has to become the norm in advance of problem-cases, not afterwards.

7. PUBLIC SAFETY MATTERS

Issues of crime, fire and public safety offer further tests of County Council competence. The Liberal Democrat record of drifting into enforced cuts when their latest funding allocation from central governments is over 30% higher than the shire-county average is not impressive. The additional funds made available by the Government from next year are meant to be invested in frontline services, and we believe that further investment in Cornwall’s fire services is vital. Labour’s campaign to keep Cornwall’s 24-hour fire-stations will go on until cuts are ruled out in both Falmouth and Camborne.

Labour will look for recognition in our policing budgets of the special problems created in areas like Newquay by a disruptive minority among our annual influx of five million visitors.

As an area many of whose basic industries (farming, fishing, construction, quarrying) are especially liable to accidents, Labour takes pride in the extra protection for workers brought about by health and safety legislation. The Tories’ promised “bonfire of regulations” can only work against their interests (and those of good employers).

8. FUNDING LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Nobody claims that the present system of Council Tax is satisfactory. It was, in the first instance, hastily improvised by a Conservative government to replace their own Poll Tax, which was even worse. But there is no alternative scheme without problems of its own – certainly not the Liberal Democrat local income tax proposal. Switching tax from property to incomes will simply widen the gap between those who own property and those who don’t. Is that what people in Cornwall want to see happen?

Getting the financial basis for local government right will take time. But that will do more good than a popular “quick fix” that ends by replacing Council Tax with something just as problematic.

Meanwhile, there are useful things to be done now. We need to make sure that the Council Tax relief which the Labour government has provided for those most in need of it is more widely known, and – even more importantly – taken up by all those entitled to it. We also need to do more to give our citizens a sense of ownership over the local tax which they pay. Labour’s plan, now being piloted in some other local-government areas, to ballot residents on council priorities for spending, deserves serious consideration in Cornwall. Particularly this will be the case if the new “unitary” authority is to command general public support – which at this stage it does not.

9. CONSTITUTIONAL MATTERS

The model of county-wide “unitary” local government towards which Cornwall is now moving is one devised by Cornwall County Council – which, given the way in which the majority party there exercises control, means that it is the Liberal Democrats’ preferred option. They have now secured a majority for themselves both on the implementation body and on the committee set up to scrutinize its work. But with that power comes the unfamiliar business of responsibility. “They must now forge ahead”, as the Local Government Minister reminds them, “to establish their own democratic legitimacy and accountability.”

The proposed new arrangements provide no clear regime of local accountability for the greatly increased local powers given to individual County Councillors. Plans for devolving functions to towns and parishes are too piecemeal and uneven to achieve this. Proposals for “Community Network Areas” are in no better shape: the aim, apparently, is to apply this model to different areas of the county in different “aspects” and in differing degrees. This scarcely suggests a system which will be transparent for voters or easy for them to use.

The implementation body has to do far better than this. At the very least, it should revisit the issue of doubling the number of County Councillors (thereby halving the powers of each individual) – an offer made in the County’s bid last summer and unaccountably lost to view ever since. Whatever their eventual number, they have to be made subject to clear lines of democratic oversight, through elected town and parish representatives. So far, we have no clue as to how this is to be done.

As for “democratic legitimacy”, the County Council have studiously avoided putting their scheme to that kind of test. Council elections, now scheduled for May 2009, will come too late for voters to influence the unitary arrangements, and too early to judge how they work out in practice.

They urgently need now to produce detailed proposals capable of securing widespread public support (which even the County Council admitted was not there in June). The outcome should then be submitted to the only people who can give it legitimacy: the voters of Cornwall.

The scheme must also be more open about the properly strategic role of a Cornish unitary authority in its relations with the South-West Region. Especially now that Regional Assemblies are being wound up, we need clarity about this: without it, Cornwall will risk becoming a minor player in a centralist bureaucracy. This strategic dimension needs be written plainly on the face of the new proposals.

The risks of fudging this are real. The South West Regional Spatial Strategy barely mentions Cornwall as an entity. Its plan to centre all strategic development either around Plymouth, or around its arbitrarily-chosen group of “Cornish Towns” is, to put it mildly, liable to distort future economic development here. It is having the same effect on cultural policies, as the Region’s policy document on these shows. Will Cornwall be entitled to modify any of this, or will it not?

At its first meeting the implementation body added to its terms of reference the need to “refine” the original “One Cornwall” scheme – a modest step in the right direction. To give it effect, they will have to keep key principles – democracy, accountability, strategic function – clearly in view, not letting them get swamped by the sheer mass of detail. Their first and last consideration ought to be the aim of better local government for Cornwall – not the advantage of any one political party.

Labour have made these views known, and stand ready to involve themselves in a real exercise of constitution-making. But the County Council’s record so far gives few grounds for hoping that this is what they want to do, or that they will do it well. The Labour government was right to make the unitary option available. But it can only be made effective by a different kind of local politics: one which – still within essential regional and national frameworks – can think and act consistently for Cornwall as a whole, not in a merely sectional or opportunist way. Labour alone among the parties seems capable of doing so.

If you believe that it is important to have Labour policies well-understood in Cornwall, and to have Cornish issues well-understood in Labour policy-making, why not work for these things as a member of your local Labour Party? You can join us by telephoning 08705 900200 or online here.