Mr.
Goodman: The Minister has not answered some of our
questions, such as how many court cases she expects as a result of the
legislation.
Ms
Winterton: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman has not understood
what I said about not having criminal prosecutions and financial
penalties. There is always the possibility of judicial review, but I
was talking about an approach by which to ensure that the comprehensive
area assessments and the other mechanisms for monitoring local
authorities are used to make sure that the duty is fulfilled. That is
not an unusual approach in how we work with local government, but one
that I am sure Opposition Members, with all their experience of local
government, know to be an effective way of proceeding.
Mr.
Jackson: What is the logical extension of the
Minister’s point about non-compliance with the clause, if it
stands part of the Bill and becomes part of the Act? Will local
authorities have a key performance indicator for this part of the Act,
will that be used and will it have a direct correlation with the
financial settlement that central Government seeks to make to those
local
authorities?
Ms
Winterton: We shall certainly have a key performance
indicator as a result of the
Bill.
Mr.
Curry: Will the Minister confirm that she has just added
to the performance indicator scale? Her late-resigned predecessor kept
telling us the extent to which the Government were taking away all the
apparatus and gendarmerie of monitoring and
supervision.
Ms
Winterton: As I understand it, the key performance
indicator is available if authorities wish to choose it. I can of
course write further clarification to hon. and right hon. Members, but
that is the
situation. I
hope that with those explanations of some of the principles that we are
adopting, the Committee will recognise the importance of ensuring that
we do something to address the problem adequately because the ability
of local people to understand, influence and shape local services is
vital. In the light of that, I hope that the Committee will accept
clause 1 and reject the
amendments.
Dan
Rogerson: We have had a debate that has been lively in
parts, but also somewhat circular. The Opposition feel that the
legislative need for the clause has yet to be demonstrated, but the
Government feel that they are justified in legislating when the issue
could happily be dealt with by offering support or by encouraging local
authority representative bodies to work together to promote best
practice.
I signalled that amendment 37 was a probing amendment
intended to allow a debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Falmouth and
Camborne underlined the distinction between the support and encouragement
given to individual local authority members to promote greater understanding
of what authorities can and cannot do and the support and encouragement
that are part of the relationship between the Department for Communities
and Local Government and local authorities, where money is made available
to authorities to promote such understanding on a corporate basis.
In the
amendment, we are saying that if the Government see fit to impose a
duty on local authorities, that will presumably be taken account of in
the moneys made available to them. If so, we should recognise the fact
that individual members of the authority might have a different view or
a different way in which they want to proceed from that dictated by the
council, which may have a particular complexion. There is a distinction
between the role of a member and the role of the local authority, as
the body corporate. Having said that, I do not intend to press the
amendment.
We are
debating clause stand part at the same time as the amendment. Although
the Minister has valiantly jumped in to deal with this rather dodgy
Bill and do the best she can to make the case for it, there is clearly
a difference of opinion in the Committee about whether imposing a duty
on local authorities is necessary or the right thing to do.
The Minister
set out the means by which local authorities might be judged, which
differ from those set out by one of her Back-Bench colleagues in a new
clause that was not selected. We are telling local authorities that
they have to do something, but we are not telling them how they will be
judged. It is like telling a motorist that they must obey the speed
limit, but that they can define it for themselves. That is an odd way
to proceed.
Mr.
Jackson: Is the hon. Gentleman as confused as I am by the
answer that the Minister gave just before he began his remarks? She
said that a voluntary methodology would be used to assess whether the
clause is being complied with. Local authorities listed in clause
1(3)(a) to (d) will, in effect, choose to be assessed on whether they
comply with the clause. Is the clause not therefore completely
specious? Is it not unnecessary to include it in the
Bill?
Dan
Rogerson: The hon. Gentleman undersells his own
contribution to the debate in implying that he is confused. In fact, it
is the Government who are confused over how the provisions will
operate.
Ms
Winterton: Local authorities choose, as part of their
local area agreements, which key performance indicators they wish to be
assessed against. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned finance. Obviously,
a lot of the funding for the work in the clause can be embedded in
existing work, but we made it clear that we will fund local authorities
to respond to the
duty.
Dan
Rogerson: I am grateful to the Minister for intervening.
She is referring back to my earlier remarks. I was seeking to make the
distinction between the ability of a local member to access money and
support to do this as opposed to the council as a whole doing it.
Although I may later seek the Committee’s leave to withdraw the
amendment, my point still stands. We need clarification on how local
members might be able to access that support and funding as opposed to
how the governing party of an authority might choose to do
so.
Let me return to the intervention of the hon. Member
for Peterborough. If this clause becomes part of the Bill and the Bill
goes on to the statute book, we are imposing a duty on all local authorities.
However, if they react to it in the way in which they say, they will
not seek to have this as one of their key targets. That underlines how
unnecessary the measure is. As the right hon. Member for Skipton and
Ripon said, the Government have made great play of how they have streamlined
that whole process, and now they seek to add something extra to that
whole menu of choices that local authorities have to negotiate with
the DCLG on how it will be assessed. That can be done perfectly adequately
through best practice and through working with local authorities to
encourage them to do it through the representative bodies that already
exist. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment,
by leave,
withdrawn. Question
put, That the clause stand part of the
Bill. The
Committee divided: Ayes 9, Noes
7.
Division No.
1] Question
accordingly agreed to.
Clause 1
ordered to stand part of the
Bill.
Clause
2Democratic
arrangements of connected
authorities Question
proposed: That the clause stand part of the
Bill.
Mr.
Curry: I want to ask for clarity on one or two points.
Subsection (1) talks about a duty “to promote
understanding”. I should like to know how local authorities can
do that. Is it the same as raising awareness, which is one of the
favourite things that lobby groups talk about? I have spent most of my
political career trying to dampen down awareness, which is by far the
most sensible thing to do in our profession.
Then we come
to paragraphs (a), (b) and (c). Should the little word
“and” appear after each paragraph so that it reads,
“the functions of authorities” and “the democratic
arrangements” and
“how members of
the public can take part.”?
Or are they choices,
because when we come to the explanation of the authorities concerned,
some have absolutely no democratic credentials. My primary care trust
is not elected in any shape or form. Nobody is elected to a primary
care trust, so how can we promote the democratic credentials of a body
that has
none?
Mr.
Goodman: The Minister muttered from a sedentary position
that those bodies have councillors on them, but I am not sure whether
that makes them democratic. How can this possibly apply to a strategic
health authority, the most remote kind of public body I have
encountered in my eight years in this
place? 12
noon
Mr.
Curry: That is precisely the case and there is a very
serious point behind this. Quite rightly, the Government wish social
services departments and health bodies to act more closely together
because the links between them are close and they depend to a
significant extent on one another. Social services are subject to local
authority control because they have elected councillors, but health
authorities are not. I know that health trusts have elections, but
turnout is so low that it must mean that the electorate is very small.
I suspect that the only smaller electorate in the world is that which
re-elects
hereditary peers from among the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.
That is the world’s most micro electorate. The turnout for
people electing health trusts is around 2 per cent.
My question
is very simple and my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal
raised it in the Chamber. How can one promote democratic arrangements
for bodies that have no democracy in them? What do you say about them
when trying to fulfil this clause? I would be fascinated to know and to
find out quite what “promoting understanding” means and
how one does
it.
Mr.
Goodman: It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend
the Member for Skipton and Ripon who has, as ever, put his finger on
some of the problematic aspects of the clause.
I presume
that this clause will also give rise to a performance indicator that a
local authority may or may not choose to accept. It is likely that most
of them will not and it is very hard to see why this is in the Bill at
all. If the Minister’s answer had been other than it was, I
concede that it would have been heavy-handed on the part of central
Government. Like so many of these clauses, it veers between
heavy-handedness and being completely unnecessary. On that theme, let
me turn to the clause itself.
As my right
hon. Friend said, the clause sets out a duty to promote understanding
and names a number of bodies. The inclusion of the bodies concerned and
the exclusion of others was heavily debated in the Lords. Then, near
the end in subsection (6), we are told that this list which we are now
debating properly—as we should be able to—can be amended
without any democratic consideration whatever. This is a point to which
I will return. My right hon. Friend raised the point about the
promotion of understanding so I will not go over that again, but the
Committee will be curious, as was the Lords, to hear the justification
for the list of these bodies before us
today.
Mr.
Jackson: In studying this particular part of the clause is
my hon. Friend, like me, slightly philosophical about what should and
should not be included? Many of these bodies have an interface with
their localities and local constituents and deliver key public
services. Given that, why does he think, for instance, that the Child
Support Agency—or whatever it is now called—or the
Borders and Immigration Agency, where we are forced to wait twelve
months or more for an answer to questions, are not included in this
list? Hon. Members will know that we have a significant case load of
local people in our constituencies concerned about those
departments.
Mr.
Goodman: My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I will
come to it in a moment because, by rising, he happily jogged my memory
about a key issue in relation to this clause. It is one I think we
should raise at the start of many of these clauses and which was raised
at the start of clause 1. It returns to the simple question of why on
earth we need any of this set out on the statute book in the first
place. There is a long list of bodies and a duty to promote
understanding. |Of course a local authority should do that; we have no
quarrel with the idea. It is a good one, and we can see why
Ministers and the Government support it, but the moment one begins to
set all that out in statute, it gives rise to questions such as the one
that my hon. Friend just asked, to which I shall return in a
moment.
The hon.
Member for Falmouth and Camborne asked why duties should not be placed
on other bodies to promote an understanding of local authorities. It is
a question that applies in the clause. Here is a long list of
bodies—chief officer of police, the broads authority, a national
park authority and so on—and the Government believe it essential
to write into statute that local authorities should promote
understanding of what they do.
Mr.
Curry: If my hon. Friend goes further, he will notice that
the Government must promote understanding of Uncle Tom Cobleigh and
all. Will not local authorities spend the entirety of their time and
use their whole staff promoting understanding of functions that they no
longer have the time to carry out?
Mr.
Goodman: Of course, and with all the costs and
complications that follow. My right hon. Friend raises an interesting
avenue of exploration. If the Government are determined to foist all
these obligations on local authorities to promote understanding of
bodies that the Government claim are democratic, such as primary care
trusts—although the Minister intervened to say, sotto voce, that
they include elected councillors—will the Government, by their
own logic, propose another measure placing on all those bodies a duty
to promote the understanding of local authorities? If not, why not? We
look forward to the Minister telling
us. Turning
to the matter of who is on the list, my hon. Friend the Member for
Peterborough raised the question of the Child Support Agency. He asked,
in effect, “If a strategic health authority, why not the Child
Support Agency?” It is hard to see why not. As my right hon.
Friend reminded us, if the Bill could usefully be called the Thurrock
Bill, the clause could usefully be called the Suffolk, Coastal clause,
because late in the day on Second Reading, my right hon. Friend the
Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) rose to his feet
and made a blistering speech pointing out that it was hard to see how
some of the bodies grouped together—for example, in subsection
3—could be considered democratic bodies.
I take the
Minister’s point about primary care trusts, but I find it hard
to understand how a strategic health authority can remotely be
considered democratic. I do not know what it is like down in the
south-west, but most of us in the south-east have no idea where our
strategic health authority is or what it does. I cannot remember when
we last met with it, although the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for
North Cornwall might be more fortunate. Those bodies are so remote from
local people as to prompt the question what on earth they are doing in
the
clause.
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