Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for introducing the Bill, especially as the Bench was barely cold from last night. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, regains her voice and has no cough very soon. My noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market should have been leading for these Benches. She is not here due to a family bereavement. She will be back in full flow very shortly, but this is very much her speech. A local government Bill should give us some real opportunities to rebuild local democracy, empower local government, provide councils with the resources that they need and restore confidence in local government, which, as we have heard this afternoon, is to become ““more visible””. I wrote that down with a question mark. This should be a chance for a more equal partnership between central and local government, as we see elsewhere in Europe and around the world. We welcome the chance to debate the Bill. I particularly look forward to the maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, whose work in Bromley-by-Bow is an extraordinary example of taking forward what can happen in a local community, and of the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, who brings so much experience to the issues that we will be debating. I am also looking forward to, although not a maiden speech, the speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough, whose parishioner I was until he became very grand and moved. I know that he knows a thing or two about community affairs. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, described this as a missed opportunity and a disappointment; my noble friend, too, gave me those words in her notes. They are more polite than I am, or perhaps they are using Lords-speak. I have to say bluntly that I regard this as a bad Bill. It purports to be decentralising, but it does not address the most centralising feature of local governance, which is finance. Public accountability for funding decisions is blurred because so large a proportion of funding comes from central government. We have an annual round of claim and counter-claim between the centre and local government. I agree with the noble Baroness that the Lyons review was a wasted opportunity. The Government now seem retrospectively to be trying to shoehorn much of what Lyons said into their agenda. Council tax is still with us. Noble Lords will not be surprised that I take this opportunity to say that it needs to be replaced by a fair tax based on ability to pay. There is a wide call to return the uniform business rate to local control. I am interested in the proposals for the supplementary rate, but they raise many questions in my mind. We need a reduction in the ring-fenced grant and the other central controls on how local councils make—indeed, have to make—spending choices. The Bill does not include measures to make local government more representative and responsive. Noble Lords will have received a briefing from the Electoral Reform Society, which states that there is a glaring omission of any reference to reform of the electoral system. We are all aware of the one-party states around the country and the dangers of councillors becoming out of touch as a result. I say that having been a councillor on a London borough at a time when we held 92 per cent of the seats on49 per cent of the vote. I thought that that was wrong, then; I think that it is wrong now. Nor does the Bill address one of the great iniquities of our time: the quango state. Quangos, trusts and boards spend more money than local authorities. It is time that we had proper democratic oversight of those bodies. The Bill highlights the problems caused by the absence of a constitutional settlement for this country. Council structures, functions and governance are completely at the whim of central government. The Bill proposes two major structural changes: the creation of unitary councils in some areas and the introduction of new models of governance that place all executive power in the hands of a mayor or a so-called strong leader. What exactly are the Government seeking to achieve? Many of us have debated these issues in this Chamber with extraordinary frequency. There is change after change, but never time for the new provisions to take root and, most particularly, no time for assessment. We have seen the development of a whole new industry of inspection, audit, analysis, target setting and performance management. When I was a local councillor in the 1980s, I welcomed performance management. It took the form of advice that one could consider—benchmarking and so on. It has changed dramatically since then, but by every measure that the Government have thrown at local councils—Gershon, comprehensive performance assessment and so on—local councils have improved their performance dramatically and there is evidence of real commitment and willingness to improve right across the board. However, there is no evidence that strong leadership leads to better performance. When I use that term, it is almost always in quotation marks for the purposes of this debate. There is no evidence that the reforms proposed in the Bill will do anything to improve the process. Indeed, it seems to us that there is a danger that focusing on structural reform will cause councils to take their eye off the ball of serving their local communities. The evidence from the last round of unitary creations is that it takes some time—years—for their operational effectiveness to reach the level previously held, and then even longer to get ahead of that. If the Bill is not about improving efficiency, value for money and service delivery to local citizens, what is it for? How can there have been a numerical limiton the number of unitary authorities to be created before the principles are set in place? It is not clear to us how the Government intend to balance the elements of the costs of reorganisation, operational efficiency or the loss of it, and local interests and aspirations. Surely it must be for local people ultimately to decide what happens in their area. That is true for overall structure and for governance. I am not aware that the Government have any evidence that a particular style of governance—elected mayors, in particular—makes any difference to the performance of an authority. Do the Government accept that, with the infinite variety of situations across the country, we should avoid seeking to impose a limited number of models? Why is the status quo not an option? If the Government are so confident that their favoured models are right, why do they not leave it to local people to come to that view themselves? In 2000, I was instrumental in increasing the population limit that would allow small authorities to opt for ““alternative arrangements””—in fact, those were what we started with, so I find it quite difficult to think of them as alternative arrangements. That gave them wider choices. Some authorities exercised that choice and have moved on to other models. There have been 32 referendums on the establishment of mayors and in 20 cases the proposal has been rejected. In four of the 12 cases that went ahead, there are active campaigns to get rid of the mayors. It almost defies belief that the Government’s response to this clear expression of local choice is to remove the referendum requirement and to leave the decision to the council without going to the people. Councils do not necessarily want that. Colleagues of mine have met the leadership of the City of Durham Council, which is involved in what I understand to be a ““people say no to giant councils”” campaign. I believe that in Doncaster a petition of 11,000 signatures was presented to the council with a motion to call for a referendum, which was agreed. But there has been procrastination on the part of the authority and it looks like this Bill will lock the petitioners—that is, local people—out of the process. That cannot be right. The devolving of all executive power to one individual flies in the face of reality on the ground in the many areas where there is no single-party dominance and the council is in no overall control. There has to be concern over the adoption of this model, under which one might change to a single-person executive or a slate. The election of a slate put forward by the new leader could cause by-elections, which I cannot see being popular with local people. What happens if the balance of the authority changes as a result of those by-elections? I remain puzzled. I appreciate that I should probably have worn purple today because I am presenting myself as the grumpy old woman that I am. When I became a councillor, the old committee system held sway. There was not the division between front-bench and back-bench councillors or the alienation from decision-making that we all feel is such a real risk. Calling councillors who do not hold executive responsibility ““front-line councillors”” will not fool anyone. My noble friend Lady Scott says, ““Why on Earth will people want to stand for election simply to be scrutineers?””. From my point of view, in London, which is very much bigger than any of these authorities, I value scrutiny, but it is a different situation and I support her point. I find great difficulty with the notion that not all councillors would be local ward councillors. When you look around at the great achievements of local government in the 19th century and the earlier part of the last century, you see that gas, electricity, sewerage, education and health were all delivered under the committee system. My noble friend said that I should reassure the Government at this point that we do not have quite such issues of principle with the other local government parts of the Bill, although we will want to look at the detail of, for instance, local area agreements in order to understand how they are to work in practice. The term ““partnership”” is used a great deal in this context. I have always felt that a partnership should be something organic and voluntary. Imposing particular models of partnership, such as where just a couple of districts speak for all the districts in a county, feels false and risky. We welcome the strengthening of parish councils, particularly the extension of the general power of well-being, but we have concerns, which we shall raise, about non-elected parish councillors. We will come to the Standards Board in Committee. It has responded to criticisms, but the process has been overly bureaucratic and centralised. I would still like to see a rather different regime. My noble friend Lady Neuberger, who is not a grumpy old woman, will deal with the health parts of the Bill. For my part, I deplore the sequence that has led from the dismantling of community health councils, through the abortive commissions for patient and public involvement, to the new LINks system. We will spend a lot of time on these matters in Committee. I conclude from these Benches by saying that we do not see the Bill making any real contribution to the rebuilding of strong local democracy or improved provision of services to our citizens. It has been put to me that we must beware of incremental change that might actually lead to a loss of democracy.