Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my two new colleagues, the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell, and the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, on their excellent maiden speeches. I declare my interest as the president of the Local Government Association and as past and present chair, trustee and chief executive of a number of voluntary sector bodies. From both the local government perspective and that of the voluntary and community sector, I welcome this Bill as a significant first step down the road of decentralisation, deregulation and devolution. The Bill marks the moment when the pendulum of centralisation starts to swing back. After one-quarter of a century of central government gathering more powers to themselves and sometimes delegating them to independent quangos that it creates, this Bill is the point at which the trend starts tentatively to be reversed. A decade ago, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation concluded a major programme of research and development on the theme of relations between local and central government. The work culminated in a so-called summit at Leeds Castle in 1996, with six Permanent Secretaries, three Government Ministers and a host of key local government figures. Over a period of two days, the case was well argued for clarity on the respective roles of the two democratically elected layers of UK governance, central and local, and for the central state to stand back from accumulating more and more decision-making unto itself. However, there were powerful reasons why this Joseph Rowntree foundation programme was, despite the millions spent analysing the issues, entirely unsuccessful in influencing the collective mind of Westminster and Whitehall and achieving change. I shall spell out the reasons for that failure of 10 or 11 years ago. First, senior civil servants in 1996 were deeply distrustful of the competence of local authority management, with some justification in some places. After 50 years of the welfare state and little reform in many areas, bureaucracy, complacency and insensitivity could be found in a number of authorities. Those civil servants in Whitehall held a very different view of their own abilities and in terms of education and intellect I found generally that they did have the edge. Their distrust of local government management led constantly to their advice to Ministers not to put their faith in local authorities to deliver any of the Government’s policies. Secondly, the political divide between left and right in 1996 had been particularly wide for many years. With the Conservatives in power centrally and Labour very strong locally, the mistrust in Whitehall was reflected and reinforced in Westminster. Local councillors were seen not only as incompetent but as the enemies of change. Thirdly, the voice of local government was confused and weakened by divisions in the sector between the Association of County Councils, the Association of Metropolitan Authorities and the Association of District Councils. It was easy for central government to divide and rule. More than a decade later, local and central government relations are in a different place. First, at the managerial level there have been remarkable but largely unremarked improvements in quality and standards. Of course, change has not been uniform and some authorities are very much better at managing their affairs than others, but now I do not believe that there are any basket cases of authorities that cannot be trusted with public funds and are likely to ruin the reputation of the whole. The sticks and carrots of an energetic improvement agenda—from the naming and shaming in comprehensive performance assessments by the Audit Commission to sophisticated mentoring and peer reviews through the Improvement and Development Agency, the IDeA—have helped to transform the managerial competence of the sector. I fear that few Whitehall civil servants—admittedly, battered by the welter of ministerial policy initiatives—would claim today that their micro-management can achieve better results than working through their counterparts at local government level. Although the public and the news media decry the postcode lottery of differences in services between local areas, a new report from the independent Office for Public Management points to the sterility of this debate: whether it is immigration and social cohesion or housing, social care or crime, different places have different demands and require local strategies and priorities. National one-size-fits-all edicts with rigid performance measurements are now thoroughly discredited. We now know that joined-up delivery of different services cannot possibly be organised by central government departments. I think that all parties now agree that it is only at the local level that the strands can be brought together. Secondly, political and policy differences today are no longer so polarised. On the theme of devolution, there is broad consensus across the parties—with the Liberal Democrats continuing their strong line on this—that central government should loosen their grip. There will always be the temptation for the ever-changing group of government Ministers, of whatever political persuasion, to keep hold of the reins for a policy they believe they have invented, or at least have championed to the point of securing public funds. But it is now all too obvious that implementation—delivery of policies on the ground—cannot be done by the central state. Ministers and civil servants must back off and allow local flexibility to adapt the policy and local ownership to motivate the local members and workforce. At the same time, locally elected leaders—by no means confined to elected mayors—have been demonstrating real leadership. After the demoralisation of decades of seeing their powers and status diminished, new efforts are certainly required to attract the back-bench councillors who can speak competently and sensitively for their local communities. A new report from the Local Government Information Unit for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Local Government will be launched this month. It will look at supporting the recruitment, development and retention of a diverse range of local talent as councillors. Thirdly, local government, impressively, now speaks with one voice, despite the varied structures and politics at the local level. The Local Government Association, thanks to Sir Jeremy Beecham, the founder chairman, and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce-Lockhart, his successor, who has spoken eloquently in this debate, with vital leadership from their chief executives, Sir Brian Briscoe and now Paul Coen, is a clear-sighted, powerful advocate with which government can and do deal with confidence and respect. In sharp contrast to the time of the Rowntree local government summit in 1996, the scene is now set for real devolution to a new constitutional settlement, which the Bill heralds. As it progresses through its next stages, I will join others in pressing the Government to take further steps towards decentralisation and deregulation and to consider more closely the interface with the voluntary and community sector, which is a vital part of the ““double devolution”” that goes beyond local authorities to the communities. At this stage, I congratulate the Government on a Bill which starts the process of change. As we say at the Local Government Association, ““Vive la devolution””.