Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Greaves. I cast my mind back to when the Labour Government came to power in 1997. They wanted to devolve more to local government, but recognised that many councils were not in a good enough state to take on more power at that time. They created the Improvement and Development Agency in order to raise standards throughout councils, with a view—I believed—to devolving a lot more power to them. Subsequently, it is hard to see what has happened. The Improvement and Development Agency has been working for some eight years. Either it has substantially improved the vast majority of councils, in which case the time has come to devolve power to those councils—which is certainly what should happen—or, perhaps, the Minister thinks that councils have not substantially improved, despite the efforts of the Improvement and Development Agency, in which case something is fundamentally wrong. That, too, could well be the case, because of the opaqueness of the finance system and the lack of connection between voters and their councils. Either way, the suggestion in my noble friend’s amendment is absolutely right: this needs a fundamental look. The reaction in the Bill to these issues, which takes us nearer to the French préfet system of local councils feeling like, and being regarded as, an administrative wing of central government, travels in exactly the wrong direction. My noble friend Lady Scott mentioned the announcement made by the Minister, Hazel Blears, on giving people power over some of the local spend. It is hardly a new idea. I declare an interest as a former south Somerset district councillor and a Somerset county councillor. The Minister will be aware that the power is already there; we did it in both places. In south Somerset we devolved budgets to a very local level, giving parish councils and local residents the power to say how they would like money to be spent in their area. It is not simply a question of voting on it, but of having a debate to which people are entitled to come and ask questions in their locality. They should not have to travel to some remote and hostile council building at unsuitable times of the day. It is not a simple mechanism whereby you have a referendum on how money should be spent and tick box A, B or C. There is a lot more than that involved. The Minister also mentioned the idea that councillors might be given a budget. Again, this is hardly new: Liberal Democrat authorities up and down the country have operated very successfully, in consultation with local organisations, the system of a small budget that can pump-prime schemes. These are not new ideas. The Government’s direction of travel quite reverses what it set out to do some 10 years ago. I would be interested to hear from the Minister just what has happened to the concept of improving councils. The goal when the IDA was established was quite short term: councils would be so improved that they would then be in a state to receive back those powers that had been taken away by the previous Conservative Administration.