Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, links Clauses 14 and 15, could I just question the transitional arrangements? These include such things as, in Clause 15(1)(d), the transfer of staff compensation for loss of office. I have the greatest admiration for people who work in local government across the country. They are immensely professional, work very hard, are of great integrity and have a real commitment to public service. Having said that, my experience is that these transitions can be extremely expensive for council tax payers. Does having this provision mean that there are going to be new regulations which go beyond, above or below the standard terms and conditions that we already have? As the noble Baroness knows, local government already has issues of recruitment and retention. There are issues of whether we can retain people against the private sector and against the rest of the public sector—local government retires at 65, and the rest of the public sector retires at 60. Certainly in previous reorganisations, the arrangements were such that staff had to be made redundant from one authority before transferring to another. The terms attached to that were extremely generous and the transfer arrangements did not always work out in the best interests of council tax payers. We need absolute clarity on this issue and I come back to my main point: why is this issue here when we already have standard conditions across the country? Are conditions going to be more generous? Are they going to be less generous? How is it going to work?