Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I am slightly surprised by the intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Graham, who suggested that we are looking at the minutiae when there is still a lot of work to be done. Looking at the minutiae and challenging the Government to tell us what they are going to do in ways not set out in the Bill is one of the very important tasks that Committees of this House have to do and, in my view, do very well on a lot of Bills, so I do not apologise for trying to do that. If this House lets through legislation that is unworkable or, even worse, is silly nonsense, we are not doing the job that we are here to do. If I wanted to engage in political skullduggery or chicanery, I would not be spending hour after hour in this Committee, worrying away at the details of the Bill. I could find other ways to do that which might be more productive in immediate political terms. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, said that we are filled with the possibility of political chicanery. That may be because in our horrifying 90-odd years of council experience, we have come across a bit of it and perhaps understand how to deal with it and stop it. A little bit of that might even be a matter of poachers turning gamekeepers. My noble friends tell me to speak for myself. That would never happen in the south of England, but when your political opponents behave like that, sometimes it rubs off a little bit. We understand that the Minister is doing her level best, but, to use a north of England colloquialism, we think that she is bragging on a pair of deuces and that there is not much in her hand. There are times when Ministers have to go back, having listened to what has been said, to challenge the department in all its respects to say, ““I am not sure that that is right””. We are challenging this because we are trying to rescue the Government from what I might call another Stoke-on-Trent fiasco. In the last version of the Bill, seven years ago, the Government produced a model that one authority adopted which now has to be unscrambled in that area. We have a chunk of the Bill that is the Stoke-on-Trent clauses and a chunk that is the Brighton and Hove clauses. We do not want to have to come back in five or six years to unscramble Stockton-on-Tees or anywhere else. Our motives are pretty honourable on this, if not always in some other circumstances—again, I speak for myself. My noble friend raised the question of what happens if there is a by-election and someone is elected from a different party. That provision is nonsense and we ask the Government to go back to look at it. The Minister said, ““These are things that are being considered as we speak””. I congratulate her on her openness and honesty, but the interpretation that we might put on it is that they are making it up as they go along and have not quite sorted it out yet. By Report, we hope that they will have. My final point concerns the six-month question. Will there be the six-month rule that normally applies in local authority by-elections—that there will be no by-elections for a vacancy that happens after, usually, the first Thursday in November, or whenever, six months before the normal election day—or can there be by-elections for the leader and executive right up until the next lot of elections? I do not think that question was answered.