Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 209CB: 209CB: Clause 108, page 69, line 33, after ““being”” insert— ““( ) the community strategy of each district council is a county in which there are a county council and district councils.”” The noble Lord said: I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 210A and 212MB in the group. Amendments Nos. 209CB and 212MB refer to community strategies at the district level, while Amendment No. 210A refers to the extent to which targets may be varied at the district level or at some other sub-county level. Again, I am talking mainly about two-tier areas. I should say that I have just discovered a misprint in Amendment No. 209CB. It should read: "““the community strategy of each district council in a county in which there are a county council and district councils.””" not ““is a county””, as printed in the Marshalled List. No doubt someone will put that right. I am becoming increasingly confused because I am told that local strategic partnerships, the bodies responsible for preparing community strategies, do not exist in any legal sense and therefore cannot be included in the Bill. The Minister has suggested that they are an informal arrangement, which seems extraordinary when the strategies are produced by the LSPs and vast amounts of money are disbursed by central government through them. I had not understood that previously, and I shall inquire about it because there seem to be some contradictions here. Community strategies are produced by both district and county councils. The purpose of Amendment No. 209CB is to ensure that the local area agreement has regard to the district community strategy, and not just the county one. Clause 108(2) currently reads: "““In preparing the draft local area agreement, the responsible local authority must … have regard to … its community strategy prepared under section 4 of the Local Government Act 2000””." That is reasonable. So the responsible authority, the county council in a two-tier area, has to have regard to its community strategy prepared under Section 4 of the 2000 Act. However, that section applies identically to counties and districts, and, so far as I can tell, the community strategies of counties and districts have equal status. District councils and their LSPs—working together, one hopes, but not always—put a great deal of time and effort into producing their community strategy and into attempting to carry out its outcomes. A large amount of consultation takes place and a large number of people are employed in producing it. These community strategies are inevitably much more locally based than county ones and it would seem sensible for the local area agreements to take account of them in each district. Amendment No. 212MB applies to a revision proposal in exactly the same way as Amendment No. 209CB refers to the preparation of the community strategy. It covers the same thing and so I shall say nothing more about it. This leads on to the question of targets and how far they can vary within a local area agreement in different parts of the responsible authority. The Minister earlier said that they can have as many targets as they wish over and above the 35 designated targets and implied that they could vary from locality to locality. So, to take a North Yorkshire example, you could have different targets in Craven than in Scarborough to take account of the different circumstances in the Yorkshire dales, the Yorkshire coast or, indeed, the Selby coalfield. The purpose of Amendment No. 210A is to probe how far the designated targets, although they may refer to the same things across a widespread county, can have different targeted outcomes in different parts of the county. For example, the Minister referred to anti-social behaviour—I do not know what is going to be in the national targets and I do not know who does—as being perhaps a local target but the national Government might think that reducing worklessness is worthy of being a designated target. Yet different parts of such a large county could have different levels of unemployment, as we used to call it—or ““worklessness”” as it is now—so could the target in Burnley be different from the targets in Wyre or the Fylde coast, for example, where the circumstances might be very different? Equally, the health of people in various parts of these widespread counties might be quite different. For example, in the old cotton towns there is a backlog of lung disease and heart disease as a result of the conditions in which people worked in the mills—the cotton dust, the damp atmosphere and so on—so the targets for chest diseases might be different in Burnley and Accrington from other parts of Lancashire. Can those targets vary within a county? If they cannot, then the one-size-fits-all nature of a local area agreement would make it utterly ridiculous and unworkable. I could quote many other examples but I think I have made the point quite clearly. I beg to move.