Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I am always happy to be optimistic but it does not always work out like that. If the Minister thinks that there will not be conflicts and difficulties, she is not necessarily observing the real world that we will see—but we will see it in practice. Local authorities nowadays possess great big piles of strategies, plans and all sorts of things and employ loads of people to produce them. Ten or 15 years ago, most of these did not exist, but are the authorities that much better as a result of having all these strategies and plans? I would hope that as a result of local area agreements, if this system comes in and is found to be practical and works, the Government may find that as part of the letting go process to which the Minister referred on our first day in Committee most of these other strategies and plans could be done away with. In my experience, a large number of them are produced in many authorities; they go through the inspections, get the ticks and the rest of it and are then put on shelves and brought out again the next time they have to be revised. Meanwhile, everyone gets on with providing the services and making the investment that everyone was going to do anyway. A lot of people in local authorities are being employed on non-productive work at the moment when they could be redeployed on frontline services, producing things. My fear about local area agreements is that they will make the situation worse. I have one final anecdote. When I got back on a local authority three years ago, I was aware of all these things and asked for a copy of them all. I was asked whether I really wanted them because it would be an inordinate use of the council’s resources for someone to go around and find them all. We have improved a bit in the past three years and that is no longer the case—or I hope so—but there is a serious problem. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.