Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 235AB: 235AB: Before Clause 184, insert the following new Clause— ““Conduct of local government members and employees Part III of the Local Government Act 2000 (c. 22) (conduct of local government members and employees) is repealed.”” The noble Lord said: The amendment, which is put forward in the hope that it might lead to one or two interesting bits of debate, is intended to abolish the entire Standards Board for England, all its doings and the entire standards regime. On that basis I do not have a huge amount of optimism that the Government will accept the amendment this afternoon, but I believe that various points need to be made. It is seven years since the new regime was agreed in the Local Government Act 2000, and five or six years since it came into operation. Has it made any real difference to the way councillors behave and to how local government acts? Has it increased the level of ethical standards within local government, or has it not really made much difference at all? In the very few serious cases which have arisen in that time, would it have been allowed to carry on without it? There is a general view within local government—if you get people talking honestly and, perhaps in some cases, off the record—that the answer to all these questions is that the regime is not worth the large amount of resource that goes into it. Various problems have arisen in the standards regime, which the Government are responding to. They are particularly changing the emphasis from pretty well everything going through the Standards Board for England towards local resolution of complaints in the majority of cases. I will come on to that at the end of my remarks. What is wrong with the system? First, the whole complaints system is in many ways operated at a trivial level. Cases which are taken to the Standards Board and often referred back to the local monitoring officer or, indeed, to the local standards committee, should really be sorted out there and then, without any great to-do and certainly without the great bureaucratic procedure that takes place. The system is very expensive to operate and the outcome does not seem to be worth the candle that is put into it. I was fascinated when listening to the previous debate on whether people with a pension from the European Union should declare it as an interest. The word used by the Chairman of Committees was that in many cases people would find this ““distasteful””. The difference in culture between what is declared in this Chamber and the restrictions on people taking part in debates here, and the very restrictive, sometimes penal, regime which takes place within local government, was fascinating. Secondly, in many places the complaints procedure has been used as a means of political campaigning. It has been used as a weapon in ““partisan dialogue””—I think was the phrase used by my honourable friend Andrew Stunell when this issue was discussed in the House of Commons. I regret to say that there have been places and times where and when it has been used as a weapon, not just politically but by some officers, against what I might call the persistently awkward squad among councillors, or perhaps just people who were saying things they did not want to hear. It is an open question as to how far you can go in having a robust discussion with a council officer without being accused of bullying. There have certainly been instances when council officers have made complaints of bullying when all that has been happening is that a councillor has been persistent in trying to put forward his or her view of what should happen, perhaps in their ward or the authority. There is a feeling that the rules laid down mean that robust debate is more difficult to have in some councils than it ought to be. Accusations can come from anyone and do not have to be backed up with anything. An accusation can appear in the local newspapers before it has been investigated and be used as a weapon in that way. When someone is put through the mill, it really is a traumatic experience, and sometimes good councillors go through hell when, in their view, they are doing no more than representing the people who elected them. I am aware of many instances of this, particularly of someone who was made quite ill by the whole process. In the end that person was found guilty on a technicality, but was clearly exonerated by the local standards committee. We discussed yesterday why people stand for the council. Very often they have to be persuaded. People who would make good councillors have to have their arms twisted to stand. Most do not say, ““I am just waiting for the local party to come round and ask me to stand””. They do not think like that. Instead, they find themselves on the council and then they may find themselves being put through a very vigorous complaints system if someone makes an accusation against them. That leads one to ask why on earth anyone does it any more. The proposal being put forward by the Government is for everything to be dealt with locally, and there is a lot of sense in that, but there are some problems as well. One of the more serious problems is that in some areas the political culture is based on the presence of the long-term majority party. It permeates the culture not just of the local authority, but also that of the local organisations, partnerships and so forth. Anyone who stands up and challenges that can be seen as a dissident, and there can be a real fear that they are not going to get a fair deal from the local standards committee. There is also the problem of the role of the monitoring officer on the council. The monitoring officer is there to advise councillors, but councillors have the right not to take that advice. Once they have checked the code of conduct and read the advice of the standards board, they may think that the monitoring officer is wrong. But if a complaint is then filed and goes to the local standards committee, it is the monitoring officer who advises it. Even if a different solicitor within the authority is technically present to do it, the monitoring officer is looming in the background all the time, so this is a difficult situation. I have not talked about some of the serious cases such as Islington because that would take a long time. Those cases alone may be responsible for the changes the Government are now making. But there is a serious difficulty in some places about representing your local ward. In some councils, the fact of representing a particular ward is in itself perceived to be an interest. I have referred previously to Birmingham where I am told that if you are a ward councillor, you cannot deal with a planning application anywhere within your ward. That is total nonsense, and yet this kind of thing is going on. On the one hand, candidates stand for election on the basis that they live in the ward—““Vote for me, I am local””—but nowadays if a town is divided into several wards, I ask that people are put into different ones otherwise they will be considered to be too local. There is a serious problem here and at the heart of the standards regime. Those are just a few of the problems. I hope that the Government’s changes will bring improvements, but I believe that we will be back here debating the problems with the new regime before very long. Indeed, there is a body of opinion in local government that would say, ““Let’s scrap the whole thing””. At the last general election the Conservatives went to the polls saying, ““Let’s close down the Standards Board for England””. I hope that that is still their policy. If it is, then on that at least I shall join forces with them. I beg to move.