Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I do not think the noble Lord has read it wrongly. I shall set out the main purpose of the clause and then we may be able to make sense of the amendment. The clause provides the central provisions through which we want to deliver our policy of a more locally based conduct regime. Our intention is that the initial assessment of all misconduct allegations is now to be taken by a standards committee rather than by the Standards Board. If the standards committee decides that action needs to be taken on an allegation, it will refer the allegation either to the monitoring officer or to the Standards Board. Although we expect that most investigations of allegations will be undertaken by local authority monitoring officers rather than the Standards Board’s ethical standards officer—that is implicit in how we have organised it—we still have a reserve power to refer the more serious cases to the Standards Board for investigation. Because we recognise the importance of maintaining public confidence in this locally focused system of assessment, where the standards committee decides that no action should be taken on an allegation, the person who made the allegation may request a review of that decision. Following such a request, the provisions requiring a standards committee to make a decision on how to deal with the allegation will again apply. The committee has to make a decision within three months of receiving the request for a review. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, asked about appeals, and that is a sort of low-level appeal mechanism.