Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

The local committee, not the complainant, decides whether to refer the case upwards. The process of sifting through the local committee will determine the seriousness of the complaint and therefore whether it should be referred. I have rather lost track of where I was on the original amendment. We were talking about the role of the Standards Board to issue guidance, particularly on the standards committees’ powers to make initial assessments in, for example, cases where appropriate levels of performance have not been achieved. In such cases any allegations or review requests will instead be dealt with by either the Standards Board or another local authority. The noble Baroness asked essentially—because her amendment seeks to delete that power—under what circumstances that guidance might be issued and what it might cover. This all comes within the general scope of trying to make the Standards Board a vehicle whereby we can promote good and systematic practice across the committees’ work. That will range from the way initial assessments are done, the nature of the evidence, the way it is reviewed and so on. I do not have detailed notes on the work on suspending standards committees’ functions. It will obviously relate to a range of potential poor performance. It may concern the way that they are dealing with initial assessments or complaints or making judgments. The guidance is not yet written but it will have to be clear about the scope and the nature of that matter. I shall have to write to Members of the Committee about that because we do not have that detail in front of us at the moment. This clearly raises a lot of questions about how serious faults have to be, at what point people will see that a standards committee is not performing to the standards set down in guidance, and what must be done to bring it up to a higher level of performance. I am afraid that I cannot take the Committee any further on this as I simply do not have sufficient detailed information about that part of the operation. This is work in progress. However, I am happy to add that to the list of questions that I shall take away.