Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I hope that this is easier, too. It is only when you get into the cut and thrust of Committee stage sometimes that you realise that there are complexities in articulating what you thought you understood in the first place. The group of amendments relates to the arrangements by which information is to be provided by authorities to the Standards Board. Clause 187 enables the board to direct an authority to provide it with information in relation to the misconduct allegations that it has received and the requests received to review its decisions. That sort of information would be used to monitor the performance of standards committees and monitoring officers in carrying out their roles. This is necessary so that the board is able to make decisions on what further support and guidance committees need to improve their performance and on whether to remove a standards committee’s powers to make initial assessments of misconduct allegations. Amendment No. 238ZC provides that, in giving directions to authorities on the information required, the board would not be able to give different directions to different authorities; it would be able to do so only to different types of authority. The noble Baroness asked about the relevant authority. The problem is that what she suggests would impede the effectiveness of the board’s monitoring role. We have specified relevant authorities so that different types of information can be given flexibly enough to meet different types of situation. The amendment would make it difficult to be able to request precisely the information required. Part of the problem is that that would be discriminatory to an extent; it would not allow for sufficient sensitivity to ask for the sort of information needed. That would be the effect of the amendment. The problem is that different authorities are likely to provide different sorts of challenges to the Standards Board in the management and monitoring of their performance. They will need to be able to provide different sorts of information to the board, depending on the different situations that they face. Therefore, I am simply saying that there needs to be as much flexibility as possible in the board’s capacity to request information. The term ““direction”” is slightly blunt. It will mean any sort of exchange that the Standards Board has with the standards committee. It might take the form of a request by e-mail or letter to provide information, so ““direction”” is a slightly heavy-handed description. Most requests for information will be in the form of exchanges of letters with individual authorities, because there will have to be a tailor-made approach to each situation in order to get the right information on the right subject. Some requests will come from the other direction, with the standards committee seeking the advice of the board. Again, one wants to be able to build in as much flexibility as possible for those exchanges. There is no intention that any such directions will be imposed in a heavy-handed way, but we want to ensure that requests for information allow matters that are particular to each authority to be looked at more effectively and that they allow areas of concern to be identified. Amendment No. 238ZD provides that any direction issued by the board about the information to be provided should comply with any direction given by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State has no role in relation to the Standards Board and we do not want there to be such a role. We think that it would be very inappropriate for the Secretary of State to intervene in the board’s day-to-day operation of the regulatory regime and therefore we do not sympathise with the thrust of the amendment. The board is an independent regulator. It has to make its own decisions using its expertise and experience, and that is why we do not want to accept the amendment.