Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

These confessions are coming thick and fast at this stage of the Bill. Amendments Nos. 238ZE and 238ZF relate to access to information arising from investigations by the ethical standards officer of the Standards Board. I will explain what Clause 192 does and how the amendments would bite on it. It extends the current access that an ethical standards officer has to documents, so that his access will not be limited, as now, to documents relating to a relevant authority or to an individual member. This is simply to allow an officer to be able to conduct an effective investigation by getting access to documents which may not necessarily relate directly to the local authority or the person, but which may relate to another interest that is relevant to the investigation, such as papers relating to the interests of family members, friends or associates. Amendment No. 238ZE would allow access only to documents directly relating to the member and not to other relevant documents that might be relevant to a member’s personal interests. After experience of the way in which the Standards Board has been working, we feel that this would unnecessarily restrict the remit of the investigation and lead to relevant evidence in some cases not being made available. The advice that we have obtained from the Standards Board, based on the board’s experience of the operation of the current arrangements over the past five years, is that the current restriction in the rules allowing only access to documents relating to an individual member has resulted in a number of cases where it was not possible for the investigator effectively to gather all the relevant evidence pertaining to the case. The sort of information in question would include, for example, a contract with the council entered into by a member of the councillor’s family, which could provide evidence of a conflict of interest but which would not be accessible under current rules since the contract would not relate directly to the member personally. It is that sort of situation. There is no intention to allow the ethical standards officer access to any or every piece of information at his whim. The access rule is limited to information that is strictly necessary to the officer’s investigation. So the safeguards are there. Clause 192 also extends the number of persons and bodies to whom information obtained by an ethical standards officer during an investigation may be disclosed for the purpose of their functions. Amendment No. 238ZF would provide that the Secretary of State would not be able to add by order further people to the list of people and bodies to which disclosure of information can be made. We feel that this is unnecessarily restrictive because it would lessen the flexibility available to the Secretary of State to allow the sharing of information with other public sector bodies so as to facilitate the effective operation of the local government conduct regime. I stress that this is very much intended as a reserve power. We would want to extend the list of bodies only in rare cases. The bodies added would have to be public bodies, such as the Standards Commission for Scotland or the parliamentary and health ombudsmen, which have overlapping responsibilities with the Standards Board. So in exceptional cases there would be a reserve power, but it is necessary. Having received the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, we will now provide for any addition to this list to be made by affirmative resolution, which will involve an appropriate level of scrutiny. So we have added a further parliamentary safeguard to the process.