Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

This very interesting debate went broader than the clause or the amendment. To an extent, some of the things that I was going to say about how a potential code might work might not cover some of the issues. The changes in governance raise very interesting questions about dynamics, access to information and so on, in how people work. I hope that those wider issues are considered by Jane Roberts’s committee, because they have a knock-on effect on whether people want to be councillors and have the support that they need to do the job that they want to do. So it is by no means irrelevant. We started consulting on a code for employers in 2004, and we think that it is time to look again at the issue as a whole. It will be important to see whether there are lessons to be learned from the code for councillors. So it is very much a live issue. If we were to come up with a code of conduct for employers, it could clarify some of the things raised today in the Chamber. So it would be worth pursuing it in a broad context, to see what could be picked up appropriately. Amendment No. 238ZL would provide that employees would be required to follow the code. That in itself is unnecessary, because Section 82(1) of the Local Government Act 2000 is deemed to incorporate any such code that comes forward. Likewise, contracts held by employers are deemed to include observance of the code, too. The machinery is in place, so, should we come with a code, there would be no problem. The existing wording of Section 82(1) provides that the Secretary of State may issue a code of conduct that sets out the conduct expected of employers, which mirrors the drafting of the equivalent provision in the Act relating to the code of conduct for councillors and imposes in the same terms a statutory requirement on members to follow such a code. So it has been put in place and lined up. After the examples and the experiences that Members of the Committee have brought to this debate, we shall look very carefully at what has been said and implied by those comments.