Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the Minister for that long reply. I am not sure I understood it all. I shall read it and the Bill again. My initial reaction is that her basic premise that it is all covered by the duty has not convinced me and I think it is probably wrong. I shall have another think and take further advice. The first point made by the Minister was that we want more detail in a Bill which, as we have said, has too much detail. That is a theme through many of the amendments in this and the next chapter, which is about petitions. We would prefer that the Government did not legislate on either of these matters, but persuaded councils to do them in other ways. If you legislate, there is a choice: one is to have genuine, in-principle framework legislation. It is our view that each of these points could be reduced to half a page: we could get it down on the petitions one but not on this one, because we want to probe more on exactly what Chapter 1 means. Our view is that you can cut it down to half a page and say to councils, ““Get on with it and do it sensibly””. They will do it in different ways, in different places, but it will be in line with local circumstances and in line with local democracy. Some councils will do it a lot better than others, but that is what local democracy is all about. Some will want to spend a lot more money on it and do it really well. Others will want to spend the minimum amount of money to fulfil their legal obligations and no more. There will be very different ways of doing it. That seems to us to be the diversity that comes from genuine local democracy and the way it should be done. There is a genuine ideological difference between us on this. The Government want to legislate and tie everyone down more and more to a uniform system for everything in every detail. That seems to be what is going on. We are against that and the principle behind it. However, if the Government are going to legislate in this kind of detail, we must cover all the eventualities and make it comprehensive. You must make it work so that people cannot come along and say, ““It does not apply to this or that””. In particular, you must make sure that it will not get in the way of current good practice. Therefore, you have to make it longer. You cannot get away from that. At the moment we have a very unsatisfactory halfway house. As far as partnerships are concerned, the Minister said that because a service is contracted out, there will therefore be no involvement in the service delivery, but that may not be the case at all. The contracting out of the service might include the involvement of some people who receive that service or some of the local people in the delivery of that service. It may involve consultation with local area committees or even town and parish councils in the delivery of that service. It is not automatically the case that, just because something is contracted out to the private or third sector, there is no public involvement. That is wrong. The second part of the amendment was kite flying and probing, as the Minister understood. There are further discussions to be had. To return to the basic principle of partnerships, we feel that partnerships, although perhaps not in this wording or in quite so much detail, ought to be in the Bill. Just because a council is a member of a partnership that does not mean that everything that partnership does will necessarily be covered by this duty. Some things the partnership does may have nothing to do with the council. Nevertheless, because the partnership itself is a public body, it ought to be included in this duty. I would ask the Minister to think about that. My final point is that some partnerships, as the Minister pointed out, are statutory partnerships. They have a freestanding existence in their own right. They are not part of the council. The council is one of the partners in that statutory partnership. In those circumstances, I am not sure that the duty given to the council will automatically fall on that partnership, because the council will have lots of other duties, in all sorts of ways, that do not fall on the partnership. Statutory partnerships, such as the crime and disorder partnerships, will be governed by the legislation setting them up, so this is also something that the Minister should think again about. We do not think that it is a difficult thing to include so we do not understand the reluctance. Having said that, there is scope for further discussion and debate. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 5 withdrawn.