Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I shall also speak to Amendments 44, 45 and 46 in my name. These take us to the second list, which the Minister told us was the list of organisations, such as parish councils and national park authorities, which do not exist everywhere but exist only in some places. However, I see in the list, "““a police authority … a chief officer of police … a strategic health authority … a Primary Care Trust””," and, "““a local probation board or a probation trust””." That drives a coach and horses through the previous explanation, although that is not a major or substantive point, is it? Amendment 43 would add to the list ““a parish meeting””. I have to say that I have not added this in the place that I had intended to, which was a line higher. I was probably drafting the amendment too late at night when I was in bed. Parish meetings were the first things that came to my mind when I thought of the previous amendment to change ““persons”” into ““bodies””, because parish meetings are not persons. I may be wrong; it may be that the chairman of a parish meeting is a person and he can exercise at least some minimal functions on behalf of the parish meeting. Nevertheless, whatever the rights and wrongs of that, I am very clear that parish meetings should be included in the list. Parishes exist in many places and most parishes have a parish council, which, I was going to say, is like any other local authority, although many parishes are unlike other local authorities. None the less, they are still functioning, democratic local authorities. Parish meetings take place in parishes that are usually too small to have a functioning parish council. A parish meeting takes place once a year or whenever it is called according to the rules for calling such meetings. We set a limit in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act on the size of new parishes necessary for there to be a parish council. I think that the limit is 100, but I am not sure. Some parishes have direct democracy in the form of an annual parish meeting and other special meetings, if required. Why should such meetings not be included in the description of the local system of democratic involvement? That is my first point, which is straightforward, and I hope that the Government will simply accept the amendment and put it in the right place. Secondly, joint waste authorities set up under the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act are included in the list. Amendment 44 is, for the moment, a probing amendment to find out what such authorities’ democratic features are. Given that the Minister is going to write to us to explain all these things, I will not pursue that further today. The same goes for waste disposal authorities under the Local Government Act 1985. They will come and we will be told what the democratic features are that require them to be in the list. That will be interesting. Amendment 46 is a much more substantive amendment, which basically says that housing associations and ALMOs—arm’s-length management organisations for council housing stock—should be included in the list. It may be that an ALMO is sufficiently close to a local authority for the Government to say that it will be included anyway, but given that they are deliberately at arm’s length, that is not entirely clear to me. They are certainly unlike bodies that deal with council housing stock that has not been pushed out to arm’s length. The main local housing associations nowadays are often in places where large-scale stock transfers have taken place—where the council has, in whole or part, divested itself of its council housing and transferred it to a housing association. Big authorities have in some cases done that in one area and not another, or perhaps they have two or three of these bodies. Housing associations are very much part of the provision of public services in an area. They get most of their money—not necessarily all, as they can raise money in the markets—from the Housing Corporation, or the Homes and Communities Agency. They are subject to a considerable degree of supervision and control through the provisions in the recent Housing and Regeneration Act. These are quasi-public bodies, but there is no doubt that they are public bodies of some sort or other. Particularly where they perform the function of a local housing authority, in providing what used to be council housing and what is now public or social housing in an area, they are a public body, so it is not clear why they should not be in the list. They are certainly as much a public body as other bodies listed and in many cases they have very clear means of involving members of the public. Usually, those people are tenants, but there are sometimes residents on the estates who are not tenants. It is not clear to me why these should not be on the list. I should like to hear the Minister’s justification for that. While we are looking at this list, it may be worth asking the Minister why she thinks that the chief officer of police is a person with democratic involvement and functions. Perhaps in a sense this is anticipating discussions on later parts of the Bill, but it is interesting to ask why the Government think that the economic prosperity boards—EPBs—will have democratic functions, since they all seem to be fairly undemocratic bodies. I do not understand why combined authorities have to be in here on the basis of the provisions later in the Bill, because the combined authority presumably will be a local authority and will be covered anyway. Why does it need to be included separately? That is particularly confusing given that the Government are saying that joint committees and joint boards of all kinds of things on a voluntary basis do not have to be in, because they will be covered by the fact that they consist of local authorities. I do not at all understand why combined authorities are here. We kept discovering these things after we tabled the amendments. As far as the PCT is concerned, there is a series of bodies—the new LINk organisations—which surely ought to be in here. Those organisations are being set up to replace the patients’ forums, which had a short period of life after the abolition of community health councils. Why are the LINk organisations not mentioned here, when they are specifically set up to involve members of the public in the local health services? Finally, on social services, there is a series of children’s partnerships and similar things within social services. Why are they not here? A lot of places now have new Sure Start centres or children’s facilities under the banner of Sure Start, which all have some kind of quasi-democratic local committee responsible for running them. Why are they not here? The problem with these prescriptive lists is that, the more you think about things in different areas, the more you think should be in the lists and the more you question why the ones that are in them are in them. If only the Government would trust local authorities to take a common-sense approach to it all within a general framework, we would do far better than by producing these lists. Since we have them, however, we are probing them. I beg to move.