Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill

I hear the right hon. Lady's concern. She makes a valid point, and she used a very important word—““stewardship””. I totally agree that there is a duty of good stewardship. That contains two elements: a requirement to make sure that public assets are used most productively for the public, and a requirement to make sure that they are not misused in any way. In some ways that is a contracting issue. The right hon. Lady will know that social enterprises take many different organisational forms, and that there is a bespoke legal form for social enterprise called the community interest company, which specifically provides for an asset lock. However, that falls outside the immediate scope of the Bill. I was talking about why we think the Bill is consistent with our ambitions and aspirations for public service reform. One of our aims is to encourage greater diversity of supply and provision. Here there may be some theological differences between us and the Opposition. We have a strong desire to try to incentivise and encourage much greater flexibility at a local level, such as providing opportunities to pool budgets and integrate services. She may be aware of some pilots that we are encouraging through the Cabinet Office on local integrated services, where the onus is much more on getting out there to find out what the community wants. All those aspirations will be backed up by action that will be reflected in the White Paper. In the context of encouraging greater diversity of supply, on which the Bill touches, we have an explicit commitment in the programme for Government and the coalition agreement to support the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charities and social enterprises, and enable those groups to have a much greater involvement in running public services.