Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, before I respond to what the Minister said, I would like to thank everybody who has taken part in the debate. I was delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, was representing the Labour Front Bench because at least somebody apart from me was not a past or present Minister. At one stage, the debate was developing into a past and present Minister’s club, with lots of gossip that the rest of us did not quite understand. However, I am grateful to everybody and particularly the former Ministers—midwives and everybody else—who have taken part. I am not one of those who think that Ministers, even at a junior level, do not have any influence and cannot, with enough energy and commitment, achieve things within their departments and perhaps outside. I spent last Christmas reading Chris Mullin's diaries about his time as various kinds of junior Minister, which give a very cynical view of the person with a minor position and no power whatever. I suspect that he laid it on a little. The diaries are extremely amusing, but I think that he probably overstresses his lack of power and influence. Having looked at it all from the outside over many years, I have seen that Ministers with energy can achieve things, but one problem that faces all Governments and all ministerial teams is that at some stage they run out of energy and new inspiration. I would not accuse the present Government of having a lack of energy or a lack of determination to do things. In fact, I think that they sometimes rush into things far too quickly, when a little more thought and careful consideration might be helpful, although I understand why they do so. However, such energy does not last. The idea that a Minister at a middle or junior level within Defra will have the presence and ability to promote causes on behalf of rural areas, particularly disadvantaged rural areas, that the CRC and its chairman have at the moment is arguable at the very least and possibly wishful thinking. I understand that the Government have an agenda, which I share to quite a considerable degree, of looking hard at quangos, reducing their costs and doing away with them when they are not doing a useful job or where what they do can be done more efficiently or democratically. I do not disagree with that fundamental wish in any way whatever, but the quangos have to be looked at one by one. One specific question that I asked, to which I did not get an answer, was whether the State of the countryside report, as a basic piece of essential impartial, independent research, will continue in future even if within Defra. I hope that the Minister might write to us with an answer to that. I would also like much more information on exactly how the rural champion across government will work. One of the things that a lot of us on the Liberal Democrat Benches have learnt in the past few months is how busy Ministers are and how much of their time is taken up with activities, some of which are clearly extremely vital and some of which I wonder why they are bothering with. I wonder why they do not just say no and get on with doing something useful. It is absolutely clear that competent, keen Ministers have their time and energies fully occupied by the job that they do. Some will cynically say that such Ministers are just being run by civil servants, but I do not think that that is true of good Ministers. Nevertheless, Ministers are very busy people. To have the job of co-ordinating rural policies across government is a pretty big job. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, can tell us how he got on trying to do that kind of thing when he was recently a rural Minister. The other fundamental question to which I do not think that I have an answer is this: what does the CRC do at present that will not be done in future? The noble Lord, Lord Knight, set out clearly what the CRC does now. What we would like to know is which of those tasks will not be done in future, by Defra or by anybody else. If £4.5 million is to be saved—as the Minister quite rightly said, that is not a small sum, even in these days—what jobs are not going to be done because that money is not being spent? The noble Lord, Lord Henley, said, ““I think that its time has come””. It is probably inevitable that its time has come, no matter how much we debate it in Committee and at later stages, but it is important that we understand who is going to do what in future. I do not think that we understand that yet. Some of the quangos—the arm’s-length bodies, or whatever they are called—that are being done away with in the long lists in this Bill will not be missed in future. In five or 10 years’ time, we will look back at the list and ask ourselves, ““What an earth were they? What did they do?””. Such quangos will not be missed and we will wonder why we argued about them, but some of the quangos will be missed, including, I suspect, the CRC. Life goes round in circles, as we know, and some of those quangos will have to be reinvented in future. It is far better either that we get it right now and do not drive the bulldozer through those that are necessary or, if the organisational arrangements are to change, that we understand at least that robust structures will be set up that will deliver the same kind of thing. Finally, the Minister said that he did not believe that the CRC could stand up to the Treasury better than a rural advocate within Defra. That may be true in some respects, but the real difference is that the rural advocate within Defra will operate within government and behind the closed doors of government. Some of what he is doing will come out, because we will have debates in Parliament, reports will be produced and leaks will appear in newspapers. By and large, however, that process will take place within government, whereas what the CRC and other similar bodies can do is to take it all out into the public domain so that the research is published. The proposals are public proposals and, as Members of Parliament and your Lordships' House, we can use that information to call Ministers to account, to take part in debates and to take part in legislation. It is much more difficult to prise information from within the department. That is a fundamental difference, which the Government have not got quite right in a number of these issues. It is customary on these occasions to ask the Minister to write to us and to give us answers to the questions that have been asked that have not been answered. I hope that he will do that after this debate. I will certainly collate the questions that have been asked from all parts of the House, write them down and hope to get more thorough answers from the Government and from the civil servants in Defra and everybody else involved before we come back to Report. We may have to come back to this issue on Report, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 28 withdrawn. Amendment 29 Moved by