My Lords, my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames and I have Amendment 3 in this group. I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Blair, was looking at me—I believe he was—when he referred to some people in this Chamber having been members of a police authority at the relevant time. I was not a member, but I questioned him in public, carrying out a role that is not unrelated to the subject of this amendment, which is getting information into the public domain—a hugely important role that someone needs to carry out. I am not sure who that someone might be in this structure.
I am aware that the Government have designed an arrangement under which the director-general is accountable to the Secretary of State, who is in turn accountable to Parliament. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Henley, in response to my amendment at the previous stage, told me that a supervisory board, which was how I described it, would muddy the waters. I had taken that proposal for a supervisory board from the arrangements that the Department for Communities and Local Government had in place, as I was easily able to access its arrangements. I said then that I was not seeking to change the architecture of the Bill.
I do not propose a governing board, and I do not go as far as the noble Baroness. However, because of the concern not to change the architecture, I have amended my own amendment to include the words, “Subject to Part 1”. That deals with the respective roles of the Secretary of State and the director-general. I tabled my amendment before seeing the outline framework document, which we are told will cover internal governance. Reading Hansard following Committee, I thought that perhaps “supervision” was regarded at any rate as an indelicate term for the relationship, although I felt at the time that the Government were a little oversensitive to my amendment.
However, I will be even blunter and say that as I read the paragraph in the outline framework document, the word that comes to mind is “cosy”. It might be much less cosy if we knew more from this document
about what the governance arrangements would consist of. We are to have a management board, which comes under the heading of “Internal Governance”—it is almost the whole of that paragraph. I do not regard management as being the same as governance. Neither do I regard governance as being the same as administration, although that is the umbrella word used for governance in Schedule 2. It is the term used to introduce the concept of governance.
I have used terms including “strategic and corporate leadership” and “advice” in my amendment. If the management board that we are to expect is not to provide strategic and corporate leadership and advice, what is it going to do? Perhaps the Minister can help us today by fleshing this out a little more.
The framework does not tell us what it will do, and that is clearly important. It says only that there will be a description of the role of the board. Although, as I said, my amendment does not go as far as Amendment 1, the points made hitherto raised extremely important issues about governance in the public and political sector. I ask one further question. I do not want to pre-empt the noble Lord, Lord Condon, because it was his question at the previous stage, but will the board include stakeholders? We know that there are to be some ex-officio members and non-executive members. Again, the House would be interested to know who it is anticipated will fulfil those roles.
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