My Lords, if the Committee will allow me, I think it is probably helpful if I complete my remarks. Our normal procedure is that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, as opposition spokesman, will speak first, followed by other noble Lords. I will answer all questions at the end, if that is acceptable.
I turn now to the amendments to the Local Government Act 2000 and to the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, which I shall refer to as the 2000 Act and the 2007 Act. In both cases, the draft order removes references to primary care trusts and replaces them with references to the NHS Commissioning Board and to the relevant clinical commissioning group. The context here is one of commissioning services rather than providing them, so it is appropriate to make this substitution. To explain this in more detail, Section 104 of the 2007 Act sets out persons who are “partner authorities” of certain local authorities. The list currently includes primary care trusts. The definition of “partner authority” is relevant for a number of provisions in both the 2000 Act and the 2007 Act. For example, Section 9FF of the 2000 Act applies, with some exceptions, where an overview and scrutiny committee or its sub-committee makes a report or recommendation to the local authority or its executive on certain functions of a “relevant partner authority” that are exercised in relation to the committee’s area or residents of that area. In such a case, Section 9FF(2) enables the committee to require the relevant partner authority,
“to have regard to the report or recommendation in question in exercising its functions”,
and Section 9FF(4) requires the relevant partner authority to comply.
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However, there is an exclusion, and this brings me to the amendment to Section 9FF(6). The exclusion applies where the relevant partner authority is a “health service body” and the report or recommendation is made by an overview and scrutiny committee or sub-committee of a non-unitary district council. There is also an exclusion where the report or recommendation is additionally made to a health service body under regulations under Section 244 of the National Health Service Act; those regulations, of course, concern review and scrutiny of the health service by local authorities. The definition of “health service body” in Section 9FF(6) currently includes a primary care trust. It makes sense to replace this with references to the NHS Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups because of the functions that those bodies are taking on from primary care trusts.
Finally, the draft order repeals the provisions of the National Health Service (Consequential Provisions) Act 2006, which inserted the provisions in the Vehicle Excise and Registration Act and the Education Act that are amended by the order.
In conclusion, I hope I have demonstrated that the draft order contains no more than is consequential on the Act. It makes some minor but necessary changes to keep the statute book up to date, in particular to ensure that clinical commissioning groups are subject to the requirements of the Audit Commission Act. I commend the draft order to the Committee.