My Lords, like my noble friend who was unable to support these amendments from the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and the noble Lord, Lord Tope, I understand that—apart from the issue around this 50% funding—the Bill does what they are seeking to achieve. If you look particularly at paragraph 117 of the Explanatory Notes to the Bill, it says:
“These powers do not enable examinations of individual relevant authorities and are not designed to produce assessment of the performance of individual relevant authorities or comparative analyses in the form of published league tables”.
Unless that wording is defective—doubtless the Minister can help us on that—it achieves what the noble Lords want. As my noble friend says, whether it achieves what we want is another matter.
In relation to the other test in Amendment 18ZA—that is, an authority,
“who receives more than half their income from government funds”—
I can see that, for certain bodies, it is a test that is currently relatively straightforward to determine. However, if you seek to apply it to a local authority you can imagine the sort of criteria that you would have to unpick and examine. Presumably it is not part of government funds to take account of its income which comes from council tax. What happens when you come to the business rate? Is it part of its income? Do you look at the gross amount or the 50% under business retention that goes to central government and then comes back? Is that still government funding? Does it originate with the local authorities? All the issues around how tariffs, top-ups and safety nets work just from that regime itself could make that particular test in the context of local authorities extremely difficult to apply. It would be easy in some cases where either they would be clearly in or clearly out but I would be surprised if there were not a whole range where it would be extremely problematic.
The test at the moment, as I understand it, is that the Auditor-General can carry out examinations of bodies when more than half of their income comes from public funds and where they are appointed by or on behalf of the Crown. I am not quite sure how you translate that into the local authority context but it seems to me that the basic proposition which the noble Lords are seeking to achieve in terms of avoiding mission creep and certainly league tables is already in the Bill.
If that is right—and for that reason some of the comparative stuff to which my noble friend was referring is not available—it raises again the question we discussed earlier about the value-for-money profiles, the guardian of which is currently the Audit Commission. We discussed who was going to maintain those profiles, which I think would be part of the data that my noble friend and I would be looking for. We do not yet know where that is going to end up and how those profiles are going to be maintained, but I think that that is a slightly different issue from the one pursued by the noble Lord, Lord Tope.