Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Alison Seabeck), who has made an elegant transition from political adviser to parliamentarian. She raised some extremely practical points about how things work on the ground, which is the most important question. The Secretary of State described the Bill as radical, which makes me think that we ought to call in the trading standards officers. I do not think that there is much that is radical about the Bill at all, but I note that Bolton lost 5-1 away to Middlesbrough on Saturday, so perhaps she had a bad weekend in preparation. The impression that I get from the Bill is that it is very provisional—many parts of it seem to betray unmade-up minds in the Department, which has not really decided in which direction it is facing. We understand that we are in a period of regime change and transition, and that there are pulls in different directions, which all Departments are caught between. The Department for Communities and Local Government in particular is caught between different tendencies. The Government’s ambitions do seem to have been diluted significantly, however, since the departure of the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband), who is now the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Of course, there is always the argument, ““We are waiting for Lyons.”” We have been waiting for Lyons so long, I am amazed that Pinter has not written a play about it. One might say that Lyons would be the ghost at the feast, if we had a feast. We do not have a feast, however; we just have a ghost. We keep waiting to hear not just when Lyons will be delivered but when the Government will decide to publish it, and whether they will publish their own conclusions, so that they can be judged by the electorate in the local elections in May and we will not be caught by local government purdah; otherwise, we will have entered a further stage of regime change, and it will be another year before local government finance starts to be given any future shape. If the Bill is intended to be a charter for devolution, it is timid and tentative. If it is a blueprint for empowerment, it is hesitant and unadventurous. If it seeks to introduce a revolution in leadership, it is muted and confined. Only in unwinding some of the best-value gendarmerie of inspection and control does it show a few red blood corpuscles; curiously, the debate has concentrated little on that, which I think is the most important part of the Bill. Of course, the Bill does not specify in any detail what will replace that. The Government made clear in the White Paper that there would be a rigorous system with a framework of outcomes. We agree with that, but the devil would be in the detail in relation to how it operated in practice. That part of the Bill, however, is welcome, and one to which we can all subscribe. The most puzzling part of the Bill, which has attracted all the attention, which I am not sure that it deserves, is the reorganisation. Two years ago, we had the Miliband momentum, which made it clear that the Government wanted to deal with reorganisation once and for all by heading for unitaries. One year ago, we had the Kelly crush for directly elected mayors. That also seems to have been diluted. What we have ended up with are some confused signals from Government. Does the regional agenda still hold true? Could it be reconfigured to help the idea of city regions to develop, and I am enthusiastic about the concept of city regions? Do we find the Prime Minister’s attachment to charismatic leadership running up against the Chancellor’s devotion to institutional solutions? All those questions seem to be unresolved.