Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I welcome parts of the Bill; there are other parts that bemuse me, and others to which I am violently opposed. As we are considering the role of local authorities in scrutiny, I will make my contribution in that spirit. The Bill is an attempt to make local government more responsive to the needs and aspirations of local communities. That has eluded us for some time, and it has led to disaffection and a lack of engagement in local elections. We have a problem to overcome in relation to local area agreements between local statutory providers and local service providers. How do we engage the local community in those, and how do we create a dynamic relationship that responds to the local community’s aspirations and influences those local area agreements? That should be the focus of our attention. Much in the Bill moves us in the direction of bringing local authorities closer to their communities, and I very much welcome those aspects of it. I can give examples of difficulties that have arisen in my local communities. A number of the most deprived communities in my constituency were asking for services, especially podiatry services, for elderly people. We convinced the local primary care trust to set up a pilot service in a satellite practitioner nurse-led centre financed by our single regeneration budget programme. That proved popular and was well attended by elderly residents in the local community. The pilot came to an end and in spite of the popularity of the service and the high demand, the community unfortunately failed to influence the service providers to bend their spend—a phrase we have used in the past—to meet that aspiration. I also chair one of our local neighbourhood renewal panels. For many years, at the start of the neighbourhood renewal programme, we asked for funding for neighbourhood wardens from the neighbourhood renewal funding. However, it was difficult to get officers who supported the panel to produce a report in favour of them in spite of the fact that the whole community, covering two estates in the neighbourhood renewal area, was unanimous in its support for the idea. We finally got the report three years later and the neighbourhood wardens are now in place. They are extremely popular and are doing a very good job. Similarly, a number of heads of local schools came up with the idea of having adult learning centres in their primary schools. They came to the neighbourhood renewal panel with the plan to work in partnership with the further education college for the borough and develop adult learning centres where parents and people from the community could come to improve their education and employability. The scale of the improvements and benefits to the local community are difficult to quantify, but with little money from our neighbourhood renewal panel the heads were able to set up those schemes. One has led to £1.4 million of additional investment to expand the adult learning centre by having a family centre on the premises and a lift to enable disabled people to access the adult college. That scheme arose from a local initiative, with the heads of local schools talking to residents on their neighbourhood renewal panel and the panel agreeing a sum to finance the improvement and introduction of those services. That is an example of people who were empowered by the resources made available to them through neighbourhood renewal programmes so that they could make a difference. There was a reason for them engaging in the process because they made a contribution and a significant difference to their community. Sadly, our neighbourhood renewal programme has been rolled up into a much more centralised structure in which it has to hit specific targets. The decision-making process has been taken away from local communities. A minimal sum of money is left for people to play around with in their communities. Basically, the presence of local residents in terms of neighbourhood renewal is now a box-ticking exercise to satisfy the requirement for some sort of community engagement to deliver on the core themes.