Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I will of course do as the hon. Gentleman asks. We do not want to over-burden public authorities with scrutiny. We want the right and appropriate level of scrutiny, and the Bill talks about overview and scrutiny at some length. The amendments that I have described so far will fulfil the commitments that I made to add bodies to the list. However, I wish to add several further bodies that we did not have the opportunity to discuss in Committee. Amendment No. 21 deals with the arrangements for joint waste authorities, which might in future be established under clause 165(1), while amendments Nos. 24, 25 and 55 will add the Arts Council and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to the list. The amendments will ensure that all the key bodies delivering or co-ordinating waste services and cultural resources in an area are fully involved in partnership working through the negotiation of LAAs and sustainable communities strategies. Amendments Nos. 92 to 95 are technical measures that will permit the Secretary of State to vary or revoke a direction made under clauses 82 and 87, and to revoke a direction made under clause 91, about which the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire asked. I turn now to the Opposition amendments, and in particular new clause 29. As my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby) said, the new clause would place a highly prescriptive, unnecessary and bureaucratic burden on the relationship between central and local government. It would require the Government to produce a report every year for each local authority responsible for producing an LAA. The report’s objective would be to chart the Government’s progress in delivering the greater devolution promised in the White Paper. Although of course I agree with the sentiment behind the new clause—the desire to hold the Government to account—there are far better mechanisms than this prescriptive proposal. The new clause would ensure that information on the number of local improvement targets and ring-fenced grants and on the volume of guidance and the degree of approval processes was made available to localities area by area. However, the point that I emphasise—particularly to the hon. Member for Portsmouth, South, who raised this point and whose attention I hope to get—is that the 35 targets set under the new regime will vary from one local authority area to another. They are not national targets imposed on every council, but targets selected by the local authority in agreement with its partners. Placing a duty to co-operate on the partners, as the Bill does, is the right to way to deliver the changes. A number of hon. Members on both sides of the House supported amendment No. 253. My hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Mr. Caton) should be commended—and has been—for his work. I ask him to be patient slightly longer. We are debating a local government Bill. Although his proposals prompted a debate today, including a fascinating and revealing exchange between the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich, they are in large part about planning as well as about the relationship between central and local government. Again, the paradox is that all the speakers who referred to the amendment welcomed the devolutionary approach, yet we are discussing the imposition of targets because they happen to be targets that we all like.