Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

Amendment No. 121A in the group seeks to do very much the same as the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee—to restore to local government, if it wishes, the possibility of a committee system. That is ruled out by the Local Government Act 2000, except in local authorities with populations of 85,000 or under. Neither of the Ministers was here at that time, but I assure them that it was a very hard-fought battle that ended up with a limit of 85,000—no more than that—for local authorities to be allowed to maintain their committee system. It would be a flight of fancy if anyone believed that the cabinet model or the elected mayor model worked to the benefit of all councillors. It is of enormous importance to people in the cabinet, who now earn enormous sums of money for being there—rightly, in view of their extra responsibility. But to think that overview and scrutiny is the perfect role for ward councillors who are not in the cabinet or not associated with it would, frankly, not be exact. It is not a great job and it carries with it no power of decision. Many people elected to local government believe that they will go in with an ability to influence decision-making. Practically all overview and scrutiny is retrospective. In my local authority, there is a very short timescale for calling in a decision before it is made. That is one way of looking at a decision, but the decision is in the hands of either the cabinet member—as is mostly the case—or the cabinet. A back-bencher’s role in that is limited. It is also true that decisions are not scrutinised before they are made to anything like the same extent as previously. People used to deride the committee system and say, ““Oh, it was only a rubber stamp””, but I can remember many occasions when it looked as if committee decisions were about to go through but came under very sharp scrutiny from back-bench members who knew exactly what they were talking about and who could make a committee chairman extremely uncomfortable because he had not taken into account a lot of the detail. I do not imagine that all local authorities would want to go back to a committee and sub-committee system. I do not imagine that they would necessarily want to adapt an executive to have a supporting committee system. But why should local authorities not have the option of doing that? Why should they not have the option of making sure that their back-benchers are included in a way that is satisfactory to them? We are going around in hoops and loops trying to make sure that this has happened. The right to call in decisions will do something simply to rectify what cannot happen under the present system of bringing matters forward. One was always able to do it, but now it is not possible and we have to have different ways of doing it. There are many structures and we need to look at all of them. This structure was denigrated and ruled out at the time. We should expand our systems of administration to allow the committee and sub-committee system to come back as part of the arrangements that local authorities are allowed to adopt.