Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

This has been an important debate as Clause 62 is part of the main architecture of the Bill. I am grateful for all the contributions. I was particularly struck by the excursion of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, into some of the wider issues, because he was exploring, in different ways, some of the tensions between leadership and scrutiny. We shall talk about some of those issues on later amendments. Clause 62 provides for changes to the executive arrangements that local authorities in England can adopt. It does that by amending Section 11 of the Local Government Act 2000. The three executive models that we propose will be set out in the Bill. I hope to meet the challenge that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, raised about providing evidence, not assertion, on why leadership is important and why we have chosen this route. Amendments Nos. 113, 113A, 121A and 126 all have the same effect, which is to reject that route and, in different ways, to seek to maintain the status quo, enabling any council, regardless of size of type, to operate any form of governance arrangements as they see fit, including alternative arrangements or other arrangements which do not involve any form of executive. I shall try to explain our thoughts on Amendment No. 125 to the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, when I reach that point. Briefly, as I understand it, it seeks to preserve for England the option of all members of the executive being elected to the council, but I shall have a slightly longer answer to give on that. I shall not reiterate what the amendments seek to achieve but will move on to the debate about the system of governance that we are proposing. The first thing that we can all agree on is that the challenges facing local councils are different from what they were five or 10 years ago. It is not just that the pressures are intensifying or that resources have to be spread wider. As was summed up in the Lyons report, councils are no longer just agents of service delivery. What Lyons said, and what the councils themselves are saying, is that there is more to the local council than simply ensuring that schools are good, hospitals thrive and the streets are clean. It is not just about meeting new challenges that we could not have envisaged 10 years ago, such as climate change, mitigation and anticipation, and all the changes that they imply, or the pressures of ageing. It is about the role of the council in envisaging and developing the shape of the place. It is a good phrase because, although it is slightly elliptical, we all know what the making and shaping of a place means. It is a broader vision that requires different sorts of leadership. In order to underpin this change of culture, about which my noble friend who is not in his place was talking and which we set out in the White Paper, we collected evidence over a period about the real impact of leadership on best value and effectiveness. I shall come to that shortly. As we stated in our White Paper: "““Places need clear vision and strong leadership to deal with constantly changing economic, social, environmental, and cohesion challenges””." The New Council Constitutions: Findings from the 2005 ELG Sample Survey showed that the arrangements that were introduced by the 2000 Act support visible and effective leadership. It was an independent report that was updated in June. It showed that since 2000 there have been changes. Councils have taken on the new freedoms. There are three sets of new freedoms. Some have taken on all of them and others have made cautious progress. Nevertheless, there has been a shift towards more concentrated leadership. The final report of the Long-term Evaluation of the Best Value Regime showed clearly that leadership is the most significant driver of change and improvement in local authorities. That is one set of evidence, but we also have another very recent set of evidence. At Second Reading, we published a report, Does Leadership Matter? It was a thorough academic report undertaken by the same research team led by Professor Gerry Stoker. The evidence is very comprehensive but it boils down to this: "““There is general agreement that the aim of enhancing effective leadership has been met and that the new executive arrangements have bedded down well, thus providing more visible and effective leadership and quicker decision-making which is in turn associated with better service delivery ... Taken together, our findings show a consistent relationship between on the one hand, authorities with a stable political leadership and authorities that have over a period of time given the full range of powers to their leaders and, on the other hand a better service performance and greater citizen satisfaction””." On the one hand we have the challenge of doing things differently because we need to, but we also have the evidence that building on what came in 2000 is a movement for a greater concentration of power. That is the direction of travel and the evidence suggests that it is working. We believe that the key to success in local government is strong and accountable leadership. We have come forward with what we think is necessary. All the surveys of stakeholders, councillors and officials demonstrate four things: the new arrangements show that decision-making is quicker; the role of the leader has become stronger; the leader of the council has a higher public profile; and the council’s relations with partners have improved. We are in no way pushing the mayoral model to the exclusion of the other three set out in Clause 62, but the mayoral models are perceived to be out-performing the non-mayoral authorities when it comes to effective local leadership. They get higher marks across a whole series of criteria. They also get higher overall approval ratings. More than 50 per cent of councillors and nearly 75 per cent of officers also believe that under the new arrangements the executive has become more effective in articulating a vision. I would not dispute that the best leaders can be successful in any system, but the executive governance arrangements that we have set out are most likely to lead to and support strong accountable leadership. I think that we have reached a point in local government history and in national and local government where we need to take more decisive steps, which is what the Bill will bring about. Noble Lords have spoken with great eloquence, but with a little scepticism too, about the old committee system. It found few friends. Even Simon Milton has been quoted as being critical of the system and saying we would not want to return to it. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said that it was not perfect. From reading the deliberations in another place and from what people said, it was virtually invisible to most people. Nobody knew who were on these committees. When I was working in the voluntary sector it was extremely hard to find out who one should approach and how, or what the process was.