Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

If we had had a Labour council and Josie Farrington in East Sussex things might have been very different. She is an outstanding example. Very few people knew what the remit of the committees was. In the other place, a whole raft of arguments was given from first hand experience about the obstructive nature of some of the committees and the obscure nature of some of the work. I do not want to denigrate the committees, nor, God forbid, the people who served on them, because they worked very well over many years. But the 2000 Act recognised that things had to change. The noble Lord seemed to suggest that they worked better for smaller authorities—the fewer than 85,000—than for larger authorities where there was a bigger challenge. We began to explore the tension between leadership and scrutiny. That is the balance expressed in the White Paper and the Bill. Yes, we have to have stronger leadership, but we also have to have greater powers of scrutiny. This is an opportunity for the ward councillors now to develop their own profile in a way that has not been possible before. We shall come to the role of the overview and scrutiny committees and the community calls for action, and so on. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said that the committee system brought on trained people but I fail to see why that cannot be developed under the existing and future system. Many of the overview and scrutiny committees themselves are turning into policy and development committees as they review the work of the council. As my noble friend said, it feeds ambition. In the three models that we have set out—the leader and cabinet executive, the mayor and cabinet executive, and an elected executive—we are allowing for choice, but within a set of principles that say that we require stronger, more visible and more accountable leadership. That is required in modern local government and that is where the strength lies. This is an area on which we disagree, but I hope that we can tease out some of these issues during our deliberations. I turn briefly to Amendment No. 125, which seeks to preserve the option of a council being able to elect all the members of the executive. As we have previously discussed, the new leader and the cabinet model, which the Bill introduces, removes that option. In future the cabinet will be appointed by the leader. We shall debate that on the next amendment. In this way, as I have explained, we think that coherent and stable leadership is more easily created. Noble Lords might have asked why Welsh authorities appear to retain the option of electing their leadership group—I know that I am giving the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, even more ammunition for a future exchange. Clauses 62 and 63 seek to modify the 2000 Act provisions in relation to English authorities but we intend to leave unchanged the detailed provision in relation to Wales, as that is obviously a matter for the Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Government. While I suspect that we may not agree, I hope that, with that statement of principle, I have been able to provide at least more than an assertion of why we are doing what we are.