Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I am grateful for that. I was being provocative, but there is an assumption throughout that, when the Government say ““strong leadership””, that is what matters, as though opponents are not in favour of good leadership. We ought to be talking about the nature of leadership, and the Government’s view is oversimplified, to put it fairly simply. We are not talking about strong or weak leadership, but good and better leadership. If that is what the Government mean by strong leadership, they must understand that there are different ways of doing that. Different ways may be appropriate for different councils, different communities and so on. For the Labour Party, of all bodies, to appear to dismiss the concept of collective leadership is an astonishing ideological U-turn that I do not subscribe to. It is perfectly possible to have consensual leadership, co-operative leadership, collective leadership or collegiate leadership and for it to be very good leadership indeed. If it works really well, it is better than having leadership by one person. The noble Baroness talked about entrepreneurial leadership. I keep trying to avoid talking about Pendle, but a good example of entrepreneurial leadership is the council’s incredibly quick decisions to invest in new buildings in the middle of Nelson as a joint venture with a local company. That must be my phone. I beg the Committee’s pardon. It must be somebody from Pendle ringing to say, ““Come on, get on with it””. If I can find out how to operate this thing—this is hopeless; I should curl up and die. There, I’ve switched it off. I apologise. I shall say two more things. I agree that leadership does not happen by accident, but nor does it happen by imposing structures. It happens by good people getting into leadership positions and working together to make the structure work. Any structure that is adopted will have advantages and disadvantages, yet it has to work. I fear that the structures that the Government are proposing will be quite brittle when things get to crisis point. My second point relates specifically to this amendment. It is okay if there is a group in overall control and it appoints the leader, who is elected by the council. The leader will probably appoint the people who have been negotiating within the group by one means or other. That will work. In a council with no overall control, as is often the case, that approach does not work quite so well. Who is on the executive will be a matter of negotiation between two or more of the parties on the council. That is underpinned by the numbers on the council and by who sticks their hands up to vote. If that decision is taken away and put in the hands of one person, particularly if that person will be there for four years, everything can break down fairly quickly and a series of crises might result, because the system is not resilient or flexible enough to cope. I ask the Government to look at that. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.