Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 115: 115: Clause 62, page 33, line 28, leave out subsection (6) The noble Lord said: Am I on again? This is the first amendment in a long group about the proposed model for elected executives. This is an important issue in the Bill and will be a sticking point. There is considerable controversy about it. We are talking about it, yet I wonder whether it will happen very much. I wonder how many councils in the country will want to get involved in an elected executive model. I think I am on fairly safe ground in saying that there are not very many. From reading the interesting discussions in the House of Commons, we understand that a lot of this came from Stockton-on-Tees, which looked at the possibility in the 2000 Act to move to an elected executive and expressed an interest in it. It seems that it was given the advice that it was rather difficult and the Government had not thought it out, so the idea got stuck in this Bill to set out a perhaps more coherent, and certainly more comprehensive, model of how we might have an elected executive. Amendment No. 115 is one of a number of amendments I have tabled to try to remove all the references to elected executives from the Bill. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, who found even more references than I did and has helped to produce a thorough list of things that need filleting out of the Bill. No doubt there are others that we have missed. The principle is that we would like to remove the references to an elected executive being a model because it is, frankly, daft. We can talk about the details of the Bill, but this is a matter where we have to say that the proposal being put forward is simply silly. What is it? It is a proposal that a group of people, a political party or any other group of people can put forward for election across an authority a slate consisting of a proposed leader and a number of other members of the executive. As I understand it, between three and 10 people would stand for election and, having been elected, would form the leader and executive of the council. I think they would be councillors, although I am not very certain because the Bill states that the Government may make regulations to what extent they will be councillors. Presumably they will be councillors and will be called Councillor Bloggs or Councillor Ali or whatever. They will be elected across the district, so they will not represent wards. They will have no direct link of the kind that the noble Baroness was talking about, which is the link between a councillor and the people who regard him as their councillor and go to him when they have a problem or something to say. We all think that is important in whatever electoral system we want. Who wants it? It is rumoured that Stockton-on-Tees may want it, or perhaps one or two leadership people in Stockton may want it, but it is not clear who else does. According to the report on the Public Bill Committee in the House of Commons, when the witnesses from the LGA were giving evidence they were asked where the demand came from and who put it forward. It is reported that the witnesses looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. They did not know, so it does not seem to have come from representatives of local government. What effect would it have on the council? It would have all sorts of effects. There would be two kinds of councillors, so the problems that we have in the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly with the additional member system would be repeated and would probably be much worse. The divisions that exist in many councils at the moment between executive and Cabinet councillors and back-benchers would inevitably be exacerbated because there would be councillors with no wards. It could unbalance the numbers—although the extent to which it would do that is not very clear—and produce a council that is not representative. If people voted differently or if there was a close vote under the supplementary vote system a slate could get in with perhaps only 35 per cent of the vote across the borough, whereas in individual ward elections quite different people might be elected because the votes would pile up in individual wards rather than being spread across the authority. There are all sorts of questions to be asked about electoral systems, and we will come on to them. Finally, there is stand part on Clause 67. Clause 67, which is printed on pages 42 and 43 of the Bill, sets out in great detail how the executive will be elected. When the debates took place in the House of Commons, a number of people—my honourable friend Andrew Stunell was particularly prominent—pooh-poohed the idea that the size of the executive had to be fixed before the elections took place. The argument was that people might well have a choice of a small executive of three or four full-time people or a big executive of perhaps 10 people who would be part-time and would operate in a very different way, and that that choice could be put before the people. The Government responded to that, and we now have the extraordinary stuff on pages 42 and 43 about the different kinds of election there might be. It is not that there will be a choice of the people standing, but that the council will decide whether it has to be a definite number of people, can be a number of people, "““the same as, or greater than, the specified minimum membership, but ... must not be greater than the specified maximum membership””," or, "““must be 3 or more””." The whole system is a muddle and quite extraordinarily complex. Few people if any are going to take part in it—there might be two or three councils putting themselves forward as pioneers but my guess is that they will come scuttling back like Stoke-on-Trent, saying, ““The Government got it wrong. Can it be unscrambled?””. I hope this House might take these provisions out before the Bill goes back to the Commons, and ask the Government to seriously think again about what is an incredibly flawed proposal. We are not there yet—we are in Committee, discussing it in detail—and on that basis I look forward to the Minister’s reply and what she can possibly say to justify this extraordinary nonsense. I do not want to blame her for it, but she has to defend it. I look forward to the debate. On that basis, I beg to move.