Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 204G: 204G: Clause 105, page 67, line 1, leave out from ““England”” to end of line 2 The noble Lord said: After that aperitif from the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, we are now firmly into Part 5. It is an extremely important part of the Bill. Chapter 1 is about local area agreements and community strategies, which are at the heart of the Government’s claim that this is a devolutionary Bill that will transform the role of local authorities. Amendment No. 204G is about two-tier areas, but I have to say something briefly about local area agreements in general to put it into context. The Bill will place a duty on lead local authorities, which it calls ““responsible local authorities””, to produce a local area agreement, consult and seek the participation of named partners and produce a community strategy, of which they have to take account when they are setting the local area agreement. It places a duty on local authorities and named partners to co-operate with each other to agree named, relevant targets within the local area agreement and to have regard to those targets once the local area agreement has been created. That sums up what a local area agreement is about. If local area agreements work well they will put local authorities at the heart of the different organisations, partnerships and networks that now create a system of local governance. They put the responsible local authority at the centre of a web—if he were still in his place, the noble Lord, Lord Graham, would call it a web of intrigue for plotting—or a network of organisations and agencies of all kinds. If they work well, they will restore to local authorities the primacy of decision-making and negotiation with other bodies that they deserve as the only democratically elected bodies. The other side is the fear that the system that the Government are setting up will be very centralist because the system of putting together and changing local area agreements will be subject to the approval of the Secretary of State and one fears that there will be a great deal of central control of what is done and how it is done, including the 35 national targets. That is the framework and no doubt the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, will talk about the pilots, particularly the pilot in Wigan which, as a relatively compact urban authority, seems ideally suited to local area agreements. Amendment No. 204G and Amendment No. 204H, which is grouped with it, are about the status and responsibility of district councils and how they relate to local area agreements in two-tier areas; that is, in shire counties with districts. There is a huge diversity in such places. No two shire counties are the same, and some of them are very different indeed from each other. Some are relatively compact, some have relatively weak districts—particularly those districts which are south-east this and north-east that, and were cobbled together in 1973 and 1974—while others are very widespread. I think of my own Lancashire or of north Yorkshire next door, which is huge. Some places have relatively strong districts which feel they are very much the equal of the counties because in some cases they are based on former county boroughs; others have very strong traditions of local democratic self-government. There is a huge diversity. I do not want anybody to think that I am trying to impose a pattern; I am not. Everything put forward in these amendments is permissive in terms of what could happen. Part of the problem is that catering for variety is not necessarily in the Bill. Clause 105 refers to responsible local authorities. Clause 106 refers to partner authorities. From looking at the list of these authorities, it is clear that the partner authorities are the constellation of bodies which will surround the responsible, democratically elected local authority in a local agreement. They are local quangos, partnerships, joint authorities, some service delivery agencies and NHS bodies such as the PCT and NHS trusts, foundation trusts and so on, together with a number of national bodies, quangos and agencies, and, indeed, a little bit of the Secretary of State’s activities as they impact on that area. People in some district councils fear that district councils are lumped together as a partner authority with the other partner authorities; a second status democratically elected authority as opposed to the counties in these areas. Yet district councils are different from all these other bodies precisely because they are democratically elected local authorities and have their own local strategic partnerships. So, within two-tier areas, you have the county level local strategic partnership which in some of the big counties is perhaps not seen as very local, and you have the local strategic partnerships at district level. The interaction of these and the interaction of the different authorities within a local area agreement seems to be something that has not yet been thought out properly. Amendment No. 204G would make the district council a responsible local authority. Amendment No. 204H sets out an alternative system for a local area agreement in two-tier areas, based on joint responsibility and equality of status between the county and the district. One local authority chief executive in Lancashire is going around saying that currently the districts are simply going to be glorified parish councils. Clearly, that is not acceptable. Amendment No. 204H also sets out that in appropriate places local area agreements could be made for part of the county and not for a whole county, where this is appropriate, where the county council area is really too big, and where the diversity—the different needs in different parts of the county—make that sensible. I refer to Lancashire, which has 12 districts. It extends from Skelmersdale, which is a Liverpool overspill town, to the edge of the Lake District and Morecambe Bay, from the Fylde Coast, places like St Annes and Thornton and Fleetwood, although not Blackpool itself of course which is a unitary taken out of it—which is slightly absurd for these purposes—and eastwards to the borders of Yorkshire in the Pennines. In the middle you have Preston, but not Blackburn, which is a unitary, and it extends southwards to the northern fringes of greater Manchester, and certainly areas which are part of the greater Manchester economic region. Under these circumstances, a great deal of diversity is needed. We need a system in which there can be local area agreements for less than the whole county—not necessarily just one district but perhaps a group of districts. It may be that the PCT areas are sensible where there is a county with a number of different PCTs within it. The needs are different, the circumstances are different, the local economies are different and the targets that need to be set down will be different. Under these circumstances, it really needs a degree of diversity and flexibility and an acceptance that the district councils are equal partners and not subsidiary partners. I have spent some time on this because it is a very important issue. Local area agreements seem to be tailored for fairly compact unitary councils. It is not clear at all that they will work well and not cause huge amounts of bureaucracy and problems in large far-flung counties. There is much confusion and concern, and, if we are going to have local area agreements, the Government have to think very carefully indeed about how they will work in places such as—and assuming that there are no unitary changes—the northern counties of Northumberland, Cumbria, Lancashire, North Yorkshire, Cheshire and many others. I beg to move.