Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I shall reiterate briefly what I said earlier. The Bill strengthens the OandS provisions in the Local Government Act, which enabled any overview and scrutiny committee to review or scrutinise and make reports to its council or executive on matters that affect the local authority’s area. The provisions enabled overview and scrutiny committees to invite any person before them and to request information from any organisation, and they required members of the executive and officers to attend before scrutiny committees. The Bill builds on those provisions in the 2000 Act by requiring executives and councils to respond to the reports and recommendations of an OandS committee. It provides that the OandS committees may require information not just from the council and its officers but also from the council’s local authority partners, and it allows OandS committees of county and single-tier councils to send reports to LAA partners, which they may require these partners to have regard to in exercising their functions. That is the context in which the noble Lord has asked some important questions. The role of districts in formulating LAAs, as we discussed yesterday, is very important. I assure the Committee that we believe that district councillors and councils themselves must be vital partners in any successful LAAs. I also explained that in two-tier areas district councils would be placed on an equal footing to their county councils on the agreement of local improvement targets. Therefore, it is obvious that districts should also have a key role in holding public services to account. We have strengthened that role in two ways. First, we have provided for joint OandS committees with equivalent powers to upper-tier authorities when they are so desired. Secondly, we have made provision for regulations that will allow districts to scrutinise LAAs where they have a direct partnership with an LAA partner. I will come on to explain why we have made that distinction and that restriction; we brought forward amendments in another place to clarify this. The point of creating joint committees is to enable us to make regulations to allow for the establishment of joint OandS committees in two-tier areas between district councils and their respective county councils. We brought that amendment forward because we wanted these joint OandS committees to be able to require information from and make reports and recommendations to LAA partners on matters relating to the attainment of an LAA target in the same way as a county or unitary authority could. We thought that joint committees were potentially a very important vehicle for improved working between districts and counties in two-tier areas. Therefore, in response to Amendment No. 218A, it would be wholly contrary to the spirit of joint working if we were to coerce local authorities into forming such a joint scrutiny committee. It would be counterproductive and something of a tautology. I assure the noble Lord that regulations will provide that the establishment of these joint scrutiny committees will be entirely at the discretion of the constituent local authorities. Therefore, I cannot accept Amendment No. 218A. We will be issuing guidance about how joint OandS committees might minimise or avoid overlap with other OandS committees in the same area and we will commission that guidance in collaboration with key bodies. At this point I cannot give a date for the guidance, but officials are working exceptionally hard on this Bill. If I can provide some idea of when we can expect it, I will. But while we know that joint scrutiny committees could play a valuable role—and I think that many will take it up—that does not mean that there will not be a continuing role for OandS committees of district councils in two-tier areas to scrutinise district functions. We also recognise that, in some two-tier areas, councils will simply not be able to reach agreement on these joint committees. We have also brought forward amendments in another place to make provision to strengthen the OandS committees of district councils of two-tier areas in their own right. The amendments that we have made allow us to make regulations under Clause 123 to enable district councils in two-tier areas to require information from local partners. The noble Lord asked me whether they would be able to send reports. Yes, they will. These amendments provide a new general power in Clause 126 to allow us to make regulations to enable district councils in two-tier areas to send reports to their respective county council where these reports also relate to matters that are LAA targets. Regulations under Clause 126 will enable us to make provision about the requirements on county councils to respond to those reports and on local public service providers to have regard to such reports. I also explained when we discussed LAAs yesterday that, while there is a mutual duty in two-tier areas on both the county and the district councils to co-operate to agree LAA targets, it is equally important to avoid duplication and overlap. The county council, therefore, will have to have overall accountability for preparing the LAA. We believe that those local authorities that have responsibility for preparing an LAA should also have primary responsibility for holding to account any partner to whom a target specified in the agreement relates. So while the amendments that we brought forward are designed to give a real voice and real influence to district councils to recognise the responsibilities, in a two-tier area we must avoid duplicate scrutiny that would place unnecessary burdens on service providers, whoever they are. The noble Lord’s Amendments Nos. 217A, 217B and 218A would allow, in two-tier areas, OandS committees of district councils and county councils to scrutinise and make recommendations to LAA partners on the same LAA target, including targets for which the district council might not be responsible. They would also allow OandS committees of district councils to send reports to their county council on any LAA target. So the answer to the question why we have restricted the scope of the district is essentially to avoid duplication and the bureaucracy and confusion that might come with it. The regulations will provide that the scrutiny committees will be able to require information from local public service providers in the more limited circumstances where they have formal partnership working arrangements. We have done that conscientiously. We also propose that the district council scrutiny committees should be able to send reports to their county council where, as a consequence of the partnership arrangements, they report on a matter that also relates to a target in the county council’s LAA. Obviously we will have to consult before we do that, but it is worth reminding ourselves that local improvement targets cover both designated targets and purely local targets—the undesignated ones. We are very anxious that district councils and two-tier authorities should exercise their scope for scrutiny on these partnership arrangements. However, a balance must be struck, otherwise reports will fly backwards and forwards on all sorts of areas and the resulting duplication will create exasperation, with the burden falling on public service providers, who are there to deliver services to the public. I hope that, with that explanation in relation to the regulations as well, the noble Lord will feel able to accept Clause 123. However, I take the point about the importance of the regulations. I will look at the timetable and give noble Lords such information as I can about them.