Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I thought that the Minister was going to invite me to withdraw the amendment, but she invites me to live with this. I have absolutely no choice but to live with it as a local authority councillor. This will be very interesting, because it will develop differently in different places. I repeat my usual mantra that all councils are different and all have different cultures, and that the culture of standards committees will evolve within the framework that has been laid down. I am a passionate advocate of local councils and local government, but there are still some pretty awful local councils, so there will be some pretty awful standards committees. It is up to everyone who is active in those areas to be very vigilant about those and to replace them. I have three very quick points to make. There is a stage before reference on which current guidance seems to be lacking, and if the new system is to work well it really must stress it strongly. That stage is mediation. There may be a big row between a councillor and a council official at whatever level. A senior councillor might quite wrongly be trying to bully a low-level member of staff, a senior member of staff might be trying to bully a new councillor, or it might simply be a good old-fashioned row. Good old-fashioned rows often involve what might be called behaving badly. That never happens in your Lordships’ House, of course, but it happens everywhere else in the world. It certainly happens down the Corridor. There is nothing wrong intrinsically with good old-fashioned rows, so long as they do not take over and become the dominant factor in a situation. It is part of human life. One only has to read Alistair Campbell’s diaries to discover that people in high places are behaving badly all the time. It is life; it is politics. If a council officer or a councillor is complaining about the behaviour of another councillor or council officer, there need to be probably informal processes locally for mediation. Sometimes, that is done within political groups. Group leaders will get together and say, ““Look, there has been a bit of a problem here. Can we sort it out and just calm things down please?”” Sometimes it will be done by senior staff of the council. It happens all the time. The problem is that the number of cases that could be referred in this kind of situation is a huge proportion of the tiny fraction of cases that do get referred, because most are dealt with sensibly. If a senior councillor is trying to persuade a junior officer to do something that has not been agreed and is against council policy or whatever, the obvious thing for that junior officer to do is to go to his or her senior and, if necessary, go right to the top. You sort the problem out that way. You do not invoke legalistic processes that bring the whole thing into the local press and bring the authority into disrepute when it can be sorted out locally. That is my main point. I am not sure that the new system has adequate rights of appeal against decisions of local standards committees. Obviously, we do not want everyone appealing, but there has to be a safeguard in the system for when local standards committees are not doing it right. As I understand it, the only right of appeal is to go to the courts and about 99 per cent of people would not have the ability, wish or finance to do that. Like everyone else, we wish the new system a fair wind. We hope that it will be much better, but we will be watching it very carefully. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Clause 184 [Conduct that may be covered by code]: [Amendment No. 235AC not moved.]