Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall move Amendment 9, which is in the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee, and speak to Amendment 9A, which is in my name. I apologise for the fact that Amendment 9A was tabled only today. That was due to some confusion between our Whips’ Office and the Public Bill Office. The purpose of these amendments is to return to an issue that we discussed at some length in Grand Committee, one of the issues to which the Government seem not to have responded and that we believe is important enough to press them on now. Amendment 9 says that the democratic arrangements for people to be governors of schools should apply not just to the schools in the principal local authority’s area but also to schools that are, ""attended by a significant number of students who live in the area of the principal local authority"." Amendment 9A applies the same wording to hospitals and similar facilities provided by the health service. The arrangements should apply not just to facilities that are in the area of the principal local authority but also to those which are, ""attended by a significant number of patients who live in the area of the principal local authority"." I do not particularly want to debate the word "significant" today. I believe that that can be left to the common sense of the principal local authority concerned. There are many cases where the catchment area for most of the school’s pupils does not coincide with the area of a local authority. People might travel long distances to schools in some areas in London but in most places this problem, in relation to this part of the Bill, is a matter of a school which is on one side of a boundary. Located near a boundary and clearly on one side of that boundary, it is in one local authority area but will be attended by lots of students from the other local authority. I explained this in some detail in Committee when I gave two examples from just outside the city of Bradford—a part of the world which I think the noble Lord, Lord Patel, knows fairly well, as do I. One school serves people in the Oakenshaw area and the other people in the villages around Keighley, with one school in Kirklees and the other in north Yorkshire. Significant numbers of pupils attend those schools. It is ridiculous that someone turning up at the city hall in Bradford or looking on the website in search of how to become a governor at one of the schools should be told that, as the school is not in Bradford, they do not include that information. Surely the question ought to be whether the information that is available to people is useful in answering the questions they are likely to ask and the inquires they are likely to make, not whether the school is on one side of the border or the other and therefore ruled out bureaucratically because it is on the wrong side. If a lot of parents and children live in Bradford and go to school just outside Bradford, or any other situation throughout the country, then surely they ought to be helped by this information. The same applies particularly to primary care trusts and hospital trusts and boards. In many parts of the country there are traditional arrangements where people in one part of a district or county go to a hospital in another district or county and they are in different primary care trust areas. If they are in the same area and county, I suppose that the county might provide that information anyway. The example I gave concerns people in the eastern parts of Pendle, particularly the parts which before 1974 were in the West Riding of Yorkshire, who traditionally go to Airedale Hospital, which the Minister revealed he also had close contacts with and knowledge of. In that situation, most people in Barnoldswick and Earby go to Airedale. So if they go to their local Pendle council shop in Barnoldswick to get this information, they will be told, "No, we cannot provide this information. It is not available here. You’ll have to go and ask someone in Bradford or Keighley". That is nonsense. It is not a sensible way to do it. I cannot understand why the Government are resisting these amendments. They are common sense and easy to operate. They rely on local knowledge about what is sensible and what is not sensible. They really ought to go in. I beg to move.