Localism Bill

My Lords, I speak to Amendments 49 and 49C, and I support the comments of my noble friend Lord Tope about district councils. Whether the prescription on scrutiny should exist is a matter for discussion. If it should, then it should apply to district councils as well as to everyone else. There is a view across parts of the legislation that was brought in 10 years ago that district councils’ overview and scrutiny functions are in some way less important than those of bigger councils. However, for some of the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord True, talked about earlier, because district councils are smaller councils and there are more councillors per elector—often a lot more—scrutiny of local services generally, as well as of their own services, is something that they can do very well indeed. That leads me to Amendment 49, which removes more classic words. The new subsection states that an ““excluded matter””, which I shall describe in a minute, "““means any matter which is … a matter of any description specified in an order made by the Secretary of State for the purposes of this section””." What major national imperative is there that the Secretary of State should make an order excluding matters from discussion? The matters to be discussed are defined as ““local government”” matters. This exclusion allows the Secretary of State to produce a list of things that the Secretary of State says are not local government matters and, therefore, under this new section, cannot be referred to an overview and scrutiny committee by a member of the council. This is silly. I do not know what other provision we are using to do it, or if we are just doing it, but my council has decided on and is getting on with scrutiny of part of the local health service within east Lancashire. It provides a vital service that is not provided by the local authority, although it has some limited influence and joint schemes. However, the local authority is performing some scrutiny. Clearly, it will have to do it with the co-operation of those parts of the health service that are being scrutinised, but that can take place. It may or may not be a local government matter. I do not know whether the Secretary of State wants to exclude it under this provision, but it is the sort of situation in which you should let the local authority get on and do what it wants to do in the interests of the people in the area. The purpose of the second amendment, Amendment 49C, is probing. It refers to new Section 9FF(1)(b) on page 202 of this compendium Bill and to recommendations relating, "““to a local improvement target which … relates to a relevant partner authority, and … is specified in a local area agreement of the authority””." I have never really understood local area agreements or got too involved in them, but my impression was that this Government were scaling back on the importance of such agreements and perhaps were looking to abolish them. Perhaps the Minister can tell me where we stand on that.