Localism Bill

My Lords, in moving Amendment 45A I will attempt to speak to the other 31 amendments in this group. I feel sure that your Lordships will be grateful if I do not list each of those 31 amendments to which I am speaking. These amendments have come from the Centre for Public Scrutiny and would have been spoken to far more eloquently by my noble friend Lady Hamwee, who serves on its advisory board. I shall endeavour to cover them myself. I share the centre’s concern that in some places scrutiny has got a rather bad name. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, said earlier, this is partly because it is seen as simply a post-hoc thing, looking back at what was done and might have been done differently rather than as part of a policy development framework, and also because of some of the effects of the rather strict executive scrutiny split that we have had for the last 10 or 11 years. Success in scrutiny is about culture and personal relationships, not processes. As it stands, the law makes unrealistic and unreasonable demands on scrutiny councillors and scrutiny functions to act in a certain way. The law is internally inconsistent, causing frustration to members and officers, who feel that they are constrained in what they can and cannot do for apparently no good reason. At no point have these policy constraints been explained by government. They are the result of 10 years of piecemeal changes to the legislation without any coherent thought having been given to the way that scrutiny operates across the piece. The Bill provides an ideal opportunity to take a broad look and make changes that are supported by practitioners in local government. That is what this raft of amendments seeks to do. Again, I can explain in some detail what each of the 32 amendments seeks to achieve. I can see from the expressions around me in the Chamber that your Lordships are keen and eager for me to do exactly that but I will not. I simply say that they seek to cover two key areas where it is considered that scrutiny needs additional freedom to become more effective. The first of those, which we have referred to previously, is partnership working. Current powers limit scrutiny in the way that they engage with local authorities’ partners. More and more local services are now being delivered in partnership, and it is inconsistent for scrutiny to have only limited powers, as given in the 2007 Act and incorporated into the 2000 Act, to hold those partners to account. Often they provide important local services where there is no real way for local people to exert an influence over how those services are provided. We are suggesting that scrutiny’s powers over partners should be brought broadly into line with those over the authority itself—the power to require attendance at meetings, to require the provision of information and certain rights to make recommendations which go beyond what is provided at present. In particular, we want a general description for a local partner as a class of person, rather than legislation setting out a specific list of named partners, which is inappropriate, inflexible and a highly centralised, top-down, government-know-best approach. Rather than continue at greater length, perhaps I may say that if the Minister is minded to give a sympathetic response, as she did to Amendment 84DA from a similar source, I am happy to discuss this matter further outside the Chamber. The other key area that I want to cover is parity for counties and districts. At the moment, district councils cannot engage with partners in the same way as other authorities and they are consequently at a disadvantage when trying to work with those partners to improve services at district level. This bears no relation to the demarcation of executive-side responsibilities between counties and districts. This anomaly, brought in by the 2007 Act, has never been explained and there can be no policy reason for its continued existence. I hope that the Minister will be able to give as sympathetic a response as she did previously and, in anticipation of that, I beg to move.