Localism Bill

My Lords, I think that we should thank my noble friend Lord Wills for giving us the opportunity to debate this issue. He had a distinguished ministerial career and responsibility for this area, which very much showed in his contribution today. We are living in an era of transparency, which has already been very much the byword of many of our debates on this Bill. We are also living in an era in which there will be increasing partnership working, outsourcing and joint working, very much along the lines on which the noble Lord, Lord Tope, focused when he talked about scrutiny functions in our debate on a previous group of amendments. The focus of FOI in the current era is therefore entirely appropriate. My noble friend’s Amendment 52A very much chimes with the group of amendments that we have just discussed in its presumption that meetings should be held in public. On Amendments 133A and 133B, he acknowledged—and the noble Lord, Lord True, touched on this—that we need to focus on the practical ramifications of driving freedom of information through a contractor, a subcontractor and then perhaps a sub-subcontractor chain. I am thinking particularly of the construction industry and how diverse and complex some of its contractual arrangements are. In a sense, my noble friend offered the route to a solution when he said that there should be some sort of de minimis or cut-off point in the application of this. His focus, as he acknowledged, was partly on the business left over from when he was a Minister, but he also dealt with some practical examples, such as Swindon, and cited the Islington Council situation, which is not theoretical but actual. The noble Lord, Lord True, said on the one hand that he was an enthusiast for freedom of information, but on the other urged his noble friend to be sceptical about it. I am not sure that those two concepts sit very comfortably together.