Localism Bill

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendments 131 and 132. No doubt other noble Lords will speak to Amendment 130ZC. We have discussed the question of challenges to local authorities by local communities and other bodies that wish to run their services. I am looking for a more ambitious community right to challenge. I support what is in the Bill. It is a very useful expression of bringing forward one aspect of the big society so that local people can become involved not just in yapping at the heels of those who provide a service but in putting forward suggestions for how they could do it better. I like that—but why does it stop at local government services? My right honourable friend Greg Clark, the Minister of State for Decentralisation and Planning Policy, recently gave a lecture on the subject to the Local Government Association. He was on the right lines when he stated that Ministers are considering inviting councils and their partners to bid to manage a range of public services using devolved budgets. This recognises that government services or services provided by non-departmental bodies at national level may be run better and with more sensitivity to local needs and circumstances if they are run at local level. They do not all have to be run nationally. That is the point of the amendment. I am trying to provide a way in which my right honourable friend’s aspirations could be put into practice across the public sector. If we are going to get this whole process going—I admired the eloquence of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, when he spoke of what was necessary—we need to generate enthusiasm for, and understanding of, what is being offered. This should be across the board and not limited to local government services. Therefore, my amendment extends the right to challenge across all public services, not just those guided by local government. Local authorities should be able to express an interest in running devolved national public services on behalf of their communities, which should be able to offer to run the services. They may need help, which local authorities are best placed to deliver. Looking at it again with rather greater reluctance, I have to say that the suggestion that local authorities should provide a list of the services that they might be interested in devolving smacks of bureaucracy and I am not particularly enthusiastic about it. I ought to withdraw the amendment; I speak to it with no enthusiasm at all and I am grateful to see that that view is shared. I will concentrate on the other amendments in this group, which propose extending the measure to services provided nationally by central government and by non-departmental public bodies and so on, and giving local authorities the right to bid and the duty to help local communities to do this. If you take London as an example—I declare my interest as one of the joint presidents of London Councils—the figures show that in 2009-10 central government spent over £47 billion in London. Local authorities actually spent much less than that—about £29 billion—so only 40 per cent of the total is spent by local authorities. By extending this measure, you are opening up a substantially larger pool from which one could get services provided locally. Of course, not all services can be delivered locally but a great many are. I shall give some examples in a moment. Extending the community right to challenge and to apply it to a wider public sector would effectively address a lot of the problems that are inevitably caused by national bureaucracy. That often stands in the way of operational efficiency and, in particular, local sensitivity. A council could say, ““If we did it for you, we would have to do it for everybody””. How often has one heard that excuse? What we are looking for in this Bill is a greater opportunity for public services to be run locally, where they can be responsive to local needs and circumstances. I will give some examples in a moment. One possibility is to have cross-departmental services that could be run effectively from a local level. Another is to empower local authorities to support local aspirations. Research commissioned by London Councils last year identified over 150 non-departmental public bodies that spend more than £100,000 a year that have an influence in London. If one takes account of even the Government’s recent efforts to try to reduce the number of these bodies, as in the Public Bodies Bill, London Councils estimates that at least 120 of these organisations remain active in the capital. Many of them are responsible for the delivery of public services for which local communities have no statutory ability to hold anyone to account. This is the target one is aiming at, the substantial number of bodies that deliver services locally but are not in any way locally accountable. Therefore local authorities should be able to help them. The third point is that, if you are going to have a community right to challenge, for that to be a genuine one, it should be open to all regardless of the local community’s expertise or experience. It will need help and the local authorities are best able to give that. If you can achieve that, you will be achieving a degree of local accountability for the services that are there for local people. Not only communities but the local authorities themselves should have the ability to challenge national services on behalf of their communities and alongside other agencies, and to run services delivered by national public bodies within their area. This would ensure that communities have some local control and that there would be some local accountability. Before I sit down, I shall mention a few examples of where I believe this could be made to work. Noble Lords will be aware of the European Social Fund, which is run by the Department for Work and Pensions. The DWP has recently proposed to spend its European Social Fund money on providing employment support for families with multiple problems. That is a very worthy aim, but does it have to be provided nationally? Surely if you have different communities with different circumstances and families with very different needs and abilities, you need to have services that reflect those differences. Therefore, it seems to me that it should be open to a local authority, or even to a local community, to say, ““Yes, we are used to working with families with multiple problems, and we could run this service more effectively. We would like the right to challenge it””. I think the DWP might find that greatly improves its ability to deliver the service—well, it would not be the DWP, it would be the others. The important point is that this would then become a local service and reflect local needs and local circumstances. That is one example. Another example may surprise noble Lords. It is Jobcentre Plus. It is again a national service run, ostensibly, on national criteria and to national standards right across the country, but anyone will tell you that in areas of high unemployment—some of them are in some of the London boroughs—there are quite different needs from those in areas where there is relatively little unemployment because services are growing and business is providing the opportunity. Surely here it should be possible for a local authority to say, ““Look. We could run this better in our area. We would like to challenge the Department for Work and Pensions and offer to run the Jobcentre Plus in our area. We could do it better, and probably less expensively””. Youth justice and services such as youth offending teams, which are currently funded through the nationally sponsored Youth Justice Board, might be more effectively delivered if they were tailored to local circumstances in line with the new financial incentives model for crime reduction. Youth crime, as we all know—indeed, I suspect that no one knows better than the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who eloquently spoke about similar problems a moment ago—is a complex and multifaceted issue which would arguably benefit from an area-based approach. There is the whole question of business regulation. Businesses are not uniform and do not form a uniform pattern across the country. It is another area that could be run by local authorities or local councils. There are other examples, but I hope I have said enough to suggest that this is a realistic extension of the right to challenge, and it should include national services, not just local authority services. I beg to move.