My Lords, we have already spent some time during the course of today’s Committee looking at the value of facility time and I do not
intend to rehearse any of those arguments. However, when we were talking about the so-called transparency clause, the Minister told us that this is about a reserve power which she assumed or hoped would never be needed. So the question is this: why are we writing into this Bill now something for which there is so far a complete lack of an evidence base and a complete lack of clarity as regards its extent or how it would be applied? We have no information on how discerning it is. Will the Minister be sitting in her office, deciding whether the time-off arrangements for facility time in the Newcastle parks department should be this number of employees for this number of hours, as opposed to those working on social care in Newcastle, or those who might be doing similar functions in the London Borough of Haringey? How exactly is this supposed to be done? If it is not the Minister, in whom we have absolute faith, how can her officials make those discernment judgments between the different local authorities or organisations concerned?
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The question is: how would this work? How long might it be before Ministers decide that they want to use these reserve powers? If it is the intention not to use them and that the power of transparency will make it work, then we do not need Clause 13 now. We could come back in a year or two when there will perhaps be an evidence base, with more detail as to how exactly it might work.
The fundamental issue is that local government and the Mayor of London are publicly accountable, as my noble friend Lord Beecham said. So Ministers will second-guess the judgment of the locally elected officials who are closer to the implications and practical questions that have to be resolved, because, somehow, Ministers remotely—hundreds of miles away potentially—know best. I thought that the Government believed in localism; they always claim that they do. The principle of local government is that local people elect local councillors to determine and to provide local services, and to do so in the most effective way. As my noble friend Lord Beecham said, there are all sorts of safeguards in place to ensure that that is done efficiently and effectively. This provision will undermine that localism. It will second-guess local officials, local people and local management, who are closer to what is happening, on something for which there is no evidence base. It does not need to be in the Bill now. It can come back if there is evidence, at some stage, of a serious problem, but none of that has been presented.
I understood that this is a Government who believe in evidence-based policy-making. We all understand the process by which manifestos are written; it is not necessarily evidence-based. But as Mario Cuomo argued, you campaign in poetry—I do not think that this is poetry—but govern in prose. Part of governing in prose is that you assess the evidence of the policy you set out and implement it only when it makes sense. This does not make sense.