My Lords, I rise to make my first contribution in this Committee, so I declare my position as vice-president of the Local Government Association. I must also, slightly belatedly, thank the Bill team for last Wednesday morning’s briefing, which was very helpful in trying to come to grips with the complexity of the Bill. There are many people with a great deal more experience than me who are also wrestling with the complexity.
I rise to speak chiefly to Amendment 34 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who has just very ably introduced it. I also support Amendment 33. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, was speaking, I was thinking of the case study of the Dutch firm Randstad and the disaster of the Covid tutoring. That was a very large and important contract that I think the Government would now acknowledge went horribly wrong and should clearly never have been let overseas in the first place. The noble Lord also referred to care homes. Financialisation and hedge fund or overseas ownership of care homes is something I have been very concerned about since a brilliant report, which is highly relevant, from the Centre for
Research on Socio-Cultural Change in 2016. It put that issue on the agenda and it has been focused on since by, for example, the Financial Times.
On Amendment 34, I perhaps come at this from a slightly different philosophical position from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in that I would like to get rid of all financialised provision and see it all in non-profit hands. I believe that is what is appropriate for this. This amendment is probing to ensure that organisations such as local social enterprises, not-for-profit companies and charities are able to apply for contracts. I would like to go stronger on that. I would like to see a preference for those organisations having many of these contracts. I think I am going to anonymise this case study because I have not had the chance to check with the people concerned, but a number of years ago I knew an excellent local rape crisis service that had been providing provision in a city for a number of years. Eventually I found out a month or so after a new contract was supposed to have started that it had been handed to a large national organisation. It was a total mess.
We have seen far too many cases like that where excellent local provision, which may not be expert at putting in tender documents but is expert at providing services, is swept aside under our current arrangements. I mentioned the Financial Times. There is very general agreement across the political spectrum that we need to stop that happening and ensure that good local services and social enterprises are able to continue, have stability, surety and certainty and do not need to put so much of their resources into the endless cycle of bidding and bidding again. I am not sure whether this amendment exactly gets to where I want to go, but it is certainly heading in the right direction. That is why I wished to speak in favour of it.