House of Commons Hansard Debates for 15 Nov 1991

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that is the case. There are legions of examples and I will not waste the time of the House by enumerating them, as they are well known to my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary.

I am very concerned about the dangerous concept of "cheapest is best". For all sorts of reasons, which all hon. Members understand, we must largely rest on the supposition that local authorities are obliged to take the lowest tender. I do not believe that any of us in our private lives ever adopts the principle behind that conclusion. We all want best value rather than the cheapest price when we purchase goods or services. There is a straightforward way around that. We need pre-qualification thresholds for companies, because that is what so often distinguishes tenderers.

Where there is an obnormally low tender which a local authority feels obliged to accept, and where the worst examples of contracts have invariably occurred, that has happened because there has been inadequate pre-qualification investigation of the ability of the organisation-- occasionally a DLO--or company to deliver the service. Therefore, we must ensure that every council and authority contracting out a service has a very high pre-qualification threshold which only those who are competent to provide the right level of service can surmount.

I warmly welcome the White Paper, which concludes by stating : "Its themes of quality, choice, standards and value for money will be fundamental to public service throughout the 1990s.

The Charter will bring for all those in public service new pride and satisfaction.

For the public they serve, it will bring commitment to quality and a power to secure it, that will put Britain ahead of any country in the world."

I warmly endorse those sentiments and congratulate my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary and the Government team on the initiative, and I commend it warmly to the House.

Mr. Maude : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I believe that the House will want to know, following the point of order from my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell), that the annual retail prices index for October announced a few moments ago was 3.7 per cent.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : That is nearly an abuse of the procedures of the House ; it is not a matter for me.

Mr. Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) : Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

Mr. Deputy Speaker : There was no point of order.

Mr. Skinner : What steps are you going to take to deal with that Government Front Bench yobbo?

Mr. Deputy Speaker : I deprecate the use of that kind of language.

Mr. David Nicholson (Taunton) : On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Would it be in order--

Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. I thought that I had made it clear that there was no point of order.

11.38 am

Mr. Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) : The hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mr. Norris) made a lengthy speech in which he catalogued an array of shortcomings in public

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services which he believes the citizens charter would address. He--or any other hon. Member--could have made that speech 10, 30 or 50 years ago and I have no doubt that it could be made in 10, 30 or 50 years' time. The citizens charter has been grossly oversold by the Government.

My earlier interventions were not designed to suggest that I do not believe that there is scope for machinery to improve public service. Some aspects of the charter can be welcomed and supported by hon. Members on both sides of the House. However, the title--citizens charter--is a gross, grand misnomer for what is nothing more than a public service consumers charter. It is worth while, valid and has merit, but it is not the great big idea that will save the Government from defeat at the next general election.

Mr. Dicks : Does the hon. Gentleman agree that an interest rate of 3.7 per cent., which has just been announced, would make more money available to implement the citizens charter?

Mr. Bruce : I should be delighted to find out where I can borrow money at 3.7 per cent.

The speeches of the Minister and the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mr. Norris) are good demonstrations of the motherhood and apple pie approach. Of course, things are wrong with public services which can be put right and mechanisms can be introduced. But the danger is in the Government's suggestion to people that there will be some great transformation. People will have unfulfilled expectations when they find that their ability to press complaints, obtain redress and have things sorted out is not as substantial as they had been led to believe.

One is also entitled to question why, if things are so appallingly bad and these measures are so urgently needed, the Government have taken 12 years and six months to come round to the idea of introducing them.

Mr. Norris : It is for a simple reason which the hon. Gentleman must appreciate. Every move that we have made during the past 12 years to introduce such measures has been bitterly resisted by both the Labour party and the hon. Gentleman's party. They now pray in aid their support for each of the measures, now that they see how valuable they are.

Mr. Bruce : I wish to make it clear that I do not pray in aid support for the way in which the Government have privatised the utilities. Indeed, the Competition and Service (Utilities) Bill, which will be debated on Monday, is a recognition of the Government's failure to create consumer protection at an adequate level before the utilities were privatised.

Before the hon. Member for Epping Forest intervened, I was about to make the second point that much of the citizens charter is a recognition of the Government's failures and mistakes over the past 12 years and six months and the need to introduce measures to ensure greater satisfaction. I have to concur with the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) that there is anxiety about the way in which the Government put more and more public services into the private sector and yet continue to claim that they will maintain satisfactory standards in services over which they have given up control and accountability for which this elected House of Parliament has lost. That was the point of my earlier intervention.

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The Minister said--other hon. Members have commented on it--that he was in favour of greater openness in government. The hon. Member for Epping Forest is well known for his commitment to the cause of freedom of information and is respected by hon. Members on both sides of the House for it. I was glad that he managed to put his commitment on the record. But the Government have resisted measures to introduce genuine freedom of information.

Setting up agencies is not wrong in itself. It can lead to greater efficiency. Neither I nor my party fundamentally objects to the principle. However, we object to the practice of Ministers denying their responsibility and accountability to the elected House of Commons for those agencies. It worries me that Members of Parliament are finding it increasingly difficult to obtain replies from Ministers or access to information.

In addition, the Government and the Conservative party seem to run down and despise public servants and public service. It is perfectly reasonable to set standards for public service and targets which people should attain, but too often the Government imply that people who work in the public sector and public service are inferior to people who work in the private sector and private enterprise. That attitude demoralises people and causes resentment. It makes it more difficult for them to fulfil their role. Interestingly, it alienates former supporters of the Conservative party.

As the hon. Member for Gordon and a campaigner in the Kincardine and Deeside by-election, I can report to the House that the thousands of people in those constituencies who formerly voted Conservative and have defected to the Liberal Democrats should give considerable anxiety to the Conservative party. People do not trust the Government with public services. They no longer believe that the Government can be trusted to maintain standards in education and health. The Government can say that publishing school league tables and information about the health service reforms are positive improvements, but there is an enormous credibility gap between the Government and voters, who simply do not believe or trust them. The voters have seen that the motivation in the past 12 years has been to introduce commercial practices and competition into public services, thereby undermining the basic public service ethic. People go into public service because they are committed to the community. They are not necessarily motivated by the standards and criteria of the private sector which the Government wish to apply to the public sector.

Mr. Maude : Do the Liberal Democrats oppose the introduction of competition into public services? Do they believe that public service organisations should not submit what they do in fair and open competition with what could be done by others?

Mr. Bruce : I oppose the idea that competition is the answer to delivery of good public services. It is not even relevant to the delivery of all services. Where it is relevant, we support it. We differ from the Government in their belief that only competition can determine the quality of service in the public sector.

The issue that was uppermost in the Kincardine and Deeside by-election was the opt-out of Foresterhill hospital, which also affects my constituency. Foresterhill is

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the only district general hospital serving the north-east of Scotland and, for some services, the entire north of Scotland. There is no competition and there can be no competition. Indeed, the health board and Ministers have said that there will be no competition, even if the hospital opts out. There is an inherent contradiction in the Government's argument. They say that competition is a good thing, yet they intend to create a free-standing hospital which will operate in a market where there is no market and no one even pretends that there could be competition. That is extremely inconsistent.

People will also look for what improvements in services they can reasonably expect. For example, during the eight years that I have been a Member of Parliament I have been approached by numerous people about no-fault compensation in services such as the NHS and the abolition of Crown immunity. I see nothing in the citizens charter to address those issues, which worry citizens.

Simply improving the delivery of service in the public sector, without providing the necessary resources or enabling facilities, will not create public satisfaction. I am sure that all hon. Members could give examples from their area, but in my local council, Gordon, a thorough review of how employees deal with the public has been carried out since the Liberal Democrats became the lead party in the administration. The council has imposed standards of which the Government would approve. However, it is no consolation to people who go to the housing department to be told politely, quickly, efficiently and courteously that there are no houses available and it is unlikely that there will be any available to meet their demands. That is where the citizens charter will, fundamentally, fall short. People want results and although it may be admirable to make the trains run on time, it did not make Mussolini one of the world's great political leaders. Nor will the Prime Minister's ambition to make Britain a cone-free society make him go down in history as a great Prime Minister.

As I was coming here this morning, I listened to a report of a speech of the right hon. Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher). She was speaking, extraordinarily, to business men in Tennessee. It may be of great benefit to both the business men of Tenessee and the people of Britain that it is a long way from here. She was speaking against the move towards European political union, which seems to be causing considerable consternation on the Conservative Benches, even to the point of unseemly attempts to vote in committees of which no one had previously heard, in an attempt to alter the balance within the party. The right hon. Lady said that she would resist all further steps to European political union because they would remove the rights of voters in Britain. Two points spring to mind, First, it is extraordinary that the right hon. Lady did not think of that when she introduced the Single European Act in the House of Commons. Secondly, I am not sure that the rights of British citizens are inherently superior to those available to citizens in other member states of the European Community. Indeed, the reverse may be the case. Some of us believe that a move towards closer political union in Europe may help to drag this antiquated political system into the 20th century, never mind the 21st century, and that we may get some of the benefits that citizens in other European countries have, such as freedom of information, a Bill of rights, a

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democratic voting system and a division of power between central Government and regional and local government. One of the great concerns of the past 12 years has been the concentration of power in the hands of central Government and the inability of Members of Parliament, never mind individual citizens, to call the Government to account or to influence control of direct public policy. I shall illustrate that by reference to the one Department of State with which I must deal regularly, the Scottish Office.

The Scottish Office is the Lord High Everything north of the border. It covers a range of policies which in England and Wales are covered by many different Ministries. English Members can question Ministers on policy almost every day, but Scottish Members can do so only once every four weeks. Even then, we must compete with Englishmen who wander in at the end of Scottish questions, having taken no part in the proceedings, simply to fill up the time and prevent Opposition Members from calling Ministers to account by asking real questions. That is of genuine concern.

Every other Department of State is shadowed by a Select Committee which can cross-examine civil servants and Ministers about the direction and administration of policy. In defiance of the rules of the House, the Government have persistently refused to set up a Select Committee on Scottish Affairs. As a result, the Scottish Office is not effectively accountable either to the people whom it is supposed to serve or to the elected Members of the House who are supposed to call it to account. Those are the types of issues that concern citizens, but the Government fail to address them. I cite another specific example. British Coal closed Monktonhall colliery. For two and a half years a consortium of local mineworkers has been competing to take over the licence and operate the mine as a free enterprise. They are not looking for public money. The Government have persistently refused to answer any questions about British Coal's conduct and attitude towards the consortium. They have refused all meetings with representatives of the consortium and with Members of Parliament. I understand that two days ago, on the instigation, interestingly, of a Conservative councillor in Lothian, a Minister agreed to meet the consortium.

Those examples show how our lousy, corrupt system works now. The Government are siphoning off their responsibility and refusing to answer questions in the House, yet they are trying to set up a citizens charter as though it were some sort of guarantee. Their record in office is of ducking their responsibility, of not answering questions, of not being called to account and of not being available to elected Members.

Mr. Maude : Does the hon. Gentleman contend, then, that public services can be provided for citizens only through directly employed, bureaucratic, pyramid structures accountable to Ministers through long lines of management? Is he now the only person left in the country and, probably, the world who believes that those means of management remain relevant?

Mr. Bruce : The Minister knows perfectly well that that is not what I am saying. I have made it clear that neither I nor my party objects to the creation of agencies per se. I am complaining about the Government's use of that structure to abdicate their responsibility ultimately to be answerable to the House. It is not a question of the

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Minister being our direct line from a pyramid ; it is that Ministers should accept that they are accountable to Parliament. Increasingly, they are ducking that responsibility.

Members and Select Committees are being treated dismissively and with contempt. The main function of Select Committees now is not to influence policy. The Government take not the slightest account of what they say. Their function is to call evidence in public. The witnessing and publication of that evidence is their most useful service. It is a valuable service, but it falls far short of what they were set up to do in the first place and what in a democratic House of Commons they should be able to do-- to influence Government policy and call Ministers effectively to account.

Too often Ministers are engaged in almost nefarious activities. They have furthered their personal careers on the back of their ministerial office and lined their pockets on the basis of the merits that they have gained from their jobs. Yet, we have not been able to call them to account subsequently because they have moved out of the range of accountability.

I shall embellish that point. I notice that Conservatives are keen on talking about the sovereignty of Parliament. Personally, I find that concept rather obscene. I believe that Parliament should serve the people who it represents rather than be their master and that the people should retain the sovereignty. In Scotland we understand that concept.

None the less, the idea is that Parliament should be sovereign. Yet parliamentarians are denied the rights of effective access to information, of getting proper answers and of calling Ministers to account. That is a sign that the sovereignty of Parliament is not a great triumph for democracy but a means of concentrating power in the hands of an establishment that is not effectively accountable--it simply has to control the majority in Parliament and it can ignore the elected representatives of the majority of the people.

Mr. Dicks : Surely the hon. Gentleman's party is desperate to get us under the control of the unelected officials in Europe. That is his party's policy. He speaks with a forked tongue.

Mr. Bruce : That is not our policy. Our policy is to create a democratic Europe, a democratic Britain and, I hope, a democratic Scotland as well. That is fundamentally different. We wish not to put ourselves in the power of the bureaucrats of Europe, but to reform Europe in a truly democratic way. It is the obstinacy of the Conservative party, which is divided and incapable both of representing Britain's national interests and of leading the debate constructively, which is causing concern. This country needs a proper open, modern democracy. It needs a Bill of rights to enable citizens to challenge the Government--the Executive--when it abuses its power and a House of Commons which is genuinely representative of the way in which people vote and which can ensure that policy is directed according to the wishes of the people rather than those of a minority who, because of a distortion, happen to control Parliament at a given time. We need to decentralise power.

The Liberal Democratic party believes that Scottish and Welsh parliaments and regional assemblies would be a good thing not only because they would bring decisions

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closer to the people, but because they would divide power instead of concentrating it in the hands of the Government in Whitehall. When the citizens charter was introduced the Government believed that it was the big idea that would temper Thatcherism and secure the present Prime Minister a new mandate. It falls far short of achieving that objective. The citizens charter is a modest gimmick, designed to paper over the cracks of a crumbling and decadent political system. The Conservative party is running away from the fact that it has power and that it has abused that power over the past 12 years and is treating the public with contempt. The public will not be conned any more. Until we have a society with genuine freedom of information, a Bill of rights, decentralisation of decision-making and a fair voting system, we cannot expect that the citizens of this country will have rights. This is not a citizens charter ; it is a public service consumers charter. It is high time that the Conservative party recognised that if the citizens of Britain are to be treated as citizens they need rights that the Government have denied them. 11.57 pm

Mr. Andrew Mitchell (Gedling) : It is most unusual for me to have the opportunity to attend a Friday debate. I cannot remember when I was last able to do so. About this time on a Friday, I am normally busy in my constituency, but when I saw that the Government had decided to spend a day discussing the citizens charter I knew that it was right for me to be here to listen to the Minister and to develop the excellent discussion that has already taken place on this important subject.

I decided to speak partly because I have had many letters from my constituents about the Prime Minister's idea of a citizens charter. The letters welcome and support the idea ; above all, they show how the citizens, our constituents, want the ideas that we have already heard about this morning to be developed.

My second reason for contributing to the debate is that I have always taken a great interest in the Audit Commission, which is pivotal to the success of many of the reforms and ideas outlined by my hon. Friend the Minister.

The Opposition parties say that the citizens charter represents some sort of volte face from the changes made in the 1980s. On the contrary, it is a continuation of the theme pursued by the Government in the 1980s, which included the economic reforms, the supply side changes and the extension of competition through privatisation and competitive tendering of which my hon. Friend spoke.

The citizens charter is an authentic continuation of the reforms that we achieved in the 1980s. It will give citizens powers in those services where so far the reforms have had only a partial effect, if any. We have already extended choice and opportunity in education, health and in housing through the right-to-buy legislation. The citizens charter will extend that choice. It captivates our constituents and they look forward to further developments in the charter.

The other politicial parties are as lost on this issue as they were on the reforms of the 1980s. I listened with interest to the rather dyspeptic speech of the hon. Member for Gordon (Mr. Bruce). On this matter, as on so many others, the Liberals cannot decide where they stand. I read

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with great interest the recent article on the citizens charter that appeared in The House Magazine by the leader of the Liberal Democrats. At first the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Ashdown) dismissed the charter by stating that it was

"a rag-bag of policy proposals, many of which were no doubt around in Whitehall in any case and would have surfaced in time." Later on the right hon. Gentleman changed his mind and said : "the Prime Minister is tapping into a strain of thinking that is, potentially, extremely powerful."

The right hon. Gentleman is obviously right about that. He also made another point with which we can all agree when he said : "The country does not want to return to Labour, which speaks more often for the corporate interests of the public sector than for the citizen."

That is the critical point--the Labour party does not believe in a citizens charter because it is in hock to large power groups. The hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Mr. Smith) has many redeeming features despite being an extremely dangerous left winger. During the week, when I am in London, I stay in the hon. Gentleman's constituency and the citizens charter will have a major effect on a number of areas in it. During the hon. Gentleman's speech we crossed swords briefly about the right to buy and I think that the hon. Gentleman managed to keep a straight face when he spoke about that.

The hon. Gentleman also spoke about the pamphlet published in 1921 by Herbert Morrison. He cited that pamphlet as evidence to prove that the citizens charter was an authentic Labour idea. However, since 1921 I calculate that there have been no fewer than six Labour Governments. Why did they not develop the idea when they had the opportunity? Why has it taken a Conservative Government and Prime Minister to implement ideas that the hon. Gentleman claims were originally proposed by that great former socialist? I cannot dispute that claim because I have never read the pamphlet.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the Post Office. I believe strongly that that service should be opened to the type of competition that my hon. Friend the Minister outlined. There is no reason why the £1 rule should pertain. I believe that that sum should be lowered to 50p as that would allow the private sector--the operators in fringe services--to get involved and to offer a much better service to the consumer. That is what the citizens charter is all about.

The hon. Gentleman was wise to give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mr. Norris) about official secrets. Again, the hon. Gentleman just about managed to keep a straight face--

Mr. Arbuthnot : No, he did not.

Mr. Mitchell : I stand corrected.

Whether one is in opposition or in government makes a tremendous difference to the way in which one reacts to official secrets. I was new to the House when my hon. Friend the Member for

Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) introduced his Bill and I listened to his powerful argument carefully. I did not believe that there was a case,

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then, for doing what my hon. Friend wanted, and, despite my hon. Friend's powerful argument, I do not believe that that case has advanced since.

Mr. Chris Smith : I have considerable respect for the hon. Gentleman, but in one respect he is confusing official secrets and freedom of information. We need reform on both counts. Secondly, although we understand that traditionally Governments of any political colour have been reluctant to undertake freedom of information legislation, we are determined, when we are in government next year, to ensure that a freedom of information measure is put through the House.

Mr. Mitchell In the unlikely event of Labour being in power, we shall see whether such legislation is introduced in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests. I remind him, to answer the first part of his intervention, that reform has already taken place. The Minister who introduced the Official Secrets Act 1989, when he was Home Secretary--he is now Foreign Secretary-- could hardly be painted an anti-liberal right-wing member of the Government. It is generally accepted in the House that he is a reasonable person, and he piloted that measure through.

Mr. Chris Smith : The hon. Gentleman reveals his misunderstanding of the issue. I accept that the official secrets legislation was reformed, but that Act, designed supposedly to reform the legislation, was deeply inadequate. It removed a few items from the list of official secrets, but put a stronger fence around those it preserved. The hon. Gentleman is falling into the trap ; simply because the Government introduce legislation that purports to reform the official secrets or freedom of information laws, or anything else, does not mean that such reform is achieved.

Mr. Mitchell : While I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman's main point, I appreciate what he says about the difference between freedom of information and official secrets, and I shall explain the way in which the citizens charter does a great deal to assist the extending of freedom of information with the releasing of information that should rightly be in the public domain.

Opposition Members are impaled on a dilemma, because they cannot make up their minds whether to belittle the idea of a citizens charter or claim it for their own. We are intent on empowering individuals to get better and more accountable services and to enable them to seek and win redress. It is to enhance the right of the individual that we address the charter and Opposition Members have not dealt with that aspect of it.

The Minister praised East Midlands Electricity, which has its headquarters in my constituency, for having set up a fixed appointments and times system which provides compensation if times are not adhered to. I echo his comments about the work done by John Harris, the chairman of that company, which was the first of the distribution companies to have such a scheme. It is a great credit to him and East Midlands Electricity. By establishing those standards, the company has set an example to the other electricity companies which I hope will be widely followed.

The Minister also mentioned that benefit centres and jobcentres were increasingly being amalgamated to provide a better service for our constituents. I echo his remarks. I recently opened the new combined centre in

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Netherfield in my constituency. It is doing an excellent job for my constituents in one of the poorer areas that I represent and he is right to say that that reform has had a significant impact on the ease with which people can use the service and the effectiveness of it.

Although I see some movement among Labour Members in respecting the work of the Audit Commission, I hope that they will think carefully about their quality commission proposals and in particular about their plans to neuter the Audit Commission by filling it with people who are public sector oriented or who have come directly from the public sector. Nothing would more effectively destroy the work of the Audit Commission, which has proved to be one of the most effective reforms of the machinery of government to be introduced in the last eight years. It has managed to tackle a central issue that should concern us. Although we are all obsessed with the amount of money that goes into public services, and are quick to seize upon inputs and to note the extent to which Government funding has or has not increased, we are much less able to monitor whether that money is spent effectively, the quality of that spending and the realities of the output from that spending. The Audit Commission has successfully addressed those issues.

The commission's value-for-money studies into improving existing services or releasing funds to be deployed in providing other, more valuable services are immensely important. I salute the skill and expertise of the commission's controller, Howard Davies, and of his predecessor, John Banham, who both made significant progress in achieving greater accountability from the public sector. If the citizens charter builds and expands on the work of the Audit Commission in the way that it should, it will be all the more successful.

Every year, the commission identifies where huge savings can be made. It has achieved savings of nearly £1 billion, which is a remarkable success. It lives up to its reputation as the enemy of waste and inefficiency and the best friend of the taxpayer. I hope that it will be used extensively in relation to the charter.

Mr. Summerson : Does my hon. Friend agree that Labour wants to abolish the Audit Commission because it fears that the commission will continue to expose inefficiency and uselessness in local authorities, and particularly those that are Labour controlled?

Mr. Mitchell : My hon. Friend puts his finger on an important point. Labour's quality commission would neutralise the effect of the Audit Commission. Because Labour is in hock to the public sector trade unions, who are its paymasters, its proposed commission could not function effectively or defend service quality for the citizen. The work of the Audit Commission will be extremely important in four areas. There has been a huge increase in the resources that the Government have made available to the police, but many of us wonder to what extent they are used efficiently. I am pleased that the commission has been deployed in the police service, though not as yet in the Metropolitan police.

There is a strong argument for allowing the commission to do for the Metropolitan police what it does for every other force in the country, in demonstrating how efficient or inefficient the police services are, and what can be done to improve them.

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That is very much a matter for the citizens charter. The four areas of police work perceived by the public as being of most importance would probably trip off our constituents' tongues. They are the response time to 999 and other calls, crime clear-up rates, the number of police on the street and their effective deployment, and control and management of parking.

The latter is a complex issue, because it concerns not only the number of parking tickets issued by the police and related services but enforcement, and whether the situation in a particular area is improving.

Those aspects are all of great importance to our constituents and we must devise ways of making the police even more efficient in dealing with those and other matters. Disparities exist throughout the country.

Considerable strides are being made. The inspectorate of constabularies has done a good job in developing a matrix of 450 indicators of police performance. Under the terms of the Local Government Bill the citizen will, for the first time, be able to compare police performance in different forces. The Audit Commission is considering how to produce comparative figures to enable the public to see how the police are performing. It is clearly important that the Audit Commission, not the inspectorate of constabularies, should be responsible for producing the comparative analysis of forces by the same logic that led to the provider-purchaser split that we have implemented in so many other public service sectors. The key issue is that the Government have made great strides in the way that they monitor and supervise public services, but there has been less emphasis in the past on doing so in a way that citizens can easily understand. That is what the citizens charter is about ; it shows citizens that the police service in their district is doing well in objective terms in some respects and perhaps not so well in others in comparison with other forces. The charter enables citizens to question and to see for themselves how services can be improved and how those improvements can be made.

The charter provides the opportunity to breathe new life into local government and help to rebuild local democracy in a number of sectors, including housing management. One need only consider the speech that the Secretary of State for the Environment made this week after visiting North Tyneside and seeing what was happening there. The charter will enable us to highlight those councils that manage housing stock badly and to see how long houses are left unoccupied and unrepaired. There are huge variations in housing management throughout the different authorities. I believe that in one metropolitan district, 9 per cent. of its accommodation stock was left empty, while in another comparable district, the figure was only 1 per cent. There are wide variations between the best housing authorities and the worst.

Housing management is important to many of our constituents. The Audit Commission recommend that out of London, a three-week period for repairs and for houses to be empty is probably long enough and, in London, a period of six weeks. But half of all local authorities cannot meet those reasonable limits. Citizens living in local authorities where they have to endure such housing conditions, need to know why their authorities perform less well than neighbouring ones, and the Bill will enable direct comparisons to be made. Originally, the inclusion of the performance of the refuse services in the citizens charter was pooh-poohed as a subject that was beneath Parliament, which should not

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concern itself with such a matter. That is far from the truth ; citizens want the best possible refuse collection as much as they want the best of any other service. The issue of "missed bins" an important one, and nothing is more infuriating to a constituent. The Bill will allow league tables of the effectiveness of refuse collection to be published.

The Litter Act 1983 was a great success and introduced many new techniques for monitoring litter and preventing it spreading. Nothing incenses our constituents more than litter and graffiti in the local environment. Some local authorities have introduced photographic monitoring. I think that the Local Government Chronicle was originally doubtful about whether the Litter Act would be successful. But only last week it made it clear in an article that it believes that it does work and is effective.

It is right that the citizens charter should cover environmental health departments and consider how often such departments in one district carry out inspections, what impact they have and how those services compare with those of neighbouring districts. As a Member of Parliament, I am conscious of the steep increase in citizens' complaints about noise and smells. There is a disparity in the way in which environmental health departments in different areas perform and we need to ensure that all perform at the standard of the best. The effect of all these changes will be to breathe new life into local government and local democracy. They will ensure not only better service for the citizen but greater accountability, and far better morale in local government because the providers will be able to see how they are doing and take great pride in their success when they are doing well. Some services will always be in the public sector and we support those services. We want them to be truly excellent and we want to establish how they can be improved. There is no reason why those services should not have their standards set and their achievements published, and the role of the Audit Commission in that will be pivotal.

My third point concerns the health service and the patients charter. The monitoring needs to be very robust and, in the interests of public credibility, we must ensure that there is external scrutiny. I was slightly surprised to see, on page 19 of the copy of the patients charter that was put through my door, that complaints should be made to Duncan Nichol, the chief executive of the health service. That is all right as far as it goes, but the public need to be able to complain to a non-health service person who can adjudicate fairly--otherwise, I fear that they will not feel that they are receiving an impartial hearing.

Mr. Tony Banks : Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could help me. I thought that Duncan Nichol was leaving his post as chief executive of the health service in June.

Mr. Mitchell : I cannot help the hon. Gentleman on the departure of Duncan Nichol or on its date, but I can help him on the point that I sought to make. It is all right complaining under the charter to the person who runs the service about which one is complaining as long as there is a further port of call--a further person to whom one can complain.

There are wide discrepancies in the service that patients in different areas receive. The conclusion of a deep and

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extensive report on day-care surgery published a year ago by the Audit Commission was that waiting lists for day -care surgery could be cut by a third through the more efficient use of such surgery. In other words, if every health authority performed as well as the best in this important respect, there would be an immense increase in the amount of day-care surgery that could be undertaken. The Audit Commission focused on the 20 most common operations, which account for about 30 per cent. of all surgery conducted, and came up with a most impressive figure. If all the health authorities performed at the same rate as the top 25 per cent., an additional 186,000 patients could be treated at no extra cost. That will be a great prize if we can achieve it.

The parents charter will enhance parental choice and strengthen parents' rights and it will make far more information available to help parents to exercise those rights. They will receive written reports annually and their children's schools will be inspected every four years. Many of us may wonder why it has taken so long to achieve the last two objectives, but I am delighted that the proposal is now to go ahead. A number of my hon. Friends and I introduced a Bill earlier this year to oblige all schools to publish their public examination results in common form. Unfortunately, the Bill was vetoed by a Labour Whip although, since then, I note that, in The Guardian, the hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), who speaks for the Labour party on education, said :

"Let a thousand league-tables bloom."

In the light of that, I am not clear where the Labour party will stand on this aspect of the Bill when we debate its Second Reading next Tuesday.

This is an important change and I am glad that we have got away from the odious and patronising attitude of so many local education authorities-- particularly Labour local education authorities--that say that one cannot trust parents with objective information about how their children's schools are doing. The charter is a great step forward and the publication of objective results will be immensely valuable in increasing choice and improving standards. When the Prime Minister said in Blackpool recently that the trendy liberals in education

"have had their say and had their day"

hundreds of thousands of parents all over the country let out a huge sigh of relief. That aspect of the parents charter will do a great deal to help. Parents do not want trendy socio-economic arguments about why their school is not as good as another. They want the best for their children and an assurance that the school will improve its perforance and give their children better opportunities. We have made good progress on education. The pay review body with its commitment to performance-related pay is immensely important. There have been large funding increases for education, not least most recently in the autumn statement. Perhaps we could all agree that it is not only a question of money. I was interested to read that in Japan half of all 16-year-olds reach a standard in maths which is reached by only 2 per cent. of children of an equivalent age in Britain. Yet the Japanese spend less per head on education that we do. I hope that the education measures that are enshrined in the citizens charter will do a great deal to improve standards for our children.

It is a pity that there are not more hon. Members here to take part in the debate. The charter is immensely important and will be greatly welcomed by our constituents. In the 1980s much was achieved in the

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