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Mr. Rooney : Yes, or Trabants.
In Yorkshire, we have an expression, "You don't get owt for nowt." Unfortunately, there is a price to pay for everything and, under this Government, that price is measured by what we call the poll tax and will soon no doubt be measured by the council tax.
If we had stuck with the fair rates policy the vast majority of people in Britain might have been able to bear that price and public services would remain public services, not sacrificial lambs on the altar of the ideology of the Conservative party. As with a similar Bill that was around at about this time in 1987, this Bill is the product of the Government's imagination. At the election it will undoubtedly turn into a nightmare for them.
9.14 pm
Mr. Robert G. Hughes (Harrow, West) : In view of the shortage of time, my speech will be rather more in note form than I intended, but I hope that the points that I make will be clear. I join in the general welcome for the Bill among Conservative Members. When examining the structure of local government and establishing the local government commission, one could not make any better start than the appointment of Sir John Banham as the chairman of the commission if one wants common sense, quality decision making and a tough-minded approach.
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There is a strong feeling, certainly among Conservatives in local government, that we need to appoint people with direct local government experience to the commission. That has been reflected among Conservatives in Parliament to some extent. When that aim is interpreted, or at least when it comes out of the other end of the machine, it results in the odd ex-chief executive being appointed. That is not what I mean. Of course, there is a place for one or two chief executives, but I can think of several names, which I will not mention, of former Labour and Conservative council leaders who could make an enormous contribution. I hope that some of those names will be borne in mind by my hon. Friend the Minister.I have a preference, and a preference is shown in the spirit of the Bill, for unitary authorities. Let us make one comparison. If West Yorkshire can manage without a county council and manage well, and the West Yorkshire district councils can carry out the necessary functions, why does Derbyshire have to be encumbered with a county council? There is a strong feeling in Derbyshire that the county council is an encumbrance and that the sooner that it goes, the better. However, I do not intend to get embroiled in the arguments between the districts and the counties. If I do, I may find myself kebabed between the two. They can sort out their own arguments. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State was right about the public relations campaigns being run by the counties and districts. They are a complete waste of taxpayers' and charge payers' money. The councils should understand that the campaigns will have no effect. Even Humberside county council is launching a campaign to show the people that they have been wrong all these years and should have loved it. Some campaigns are doomed to failure from the start and that one will certainly be a waste of time.
The question to be asked is how the popularity of the final proposals is to be tested. We should not go so far as to hold a referendum, but the people must have the final say.
I wish to say a few words about what measures we would be considering if we had the misfortune to have a Labour Government. Rather than moving towards unitary authorities we would be considering the re-establishment of the Greater London council--a new, larger and uglier version. One would not think that that was Labour's intention from reading the document "London United" issued by the Labour party, but one would know it from reading the draft of that document which the Labour party did not dare publish. If it had published the full document as originally written, we would know that there are some real nasties in it.
For example, housing strategy would go to the GLC. The hon. Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) rightly told us that it would be impossible for a county council to run housing strategy. Yet that is what the Labour party promises for the new GLC. It wants to give tourism back to the GLC, yet the only contribution that the GLC made to tourism was to destabilise and almost destroy the London tourist board.
Despite the GLC's lack of success with London buses and the London underground, the Labour party wants to give back to the GLC not only the buses and the underground but Network SouthEast. That would not go down well with my constituents or with many people in the south-east of England.
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To crown it all, it is people like the extremists--in some cases, frankly, nut cases--who run some Labour authorities in London that the Labour party wants to see running London's police. The Labour party's draft document, which it did not dare to publish, refers to London policing functions. No wonder the party did not dare publish that document.The Audit Commission must be free to cause discomfort. Of course it says things that are uncomfortable for the Government and for local authorities. Howard Davies has done a very good job there. I wonder how long he would last in the emasculated Audit Commission about which the Labour party has talked. The Labour party has form in standing up for secrecy in local government, in opposing the publication of school results or of any other kind of league table. That is why the party opposes this part of the Bill. Its approach to cost comparisons is to say that they are not fair, whereas the Conservative approach is to ask, "How can we do better? How can we provide a better service?"
The hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould), in a half sentence that he perhaps did not mean to utter, let the cat out of the bag. He said that the real problem was a failure of local government funding. In other words, like all of his Labour colleagues, he is promising paradise when he should be talking about priorities. Labour makes promises : a new council house building programme, more money for community care, more money for roads and pavements, more for teachers, better schools, extra equipment, new capital expenditure, leisure centres and sports facilities--and all of this to be funded without a general increase in taxation.
Labour's deputy leader has been saying to the councils, "You may not get as much as you want, but you will certainly get more." This is a deeply cynical exercise in uncosted but attractive promises. It is not so much a programme to improve services as a Labour gimmick to gain votes.
9.22 pm
Mr. David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside) : The hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Hughes) has just done a first-rate job on behalf of the Labour party. We congratulate him on spelling out the good things that we shall be offering. We also pledge that when we are drawing up the membership of the commission we shall take into account his earlier suggestions about widening the membership. We shall even consider him in whatever new role he has at the time.
If ever there was a wolf in sheep's clothing this Bill is it. It pretends to be about local government when it is nothing of the sort. It pretends to be in favour of the user, the customer, although it does not mention quality at all. That being the case, we are right to ask what the Bill's objectives really are. Clearly, they have nothing to do with extending local democracy or with bringing local government closer to the people or about accountability. They are not even about the accessibility of services, and they are certainly not about the development of economic and social policies--something that is so often ignored in the scramble to fragment and disintegrate what was built up over the last century by local government people of all political persuasions. It is certainly not about quality, and
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it is not about service. The words "public service" are, and for the past 13 years have been, anathema to Conservative Members. The content of the Bill, despite its presentation in this House and in another place as being innocuous, is, in fact, a reflection of the views of the No Turning Back group of Conservative Members. Unlike the council tax legislation, its provisions can be embraced with genuine enthusiasm by the Minister of State. Instead of having to stand on his head, he is runing hard and pushing his shoulder to the wheel because, of course, he is a member of the No Turning Back group. [H on. Members :-- "Hear, hear."] Hon. Members who are shouting "Hear, hear" indicate the support that the No Turning Back group commands in this debate and in the Conservative party. Members of the Conservative party were nurtured--nay, bottled--on the heady milk of Margaret Thatcher's version of Conservatism. The pamphlet "Choice and Responsibility", which was supported by the Minister of State, spelt it out. It said :"Local authorities, like central Government, should become enablers rather than providers Compulsory competitive tendering should be progressively phased out and replaced by compulsory private tendering Only public health, civil defence and local amenities need to remain an integral part of local government."
That is the agenda of the No Turning Back group. That is what it stands for and that is what the Bill embodies.
Part I, which deals with the tendering process, makes the values clear. Instead of what we would consider to be a reasonable programme for the provision of services, and an increase in control by local people over such provision by holding to account those whom they elect, we have the Conservative party slogans of privatise, centralise and neutralise. Cost, not quality, ideology not competence, delivery for profit rather than service for people--those are the slogans that we have had from this regime. Those who read the Bill, the comments in press releases and the local government commission's guidelines will be able to see that.
The Secretary of State talked about cost, economy, efficiency and effectiveness but not about quality or service. If the Conservative Government were serious about a genuine effort to reach a consensus about the way in which we should mirror what is taking place in the rest of Europe--east, central and west--and in the United States and Canada with the devolving and decentralisation of services, we should be happy to reach an agreement with them. What is needed is not compulsion or dictation from the centre but people working together in the best interests of their local community.
Interestingly, the message spelt out by the ideological right in the United States is rejected by the ideological right in Britain. While they both preach the supremacy of the market and the inalienable rights of the private sector, the Americans preach a pragmatism in the provision of local services. More importantly, they advocate removing the overwhelming power of the central state to dictate, and leaving states, counties and cities to decide matters for themselves. That message is being fought within the Republican party between Pat Buchanan and George Bush.
Here, we have a strange, enforced market economy. If a local authority wins a tender, the Government try to take it away. They invent strange reasons for doing so, saying that it has used anti-competitive practices. One cannot expect the Government to accept European Community
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rules about the "economically advantageous" projects that should be accepted when any scheme goes out to private tender but one can expect consistency. Three times in the House of Lords spokesmen contradicted themselves when asked whether that phrase should be applied.As my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) said, the spokesmen got themselves into an even bigger twist over the question whether cost should be the primary basis on which to judge a contract, or whether then to introduce another element so as to ensure that white collar services can be won by the private sector. In other words, they have an enveloping scheme under which there has to be a basic threshold over which people must pass before getting into the realms of simply accepting the lowest possible tender.
All of the contradiction comes because when the citizens charter was announced and the Prime Minister increased the costs of the Cabinet Office by £800,000 to pay for the work to be done on it, bringing the cost of the Cabinet Office to £22.5 million, it was announced that the PA consultancy report had been commissioned. At paragraph 1.4, the report states :
"It can be argued (and indeed many of our case study authorities did argue) that, given the problems with the application of CCT in the corporate service sector described above and the current existence of strong pressures to reduce central costs (described in section 2), it is neither desirable nor necessary to extend CCT into this sector at all. There is some substance to that argument." The PA report was supposed to justify the Government's programme and ensure that they could press ahead with what they wanted to do. Every professional body that had been consulted has rejected the programme and the proposals attaching to it. The winner of the Queen's gold award for the best architectural projects of the year, Mr. Stansfield Smith--for Hampshire county council schools as it happens, an authority that is proud of local provision by an in-house organisation--has described the programme as being as much about "cheap politics as about cheap buildings".
He referred also to cheap tendering. My right hon. and hon. Friends could not describe it any more succinctly than that.
The programme is intended to ensure that people can make profit out of public service rather than to achieve the goals that we see as important for ourselves. We, the Opposition, do not have only those who are in public service to support what we believe to be right. We have, for instance, the former comptroller of the Audit Commission, the new chairman of the local government commission, John Banham. At the conference of the Institute of Housing at Harrogate in 1985, Mr. Banham praised the authority of the city of which I had the privilege to be leader, describing it as the most efficient authority in Britain.
Mr. Portillo : He did not always do that.
Mr. Blunkett : I think that once was enough, Mr. Banham said that Sheffield was a shining example. He added--this is the importance of the statement--that privatisation was the last resort of a management which had given up. That is about the ticket.
There are local government officers who are engaged in management buy-outs and others who decide to work in the private sector and pretend that they can deliver services better while being paid more than in the public sector.
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Alternatively, they can get some rewards from shareholdings. We have Whitewater Leisure, Contemporary Leisure and all the controversy about those who used to work for the Glasgow authority. They go off and tell untruths about the organisations for which they are working--in fact, downright lies--or for which they worked. I shall say that outside the House if there is anyone who is worried about privilege.The examples that I have given show that there is a fundamental myth, which is that public service is incompetent and that the private sector is always right. It is not always in the right and we know that it is not. We know, for instance, that 76 per cent. of the services that have been put out to tender have been won in-house despite the fact that in-house organisations cannot develop the capital investment and lease equipment in the same way as the private sector. Everything that they borrow has to be put against basic credit approvals. They are bound and gagged when it comes to extending services by engaging in competition with the private sector outside the local authority.
Some of us were interested to hear the Secretary of State espousing or advocating cross-boundary tendering. I say to the hon. Member for Harrow, West that I think that the right hon. Gentleman's words will have reached the chairman of the Audit Commission. They might even have reached the legal officer, Mr. Tony Child. If that has happened, his view will change overnight. I hope so, because it would be nice to integrate--to subsume-- the Audit Commission, in an orderly fashion, into our quality commission. That would provide quality for people and ensure that league tables mean what they should mean, which is a comparison of the delivery of services to people. They should show, for example, how many home helps per thousand of the population are being provided. They should show up Tory authorities for not providing nursery provision. It is 20 years since the previous Prime Minister, when she was Secretary of State for Education, promised universal nursery education for all three to five-year-olds whose parents desired it. Promises fulfilled--people standing on their heads by the dozen.
I shall cite one league table comparison that might be worth considering. Earlier today the Secretary of State chided me and said that in some way I was an advocate of his system because I used the example of refuse collection and its cost to show that his system was simple and that we were in agreement on it. He should ask Chiltern, the Buckinghamshire district that I quoted, and whose refuse collection costs a great deal, why that should be so. It is because collecting the refuse of houses in close proximity, such as terraced houses in the city of Sheffield, costs only one third of what it costs to collect the refuse of houses in the posh south- west of Sheffield, where the houses are spaced out and the collection men have to walk up long drives. In Sheffield, householders do not have to carry refuse to the end of their drives--how do we construct league tables to reflect that?
Conservative Members might like to think about the league table that I am about to cite. The Secretary of State for Education and Science is keen on people reading books. We are all keen on that. I am desperately in favour of my children learning to read books. What about the number of books issued ? I am not referring to The Sunday Times cocked-up, distorted version, which CIPFA denounced after it had been printed. I shall give the figures for the number of library books issued per hundred of the
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population across a sample of authorities. For Manchester, it is 537. Who controls Manchester ? It is Labour. For Hammersmith and Fulham, the figure is 382 ; for Lewisham, 371 ; for Merton, 366 ; for Greenwich, 346 ; and for Islington, 345.For Suffolk--a Tory authority--the figure is 129. It could manage only just over one book per person per year. For Berkshire, it is 134 ; for East Sussex, 149 ; for Cornwall, 153 ; and for West Sussex, 167. What a fantastically literate lot they are in Tory authorities. People talk about reading and about literacy, but they do not spend the money to enable people to achieve that. The Labour party believes in service and in spending money wisely on providing that service. We believe in a local government structure and a set of functions that enable that to happen.
The hon. Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) found himself in an interesting ideological twist on whether function or structure came first. He denounced function as an irrelevance and said that we needed to set up a structure. Presumably, we could invent anything that we liked. Local government could meet in a telephone box because function is not important. However, we all know that it is important and that it is the driving force of structure. We need the right finance and the right structure, but above all we need the right objectives. We need to know what we are setting out and why. We need to know the principles behind what we are doing.
If we believe, and many of us do, in unitary local government--one door to knock on and one set of people to hold to account--we must give them something to do other than riding around in a civic car pretending that they are important and delivering nothing, responsive to no demands, not aspiring to change and improvement, and not even doing what the Conservatives of old did in the Chamberlain era when there was the sort of socialism that is now anathema to the Tory party. Instead, according to the Tory party, and as spelt out in the guidelines to the commission, we have a structure that accords with the aims of the right hon. Member for Cirencester and Tewkesbury (Mr. Ridley). He is ill, and I hope that he is now improving. In one of his speeches, the right hon. Gentleman spoke of a council that met once a year to put out contracts, had a good lunch and then went home. I am sure that all Conservative Members are in favour of a good lunch ; but it simply will not do.
Let me spell out what the commission's report is supposed to do. The guidelines do not talk about developing a structure that is crucial to the quality delivery of services. This is what they say about housing :
"Authorities also own and manage 4 million houses nationally." Referring to assessment and monitoring, the guidelines continue : "Their role in these areas of housing will be passed over to housing associations and the private sector."
They speak of opting out in the primary, secondary and further education sectors ; as for social services, they speak of monitoring and enabling rather than providing. Every part of appendix A talks about disabling local government, rather than enabling it to perform.
We offer something very different. We offer a decent finance system that can sustain the functions that we give to local government, and a structure that is not piecemeal,
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but is based on identifiable communities-- that is geared not to numbers alone, but to the ability to provide a decent level of service.What the Bill offers is not local, nor is it government. It is dictation from the centre ; it is administration rather than government. What is not privatised will be centralised. All that the Bill contains, and the ideology behind it--the values and principles that it espouses--must be rejected tonight in favour of genuine local democracy, and a Labour Government who will implement real policies for the people whom we represent.
9.41 pm
The Minister for Local Government and Inner Cities (Mr. Michael Portillo) : I thank the many Conservative Members who have spoken sowell in support of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire), who is one of the most thoughtful Members of the House in this context, described it as historic. It is indeed historic, not because reforms of local government have not taken place before--they have done so often--but because it offers a reform of the structure of local government. That structure can now be diverse, based on local choices, and it can place tremendous emphasis on community identity. Different solutions can be adopted in different places, solutions that are suited to the different needs of different people. My hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. French) was particularly strong on that point.
It struck me as extraordinary that the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) should attack us on that point. To him, the idea of different solutions in different places seemed untidy--chaotic, he said. It did not meet the socialist ideal of being able to impose the same solution from Whitehall on every part of England. It appears that, over the past 20 years, the hon. Gentleman has slept soundly. The Labour party has learnt nothing about the deep-seated wish of the British people for local government structures that reflect what they feel about their local communities, and units of government that mean something to them and are not imposed on them.
Mr. John Maxton (Glasgow, Cathcart) : Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Portillo : I am sorry ; I will not give way.
Something very funny must have happened to the hon. Member for Dagenham on his way to the Chamber. Last year, when the Government announced the proposals, Labour appeared to be in favour of the reform of local government structure and the establishment of a local government commission. The hon. Member for Dagenham must have been speaking out of turn at that time ; he has certainly been nobbled since.
It may well be that the policy was agreed by the shadow Cabinet, but some chance remark made by the Leader of the Opposition at Luigi's restaurant threw the whole thing into disarray. The Labour party is certainly in opposition now. I am not sure whether I am more appalled at the prospect of the Labour party being in government than I am at the prospect of having the support of the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Bellotti) and the Liberal party.
Diversity is the point of the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Reading, West (Sir A. Durant) said, backed up so eloquently by my right hon. Friend the Member for
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Southend, West (Mr. Channon), we do not want this reform to result in lines being drawn on a map that will be imposed upon people. There is no need for a minimum size. There is no Whitehall model that could embrace the Isles of Scilly and the demands of Yorkshire. There is no reason, as the right hon. Member for Halton (Mr. Oakes) and the hon. Member for Eastbourne were concerned to know, to presume the need for joint authorities.My right hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West asked me a number of specific questions. The chairman-designate of the local government commission, Sir John Banham, is in place. I hope that soon, bearing in mind what my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Hughes) said, we shall make more appointments to the shadow commission so that the commissioners can begin to plan their work in order that the commission can start its work shortly after Royal Assent. The Bill specifies a maximum of 15 commissioners. That number is enough to operate on a regional basis.
It should be possible for the local government commission to consider four or five different areas throughout England at any one time. The areas will differ in size. I believe that the smallest area that will be considered by the commission at any one time will be a county, with the possible exception of certain islands. However, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West said, it may be appropriate in some cases to consider a group of counties if clear cross-boundary issues are likely to arise during the discussion period.
The order in which we put the various parts of England under the local government commission's microscope will be for the Government to decide. It will take some years to complete that process, but that is a necessary price to pay for the flexibility that the legislation gives us. It enables us to tailor our solutions to suit the needs of different places.
We are predisposed towards unitary authorities. We believe that there are strong arguments in favour of unitary authorities. My hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Mr. Hargreaves) spoke eloquently about them in general and about how they would apply in his particular case. When there are two tiers of local authority, people tend to become confused about who is doing what. Accountability suffers. People do not know which authority they are paying for particular services. It leads people to believe that there is excessive bureaucracy and overlap and the potential for waste. We do not want to be dogmatic. When he spoke about north Yorkshire, my right hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Alison) said that it would be unwise for any Government to impose the same pattern on every part of England because the differences between one part of the country and another are so great.
At the beginning of his speech the hon. Member for Dagenham said that no one disagrees with the Government's wish to introduce simplicity into local government, but the fact is that the Labour party profoundly disagrees with that wish. It wishes to impose an extra tier of regional government upon the country. It does not matter to the Labour party that the regions are unpopular, or that they cannot be afforded, or that they are unwanted. The Labour party still favours introducing another layer of government, imposing it upon the people of this country and raising taxes to pay for it. What clearly are wanted are the links that people cherish with their traditional counties. Even if the units of government are not based upon the counties, people still
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hark back to the links that they had with the traditional counties. They are still keen on those links. There is no reason why the traditional counties should not emerge as part of the process, even if they are counties that have no administrative functions in certain places. [Laughter.] The Opposition laugh at their peril. It matters very much indeed to the people of Wirral whether they live in Cheshire or Merseyside. It matters very much to the people of Coventry whether they live in Warwickshire or in the west midlands. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, West (Mr. Sackville) is in his place. It matters a lot to many people in Bolton whether they live in Manchester or Lancashire. Many of my constituents are deeply concerned about Middlesex.To the people of England, it is more than a question of who administers local government : the lines on the map, the cricket teams, the Lords Lieutenants and signposts are important. To the Labour party, they are untidy matters, which is why it not only opposes these changes but laughs when they are mentioned. The hon. Member for Dagenham wants not only to recreate a GLC but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West said, for it to be bigger and for it to control the police, which the old GLC never did. He warned us that we would pay the price. He said that a Labour Government would create a new GLC. Labour will pay the price : there will be no Labour Government because of the London effect. Once again, we shall win marginal seats in Lambeth, Haringey, Lewisham and Waltham Forest, where people are fed up with Labour government. We shall win in Brent and Ealing, where we have already turfed out the Labour party, and marginal seats in Wandsworth and Westminster, where people have seen the benefits of Conservative government. The London effect will again work in favour of the Government. One has only to look around to see Labour government in action in London. I appreciate the courtesy of the hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) in giving notice of the details that he wanted to raise. We shall address those points in Committee, and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary and I will be happy to deal with them in correspondence. However, it would be unrealistic to do so in replying to the debate. We have sought evidence that the de minimis rule is inappropriate. In England, no such evidence has come forward, but it is for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland to decide whether he is convinced by the evidence.
The hon. Member for Linlithgow raised a number of other important issues that we shall want to consider in Committee and, I hope, in response to consultation.
Mr. Dalyell : Will there be a decision on de minimis fairly soon?
Mr. Portillo : That is a matter for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland, who will have noted the points that the hon. Gentleman made.
The hon. Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney) mentioned the fire service. I do not share his view that it is inappropriate for it to be excluded from compulsory competitive tendering. None the less, we are in a consultation period and the Home Secretary will want to take account of all the points that are made to him. As the hon. Gentleman said, the opinions of chief fire officers will obviously weigh with the Government.
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There has been a change in the approach of local government to compulsory competitive tendering, but it appears to have been lost on the Labour party. Local government is anxious to provide better value, to improve management, and to seek competitive bids for many of the services that it provides. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary and I received representations from local authorities about their standard spending assessments. Hardly a single Labour orConservative-controlled authority failed to mention the strides that they are making in improving the competitiveness of services and in putting services out to competition.
The Labour party is almost alone in the world in questioning the benefits of competitive tendering. My hon. Friend the Member for Reading, West and my right hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West gave good examples of the way in which it is improving services. My hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Atkinson) made an eloquent speech about compulsory competitive tendering ; and I was heartened by the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Nelson) also realised that we were talking not about compulsory contracting out but about compulsory competitive tendering, which means that there is an opportunity for the in-house team to make a bid.
Many local authorities have moved ahead and are putting many of their services out to competitive tender. They are already investigating the scope for putting some more services--management services, computer services and the collection of moneys--out to the private sector. In compulsory competitive tendering the Government are merely bringing up the rear and ensuring that local authorities that have not yet taken advantage of those techniques are brought up to the level of the best.
How the House will have valued yet another statement from the hon. Member for Dagenham, this one to the effect that he would do something only in extremis. On this occasion, he said that if he were Secretary of State he would introduce compulsory competitive tendering only in extremis. That is yet another case of the hon. Gentleman not being able to make up his mind about his policies and he must therefore reserve the right to do precisely what is Government policy.
I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East was extremely eloquent about the importance of levelling the playing field between the private and public sectors. There have been far too many cases of abuse in which local authorities have contrived a system of competitive tendering under which only the direct service organisation could win because special conditions were imposed. Those practices must be brought to an end, and I know that my hon. Friends will strongly support the Government when we say that enough is enough and that if we are to have a compulsory competitive tendering regime, it must be one under which the private and public sectors are able to compete with absolute equality.
The hon. Member for Dagenham said that the citizens charter had been ineffective, but how wrong he was. Here we are, just a few months after the announcement of the citizens charter, legislating to improve the services provided to citizens. We are already halfway through a Bill which is a major step forward in that respect, and it is
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breath-taking nonsense for the hon. Gentlemen to suggest that Labour authorities were pioneers in the provision of better services to their constituents. We know that Labour authorities in London and throughout the country have become bywords for poor and expensive services, for litter-ridden streets, for badly-managed housing estates, for miserable conditions and for high levels of taxation. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett) raised the question of how much it cost to collect a tonne of rubbish in one place as opposed to another. It is expensive in Wandsworth because the streets are swept every day. I suspect that it would be cheaper to collect a tonne of rubbish in Lambeth on the basis of an annual sweep of the streets because, to pick up a tonne of rubbish there, one would hardly have to stir from the spot. That is the experience of many people living in Lambeth. We shall introduce a system of measurements so that people in different local authority areas will know precisely to what standard their local services are being provided.The hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mrs. Fyfe) criticised the Government for not slavishly following the advice given by consultants. In this Government it is the Ministers who decide on policy, not the consultants. It gave us a good insight into a Labour Government. A Labour Government would bear the impression that the last consultant laid upon them. The Opposition have no philosophy of their own. Presumably, they would set out on one course of action, receive a consultants' report which would blow them off their course, the journalists would then be summoned to Luigi's restaurant and policy would once again be changed.
Labour is offering to people who are presently enjoying the benefits of compulsory competitive tendering a promise to scrap it. It offers to those who demand quality the abolition of the Audit Commission, something to which it is pledged. Labour offers to all those who want simpler local government a new tier of expensive regional government.
We offer higher quality services brought about by competition, we offer better information to the public about the standards of service which they will receive, and we offer to reform local government to reflect wishes and natural communities. For those reasons, I commend the Bill to the House.
Question put, That the Bill be now read a Secondtime :-- The House divided : Ayes 276, Noes 221.
AYES
Division No. 43] [10 pm Adley, Robert
Alexander, Richard
Alison, Rt Hon Michael
Allason, Rupert
Amery, Rt Hon Julian
Amess, David
Amos, Alan
Arbuthnot, James
Arnold, Jacques (Gravesham)
Arnold, Sir Thomas
Ashby, David
Aspinwall, Jack
Atkins, Robert
Atkinson, David
Baldry, Tony
Banks, Robert (Harrogate)
Batiste, Spencer
Bellingham, Henry
Bendall, Vivian
Bennett, Nicholas (Pembroke)
Benyon, W.
Bevan, David Gilroy
Biffen, Rt Hon John
Blackburn, Dr John G.
Blaker, Rt Hon Sir Peter
Body, Sir Richard
Boscawen, Hon Robert
Boswell, Tim
Bottomley, Peter
Bottomley, Mrs Virginia
Bowden, A. (Brighton K'pto'n)
Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)
Bowis, John
Boyson, Rt Hon Dr Sir Rhodes
Braine, Rt Hon Sir Bernard
Brazier, Julian
Bright, Graham
Brooke, Rt Hon Peter
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