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Mr. Illsley: Does my hon. Friend hold the same view on electoral registration? The register in my area is many thousands of voters down on previous years. Does he think that local authorities should do more and should have more resources to improve the register?
Mr. Bennett: It is important that people should be registered to vote and that we should make it easy for people to vote, but, having done that, we should not get too upset if they remind us sometimes that it is not the most exciting thing. As we take ever more powers from local authorities, I do not blame people who do not particularly want to vote. Changing the system will not increase the number of people who vote.
Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon): The Bill is nowhere near as bad as the Minister's speech made it appear. She is occasionally shrill and she does rather blather, but when she does both simultaneously it becomes very tedious.
The Minister mentioned her great four Cs--challenge, consultation, comparison and competition. She did not mention a fifth C--councillors. The motivation of councillors to carry out the changes matters most of all. If we move to new structures of government, the role of the back-bench councillor and the motivation to become a member of a council will be crucial to making the reforms work.
If the system becomes too executive, those who are not part of the inner circle will have to think hard about their function. We want councillors to carry the measures out on behalf of the community--a word that I am not frightened of. I hope that the Minister will remember that most of the community is not represented in the community consultations. Most people do not belong
to bodies, organisations or pressure groups and are not represented. We must be careful not to nominate too much. Consumers' organisations are entirely nominated, but claim to represent the community.
The Minister accused us of believing in capping, compulsion and central control, which are the three hallmarks of the Bill. Capping will be more extensive because it can be multi-annual and can be started below the level of the budget, which was not the case under the previous Government. Compulsion lies in the range of reserve powers to be exercised by the Secretary of State, who is part of the central Government.
It would be better if the Government agreed that they should have a view about what it is sensible and right for local authorities to spend. They spend a proportion of the national product and we cannot ignore that. The argument is about how that is done and where a fair balance lies. It is an argument not of principle, but about sensible methods and balance. If we put the issue on that basis, we may be able to reach broad agreement.
The Bill is not a charter for local government liberation. On best value and capping the Government have draconian powers of intervention. For once the notes that accompany the Bill are not as obscure as they often are for such legislation. Normally, they are even more complicated and less comprehensible than the Bill, but that is not so in this case. They give some useful examples, but the word "intervention" appears regularly. Let us not pretend that this is a charter of liberation. Even if local government has been let off the chain, it has certainly been caged, to use one of the Prime Minister's favourite metaphors.
There is merit in best value, but it is more all-pervading than compulsory competitive tendering. It has two fundamental elements. The first is a requirement to undertake reviews of every service within five years. It would be interesting to know in what order they are to be reviewed. Will the difficult ones be taken first; will it be left entirely to the local authorities; or will there be a mixture? Secondly, there is an obligation to produce annual performance plans, which will be subject to audit. An inspection will be either by the existing service inspectorate or by the new Audit Commission--which has become the 7th cavalry in all this--as the best value inspectorate for housing, highways and environmental health.
The hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Mr. Stringer), who is just leaving the Chamber, was leader of Manchester city council. He rightly said that CCT had served its purpose. It forced councils to define the cost of a service and to measure its delivery. Before CCT, local authorities were under no such obligation. In that sense, best value is a linear descendant of the principle of CCT. Without CCT there would not have been best value. To be honest about it, the one grew out of the other.
The essential question on reviews is how competitive the service will be required to be. The Government are to produce guidance on competition and it will be critical. Incidentally, I hope that the direct service organisations will have to keep separate accounts, as they do now, so that their finances can be checked and will remain transparent. An enormous amount hangs on the strength of the guidance, which I hope will be published before the Bill is considered in Committee.
Much depends on the powers of the Secretary of State, but some important issues will have to be sussed out in Committee. The role of competition is crucial. CCT got the private sector involved. What are the Government's intentions as regards exposing services to the private sector or to the voluntary sector, or indeed to competition from other local authorities? For example, in education there is the possibility of the private sector being brought in to take over failing local education authorities. Is that part of the best value exercise? Can it be extrapolated to different services?
How do we ensure coherence between the various inspection regimes? The Minister has admitted that there are many individual regimes. How do we achieve a cross-cutting--a favourite Labour word--assessment of them? How do we make sure that a local authority that subjects itself to a rigorous scrutiny and therefore marks itself down does not get hit harder than a local authority that is permissive in the way in which it examines its own services?
The advice that--presumably--the Audit Commission will have to give the auditors will be crucial in achieving coherence in the way in which the services are inspected. What is the methodology in the scrutiny? If there is to be intervention, it has to be triggered by a common standard. We have to be sure that the Secretary of State uses his powers on a basis that can be justified and that they are not seen to be used arbitrarily.
There are also bound to be questions on the timeliness of the performance information from local authorities. After all, the performance indicators will be crucial to the measurement process. We should demand much quicker delivery now that there is to be an annual performance plan. Local authorities have enough experience to generate performance indicators on a much better basis than now.
Some services will have to be pushed hard. Social services, for example, are not inherently less capable of being measured than other services, but operate in a culture in which such a process is alien--a culture that will have to be challenged.
It is important to remember that the services are for people. The process must not become an internal exercise which is hidden from the real world in which the services are supposed to be delivered. Therefore, the mechanisms for involving councillors--which is where the measure moves into the restructuring processes that the Government will no doubt introduce later--and for giving substance to the consultations are also important. I hope that the Minister will say more about that in Committee.
The role of the Audit Commission will also be crucial. The new leader of the Audit Commission, whom I appointed to the Audit Commission, will make a very good General Custer, although I think her fate will be a good deal more felicitous than that of the unfortunate American general. However, she has a difficult job to do. Where the Audit Commission has to inspect, is it intended that it should be an in-house inspection with Audit Commission inspectors, or will the Audit Commission be at liberty or be required to appoint external inspectors or invigilators? Will it have to lay down the rules by which they operate or the standards by which they measure? It is a crucial issue, not least for the staffing requirements of the Audit Commission. Clearly, it will need new staff to carry out its new functions. Will it still be responsible for
the performance indicators? It has done a remarkably good job. It has sometimes made people feel uncomfortable, but it is no bad thing that people should feel uncomfortable about the revelation of statistics.
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