| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Jenkin: When the hon. Lady goes shopping and buys herself a nice new dress, does she believe that she does not get value for money unless she buys the cheapest dress? That is not how normal people make purchasing decisions. They judge value for money on the relationship between the quality of what they are buying and what they are spending. That is what we are focusing on. The hon. Lady is falling into the trap of believing that value for money means the cheapest. That is silly. We are looking for the best value for money.
Jackie Ballard: I am so pleased that the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin)--or wherever it is--holds me in such high regard. Under compulsory competitive tendering, people shopping for trousers would have had to look for the cheapest.
Ms Armstrong: What about dresses?
Jackie Ballard: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman buys dresses, too. When I go shopping, I might be looking at more than just the cost or the quality of the article. If I were looking at just those two aspects, value for money might be my main consideration, but I might be interested in whether the article was made by people in a sweat-shop in the Philippines or by people somewhere else who were paid a decent wage. Many people take into account equity, decency and opportunity when looking for goods and services. The purpose of our amendments in Committee was to widen the definition from the Audit Commission's narrow three Es.
The amendments of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst look attractive on the surface, because most of us have a positive knee-jerk reaction to the word "elected", but I am confused about who the right hon. Gentleman thinks the elected representatives of taxpayers are. Councillors are their direct representatives. I wonder whether he is thinking of having more elections to choose people to be consulted on best value. I should be surprised if that was his plan, because it would be bureaucratic nonsense.
However, that argument does not apply to amendment No. 30, which would be an improvement. It would be useful for the business community to elect representatives for consultation purposes. That could refer to representative organisations that already exist--for example, chambers of commerce and industry. We support the requirement for local authorities to consult local people on how to fulfil their duties under best value; any good local authority should be doing that already.
Consultation would show that most people with an interest in service delivery would want other issues above and beyond the three Es to be taken into account. In Committee, the Minister said that, although only the three Es would be in the Bill, local authorities would, for example, be expected to take equality issues into account. Local authorities should act as leaders of their communities, and ensure that services are provided in accordance with the needs and wishes of local people.
Without policies to address disadvantage, there is a danger that majoritarianism may rule in consultation responses, and that would further disadvantage minorities who are excluded by economic, social, physical or geographical conditions. I repeat my concern that employees are not included on the list of those to be consulted about the duty of best value.
Mr. Lansley:
I wish to respond to two points made by the hon. Member for Taunton (Jackie Ballard). First, I do not think that it is necessary for additional Es--be they equality, equity or environmental sustainability--to be added to the list of those considerations to be taken into account. The word "effectiveness" in this context is a compelling word, and includes the taking into account of all those purposes for which the authority exercises its functions.
If the authority, rightly, believes that equity in the administration of its functions or environmental sustainability is an appropriate purpose, it is perfectly reasonable for the authority to seek to carry that out effectively--and it will come to its best value duty by that route.
Secondly, amendment No. 50 deals with the hon. Lady's caricature of what value for money means in this context. My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) made it clear that he thought that value for money would be an improvement. However, it is not simply that the amendment would improve the drafting, but that it would radically change the way in which authorities had to think about their best value duty.
My fear is this: The Government's rhetoric in relation to the best value duty is that the concept of continuous improvement embraces--naturally and spontaneously in all authorities that exercise the best value duty--continuous improvement in value for money. However, that is not necessarily the case. An authority that said that
it had regard to economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the context of seeking continuously to improve its services may not necessarily continuously improve value for money.
That authority may be far more concerned with the continuous raising of the level of service provided--even to the point where there are, effectively, diseconomies of scale or inefficiencies in the service provided--or with the way in which the quality of service is provided, while having regard to things like efficiency and economy, but none the less seeing the continuous improvement criterion as the driving consideration.
Labour and Liberal Democrat authorities are prone to move on quickly from a debate about value for money to a debate about how additional money can be spent in ways that will deliver additional services to the public. They may well take the view--they may well be wrong--that the additional service that they wish to provide represents a continuous improvement in that service. However, that may not necessarily deliver value for money. Although an authority may think about whether it can provide a service economically, that does not mean that that level of service represents necessarily greater value for money than that provided the year before. The authority may have moved to a standard providing lower value for money than that which applied before.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex expressed the need to have regard not just to the three Es, but to ensure that each is given its due weight. "Having equal regard" would be the appropriate wording. If that does not happen, it seems perfectly legitimate--if not satisfactory--for an authority to have regard to economy in the delivery of its service, but to override economy in the interests of what it regards as effectiveness.
Amendments Nos. 50 and 57 deal with the same purposes, but the amendments tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) give effect to a different purpose, to which I am quite sympathetic. The hon. Member for Taunton seemed not to appreciate the circumstances in which the measure could apply. Happily, my district authority and county council routinely consult me, as a Member of Parliament, about the manner in which they exercise their functions before they set budgets. It is not necessary for them to do so--it is certainly not their duty.
Equally, county councillors are not necessarily consulted by district authorities before budgets are set, and district councillors are not routinely consulted by county councillors before budgets are set. Likewise,the "elected representatives" could well include representatives elected to parish councils who, in my experience, could offer an effective means by which the service that a district council provided to the people in its area could be assessed and consulted upon before a district authority set its budget.
In truth, elected representatives from parish councils would probably deliver a far more meaningful set of consultations to a district authority about how it should set its budget and balance its demands upon the taxpayer with the service that it provides than would a focus group or a representative sample of the electorate, who may well have a less complete understanding than parish councillors of the manner in which the district council relates to the local area.
The hon. Member for Taunton asked who would be the representatives of persons who were liable to pay non-domestic rates. Under the clause, that is left entirely in the hands of a best value authority to choose for itself. I was the representative of the British chambers of commerce at the time of the Local Government Act 1989, and it was largely at our instigation that we secured a statutory duty for local authorities to consult representatives of the business community--effectively, non-domestic ratepayers--in relation to the framing of local economic development plans. That is sometimes honoured more in the breach than in the observance, but it is still there, 10 years later, on the statute book.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |