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Mr. Bermingham: I have been listening carefully to the hon. Lady, and a thought has started to cross my mind. If we take the city of Birmingham and the next-door town of Wolverhampton, which are not in the same local government area, why should there be different needs in two adjacent towns? The hon. Lady's argument about the board meeting local needs has no great substance, so perhaps she will provide an explanation.
Jackie Ballard: It sounds as if the hon. Gentleman is arguing against having local boards at all, although I had
understood that that was not his opinion. Surely he would accept that, at the very least, there are different patterns of criminal activity and varying availability of, for example, social housing and employment, in different parts of the country. I shall not take up the House's time going through all the different types of needs, but I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman took that line.In Committee, the Minister challenged me to count the number of new powers that the Bill will give to the Secretary of State. I have to confess that I have not had enough idle moments to complete what he knows is a lengthy task. I suspect that he has not had enough idle moments, either. However, the power is a centralising power too far. The Central Probation Council, which is the probation employers' organisation, generally welcomes and supports the Bill, but it has strong feelings about this issue. In its briefing, it states:
- The Home Office consultations on the Prisons/Probations Review and "Joining Forces to Protect the Public" set out various options for the future governance of the probation service, including a national service with "local reference groups or advisory boards". The government did not choose that option. Instead, local probation boards retaining the full duties of employers of probation staff were decided upon.
- It is important to recognise the corporate status of the new boards and the responsibilities placed on them, not only by the Home Office, employment law, financial regulation, health and safety regulations, the Better Quality Services initiatives and the Human Rights Act.
The Home Secretary said that, for the effective performance of the service, it was important to be able to make the chief officer appointment centrally. However, in the national health service, chief executives are employed by local trusts and, as we have already heard, chief constables are employed by police authorities. The Home Secretary said that lack of consistency in the probation service had been a major problem in the past. As my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) said, does that not suggest a failure of the inspectorate to monitor and report on adherence to national standards?
The Home Secretary talked about the centralised approvals system of chief police officers and said that it could not be compared to the system for probation officers. In responding to our debate, will he comment on the new assessment centre process for the appointment of chief probation officers? That process will be similar to that governing the appointment of chief police officers. Our debate on this group of amendments has been the longest so far tonight because it concerns the balance of power and lines of accountability, which are key issues in the Bill. I am disappointed that the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald said that her party is not inclined to oppose the Government on this matter. Liberal Democrat Members are inclined to oppose the Government on their failure to support these Lords amendments and we hope that the right hon. Lady will join us in the Lobby.
Mr. Straw: The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) set me the difficult test
of answering her questions with sufficient rigour and conviction to satisfy her. She is on an each-way bet and, should she wish to vote with Liberal Democrat Members once I have finished, that would be consistent with what she said earlier.I should like to deal with the key issue raised by the right hon. Lady and the hon. Member for Taunton (Jackie Ballard). When discussing institutional change, there is always a tendency to think that it is possible to lay down single lines of accountability and answerability and to think that there must be an algorithm that can establish those to the exclusion of other, more complex, arrangements. However, life is not like that, especially not in a large society in a big country of 55 million people, with 50 million living in England and Wales.
We are trying to do two things--run a national service and make it locally responsive--so there will be a tension. There is not a single line of accountability, but lines of accountability, answerability and responsiveness are drawn. That is no different in the public sector than in the private sector. I can think of plenty of examples in which large national companies wish to ensure that they maintain a national operational framework at the same time as they secure responsiveness to local need. They do that by having the chief executive of each of their subsidiaries appointed by the main board but, day by day, that chief executive is a member of the subsidiary local board, which, in turn, represents the local area or the specific interest of that local subsidiary company. There are other examples in the public sector.
Of course, we will look at parallels. However, in each service in the public sector from, at one end, highly local services such as planning and environmental health, to the armed forces at the other, there are different arrangements to provide for the balance between local responsiveness and national direction according to the needs and functions of each service. We must try to make a bespoke service.
The right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald asked about clear management lines, which were also mentioned by Baroness Blatch. Under the arrangements, the lines of management are clear and the national chief officer will be appointed by the Secretary of State. In turn, the area chief officers will be formally appointed by the Secretary of State, but the national chief officer will have a great deal to do with those appointments. Those chief officers are answerable for what happens in their local areas. Moreover, they are full members of the local boards, to which they and other members are appointed by the Secretary of State, so they are all appointed on the same basis. As for the chairs of NHS trusts, may I tell the right hon. Lady that it is on the record that they are appointed by the Secretary of State, not appointed locally. Chief executives in the NHS are appointed locally, but the chairs are not, although they have a semi-executive position, which must be borne in mind.
That arrangement in the NHS delivers the right balance between clear management lines in a national service and local responsiveness. Local chief officers are appointed by the Secretary of State on the recommendation of the national chief officer, but are full members of their local board, take part in discussions at a local board level and, within the local board's terms of reference, must abide by its decisions. They could be outvoted on the local board.
I ask the House to consider what would happen in the reverse situation in which the chief officer was not a member of the local board but had been appointed by it and was subordinate to it. That must be so; one cannot be appointed by a local board and suddenly become a member of it. It would be odd for the local board to be the employer of one of its own members. Such an extraordinary arrangement would raise difficulties over any employment issue.
7.30 pm
Mr. Straw: If the hon. Lady is about to mention head teachers, she is right and I am wrong. I knew that there was some flaw in my argument and it is unfortunate that it occurred to me after I had spoken. However, having chaired the board of governors of a large comprehensive, I have been through difficulties over employment of a head teacher--not the current one. Where there are problems with the employment of a head teacher, the fact that the head teacher is a member of the governing body that appointed him or her raises serious difficulties. I shall now make a good point on the basis of the facts, having made a not-so-good one without the backing of the facts.
If the alternative arrangement proposed by the Opposition were introduced, there would apparently--only apparently--be clearer lines of communication locally. However, it would be certain that national lines of communication would be much more confused. In effect, because the local board had appointed a person, that person would think himself or herself much more answerable to his or her employers than he or she was nationally accountable. That would undermine the concept of a national probation service.
Mr. Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre): Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Among other things, that would make it more difficult in practice to hold the Secretary of State to account for what was going on in an alleged national service. People would say that it was a national service in name but not in practice.
Mr. Dawson: My right hon. Friend has started to answer my point, but we are discussing an important national service and we need to address both consistency and cultural change. We may be moving away from what has been something of a social work service to one that has, as one of its principal aims, the protection of the public. Is it not an index of the Government's seriousness that they propose to manage that change in the way that they do?
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