Local Democracy, Economic Developmentand Construction Bill [Lords]

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The Committee consisted of the following Members:

Chairmen: Mr. Eric Illsley, † Mr. David Amess

† Cooper, Rosie (West Lancashire) (Lab)

Curry, Mr. David (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)

† Dunne, Mr. Philip (Ludlow) (Con)

† Efford, Clive (Eltham) (Lab)

† Gardiner, Barry (Brent, North) (Lab)

† Goldsworthy, Julia (Falmouth and Camborne) (LD)

† Goodman, Mr. Paul (Wycombe) (Con)

† Heppell, Mr. John (Nottingham, East) (Lab)

† Jackson, Mr. Stewart (Peterborough) (Con)

† Lilley, Mr. Peter (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)

† McCarthy-Fry, Sarah (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government)

† Raynsford, Mr. Nick (Greenwich and Woolwich) (Lab)

† Rogerson, Dan (North Cornwall) (LD)

† Stewart, Ian (Eccles) (Lab)

† Watts, Mr. Dave (Lord Commissioner of Her Majesty's Treasury)

† Winterton, Ms Rosie (Minister for Regional Economic Development and Co-ordination)

Mick Hillyard, Committee Clerk

† attended the Committee

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Public Bill Committee

Tuesday 9 June 2009

[Mr. David Amess in the Chair]

(Afternoon)

Local Democracy, Economic Developmentand Construction Bill [Lords]

Written evidence to be reported to the House

LD 01 Specialist Engineering Contractors’ Group

LD 02 Federation of Small Businesses and the Specialist Engineering Contractors’ Group

The Chairman: I trust everyone had a good lunch and tea. No amendments have been selected in respect of clause 3.

Clause 3

Monitoring boards, courts boards and youth offending teams

4.30 pm

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

Mr. Paul Goodman (Wycombe) (Con): Welcome to the Chair, Mr. Amess. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, as it always has been. Two Ministers new to the Bill are in the Committee, but we will find a certain repetitive quality to the debates. I will briefly address clause 3 in the same way that my Opposition colleagues addressed clauses 1 and 2.

It is obviously desirable in principle for local authorities to promote understanding of other bodies, including monitoring boards, courts boards and youth offending teams. Many Members of Parliament work frequently in our constituencies to promote understanding of such bodies, which is a worthwhile objective. However, we do not understand why the promotion of understanding has to be included in a Bill, as it is in this one. We did not receive much of an answer in relation to other bodies when we discussed clauses 1 and 2, and I suspect that we will get the same on clause 3.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) was far ruder about this clause on Second Reading than I intend to be now. We simply do not understand why it needs to be included in the Bill. It is separate from clause 2. Presumably, there is a reason why the bodies included in clause 3 do not fit in the same category as those included in clause 2.

As the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne pointed out this morning regarding the bodies listed in clause 2, we wonder whether there will be a reciprocal duty on the bodies included in clause 3 to promote understanding of local authorities or themselves. Local authorities will promote understanding of the bodies, but there is nothing on statute, as far as I am aware—the

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Minister may know otherwise—that obliges the bodies to promote themselves. By the Government’s logic, surely they should do so. I look forward to the Minister’s explanation of that, just as we are looking forward to hearing whether the bodies will have a reciprocal duty to promote local authorities.

Clause 3, like the others, is burdensome, bureaucratic and unnecessary. We see no reason why it should stand part of the Bill. We have tabled an amendment that would delete it, which was obviously not selectable. The Liberal Democrats have since withdrawn their names from it, and it is over to them to say what they have to say on the matter.

Julia Goldsworthy (Falmouth and Camborne) (LD): It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Amess. As the hon. Gentleman said, our concerns are in the same vein as those expressed about clause 2. It is not clear why only principal authorities should have a duty to promote the understanding of the organisations listed in clause 3, just as it was not clear in relation to the bodies included in clause 2. It is also not clear why there is no reciprocal duty for the bodies to promote an understanding of their own arrangements and local authorities’ arrangements.

That leads us to conclude that the clauses serve only to highlight what a dog’s breakfast the current arrangements are, and how confusing it is for a member of the public who seeks to understand not only what all these organisations do, but their complaints procedures, accountability processes and so on. They are completely different from organisation to organisation, but rather than attempting to streamline that process or to consider how complicated things are from the point of view of the people who receive those public services, it seems that the Government have simply palmed off the responsibility. Rather than explaining something that is complicated and incomprehensible to most people, they have given the responsibility to the local authorities, and said, “It is your job to explain that.”

Mr. Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con): The hon. Lady is making a very strong case. What would she say to my constituents, and perhaps hers as well, who look at clause 3 and may accept the premise on which it is based but at the same time are told that, for instance, they are not permitted to know the location of bail hostels? That, again, is the interface of locality with the criminal justice system. It has been outsourced to ClearSprings, for instance, and Ministers are not permitted to divulge, or choose not to, their location or set up structures where proper consultation can take place in residential areas when such hostels are proposed.

Julia Goldsworthy: The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. It seems ironic that the Bill will defeat the object of what the previous Secretary of State claimed it would achieve when she first established in her White Paper “Communities in control” what it was designed to achieve: to get people engaged in how public services are delivered at a local level, and to try to see things from the perspective of the people consuming public services. What we have instead, unfortunately, is the silos that already exist, which the Bill seems to entrench. Instead of trying to look at the issue in a cross-cutting way, the Bill is suddenly lumping responsibility for

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explaining all the complications with the local authority. As I said, it seems to be entrenching the silos, rather than resolving them.

I turn to the point made by the hon. Member for Wycombe about the withdrawal of our amendments. My understanding is that we tabled amendments identical to his. Those have been withdrawn and our names added to his amendments, so I hope that makes it clear that we are of one mind on how extraneous the proposals are. We do not need them in the Bill. I do not see how they will simplify a very complicated set of arrangements. For that reason, we will oppose them.

The Minister for Regional Economic Development and Co-ordination (Ms Rosie Winterton): I welcome you warmly to the Chair, Mr. Amess. What a great pleasure it will be to serve under your chairmanship on this interesting Bill, which has already engendered a great deal of lively debate and I am sure will continue to do so.

Clause 3 requires principal local authorities to promote understanding among local people about independent monitoring boards for prisons and immigration removal centres, courts boards and youth offending teams in their area. Such information will be about how those bodies function, how a person can become a member of the boards and bodies, and how they can participate in some of the associated decision making and mechanisms.

If we want really to promote active participation in decision making in our local democracy, we need to look beyond just councils and councillors and to other bodies in which people can play a civic role. In making it as easy as possible for people to do that, we have clause 1, which is about promoting understanding of the role of the councillor. We promote civic roles in connected authorities under clause 2, such as a school governor or member of a police authority. Other key civic figures are set out in clauses 3 and 4, so people have the maximum amount of information available to them.

It is important that we look at some of the statistics on representation in those other important civic roles in our society. Only a third of courts board members are women. We talk a lot about getting younger people to play a part in their local communities, but 80 per cent. of magistrates nationally are over 50, and the average age is 57. Although 50 is of course a fantastic age to be, it is important that younger people, who, along with 50-year-olds, have so much to offer, become involved and interested in what is happening around them. Again, the proportion of black and minority ethnic members on independent monitoring boards does not mirror the composition of the local population.

Julia Goldsworthy: I draw the Minister’s attention to our earlier debate on how people are confused about the difference between a council and an officer, and about the different services councils provide. Does she not think that requiring councils to promote the understanding of those other boards could generate more confusion? If councils are responsible for promoting them, people might be led to believe that councils are also responsible for delivering those services. Can she explain how councils will be expected to promote understanding of those organisations, and should regard not be paid to other ways in which that could be done?

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I draw the Minister’s attention to the Councillors Commission, which put quite a large responsibility on political parties to ensure that they raise awareness. It has supported political parties in promoting understanding to help tackle the lack of representation she has spoken about. That responsibility need not rest solely on the shoulders of councils, which, unfortunately, is the impression the Bill has given. Finally, how do the Government propose that both they and local authorities will assess the impact of the promotion of that understanding?

Ms Winterton: I want to stress that clause 3 is not an attempt to take away from the other bodies any responsibility for promoting what happens or how people can get involved in their organisations. It is an attempt to build upon that and to ensure that the roles available for our constituents are promoted even more widely. I challenge the hon. Lady’s assumption that that would become confusing because, when trying to increase people’s understanding of the possibilities of playing a role in civic life, it is a good idea to have information about all the possibilities in one place. We all know that people get confused and irritated by having to run to many different information points to get an idea of what they might be able to do, so having the information in one place is a good way of helping them to look through what is available and decide what is most relevant. That fits with bringing together into one information hub all the possibilities for people who want either to fulfil a civic duty, or to understand how they can best shape their local services and play a role in their local communities.

The opposite of what the hon. Lady is talking about is in fact the case: we want to broaden the number of people involved. It is true to say that people who get involved in one area of civic life often, as a result, get involved in many others. That is all very laudable, but we want to ensure that different people get involved in areas they feel are relevant to them, because sometimes—we need to be honest about this—a smaller number of people take on many roles. We want to ensure that a whole range of people get involved.

4.45 pm

Mr. Goodman: The Minister is making a perfectly good case for the promotion of understanding—

Ms Winterton: Good.

Mr. Goodman: The right hon. Lady should not be quite so swift to assume that the rest of the sentence will be laudatory. She is making a perfectly good case for the promotion of understanding of the bodies. It is curious that the Bill slaps the duty on local authorities but not on the bodies themselves. She is making a perfectly good argument for local authorities promoting understanding of themselves. Surely, it must therefore follow that if they are going to do that to local authorities, the Government will place in legislation a similar duty on those bodies to promote themselves.

Ms Winterton: As I have said, we do not want to take away the responsibility of other bodies to promote understanding of how people can get involved, but we are discussing a local government Bill, which is about

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the duties that fall upon local authorities. Where local authorities are entering into this exciting initiative to ensure that more people at local level are aware of the role that they can play in civic life and how they can shape their services, we are keen to ensure that there is the ability to gather all that information in one place.

On the hon. Lady’s other question, we discussed in some detail this morning how we intend to ensure that monitoring can take place effectively in the ways that we talked about, whether through the comprehensive area assessment, the Audit Commission or otherwise. The usual ways in which that monitoring is done will ensure that we have a good, sound system that all our citizens will find effective, and which will encourage them to play a greater role in our civic society.

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Prepared 10 June 2009