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Any good authority would continue to promote understanding of such a school but, as I keep saying, this legislation is not for the good authorities; it is for the less good ones. I hope that this will never happen, but there may come a time when an authority declares, in accordance with the letter of the law as set out in what will by then be the Act, that it does not have to promote understanding as regards a school because that school is not located in its area. That is not likely to happen in my authority for many reasons, but there is a lot of concern in some London boroughs about the number of children who travel to other boroughs because of the perception, real or otherwise, of the schools in one borough as compared with those in another. A situation could well arise where one council, for its own reasons, does not want to promote a school in another borough that is attended by many of its pupils because it wants those pupils to attend its own schools. This is not just an academic point. If a local authority wants to comply with the letter of the law as distinct from its spirit, it will be able to do so under the current wording of the Bill. That is the issue that we are trying to grasp.
Lord Graham of Edmonton: I wish my noble friend good luck.
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Lord Patel of Bradford: I am from Yorkshire so I will be fine. This has been a helpful debate in which important points have been raised. I take on board the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Tope: this is not an academic argument, but a real issue. I take the point sincerely. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has addressed the important issue of geographical boundaries in relation to the duties that we are placing on local authorities. I will not go into detail about the position in Yorkshire because of conflicts of interest. I live in Bradford, I worked in Keighley as a social worker and last year I opened a very good new mental health ward in Airedale hospital. I drive regularly through all the villages and towns that the noble Lord talked about, so I understand where he is coming from.
These amendments would require local authorities to provide information on the functions and governance arrangements of schools, FE colleges or health services which are not within the local authority area’s boundaries but which are used by the council’s residents. I will recap on what we are trying to do. In Clause 2, we seek to place a duty on local authorities to promote the functions and democratic arrangements of the public bodies—that is, the connected authorities—that are responsible for the provision of public services in the area. It is important to remind ourselves that this duty is about promoting understanding of the democratic arrangements for public bodies set up to be influenced by citizens either directly or indirectly or run by lay citizen representatives. It is not designed to cover all conceivable information about public services in general. In practice, democratic arrangements have boundaries. Although citizens may on occasion use the services of a neighbouring council, they cannot vote in the elections for that neighbouring council.
As the noble Lord clearly stated, a number of core services are provided from outside any given local authority area. This is true for schools and certainly for FE colleges, and it is also increasingly true for health services. But we do not believe that this is a reasonable or practical requirement to place on local authorities. I will begin by setting out what we intend to include and I will then address each amendment.
As my noble friend the Minister outlined earlier, we are clearly aware of, and do not take lightly, the burdens on local authorities when they have new duties placed on them. We place such duties on them only where we truly believe that it is necessary and, in this case, we believe that it is. If we are to embed promotion of democracy deep into the culture of local authorities, we want to ensure that local people are being made fully aware of how they can get involved in shaping local services.
Inevitably, there is a fine balance to be made in addressing the needs of the community and minimising the burden on local authorities. In doing this, we are also very mindful that we do not want to increase duplication of information where that is not necessary. We are asking all local authorities to promote democratic understanding in this way. We do not only mean providing information by way of newsletters or leaflets and on websites, although that is crucial. We want local authorities to embed the promotion of democracy within their work. We want local authorities to work with schools,
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The amendments would increase the responsibility on local authorities and duplicate information. Should we require Manchester to promote the democratic arrangements and health service in Salford, Bury, Trafford, Rochdale, Bolton and so on? The noble Lord provided the example of Airedale hospital. The increased responsibility would be a significant burden on local authorities.
The noble Lord, Lord Tope, talked about the situation in London. In London, over one-fifth of children travel out of their home borough to attend school. When would a London borough stop in providing information on secondary schools? This is by no means unique to London, as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said when he talked about the excellent South Craven secondary school. It would mean that many authorities would have to identify and promote the democratic arrangements of services that are located outside their area, even though the services would also be promoted where they are located as part of the duty.
Of course, people with an interest in these services, whether in or out of the authority in which they live, are entitled to information about their functions and democratic arrangements. This information would be available in the school, college or hospital itself. When you are in a foundation trust, you are actively going out of the borough to increase your membership and the membership of the governance board. Information would also be available from the council where the service is located. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, will appreciate that defining “significant” is not straightforward.
To go back to our definition of local people, councils will be expected to promote this duty to people who study in their area anyway. We expect local authorities to take a sensible approach and to consider how imaginatively to promote democratic understanding, as we have set out in their duties, in a way that is relevant to their local communities. I take on board what the noble Lord said about the sense of what is meant here; that is crucial.
We will of course work with the LGA to ensure that we cover those issues and points in guidance. The debate today will help to develop that guidance, but the amendment would add nothing to the Bill.
Lord Greaves: I have to say that I do not know who writes the stuff for the Minister, but I was not terribly impressed with that. The amendment would add a great deal to the Bill. It would totally change the Bill. The Bill refers to,
That is pretty prescriptive. I am trying to turn it round to say: do not define it according to the bureaucratic boundaries and bureaucratic systems, which people
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The noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and the Minister asked how councils would determine which things to include and how to define “significant”. I would not define “significant”. We do not have to define “sustainable development” whenever it appears in Bills; we are not allowed to. Let us not define it. Let us leave it to the common sense of the councils concerned. That is what the Government will not do. They will not let go. They will not say, “Here, around the country, is a series of councils. If we treat them as sensible, intelligent people with common sense and trust them to do sensible things, by and large that is what they will do. If we try to tie them up in detailed prescriptive rules and regulations, they will behave less sensibly, because that is what people do”.
The Minister referred to the ward that he opened at Airedale hospital. Sometimes I think that the debates that we have here are driving me mad. I hope that I will not have to take advantage of the excellent facilities that he was responsible for introducing. I do not know.
If anyone goes to Barnoldswick and tries to issue a document telling people how to get involved in the health service but it is all about Burnley and Blackburn and does not mention Airedale, there will be a riot on the streets of that town. So Lancashire County Council and Pendle Borough Council, when producing such documentation, will say that it is common sense that they must include Airedale because they are local people and they know where people go. They do not have to spend money doing opinion surveys on where people go. We all know. That is what the Government do not seem to understand: people on the ground know these things and will do sensible and common-sense things.
Finally, given the way in which the Bill is written—that the hospital has to be in the district—some districts probably do not have a hospital any more, so they would be missed out altogether. Is that what the Government want? The Minister said that information will be available at the school, the hospital, the college and so on. I begin to think that that undermines the whole basis of this part of the Bill. I am not satisfied with the answer.
Baroness Maddock: Will the Government think about what happens when you are near the border, particularly with health authorities? My noble friend was talking about hospitals. If you live in Berwick-upon-Tweed, you might go to Edinburgh, Newcastle or the Borders General. In rural areas such as ours, border country, these things are very complicated. We are again looking at generalities rather than being too specific.
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5.30 pm
Lord Greaves: I am tempted to say that we should wheel in my noble friends Lord Wallace of Tankerness and Lord Livsey of Talgarth to discuss these border issues, but they are tied up in the marine Bill and doing work on behalf of some of us. I note the point made and, at this stage, I shall withdraw the amendment, but I beg the Government to look again at this. I do not think that it is a complicated or difficult matter. The Bill just needs a slight change of wording and we would all be very happy. In the hope that I will be happy, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendments 35 to 42 not moved.
Lord Greaves: I shall also speak to Amendments 44, 45 and 46 in my name. These take us to the second list, which the Minister told us was the list of organisations, such as parish councils and national park authorities, which do not exist everywhere but exist only in some places. However, I see in the list,
- “a police authority ... a chief officer of police ... a strategic health authority ... a Primary Care Trust”,
That drives a coach and horses through the previous explanation, although that is not a major or substantive point, is it?
Amendment 43 would add to the list “a parish meeting”. I have to say that I have not added this in the place that I had intended to, which was a line higher. I was probably drafting the amendment too late at night when I was in bed. Parish meetings were the first things that came to my mind when I thought of the previous amendment to change “persons” into “bodies”, because parish meetings are not persons. I may be wrong; it may be that the chairman of a parish meeting is a person and he can exercise at least some minimal functions on behalf of the parish meeting. Nevertheless, whatever the rights and wrongs of that, I am very clear that parish meetings should be included in the list. Parishes exist in many places and most parishes have a parish council, which, I was going to say, is like any other local authority, although many parishes are unlike other local authorities. None the less, they are still functioning, democratic local authorities. Parish meetings take place in parishes that are usually too small to have a functioning parish council. A parish meeting takes place once a year or whenever it is called according to the rules for calling such meetings. We set a limit in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act on the size of new parishes necessary for there to be a parish council. I think that the limit is 100, but I am not sure.
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Some parishes have direct democracy in the form of an annual parish meeting and other special meetings, if required. Why should such meetings not be included in the description of the local system of democratic involvement? That is my first point, which is straightforward, and I hope that the Government will simply accept the amendment and put it in the right place.
Secondly, joint waste authorities set up under the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act are included in the list. Amendment 44 is, for the moment, a probing amendment to find out what such authorities’ democratic features are. Given that the Minister is going to write to us to explain all these things, I will not pursue that further today. The same goes for waste disposal authorities under the Local Government Act 1985. They will come and we will be told what the democratic features are that require them to be in the list. That will be interesting.
Amendment 46 is a much more substantive amendment, which basically says that housing associations and ALMOs—arm’s-length management organisations for council housing stock—should be included in the list. It may be that an ALMO is sufficiently close to a local authority for the Government to say that it will be included anyway, but given that they are deliberately at arm’s length, that is not entirely clear to me. They are certainly unlike bodies that deal with council housing stock that has not been pushed out to arm’s length.
The main local housing associations nowadays are often in places where large-scale stock transfers have taken place—where the council has, in whole or part, divested itself of its council housing and transferred it to a housing association. Big authorities have in some cases done that in one area and not another, or perhaps they have two or three of these bodies. Housing associations are very much part of the provision of public services in an area. They get most of their money—not necessarily all, as they can raise money in the markets—from the Housing Corporation, or the Homes and Communities Agency. They are subject to a considerable degree of supervision and control through the provisions in the recent Housing and Regeneration Act.
These are quasi-public bodies, but there is no doubt that they are public bodies of some sort or other. Particularly where they perform the function of a local housing authority, in providing what used to be council housing and what is now public or social housing in an area, they are a public body, so it is not clear why they should not be in the list. They are certainly as much a public body as other bodies listed and in many cases they have very clear means of involving members of the public. Usually, those people are tenants, but there are sometimes residents on the estates who are not tenants. It is not clear to me why these should not be on the list. I should like to hear the Minister’s justification for that.
While we are looking at this list, it may be worth asking the Minister why she thinks that the chief officer of police is a person with democratic involvement and functions. Perhaps in a sense this is anticipating discussions on later parts of the Bill, but it is interesting to ask why the Government think that the economic
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We kept discovering these things after we tabled the amendments. As far as the PCT is concerned, there is a series of bodies—the new LINk organisations—which surely ought to be in here. Those organisations are being set up to replace the patients’ forums, which had a short period of life after the abolition of community health councils. Why are the LINk organisations not mentioned here, when they are specifically set up to involve members of the public in the local health services?
Finally, on social services, there is a series of children’s partnerships and similar things within social services. Why are they not here? A lot of places now have new Sure Start centres or children’s facilities under the banner of Sure Start, which all have some kind of quasi-democratic local committee responsible for running them. Why are they not here?
The problem with these prescriptive lists is that, the more you think about things in different areas, the more you think should be in the lists and the more you question why the ones that are in them are in them. If only the Government would trust local authorities to take a common-sense approach to it all within a general framework, we would do far better than by producing these lists. Since we have them, however, we are probing them. I beg to move.
Lord Hanningfield: I have some general support for the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, and his amendments in this group. If there has to be a list, it must not exclude obvious bodies. The parish meeting is an obvious body, because small communities are often not big enough to have a parish council, so the parish meeting is their democratic body. It is rather an insult to small communities to exclude the parish meeting. It is the only thing that they have, and they use it very democratically. If there is a big issue for the village or community, it is dealt with democratically at the parish meeting. I particularly concentrate on this, because, as I said, it is an insult to exclude it.
Lord Borrie: Briefly, the only local authority of which I have ever been a member is a parish council. I was a chairman of a parish council in Warwickshire—we were just about big enough to have a council, as distinct from a mere parish meeting—and it did some quite useful work. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, would no doubt prefer Amendment 43 to follow list A rather than list B, but I thought that a parish meeting was excluded—I may be wrong; I am sure the Minister will respond if I am—because it has no separate
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Baroness Maddock: I support my noble friend if we are going to describe what is in the lists. We have had a discussion about the difficulties surrounding that. People need to understand fairly carefully how social housing is provided in their area, which body they go to if they want to be on the list, where the money comes from, how they can become involved if they think it is important to have more social housing in the area, and who is responsible for other housing issues.
In my area, there is the issue of second homes. As the Minister knows, Northumberland has been reorganised, and the arrangements for housing will be completely different from the previous arrangements when we had a district council and a county council. This is quite important. If we are going to be prescriptive and have a list, I am not quite sure why it does not have something about housing in it, although I recognise that this is quite difficult. The local authorities still deal with lists and homelessness, but social housing is also important, and there is quite a connection between the two, so I hope that the Minister will take that on board.
Baroness Andrews: I am pleased to say that I am going to bring great joy to practically everyone in the Committee. That will make a nice change. Parish meetings are very important. In fact, it was our intention that parish councils, as identified in the Bill, would cover them. However, the noble Lord makes an important point. I will take it away and think about how we can accommodate it, so I hope that that will help.
5.45 pm
As regards the other issues he raises, for example in relation to joint waste authorities—when I write to noble Lords I shall certainly give as full an explanation as possible about the democratic arrangements as we see them—he has already argued that joint boards and joint committees should be included. I know that this is a probing amendment. We are agreed that this area is of great interest to people. I know from personal experience that nothing is more likely to exercise a local community than a decision on where to place landfill or incinerators. However, joint waste authorities are bodies on which local councillors sit. We believe it is very important that people are made aware of this and of how decisions about waste are made. People should be aware of the waste hierarchy and who they can talk to if they have concerns and issues. We think that these democratic arrangements are relevant. That is why they are included in the list. People need a greater understanding of this issue, because waste is one of those things that is divided up in terms of function in the two-tier authorities and there is a lot of confusion as regards collection and disposal. Therefore, there is a good case for including that.
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Complicated issues arise as regards social housing. I take the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, made. We tried to address that in part by including the HCA in the list. Although it is not often a direct provider, it directly funds certain projects and developments. Therefore, there is a strong relationship with local authorities. Amendment 46 seeks to add ALMOs and other providers of social housing under the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008. By the latter group, I believe he means “registered providers”. This is the term in the 2008 Act which refers to bodies registered with the regulator of social housing—whose trading name is the Tenant Services Authority—and it includes all current registered social landlords; that is, housing associations under another name.
We had very long debates during the passage of the 2008 Act and previous Acts on why it is not appropriate to treat housing associations as public bodies. Housing associations are non-profit, private bodies, often charitable, with a long history of independence. They are very anxious to keep that status and we are very anxious to ensure that they do. They are not connected with local authorities in any formal way and are not normally their agents or contractors. I invite the noble Lord to revisit the debates that we had on the Homes and Communities Agency during the passage of the Housing and Regeneration Bill, in which I went to great lengths to explain that principle. Indeed, noble Lords agreed with that principle on which that Bill was based. That is where we still stand. These bodies must retain their private status.
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