Schedule 2 - Commission for Rural Communities
Natural Environment and Rural Communities Bill
1:15 pm
James Paice (Shadow Minister (Agriculture), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; South East Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
There is obviously going to be a Commission for Rural Communities, so we now turn our attention to one or two small but important, aspects of trying to get that right. The four amendments all relate to the commission’s board.
Amendment No. 57 deals with the size of the board. The Minister—and the Secretary of State on Second Reading—spoke about the CRC being a small organisation that will not have a large number of staff and will not cost a vast amount of taxpayers’ money. Therefore, why is it necessary to have so many people on the board? My recollection is that there could be as many as 15. I am proposing that we reduce the board size to eight. The larger any organisation is the more unmanageable it becomes. Anyone who has tried to chair a meeting knows full well that the more people there are, the more difficult it is. For a small organisation that is trying to do the job that the Minister has set out, eight members is perfectly reasonable. I therefore commend the amendment to the Committee and mention in passing that the difference between eight and 15 is fairly massive. I am not necessarily wed to eight, but I do not think that there should be such huge variation.
Amendment No. 58 returns to the issue of accountability, which colleagues and I referred to in the previous debate. The wording of the amendment is slightly tortuous and, I suspect, entirely novel. Nevertheless, it seeks to address the point that, although we cannot introduce direct accountability because of how the Government are setting up the commission, it would be a significant step forward if the people on the board knew what it was like to be a representative of rural communities. That is why we are proposing that at least half of the board should have recent experience of having been elected either to a council or to this House—they could not be a sitting Member of this House, but could be an ex-Member. That would add the element of board members knowing what it is to be elected.
There will be many occasions when hon. Members from all parts of the House of Commons will reflect on the different attitudes and pressures of and on elected representatives, who know what it is to be elected. We have all heard it said, or said it ourselves, that it is all very well for him or her, but they have never been elected to anything in their life. That is an important point. Even if we are not building direct accountability into the organisation, the people who serve on the board, or at least a majority of them, should have served in recent times as an elected member and therefore understand the discipline of accountability. I suspect that that is a novel approach, but I hope that the theory, at least, commends itself to the Minister. Again, I do not pretend to have got the drafting entirely right.
Amendments Nos. 59 and 60 are effectively a repetition of amendments that I tabled in respect of Natural England. They would include in schedule 2 proposals for members to be appointed for a term of four years and a maximum of two terms, to keep a constant flow of new blood to the board, while accepting at the outset that it would need to be staggered to avoid an “all-in, all-out” situation. The importance of the proposals is clear. I made the case as well as I could for Natural England and I will not bother to repeat it, especially as it failed to achieve its desired intent at that stage.
The four amendments would go some way towards improving the standard of the board, making it a manageable size, and not excessive compared to the size of the organisation seeking to run it, and bringing on to the board people with some understanding of what it is like to be accountable to the people whom they serve.