Clause 41
Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill
5:45 pm
Bob Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst, Conservative)
I want to pick up where the hon. Member for Leicester, South left off. I agree with him and I commend much of what he said to Ministers. His experience as a former leader of a large local authority should weigh heavily with them, especially given the Minister’s comment when he intervened on an observation by my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Bedfordshire who said in the context of the Gordon Keymer scenario that the key test is contrasting a well run authority, whatever its structure, with a badly run authority. As my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate said, we should not work on the assumption that the committee system can work only in small authorities. There is no reason why it should not be applied in large local authorities in its enhanced form.
The point was made about clear political leadership and we all sign up to that. There was never a larger local authority in English history than, first, the London county council and then the Greater London council, nor were there local authorities with a stronger tradition of clear political leadership and direction. Herbert Morrison was as strong a local government leader as one could find operating under the old committee system, so were Ike Hayward, Desmond Plummer, Horace Cutler and—dare I say it— Ken Livingstone.
All those people gave very clear political leadership and direction to their authorities under the old committee system, never mind the modernised and enhanced one which, I agree with the hon. Member for Leicester, South, should be an option. If it could work then, why cannot it work now? Does it not come back to the quality and calibre of the politicians and the senior officers?
My experience chimes with that of my hon. Friends and others. If we want to keep good quality people in local government, they have to think that there is a worthwhile role for them. I do not denigrate scrutiny and I take the point, but if people believe that the only time that they will be able to take a decision and make a difference in a substantial and meaningful way is by waiting to become a member of the executive, it will put a lot of very good people off—hence the turnover, which is a real concern.
Some local authorities try to get around the problem because they want to be involved in scrutiny but a good council wants to be involved in policy development too. In Bromley, we call our scrutiny committees policy development scrutiny committees, which is an attempt to get members involved at an earlier stage. We could do that in the context of the leader and cabinet system and of the enhanced committee system too.
As I said, I spent 16 years as a member of a London borough council and for eight of those years I was chairman of one of the large service committees—first the environment committee and then the social services committee. It was under the old structure, but we gave a pretty clear political steer. We had a leader, who chaired the policy and resources committee; the chairmen of the five or six service committees were on the policy and resources committee and the opposition were also represented on it.
We had a system of delegation that enabled urgent decisions to be taken and we should look again at the legal problems that sometimes get in the way in that respect. We made sure that members—usually the chairman or the vice-chairman of the committee—were involved if urgent action had to be taken,. We also had a system whereby the leader and the service committee chairmen could meet senior officers and give them a steer, or direction.
The point is well made that, in the policy resources committee, not only could the opposition debate the issue and question the officers on their recommendations, but the officers had to account for them. That worked in a very large local authority—London boroughs were almost the same size as the city of Leicester, for example—and it worked on a bigger scale for the London county council and the Greater London council, so I do not understand why we are closing that option off.
I say to the Minister that there is a contrast between the Government’s approach to this clause and to the previous one. If we accept that the option can work for small local authorities, why close it off arbitrarily for larger local authorities? Would not the decentralising, localist option be to leave it open for all classes of local authority and, as the Minister said earlier, let them decide?