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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, Amendment No. 79 raises the same issue as has been raised by my noble friend Lord Greaves; that is, the leader changing the cabinet. Forty-one per cent of councils that operate the leader-and-cabinet model do so as a matter of choice. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said that that model is used in Kensington and Chelsea. However, 59 per cent of authorities that operate that model have decided that the council should choose the member of the executive. The Minister explained when addressing previous amendments how councils which have moved to the leader-and-cabinet model have improved their performance. If they have improved their performance under a system where the council chooses the cabinet, why does she feel the need to force the majority of councils to change the way in which they operate? There are two potentially unwelcome outcomes. First, in councils in which one group is politically dominant, there is a danger that the loyalty and focus of the Executive will be to the leader as an individual and not to the council as a whole—to their colleagues and their group—because the blunt truth is that they will owe their jobs to the leader and not the council as a whole. That will have a quite a marked effect on the dynamics of the council. More significantly, I am concerned about the situation in which councils are in no overall control. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, spoke about the will of the people. In many areas the will of the people is that no one party controls a local authority. When a council is in no overall control, it has to be pragmatic about how it finds a way to move the council forward. That may mean all sorts of devices must be used, such as shared leadership or one party being leader for one year and another party taking the leadership for another year. A whole variety of models is in place. The difficulty is, when no one has overall control and two political parties are working together, a leader of one party will appoint members of another party to the Cabinet, which is politically unacceptable. In the councils that I know, that would be, in presentational terms, impossible to justify. However councils have got round it in the past has been a matter for local choice—and this measure will rob them of that. A similar issue arises on four-year terms, which is the subject of my noble friend’s other amendment. I support him very strongly in this because, again, in councils with no overall control it is very unlikely that a minority party in joint administration will put another party leader in place for four years. The result of that may very well be that more councils will be run by minority control, which would be much less stable and would work against the strong leadership that the Minister seeks to achieve. My Amendment No. 130 deals with new Section 44C and the removal of a leader. The two new subsections make provision for a local authority to remove the executive leader by resolution but do not refer to resignation and what happens should a leader resign. Finally, my Amendment No. 245 is a tidying-up amendment, removing Schedule 5, which refers to the transitional arrangements for a move to new models. If the other amendments were passed, Schedule 5 would have to go too.