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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Baronesses for their comments and to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, for moving the amendment. We welcome him back. We missed him on Monday. He would have enjoyed the debates we had then, particularly that on a referendum. It is good to see him in his place. I realise that he has made a heroic effort to be here and we hope that he will be well enough to be present throughout our discussions on the Bill. I fear that in some ways the case I have made has been somewhat parodied. As I tried to explain on the previous amendment, I do not believe for one moment that leadership is the opposite of democracy or that democracy is in any sense a nuisance. After many years of an evolutionary system of local government, we are trying to equip it with a sharper set of tools which will allow it to facilitate people to work together in leadership teams but with leaders who have the autonomy and scope to do what is necessary. We are facing challenges that 10 years ago we could not have put a name to. The obvious one is climate change. There is a dramatic need to take tough decisions on where and how we build or how we organise our waste disposal. These decisions do not mean that ordinary members of a council have no view or no value—far from it—but ultimately it now behoves us to organise our arrangements so that we have stronger leadership. That is all that the Bill is leading to, but as I keep saying, it certainly does not diminish the notion of co-operation, debate and discussion throughout the range of activities that a council has to continue to do. Amendments Nos. 78 and 79 would remove the requirement that the leader must appoint the Cabinet and would instead provide for the full council to appoint all the members of the executive. In the same vein, Amendment No. 83 would ensure that responsibility for executive functions remained with the whole executive rather than being vested solely in the leader. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, asked why we think that this is an important move. I turn again to the evidence, which applies to some of the other amendments too, particularly Amendment No. 245, which is rather a general amendment. I have referred to the evidence before. It demonstrates that councils operating executive arrangements, which allowed leaders to take decisions themselves and appoint and allocate portfolios to their Cabinet, gained higher CPA scores in the three years between 2003 and 2006. It clearly shows that there was a positive and statistically significant relationship between the proportion of citizens who were satisfied with council performance and the number of executive freedoms, which included selecting members of the Cabinet. That was already the case for the mayoral models. All we are proposing is to place all leaders on the same footing, including indirectly elected executives and the strengthened leader and Cabinet model. The noble Baroness suggests that somehow loyalty will switch from the council to the leader in that situation. However, the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, who speaks from great experience—she spoke in Committee and again today—said that it was important for the leader to have confidence in his or her executive team. She spoke about the advantages that the model brings in being able to say to your colleagues, ““I would like you to be part and parcel of my team. You have the skills that we need to deal with this particular set of challenges and circumstances””. I heard nothing to suggest that that loyalty to the leader does not mean that there is an equal loyalty to the performance of the council. There is a vested interest in seeing the council succeed. That is why one stands for election. One does not stand in order to fail, either personally or as a member of a council. It seems to me that if we set up these straw dogs or straw animals, we are creating problems which do not exist and we are saying to councils, ““You may do this but it comes with an awful lot of problems attached””. One thing that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said, which I was struck by and will take away and think about, is that councils do not know about some of the Bill’s implications for them. I can see noble Lords nodding. That is a serious point, and if the House will allow I will go back and discuss how we can address that problem. I do not want to make a meal of this. Those are the reasons why we feel that enabling the leader now to appoint that Cabinet, to strengthen the collective position of the Cabinet in that way, to demonstrate clear leadership and clear accountability, is important. Amendments Nos. 128 and 129 are on the presumption of a four-year term. I take the point that this is an issue in councils of no overall control. I hope that I can give some reassurance, because it may not have been entirely clear in our previous discussions. We have made a presumption, which is clear in the White Paper, that it is obviously a four-year term for directly-elected executives. It is also clear in the White Paper that this is a presumption of a four-year term to enable better leadership. As I said in Committee, it is not simply our view that a four-year term brings stability. It is shared by the Local Government Association which, in its Closer to People and Places report, called for, "““the appointment of a leader for the full term of the council … to encourage development and succession, but also the clear expectation that personal accountability means just that in the event of serious underperformance””." It is important that we are talking about a presumption. We recognise that there will be circumstances where it will be appropriate that the term will be shorter than four years. For example, where a council has partial council elections and a member is elected leader who only has two years before their term as councillor ends, then their term as leader will be two years. Equally—this is where it is important to consider the NOC councils—we recognise that it is only democratic for a council to be able to provide in its constitution for whatever arrangements it thinks are locally right for ending a leader’s term of office within the four years. A council may decide and provide for this by specifying a vote of no confidence. However, a council might wish to include in its constitution a range of other circumstances where a council may vote to end the term of the leader, as it does now. I point noble Lords in the direction of several councils that have made specific arrangements in their constitutions for specific circumstances arising, and I will send noble Lords a note on that if they like. In a situation of no overall control, it could be open to a council to make some expression of that in its constitution when control changes. So let me say again that there will be nothing that imposes a four-year term on indirectly elected leaders. We are talking about a presumption in the constitution. It will be open to a council to provide for the council, if it so votes, to end a leader’s term of office, and the constitution may specify the circumstances in which the vote may be put. That allows for a certain degree of freedom. The White Paper clearly states in paragraph 3.23: "““It will continue to be for councils to decide, through their constitutions, under what circumstances the leader might be removed during the 4 year term””." New Section 44C provides for the removal of a leader in a new-style leader and Cabinet model. We considered over the summer, in response to the debates that we had in Committee, whether we should make it compulsory for local authorities to have a process for a vote of no confidence in the constitution. However, we shied away from that because we did not want to prescribe on matters of detail. We thought that this was the sort of thing that was best left to local authorities. Local authorities will still be able to include in their constitutions provisions to apply in the case of a vote of no confidence, or a change of political control. Indeed, we know of several councils that have provisions for that circumstance. I hope that on those grounds noble Lords can take some reassurance from what I have said in relation to the circumstances that they have described of instability and the sort of perverse consequences that might arise. Amendments Nos. 130 and 131 concern the procedure where a leader is removed during their four-year term. These are matters of detail which will be addressed through regulations dealing with vacancies in the office of executive leader, including those resulting from resignation, under new Section 44H. This mirrors the approach we have taken previously to making provision for mayoral vacancies. We do not believe it is appropriate to put that degree of detail in the Bill and I hope that noble Lords will agree that that is sensible. I have addressed most of the amendments. Amendment No. 245 would ensure that councils operating the current leader and Cabinet model would not be required to move to the strengthened model. Therefore, it is implicit from what I have been saying that it would be difficult to accept that amendment. I hope I have been able to give noble Lords a degree of assurance on both issues raised by the amendments.