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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I was not going to speak to the amendment but was encouraged to do so by the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh. We thrashed out the details of the amendment in Committee, so I will not go through that again. The noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, said that the present system has not been going very long. It has been going seven years, which is a long time by modern standards. In the old days, things went on for 30 or 40 years; now, with the sort of Maoist revolutionary ethos we have about the place, everything has to be reformed every two years. The only thing that has survived in reasonable form so far has been the House of Lords. Perhaps it is next in line. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Graham. Some of our concerns over the Bill are that the Government is again messing about too soon with structures which have only really been operating effectively for perhaps four to six years. They are still bedding down, and people are still finding out how to work them—particularly things like overview and scrutiny. The reason I want to comment on what the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, said comes back to something I say from time to time: even with all the detailed, top-down centralised control the Government try to impose on local authorities nowadays, they are still diverse and different. It is not just the diversity between a great, far-flung county like North Yorkshire and a little shire district in Lancashire, or big cities like Manchester and Birmingham; it is diversity between what, on the face of it, look like quite similar authorities. How the executive system works is also diverse. Some councils have quite small executives, others have 10 members on theirs. There is not much relationship between how many people are on the executive, the type of council or the extent of their powers; it is to do with how that council wants to run its own affairs. There are councils where a large amount of decision making is devolved to individual members of the executive, so the executive member for—I was going to say education, but it is probably ““children’s services”” nowadays—actually takes a huge number of decisions personally. That seems to be the system, for example, in Lancashire County Council. There are councils where no powers are devolved to individual members of the executive—although they will have portfolios and get heavily involved—and the decisions are taken collectively by the executive. There are councils where executive members are all virtually full time; in fact, some of them I know are far more than full time, spending their entire lives on it. There are other councils where executive members are still traditional part-time councillors, who do their council work in their spare time. I do not know what the executive allowances are in Wigan, and had probably better not inquire. In my council, in Pendle, we have an executive of 10 but the allowances are very small indeed. All those 10 people have got valuable jobs to do. It is all a question of how you work it out, divide it up and organise it. I would argue strongly for councils to be able to do it in as diverse a way as possible, according to what they think is best for their circumstances. If we had the ability, we would increase the size of our executive because we would give non-portfolio positions to the leaders of at least two of the opposition parties. They would want that, because we want them to discuss things with us because we think that discussing things in an open executive with the press there is a good way of thrashing out the issues and coming to decisions. Other councils would not want to do that at all. But, unless they are actually members of the executive, with that status, they will not come. I am really arguing along wider lines than my noble friend: let us have more diversity and more ability on the part of councils to do their own thing. It is only through diversity that you find out what works. If everybody does the same thing, you find out whether it works, but not whether all the other ways of doing it work. That is the practical argument in favour of diversity. I speak in favour of my noble friend’s amendment, and counsel the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, to accept that the world is not all the same as Wigan.