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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, this is a slightly surreal point given the circumstances. I am not entirely certain that I will be able to give the noble Baroness a huge amount of detail on the precise point that she has raised. I may end up writing to her about this. However, I will run through the impact of the amendments. Essentially, Amendment No. 121 would allow the leader of a directly elected executive to remove members of the executive before the end of their four-year term. Amendment No. 122 would ensure that any member of an executive who was removed from office would be unable to claim compensation. We understand that the noble Baroness is seeking to make modifications to the directly elected executive model. We have listened carefully to the comments. On Report in another place, we tabled amendments to clarify the provisions following concerns raised by the Liberal Democrats in Committee. This set of amendments would undermine some fundamental principles. The directly elected executive allows the electors of an area to vote for a slate of members. All members who appear on a slate will have a direct mandate from the electors to serve a four-year term. On those grounds, we do not believe in principle that a member of an elected executive should have their term of office cut short. They have been elected. That is the whole point. The leader will be responsible for ensuring that the members of the slate are all people with whom he can work. The dire prediction made by the noble Baroness about falling out with someone and then keeping them in post with nothing to do is rather far-fetched. Where disagreements arise, the executive would have to resolve them and concentrate on delivering a high standard of public services for the area. If it was unable to do that, obviously that would be something on which the electorate would reflect. An option would be for the elected executive member to resign if they felt that they could no longer work with other members. My main point is that they have a direct mandate from the electorate. We cannot conceive of a situation in which anyone other than the electorate should remove them from office. The noble Baroness extrapolates from that a possible constructive dismissal. I simply do not know enough about employment law to say anything on that. I appreciate that she may well have given me prior warning of this, but I cannot say anything more at the moment. I will have to write to her on that point.