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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 192ZA: 192ZA: Clause 125, page 83, line 8, at end insert ““and”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I wish to speak also to Amendments Nos. 192A to 192E. Amendment No. 192A is a probing amendment to seek further clarification on aspects of the community call for action. Amendments Nos. 192B to 192E would provide for a single community call for action—CCfA—process for all local issues by including crime and disorder matters in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill process and would remove the Secretary of State's discretion to exclude matters from the CCfA process. Despite the growing opportunities for participation through increased empowerment in both national and local government, recent research suggests that people are beginning to feel disconnected from matters in the public realm. As we have discussed many times, this has been seen in falling turnout and reduced trust in political structures. The community call for action could therefore be used as a valuable method of ensuring that communities could ask questions and hold local authority and other decision-makers to account. Yet the Bill’s proposals for community call for action indicate that local people and groups can request a CCfA only with a ward councillor. Amendments Nos. 192B to 192E deal with the specific problem of having a separate crime and disorder procedure; in other words, not allowing crime and disorder to be tackled via a community call for action. In Committee, the noble Baroness argued that there were important differences between community safety issues and other matters which necessitated a separate community call for action procedure. However, as we discussed then, crime and disorder is one of the matters which most concern residents and this is all the more reason to bring it under the community call for action procedure in the Bill and not have it as a separate procedure in the Police and Justice Act. Furthermore, this separate process for crime and disorder running alongside the procedure in this Bill runs the risk of being unnecessarily difficult to operate in practice and of causing a great deal of confusion to local people, who see everyday policing matters as something to do with local authorities even when they may not be. Our debate in Committee also highlighted that a unified CCfA process would enable crime and disorder problems to be tackled alongside the underlying socio-economic factors that cause them using a single approach. The Police and Justice Act process enables a member of the public to appeal to the council executive if a councillor declines to refer a matter to an overview and scrutiny committee whatever the councillor's reasons for doing so and whether or not he or she has dealt with the matter in some other way. This clearly gives greater licence for vexatious appeals. I should be grateful if the Minister will take note of our anxiety—I think and hope that she will do so—about having these two separate functions within two separate aspects of legislation when they should be dealt with together. I hope that she will give us good news on that. I beg to move.