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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

My Lords, I speak in support of the spirit of the amendments. I have been a long-time advocate of the fact that local government can do much better many of the local administration tasks currently performed by central Government. On the first day of Report, the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, evoked French local government as a wonderful model. I am glad to see the Opposition Front Bench putting that into practice, as this is something that happens in French local authorities. The advantages are many-fold. In addition to what the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, said about how local authorities can tackle worklessness and deprivation, we know that it is often intergenerational. People are on benefits; and their children and grandchildren get on benefits. We could begin to tackle this in a much more coherent way than is currently done by the agencies. There would be greater public contact with the town hall. People will go there and understand what local government is about. One of the things one notices in France is how people going about their ordinary business have to go regularly to the town hall. We do not want to repeat the number of forms that you have to get in France, but it is quite a good system that involves people. As the noble Baroness said, local authorities already administer important national benefits, such as housing benefits and council tax benefits. We could avoid much of the duplication; we are collecting the same information twice. We could do it more effectively. The noble Baroness mentioned that we could target people who are missing out on benefits. I am convinced that we could do it more efficiently in the light of the Gershon savings. I noted more targets announced last week by the Chancellor. We need to think about those things which are in one sense radical but could improve the service and achieve efficiency savings. I know that the Department for Work and Pensions has conducted studies on whether some of the administration could transfer to local authorities. I hope that in response my noble friend can give us encouragement that the Government will seriously consider this.