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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 30: 30: Clause 76, page 55, line 35, after ““appoint”” insert ““not more than the specified number of”” The noble Baroness said: My Lords, on Amendments Nos. 30 to 32, I return to the question of appointed parish councillors. Noble Lords will recall that we on these Benches have considerable concerns about this Bill introducing into local government a new category of councillors: appointed councillors. From the start, we need to emphasise that town councils, including parish councils, are a tier of local government and should not be treated as subordinate or lower quality in any way. We therefore need to take any provisions applying to them very seriously indeed. The National Association of Local Councils does not support this measure. It has said that, while it will work with the Government to make it work, it does not particularly approve of it. I imagine that the national association recognises that it is important in localities that the local council enjoys the moral support of the community it serves. The problem is that it is often not just important to be completely above board, but to be seen to be so. The problem with the appointment process is that there is always a danger that it will be said in local areas that particular individuals were appointed because of who they know or because they already had friends on the council. It is going to be difficult, both for them as individuals and the for the parish council as an entity, to deal with this new category of appointed councillors. There have been some inconsistencies in remarks from the government Benches. Like my noble friend Lord Greaves, I have been re-reading Hansard. First, through the debates in Committee and on Report, I am still unable to get any sense of who wanted this provision—who has requested it—and what its genesis is. It does not appear to have come from the National Association of Local Councils. Local councils are currently able to use co-option, which is done fairly frequently in areas where, for example, insufficient people put themselves forward after a set of elections; sometimes members are co-opted to make up the numbers. The principle of co-option is well understood, but it is not clear why this new category has appeared. In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, said: "““we should make the difference clearer between those who are elected and those who are not””.—[Official Report, 11/7/07; col. 1480.]" We currently have co-opted and elected. The Bill introduces a third category, and I fail to see how the noble Baroness can claim that introducing one makes it clearer to anyone. I have repeatedly asked the Government to explain what an appointed councillor will be able to do that a co-opted councillor will not. The answer I have had is that appointment will be for those who are not eligible for co-option; the one example has been for under-18-year-olds, who can be appointed to a council. I am sure that that is very well and good, although it will be interesting to see how many are in fact appointed to parish councils in a year or two’s time. Beyond that, the Government have not been able to give any examples of the sort of people who could come forward for appointment and not co-option. I am concerned about, for example, whether people will still have to be resident in the area or whether they could be drafted in from some distance outside. There is another inconsistency because, although it is not in the Bill, we have been led to understand that one of the criteria by which a parish council will be judged good enough for quality parish status will be the health of its governance arrangements. Again, it is difficult to get a sense of good governance arrangements and mandate if a number of the councillors are going to be appointed. We do not know how many people will be allowed to be appointed onto a parish council. In Committee, my noble friend Lord Greaves asked the Minister whether it is going to be a third. The Minister said that the Government imagined something rather less than a third. The point is that we do not know because it is not in the Bill and is left to regulation. Despite the clearly stated reservations of the delegated powers sub-committee, the negative procedure will be used when the secondary legislation comes through. That means very low level parliamentary scrutiny of the details of the Bill. We on these Benches feel that it would be better to have in the Bill at least the modest provision that the number of appointed councillors will always remain very small. I beg to move.