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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

The hon. Gentleman is right: I do have some issues that I want to raise. We rehearsed them quite thoroughly in Committee. The Minister's predecessor gave us some assurances about how he hoped things would turn out. It is good to see that some of the things that in Committee he undertook to do have materialised, but some quite serious issues are still not sorted out. I welcome the fact that the phraseology in the Bill is now more transparent, but I am not sure whether in making it transparent the Government have entirely responded to all the points that are outstanding. I want to deal first with what in Committee was called the overcoat clause. When is a councillor a councillor and when are they taking part in their private life? I understand that the turning point in the High Court case against the Mayor involved the distinction that, as he had his coat on and was outside the door, he was in the clear, whereas if he had been in the lobby without his coat on, he would not have been in the clear. One can argue about that interpretation, but it has led to the introduction of the concept of whether someone is wearing their overcoat determining that they are on duty or on private business. I welcome the fact that the phraseology now narrows the provisions, so that only those things that are criminal offences when someone has their overcoat on will come to light. I mentioned smoking. I do not smoke, so it is not a problem for me, but it would be a brave Member of the House who said that they had not done anything in even the past six months that, had they been in the wrong place at the wrong time, might have resulted in their being charged. Let us take speeding as an example of that. Although we have superficially restricted what can happen to people when they have got their overcoat on, the fact is that most local government councillors could be sent to the Standards Board for at least one thing every month. Therefore, the changes do not necessarily restrict things as much as the Minister would hold out. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will respond positively to what the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) has said about putting on record the Government's intentions on how the code should be drafted and, more importantly, how it should be applied. It emerged clearly during earlier stages of the Bill that the content of the code was only part of the problem, and that another part was how the code should be interpreted. The reality at local government level is that monitoring officers on local authorities give members advice, and that cautious members go to those officers and say, ““I think this is all right, but do you think it really is?”” Almost without exception, the monitoring officer will say, ““No, it isn't.”” They employ the insurance principle: if someone asks whether it is safe to do something, the best thing to do is to say no. We have consequently seen a progressive shrinking of the amount of discretion that local authority members have over their conduct, and increasing conservatism—with a small c—about how the code should be implemented. That has undermined the credibility of the code and of the Standards Board. It would be good to feel that the provisions that we are considering would reverse that and restore the credibility of the board, but it will take some talking by the Minister to persuade me that we have achieved that. So far, I have been talking about matters that relate to the overcoat issue: to what degree is a local councillor at risk when they have their overcoat on? However, there are also important questions relating to what they may and may not do when they are not wearing their overcoat—that is, when they are acting as a local government councillor. On Report, I drew attention to the fact that the Government intend, via other legislation, to give local communities more say in the planning process. That is quite explicit in their planning White Paper and I understand that it will be reflected in the legislation to follow. There will be a requirement specifically to solicit the views of local communities; developers will apparently have a duty placed on them to solicit views in that way. If we are not careful, we could find ourselves in the absurd position in which everyone could take part in a consultation on a projected planning application except elected local councillors. The present interpretation of the code is that local councillors may not participate, advocate or campaign in respect of any planning application that has been submitted to their authority. Of course, there are various elaborate charades that people can go through to get round that, but when I served on a planning committee 20 years ago, it was not seen as out of place for a local councillor to say, ““I am opposed to this, and I shall go to the committee to say so””, or for them to go to the committee, or for them to vote against an application. Nowadays, a councillor would go to prison for doing that. That is an absurd situation for local authority representatives to find themselves in.