---

Local Authorities (Overview and Scrutiny) Bill

The Opposition very much appreciate the Bill's intention, which is to give councils much greater powers to scrutinise local public services. We all recognise that the delivery of those local public services has changed over time, and a variety of providers not just in the private sector but increasingly in the third sector now provide essential public services for local communities throughout the country. A local authority's scrutiny functions are therefore a vital tool in promoting accountability and ensuring transparency in local decision making, and that allows local communities to become involved in the decisions that affect their daily lives. Given the importance of the powers that the Bill confers, and the Government's previous commitments to introduce them, we are slightly concerned that the actual legislation before us is a private Member's Bill. It appears to all intents and purposes to be a Government Bill. Having said that, I turn to the broad sweep of the Bill, the intention behind which we support. We have some concerns about the wording of certain clauses, and before the Bill goes into Committee we would like to flag up those concerns so that Ministers and the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) take them on board and we have a more constructive debate in Committee. Overview and scrutiny committees perform an important function, reviewing policy and performance and holding local public service providers to account. Currently, those committees have the power to require information from a range of organisations including councils, NHS bodies, law and order bodies and partner authorities that are involved in local area agreements. The committees can also summon representatives of most of those bodies to appear before them, and they can require such officials to respond to reports and recommendations that have been issued to them. However, that does not happen with all bodies—for example, partners that are involved in delivering local area agreement objectives. Indeed, many other local bodies are not required to submit to the same level of scrutiny by local authorities, so their voluntary participation in scrutiny is not guaranteed. There is a growing recognition that overview and scrutiny committees need to have powers over a wider range of external organisations as they become more involved in local public services, and that councils should provide sufficient resources and support to those committees so that they can undertake more scrutiny. The Bill seeks to address a number of issues, and we welcome its intention to increase local scrutiny powers. However, I want to flag up a number of concerns about how the Bill, as currently worded, will work in practice, so that in Committee we can have a proper debate about the range of challenges that the Bill poses. I shall quickly go through the Bill, clause by clause. One of the most important measures in the Bill is the power to scrutinise a "designated person or authority", and there are questions about how that designation will be defined. It would therefore be helpful if the Minister could either set out his views on the organisations that could come under the Bill's designation or state whether he intends to publish a draft list of such bodies. That would be helpful, because many Members would then have a better idea of the Bill's sweep. The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) rightly raised not concern but his interest in understanding how broad the designation will be, because clause 1 is vague. Subsection (2) defines a matter "'of local concern'", but it does so relatively, stating:""A matter is 'of local concern' in relation to a local authority only if it affects the authority's area or the inhabitants of that area to a greater degree than it affects the areas of other local authorities or the inhabitants of other such areas."" I am not clear about how that definition will work in practice, or about whether we actually want that provision.