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Assistance to Communities

I have mentioned Gift Aid, but there are specific considerations relating to making the process easier. The most important point is that there needs to be a serious step back. We need to consider what has happened over the last 20 years as a result of increasing regulation and bureaucracy. We need to look at it in the round, because it is complex, and much of that stuff is there for a reason. There has been some progress in reducing the time associated with making CRB applications, but there is a lot of frustration about the need for multiple applications. There is a desire for things such as a passporting scheme to be considered. However, I want to talk about making things easier, the relationship between the state and the organisations, which want to step up and help to deliver services, and the frustrations that those organisations face. The report is interesting because of the themes that it brings up. It illustrates some things that seem to be going wrong, and it is frank about some of the difficulties that the Government face—government is hard. There is clearly a lot of effort on giving clearer guidance to local authority commissioners about things such as EU procurement laws and all the excuses that can be used. The Department is clear that there is still a serious problem at grassroots level. The guidance is still not clear enough and there is a big problem with helping commissioners to differentiate between value and cost. If that argument is won, there is a need to help with the measurement of value. The Minister knows that there is a lot of debate about measuring value, but the simple point is that finding money, whether public or private, will be more demanding when we want to measure value and impacts. The Government can play a role by working with the sector to find mechanisms to help commissioners to identify and quantify impact and value, and that will help in an environment in which the natural human tendency will always be driven by cost. If we believe that there is a distinction between value and cost, the people who are trying to make the process work will need some help from us. Another theme that comes through in the report is the difficulty of spreading best practice. Some local authorities and commissioners are doing that well. The Compact works well in Merton, which I am sure the Minister and others have visited. There are local authorities that are very clear, nimble, flexible and agile in their dealing with EU procurement law, such as Hampshire and Westminster, which have been cited. We always talk about spreading best practice—it is one of the clichés of the political narrative—but why is it so hard in practice? The report talks about using regional improvement and efficiency partnerships, but I am sceptical about that idea, because another regional layer would be introduced and that would add to the confusion. We already have the Local Government Association, the Improvement and Development Agency and lots of people trying to help but, collectively, they are not making an impact, so that needs some thought. On the commissioning process and the difficulty of accessing public money, we need to revisit all the things that flow from that, such as reporting, monitoring and accountability. The example that sticks in my mind is of a gentleman who represented a community group in Dorset standing up at a conference, waving a document at me and saying, "I applied for a contract of just a few thousand pounds from my local authority, and I'm having to fill in a 28-page contract. This is bonkers." More dramatically, a social entrepreneur told me that he had received £500,000 from a private sector grant-making organisation on the basis of four agreed desired outcomes. One piece of paper framed that entire relationship. He then got £1 million, which is a lot of money, from a Government Department, but he told me that he wished that he had not, because of what happened next. That Department hired an agency as an intermediary to manage the relationship, and the agency came in and checked his diary, e-mails and phone logs to see what he was doing. The message that I get, and I am sure the Minister has picked up on this as well, is that our message to the sector is wrong. On the one hand, we say that we love its creativity and powers of innovation but, on the other hand, what we put it through with the contracting and commissioning process sends the message, "We don't trust you." The focus in the House has to be on what we can do to reduce bureaucracy and the flurry of activity in the name of accountability, and how we can introduce more trust into the process of commissioning and procurement. My last point in that context is about more effective checks and balances in the system. The Compact is clearly very useful, but it is undermined by the fact that it can be ignored with impunity. It is time to get serious about giving the commission a clearer role and recognised authority. Greater transparency, about which we feel strongly, is another important tool in the box. There should be transparency about public money and the terms and values of contracts and grants. That is why our commitment to publish details of all public expenditure over £25,000 will be an important catalyst for driving better processes. Transparency, as we know in the House to our cost, can be a powerful force for change.