Lord Bichard (CB)

My Lords, my Amendment 309 in this group seeks to impose a duty to co-operate on local public service partners. I again thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for adding his name in support. I will not repeat at length the arguments I rehearsed in Committee in support of the amendment, many of which are equally relevant to my Amendment 182, which we debated on Tuesday. Suffice it to say that the recent fragmentation of our public services has resulted in disjointed services that do not align with the perceived needs of ordinary citizens, in wasted resources and in a damaging culture of competition rather than collaboration between providers. Ordinary folk just want to see collaboration and partnership working to improve the quality of the services they receive. Many attempts have been made to address this problem. Noble Lords will recall initiatives such as the joining up central government initiative—a work in progress—health and well-being boards, integrated care boards and the troubled families programme. In all honesty, none of these has resolved the problem. Perhaps only Total Place, in which I played a part, was enthusiastically embraced by all sectors. The Bill takes a different approach and includes a provision for strategic authorities to convene meetings that partners will be required to attend, but I am really not convinced that the power to convene meetings will resolve the deep-seated problems that have beset multi-agency working. To succeed, we need to be more radical. Rather than setting up yet more working groups, liaison committees and joint boards, we should attack the problem at its root and place on public sector agencies a duty to co-operate with the strategic authority, principal councils and each other when they are formulating policies and plans or delivering services. If such a duty were imposed, the responsibility for ensuring that it was met would rest with the agencies themselves, which is exactly where it should be. There is nothing new in this proposal. After all, the public sector equality duty places a duty on public authorities to consider how their policies or decisions affect people who are protected under the Equality Act. Under the Children Act 2004, a local authority must co-operate with relevant partners, bodies and individuals to improve the well-being of children in the local authority’s care. In doing so, it must consider the role of parents and others who play a part in caring for children. So there is no reason why an overarching duty to collaborate should be difficult, and the advantages of it are immense—I think it would be a complete game-changer. For a start, it would send a very clear and necessary message that this Government expect to see collaboration between agencies, not competition. It would change the culture of our public sector entirely. It would show that the primary driver of public services must be to meet the needs of clients, citizens, customers or whatever you want to call them, not to serve for their own convenience or to enhance their own profile. This amendment is supported by the Local Government Association, and I am given to understand that the Minister and the Secretary of State want to explore it further. I entirely understand that: there is probably more policy development to do, and there is a need to consult all the players in this sector. That is why I will not push this to a vote, although there is probably a majority in this House in support of the proposal. At the end of the day, this is a decision not for the providers themselves, some of which may find this inconvenient, but for the Government, to decide what kind of local public service they need. I think they need this duty.