Lord Bichard (CB)

My Lords, I rise to speak on cue to my Amendment 182, declare an interest as an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association and thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for supporting my amendment. I welcome the Government’s amendment to establish overview and scrutiny committees. Why then have I persisted in my amendment for what I have called local public accounts committees? It is because the overview and scrutiny committees will focus only on scrutinising strategic authorities. I believe that we need to extend the focus of scrutiny from a single institution—the strategic authority—to the wider scrutiny of the place. The crucial difference between my amendment and the Government’s proposal is that my scrutiny committee would have the power to report not just on strategic authorities but on how effectively all local public service partners were collaborating in a place for the benefit of the public and the wider community. Why is this so important? I will not go through the points that I made at length in Committee, but over the last four decades our public services have become increasingly fragmented, with the establishment of a myriad of disconnected, sometimes single-purpose agencies whose objectives and targets have on occasions overlapped and even conflicted. As we all know, those agencies have worked too often in silos. As a result, the public have struggled to access or even make sense of the disjointed services that are on offer. Money has been wasted because the silos do not work together to deliver the best value for money. At worst, people, sometimes children, have died because data and intelligence were not shared quickly enough to protect them. In many places public service partners have worked very hard to break down these silos, but that is not uniformly the case. The prevailing culture in our public services has too often been one of competition rather than collaboration. I am convinced that for that to change we need in every local area a body with the power to scrutinise and report on how all public sector partners co-operate or do not co-operate for the good of citizens. If instead we establish overview and scrutiny and scrutiny committees which address only the performance of a single institution, we will reinforce the silo-based mentality that we have created for another generation—all for the want of adding a simple power for the overview and scrutiny committees to report on how the wider system is working. If we do give those committees that additional power, we will also demonstrate that in a devolved system, accountability does not always have to be to the centre. Accountability can be local, should be local and can be done more effectively if it is. Extended scrutiny committees and local Public Accounts Committees of this sort would be very visible. They could involve local business communities and the voluntary sector, perhaps with an independent chair. They would become a very visible local body. I promoted this idea when I was chief executive of Gloucestershire County Council. Your Lordships must suspend your disbelief—that was in the 1980s. Therefore, I was delighted when the English devolution White Paper committed government to explore the local public accounts committee model. The problem is that this Bill and the Government’s amendment do not follow that through. However, my conversations with the Minister since Committee—which I am grateful that she was prepared to be involved in—suggest that she remains supportive of the concept but wants to see more policy development and more stakeholder consultation before progressing further. I understand that. If the Minister can confirm this from the Dispatch Box tonight, that will take us quite a long way further forward and I will not press this to a vote. If, for example, we could set up a working party to produce a fully formed proposal for local public accounts committees, we would have taken a big, decisive step in changing the very culture of our local public services—from competition to collaboration.