National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 7th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not detain the House for very long. In moving the amendment in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Stevenson and the noble Lord, Lord Maude, I want to put on record my appreciation and thanks to the Minister for his considerable courtesy and his preparedness to listen and have a dialogue with his own ministerial colleagues in relation to this and other amendments today. In passing, although this is not a gripe against the Minister in any way, it is unfortunate that his noble friends who are responsible for business have not heard of something called the “dinner break”, which neither is a dinner break nor allows people to have dinner.

I shall try to set an example and be brief because we debated this at Second Reading and we debated the issues at length in Committee. There was considerable consensus that it would be right to allow the Government to have a nominee, which would fulfil the objectives that the Government laid out in relation to the remuneration to be offered to staff working on the National Citizen Service and, subsequently—I agree with this—on the audit and risk committee in relation to avoiding the misuse of substantial sums of public money. It is in that spirit that I move the amendment. Again, I recognise the care with which the Government, in the form of the Minister, have been prepared to respond to this and to my noble friends on other amendments on the Marshalled List today. This would mean a fair, open and merit-based competition for non-executives and the ability of the Government to get their own way in terms of having a nominee on the committees of the NCS, but would not place the National Citizen Service in the erroneous position of being seen by families, young people and providers as presenting a government scheme determined, directed and therefore shaped by the Government, rather than the actual position of the NCS.

In the debate on Monday on the size, shape and nature of this House the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said that it was at its best when dealing with—I paraphrase—non-controversial legislation. I hope that I will be able to say on Third Reading that the House has been at its best in shaping this non-controversial legislation in the interests not of the Government or Opposition, but of young people. I beg to move.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly in support of the amendment, to which I have added my name. Its purpose is to encourage the Government to bring forward some firm plans on how to address some of the points raised in Committee by the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Maude, and others, who were firmly of the view that the Government had got it slightly wrong in terms of its overall structure—so much so that it would put people off from joining the NCS, which would be a bad thing. I hope to hear proposals from the Minister that might resolve that problem.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Lord Ashton of Hyde) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the kind words of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for his brief remarks. I am thankful to both of them for making themselves available for meetings to discuss this, and I think we can agree a way forward.

We must, I believe, strike a balance. On the one hand we agree that we must give the organisation all the independence we can. It needs freedom to innovate, maintain its strong brand among young people and forge its own path. Young people must not feel the NCS is something that government does to them; they must want to go on it. At the same time, the Government have a duty to protect public money. Unsatisfactory or wasteful use of public money could kill the programme as surely as too close an association with the Government.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, made a helpful suggestion in Committee for how we might strike this balance. He suggests that we do not have a government representative on the board but that a government representative is involved where appropriate and necessary for the Government to exercise oversight.

The provisions on the government representative are in the charter, so I can commit to amending article 5 to remove the requirement for a government representative on the board. All board members will be appointed through a transparent and open process in line with OCPA procedures. Article 8 of the charter will retain the existing provision for a government representative on the remuneration committee of the organisation. As article 5 will no longer include the government representative, article 8 will be amended to state that the government representative is to be appointed by the Secretary of State in consultation with the chair. The government representative will have to approve the pay policy—not individual awards—of the trust, as included in the current draft. A sponsoring department always needs to have the ability to approve pay policy, in accordance with Managing Public Money.

We will also add an additional article to the charter. This will specify that there must be an audit and risk committee and that there must be a government representative on that committee. We want to be ambitious for the NCS and this necessarily means that the trust will handle a significant amount of public money. To fulfil its responsibilities towards public money, the Government need to be satisfied that the right procedures to manage that money are in place. We must also ensure that all board appointments meet the high standards expected of public appointees. The Prime Minister is responsible for recommending appointments to the Queen, and the Secretary of State will ensure an appropriate level of government involvement in the recruitment process, including government representation on recruitment panels for board members, in line with the code of practice for ministerial appointments to public bodies.

Together these measures will ensure sufficient government oversight, while allowing the NCS the freedom to have an independent board to lead the organisation. I hope that, with these commitments to amend the royal charter, the noble Lord will withdraw the amendment.

National Citizen Service Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Blunkett and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 22nd November 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I have no amendments in this group, so I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for speaking briefly. It is unarguable that we should have the maximum transparency for the new body and sensible measures of comparability. We should be able to take account of value for money and impact, although those are two separate things: value for money is crucial in the wise use of public expenditure, whereas impact—this is why the longitudinal study is so important —is what happens down the line. I just caution the voluntary sector to be careful what it wishes for in terms of other organisations receiving varying amounts of public funding while requiring for others what they might find difficult for themselves.

To put that in context, in the last Parliament I was asked and was happy to be the transitional first chair of Youth United, which sought to bring together the uniformed organisations to increase impact in areas of deprivation. The need to do that, pressed by His Royal Highness Prince Charles, was that, on the whole, those areas of great deprivation were not covered in the same way and the impact was not as great as would be expected or desired. Some of the money that went in came from the LIBOR fines. When those fines are levied, they become public expenditure, albeit, as we might describe it, as “the Chancellor’s slush fund”, where there is as little transparency and openness as I have ever come across, in bidding processes or in acknowledgement of what has happened to the money down the line.

I just counsel that we build in the necessary requirements to ensure that money is used extremely wisely and we do not, to use the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, go down the road of Kids Company. We need to be clear what we expect of the outcomes. As I tried to say on Second Reading, that is not just about numerical targets; it is about outcome measures as to how the impact is held on to, in terms of those young people—where they have come from, where they go to and their participation post the NCS experience. I just repeat: for big and small organisations alike, be careful what you wish for.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, those are wise words and they will ring in the ear long after my noble friend Lord Blunkett has uttered them. We should bear them in mind throughout this debate.

I do not want to say much about this, because the purpose of these probing amendments is to invite the Minister to reflect on how he wishes to take this forward and we should listen to him carefully. I will make two points. First, what is decided about the reporting functions must be the corollary of what we have decided about the structure. Rather than repeating the debate on the first amendment last week, I think that it is obvious that, if the structure adopted is the royal charter body, for example, it will bring with it the implications of a non-departmental public body. Therefore, the auditing by the NAO will be brought to the Public Accounts Committee and there will be a virtuous cycle of accounting and reporting, which we are well used to and will probably cover one aspect of this.

On the points that have been made more generally, this organisation will serve a much wider public purpose than simply to operate a number of courses or to commission those courses. The report is to Parliament, which raises much wider questions about what you would need to do. As has rightly been said, many of these measures are not numerical, so it would be interesting and challenging to see how one could frame that in a way that would both be a formal account—a measure of the consumption of resources and the impact of those resources in terms of diversity and reach—and provide information that will allow those who have to engage with this body to anticipate and work closely together with it. I echo the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, about the need for a broader cut through this—not just an annual report, but a commissioned report looking at some of the wider indices. That might be annual, but I agree that it perhaps needs to happen a bit later. That might be a way of framing this. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on the matter.