Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Maclennan of Rogart and Lord Greaves
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
My noble friend must have been momentarily nodding during the part of my speech in which I referred to inflation of 26 per cent. I was about to refer to the embarrassment of having to answer questions about the prices of fundamental items in the domestic budget at that time.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, if we are now going into history, it should be put on record that the inflation rate, which peaked at 26 per cent, was going down at a substantial rate by the 1979 election after the beneficial influence of the Lib-Lab pact.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I am not trying to resurrect history tonight, but merely to call in aid some of the relevant factors. It is true that inflation dropped to 10 per cent, but that is still more than three times what it is at present.
I agree that the nexus and concatenation of consumer protection bodies played a considerable role in helping to focus policy-making on what was necessary. I appeal to the Government to recognise the inadequacy of the present proposals for change. The Bill is primarily about winding up bodies, not about indicating what is to take their place. That is one of its defects. It is an attempt to make things possible, but it will not command the approval of Parliament if we do not know what are to be the alternatives, and if we are not satisfied that they are satisfactory and will deliver what the bodies that are for the chop have delivered. No one can pretend that this body has passed its sell-by date or ceased to have a useful potential purpose in future. I say yes to rationalisation and reorganisation—but let us know how it is to be done.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Maclennan of Rogart and Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am glad that I was here in good time. I will speak also to Amendment 103 in the same group. These amendments would require persons and bodies exercising functions transferred to them under this Bill to act according to the principles of sustainable development.
I am aware that the coalition Government have ambitious plans to be the greenest Government ever. The coalition agreement itself has specific commitments to tackling climate change, protecting wildlife and a series of environ1mental objectives alongside the objectives of economic prosperity and fairness in social policy—all the components of sustainable development. The Minister and I had many happy discussions on sustainable development in the previous Parliament, when we occupied different roles.
In July this year, the Secretary of State for Defra, Caroline Spelman, said:
“This Government are committed to sustainable development and to becoming the greenest Government ever, promoting economic development, environmental protection and an improving quality of life for everyone in the UK”.—[Official Report, 22/7/10; col. WS 83.]
I want to write this into this Bill.
Many of the bodies listed in this Bill have a range of generic and specific duties or policy commitments that are there to safeguard the general public interest. The risk across a range of such duties and commitments is that these safeguards will be removed as functions are transferred to a range of companies, community interest companies, charities, other unincorporated organisations or persons, even indeed to government departments. The purpose of this amendment is to safeguard the public interest in one respect—sustainable development.
The danger is that this Bill, and its operation, will result in this and other safeguards being written out or restricted by the constitution or viewpoint of the body or person that is taking over the functions. It is easy to think of a lot of examples. Somewhere functions may be transferred to perfectly good organisations with perfectly desirable objectives. For example, should the management of Natural England’s national nature reserves, or some of them, be outsourced to other conservation bodies, it is entirely foreseeable that future management arrangements might consider not other environmental outcomes but merely the contribution that national nature reserves might make to the very narrow area of nature conservation. It is appropriate, however, that other outcomes ought to include those which Natural England would consider at the moment, such as the contribution reserves could make to local economies and social outcomes—for example, enhancing the health of local people through increased provision of health walks, which may well contribute to better physical and mental health among the people taking part.
The point is that, at the moment, a large number of these organisations have it written into their objectives and their purpose that they have a wider objective and purpose than simply the very narrow one associated with the particular facilities or services being provided.
There have been many attempts over the years to provide the best legal framework for sustainable development and protecting the environment. Over 100 different duties have been established in law, many of them for the bodies and offices listed in this Bill. The purpose of this amendment is to make sure that, if services, facilities and functions of these organisations are transferred to other people or to other bodies, these essential purposes and safeguards remain. I beg to move.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
I support my noble friend and the amendment. Undoubtedly, it may be regarded as not belonging in a skeleton Bill but it provides a safeguard to ensure that the Government’s intentions are made good. It is not an additional, unnecessary decoration on the Christmas tree.
In Schedule 1, there are a number of bodies which can significantly affect the environment: the Commission for Rural Communities, the Environment Protection Advisory Committees, the regional and local fisheries advisory committees and the various regional development agencies. In Schedule 3, there are the internal drainage boards and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. In Schedule 4, there is the Marine Management Organisation. In Schedule 5, there are the internal drainage boards. I select those merely at random; there are many more. For the avoidance of doubt, it would be a safeguard to include the amendment.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Maclennan of Rogart and Lord Greaves(13 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Greaves
I give general support to the general idea behind the amendment. The details of the amendment are probably impractical, but the underlying purpose of moving it as a probing amendment is absolutely vital. It goes to the very heart of why many of us are unhappy about this Bill as it stands at the moment. There has been a lot of talk about procedures and super-affirmatives and all that kind of thing, but the basic problem at the heart of the Bill is that it proposes to put on the statute book a list of organisations which the appropriate Minister will have the power to abolish or merge, or the power to modify their constitutional or funding arrangements, to modify or transfer their functions or to authorise delegation. In some cases, organisations appear on more than one of these lists. That happens in Clauses 1 to 6. I shall ignore Clause 11 and Schedule 7 at the moment, as they give rise to a different issue altogether—a list of organisations that may or may not be added to these other lists in due course. What is to happen to those is all up in the air and all rather a mess.
Clauses 1 to 6 set out the Government’s clear and stated wish to abolish all the organisations in Schedule 1, for example. That is government policy, as we have it so far. If the Government have a policy to abolish this long list of organisations—and I, for one, do not disagree with the abolition of quite a few of them, although I would argue about some of them—there is not just the question of the abolition of the organisation. Abolishing an organisation is a mechanical thing; you close it down and no one is employed by it. The crucial thing that this amendment gets to the very heart of is what will happen to the functions of those organisations. In my judgment, it is far more important that the Government tell us what is to happen to the multifarious functions of those organisations than it is to say that they wish to close them down as bodies or structures. The functions are absolutely crucial.
That is information that in some cases we are being provided with outside the confines of the Bill. We have some ideas about what will happen to the functions of the regional development agencies. We know that some of those functions are being ended and that their planning functions are being closed down altogether; in fact, they have been closed down in most cases already. Some functions will be transferred to local enterprise partnerships if and when they exist everywhere, although they do not yet exist everywhere. Even the regional development agencies have functions that we do not know who will carry out. There is the whole question of rural development and its funding, and two or three weeks ago I put down a Written Question on that matter. The answer, in effect, was that it had not been sorted out yet, that for the time being it would continue to happen through the RDAs but that sooner or later it would be transferred to someone else. The assumption is that it will be transferred to someone at the centre, but no one really knows. Even with bodies like RDAs, where quite a lot of work has been done and documents and White Papers have been published, we still do not know at all what will happen to the functions. With many organisations, we do not have a clue. It seems that this is the fundamental problem that the Government have with the Bill.
Later we will discuss amendments that would delete almost every organisation in Schedules 1 and 2, right through to Schedule 6 and the infamous Schedule 7. It will take a huge amount of this Committee’s time to go through these and try to prise out of the Government what they propose to do. I suspect that many of these amendments have been tabled not to delete the organisation from the list but to find out what the Government’s intentions are for the existing functions of each of those bodies. Which are to be closed down, which are to be transferred to other outside bodies and which are to be brought in-house within departments? Who knows what will happen to some of them? That is the crucial thing. It is what these bodies do that matters, not their structure, unless you work there and your job is on the line.
Therefore, this amendment is fundamental in that it gets to the very heart of one of the main problems with the Bill. We simply have not been provided with information by the Government as to what is to happen to each of these bodies. As I say, the time to provide that information is not, as set out in the Bill, after Royal Assent and before commencement. The time to provide that information is now, to this House and then to the House of Commons, so that we can be absolutely certain when we consent—if that is what we do—to the different organisations being in one or more of these lists of how the services and functions that they provide will continue.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart
My Lords, I very much agree with the purpose of Amendment 180. It is of fundamental importance that the purposes of the making of the order are fully understood in respect of the transfer of functions. It is more than desirable; it is inevitable and necessary that if the changes are being made to procure efficiency, economy or accountability, it should be possible to judge whether those goals are being achieved by the transfer of authority or the winding up of the body. I know that, in respect of the regional development agencies—notwithstanding the announcement of the LEPs—there is a great deal of uncertainty, for example in respect of the distribution of the European rural development fund, which has not been resolved. It has been suggested that this may be transferred to another body. It has been suggested that it might be transferred to a privatised body, perhaps even consisting of existing members of the RDAs, which have been responsible for this for some time. We have no idea how this will be handled. That is not satisfactory. It is a reasonable objective that the Bill should make this clear, for the reasons already given in this debate. The language of the amendment might not be absolutely suited to bringing this out; none the less, I hope the Minister will give serious thought to that requirement of transparency.