Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Debate between Lord Fox and Lord Greenhalgh

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. As the deputy mayor for policing and crime alongside him when he was a very distinguished commissioner, I always defer to his operational understanding. This is someone who led a very large service and understands the constraints that would occur if we saw a withdrawal of labour from these very specialist police staff who do more than just support police officers on the front line.

I draw attention to the fact that there is a real inconsistency here. As a former Fire Minister I am delighted to see that fire is included when it comes to call handling, and as the son of a surgeon I am delighted to see that the London Ambulance Service and other ambulance services are included in the Bill. Let us take London call volumes as an example, to give a sense of the order of magnitude. The Met answers 13,000 calls a day, which is nearly 5 million calls a year. The London Ambulance Service answers just over 2 million calls a year, while for the fire service it is probably nearer to 150,000 calls a year. We need parity when it comes to our three blue-light services, particularly because, as the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, put it, some of these calls are about wheels moving fast to save lives, even if they do not always know that is the case. I just do not understand not having the same approach to all three blue lights.

The noble Lord also raised forensics. The clear-up rate is about 95%—I hope that is still true—for murders in our capital city. That is largely down to a team effort that includes the use of forensics, and we have just heard about the importance of surveillance in tackling crime.

I think that even at this late stage we should consider the police service within those public services where we require a look at minimum service levels. It makes intellectual sense, and I know that at this stage we could introduce these amendments. Based on the response from the Home Office, we will see whether we bring this back on Report in the right part of the Bill—we were a bit late tabling the amendment, for various reasons.

It makes sense to have parity between the three blue lights. That is why I support the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe. As deputy mayor, I always knew to defer to his operational excellence.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, we are not particularly in the business of adding people to this Bill. If the noble Lords had attended all our sessions, they would have heard that we are not terribly appreciative of the Bill’s objectives, nor the way in which it goes about them. But I am grateful to the noble Lords for highlighting, as we pointed out earlier, the curious selection of services. We particularly questioned the decommissioning of nuclear installations, for example, where voluntary agreements already exist on a pretty comprehensive scale, so why is this in there?

I am also grateful that they have attracted a Home Office Minister here to answer the question. My question for him is: how much consultation was held with the Home Office by what was then BEIS, which drew up the Bill, about choosing who was on this list, and indeed who was not, when it came to drafting the legislation? That would be an interesting point.

I could not resist pitching in on forensic services. As the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, knows, since the change in the whole service, essentially its privatisation, a large lump of that service went into the police force—I was going to say it was “captured”, and that is not supposed to be in a pejorative sense. In the Metropolitan Police, a huge proportion of what was often delivered externally to the police force is now being delivered internally; I think it is around 80% in the case of the Met. That leaves 20% of the service coming from private sector providers and what I call specialist suppliers, which are often academics or people who have set up organisations. I suggest that it is much harder to make those two types of supplier fall within the remit of what the noble Lord envisions, given the debate we have had about involving private sector suppliers in the health service or transport. That debate has clouded how this would operate. Still, a large proportion of the forensic service is within the police ambit when it comes to management.

With those notes, the key issue is to ask the Home Office why fire and rescue is in but the police are not. What consultation process did that go through, and how did the decision come about? We would be interested to see inside the box.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Fox and Lord Greenhalgh

Report stage
Monday 28th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly. I have just a couple of points to make before I speak to Amendment 9. First, I join the chorus of welcome for the collaborative spirit that the Minister has managed to engender among noble Lords working on the Bill. Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—who I see has slipped out—and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, both mentioned the fog of uncertainty created by the number of government amendments. I have a small mea culpa as to why some of those have been carried over on Report. Those of your Lordships who were in Grand Committee will remember the outrage caused by 340-odd government amendments landing without an explanation. That caused me to push them back, so I am afraid that I am responsible for their reappearance. However, that did what we wanted it to do: it gave us time to understand and follow those amendments. I think this amendment arises from the perspective we have had in that time.

Two things have happened which I never thought would: first, I find myself in almost complete agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan; and, secondly, he appears to be calling for the emulation of the EU in British law. When we get to the retained EU law revocation Bill, I am sure he can join me to make similar entreaties from his position at the back of the Chamber. Joking aside, the point here is whether this was deliberate or an accident; we are waiting to hear from the Minister on that. This issue reflects a number of debates, certainly the one we have had on Amendment 34—which I trust will come back at Third Reading rather than being agreed here—and one that we will have in a later group in which the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, has highlighted another issue.

More generally, whatever happens to the Bill on Report, there is a real need for people to sit down with cold towels on their heads and go through the Bill line by line one more time before we get to Third Reading. Because there have been so many amendments, it has been almost impossible to follow properly what is happening. We have all done our best, and the Minister has worked like a Trojan—as have your Lordships—but I think that there is a strong call for further work to be done once we get through Report stage on Wednesday evening.

With that, I support the attempts of the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, in Amendment 9 to get some clarity on this, and I support the spirit of her speech.

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I rise because I was named by my noble friend Lord Moylan, and because this is a subject that I feel very passionately about, as someone who spent 16 years as a councillor and six years as a council leader. Indeed, I am very proud of the work we did to collaborate. It is something that came to me a little late in my local government career, because I used to believe in two things: competition and fear—that is, fear of failure—but collaboration is also important in local government.

My noble friend Lord Moylan pointed to the vision we had in west London to come together to collaborate to drive down costs. In fact, when it came to library services, it was very much in the back offices that we could make savings so that libraries could stay open and the public could be served by excellent libraries. We worked very carefully across a whole range of areas, such as highways and helping children across west London who needed safeguarding and support to find potential parents who could look after them, in a way that would not have been possible without collaboration.

I am also a huge fan of mutualisation. I know that is coming up in group 6, but I want to say that as someone who was a pathfinder of the work that my noble friend Lord Maude brought forward. The organisation that was spun out of the council to provide school support services exists today and is trading very well with officers I had as senior officers in Hammersmith and Fulham. They preferred a life outside the council. I pay tribute to that movement. It had real vision behind it. It did not involve competition and was really about empowering people to provide the services that they were already providing in a better and more comprehensive way. I think that was a tremendous pathfinder and I only wish that it could have been rolled out more widely across local government and the public sector.

I probably should have declared my business interests as set out in the register before starting to speak. However, I can honestly tell noble Lords that I have absolutely nothing to do with public procurement in my business life because today it takes a long time. It is really difficult and the barriers to entry are very great. I am sure the purpose of this Procurement Bill is to make sure that public procurement works for the benefit of those services and we can use competition in a sensible way and it can be streamlined. I think the purpose of the amendment from my noble friend Lady Noakes is to ensure that, where local trading companies exist, they will not fall foul of the reasonableness test and things have to be put out to competition. In fact, as a council leader I bought a communications service from the City of Westminster because of the expertise it had in comms. That was an expertise that existed only in Westminster City Council, and I did not think that that needed to go out to competition. So I think we need to be sensible.

As a true loyalist, I support the Government if they can point out how a reasonable test can work to ensure that there is not unnecessary tendering in this instance. Provided I get those reassurances, I am happy to support the Minister in her endeavours to ensure that we sort out these areas and preserve areas such as local authority trading companies that provide an important part of services in local government.