Lord Greaves
Main Page: Lord Greaves (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)(13 years, 11 months ago)
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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.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
My Lords, ultimately, there is no greater safeguard than the will of Parliament, as expressed through the accountability of Ministers at the Dispatch Box, on all issues. I understand exactly what noble Lords are saying from all sides of the House, but for a Government committed to building sustainability into all their activities, there is no need to make it explicit. It is implicit in all that this Government are doing.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am grateful for some of the assurances that the Minister has given. But the debate which has taken place on this amendment—I thank everyone who has taken part—comes to the core of a major flaw in the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, suggested. Sustainable development is just one example of the safeguards written in countless reams of legislation relating to the bodies listed in the schedules to this Bill.
The Minister said that I am trying to make one further requirement: I am tempted to say that I am trying to make a requirement. As the Bill is set out, there are few clear legislative requirements for when functions are transferred from existing bodies to other bodies, whether they are existing bodies being closed down or they are just being run down and having some of their functions transferred.
There was a slight diversion in the discussion about national parks. Indeed, national parks are one of the important areas to be included in our discussions about the particular bodies affected by this Bill. I do not want to pre-empt that debate, except to say that it is very good that the Defra Minister, my noble friend Lord Henley, will take part in that debate. Finding out exactly what the Government intend for national parks will be a crucial part of the scrutiny of this Bill. I thank the Government and my noble friend Lord Henley for that. No doubt my noble friend Lord Taylor is rather pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Henley, will be taking part in it. There is no doubt that national parks authorities are in the process of selling off or leasing out property for other people to manage. I raise the issue of the Losehill educational centre in the Peak District near Castleton. The national parks authority is considering proposals by people who are willing to buy it and take it over. So there is a certain amount of selling-off going on as a result of reduced budgets and there is a great deal of concern and alarm over Losehill, but that is a diversion from this debate.
The Minister said, “It is about making public bodies more accountable and more efficient”. I am sorry the previous group of amendments was not moved because accountability is crucial here. If functions are being moved to the private sector in some cases—
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, perhaps I may reassure the noble Lord that we have found a better place to bring it back so we will have an opportunity to debate it later in Committee.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, that is one assurance I can well believe.
This amendment is about keeping some of the safeguards which exist in legislative form in relation to some of the bodies listed. There are many more safeguards of different sorts which are in legislative form at the moment. One of the real concerns over this Bill is the process by which Parliament will be able to scrutinise and the Government will be accountable to Parliament in the discussion of whether these safeguards are going to remain. Ministers are indeed accountable to Parliament, but ministerial accountability to Parliament at the Dispatch Box, when we can ask questions and raise debates and so on, is rather different from legislation written down in the statutes of the land, in the law of England, which can, if necessary, be challenged in court. It is a different sort of accountability if people are responsible to the courts of the land for following the laws which have been set down by Parliament. It is in many ways a much more robust form of accountability and we are concerned that it is going to go if, as the Minister says, the Government prefer that all this is done on a non-statutory basis. The ministerial orders which will be responsible for making a lot of the changes proposed to the organisations set out in the schedules are in themselves legislation. To suggest that a lot of it will be non-statutory suggests that those orders will not contain these safeguards, and that, too, is a major concern.
These are important issues which go beyond the particular issue of sustainable development and I am sure they will come up again and again as we continue to debate this Bill. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
If another non-departmental public body takes them on, that will indeed be the case.
On the whole business of freedom of information, it might be opportune for me to say that the Government are committed to extending the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency, and a number of options for meeting this pledge—including the further extension to additional bodies carrying out public functions—are being considered by the Ministry of Justice. I therefore expect the House to be informed about this during the passage of the Bill.
Lord Greaves
Can I follow that with a question? If a forest was sold to a private landowner and the terms of the sale included a continuation of existing access for the public to the forest and its facilities, would that still be classed as a public function even though it was being carried out by a private landowner?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
To the extent that the sale would impose conditions on any buyer, I imagine that the terms of such a sale would insist that this right of access was written into the agreement. Indeed, to the extent that the Government are responsible for safeguarding public interest in this respect, it would be for them to ensure that the agreement was held to by any prospective purchaser.
Lord Greaves
I am sorry; I did not make myself terribly clear. If right of access, which perhaps is a public function, and other public goods provided by that forest are to continue, would the private landowner be subject to the freedom of information provisions?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am sorry but I will, if I may, go back to the whole business of public access. Public access is a right; it is enshrined in law. If people have right of access, they have right of access; it cannot be challenged. It would be up to the Government to ensure that any body that was party to a contract that included public access maintained that responsibility.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I, too, support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Liddle, and I associate myself with the remarks made by my noble friend Lady Armstrong. I, too, come from the east side of the region. Indeed, she spent the early part of her career in the ward that I now represent and she has obviously benefited greatly from that experience.
Today’s debate is quite significant in terms of the problems of the north-east. This morning, I read that Durham University Business School has produced a report for the soon-to-be-abolished One North East that suggests alarming implications for the region. The report refers to 50,000 jobs being lost in the near future, 20,000 of which will be in the private sector, with a loss of £2 billion to the regional economy over the next few years. The report has provoked the chairman of the development agency—a leading private sector businessman in the region who hails from Sunderland—to renew his criticism of the current trend of government policy. It is clear that he is very critical of the decision to abolish the agency and that the private sector in the region, for the most part, wishes the agency to continue. If the current policy is maintained, of course that will not happen.
In addition to those serious concerns, there is another issue that could be partly addressed by an amendment along the lines of Amendment 16, which seeks to require that,
“the ‘eligible person’ to which functions are transferred must be located within the region”.
I invite the Minister to agree that if Amendment 16 is accepted—and even if it is not—the same principle could be applied to the assets built up by the agency within the region. When I asked a Written Question about that recently, I received an answer that I would say was remarkable for its opacity if it were not, I am afraid, characteristic of most of the Written Answers that I and other noble Lords receive. Referring to the White Paper on local growth, the Written Answer stated:
“As set out in the White Paper … RDA assets and liabilities will be transferred or disposed of in line with a clear set of principles which include a key aim of achieving the best possible outcome for the region consistent with achieving value for the public purse”.—[Official Report, 22/11/10; col. WA 286.]
However, the White Paper states that the principal criteria will be,
“that a reasonable balance is reached as part of disposal/transfer between national deficit reduction, national policy aims and local ambitions/opportunity”.
In other words, the local element seems to be the back runner in that field of three considerations.
I hope that the Minister will give a clearer indication that the proceeds of any asset disposal—if assets are indeed to be disposed of, although they may well be better retained within the portfolio of agencies or other bodies that survive the abolition of the RDAs—should be directed to the region to which they have made a significant contribution over the years. The regions will be desperately in need of those, to judge by the report published by One North East today.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have considerable sympathy with the gist of Amendments 8, 12 and 16. I am aware that we will discuss regional development agencies in their own right not much further along in the Bill—at least, not much further down the page—so I will reserve most of what I want to say for that time. However, we have to see the amendments and the future—or non-future—of RDAs and where their functions are going to go in the context of what will, in effect, be the destruction or removal of the entire regional tier of government in this country. That may be a good thing or a bad thing, but things will be very different from what they are now.
In my view, this decision has been made from a very south-east of England perspective. People tell me that, given London’s governance arrangements nowadays with the mayor and the London Assembly, a regional development agency in London is redundant. I can understand that. People also tell me that the regions that have been created and drawn on a map in the south-east make no sense whatsoever. In any case, it is not clear why a regional development agency is needed in a part of the country that, at least to those of us who live in the north of England and other distant parts of the realm, appears to be relatively prosperous compared with the regions in which we live.
There may be a question as to whether a uniform pattern of regional government is required across the country, but what is—and always has been—clear is that some level of regional government, or governance, in the northern regions is essential. We now face the position in which, not very far to the north, Scotland has its own Parliament, which has an increasingly federal relationship with the rest of the UK. Scotland is able to make decisions for itself and, clearly, can attract and create investment in a way in which we cannot. The idea that Yorkshire, however you define its exact boundaries, and the north-west of England—never mind the north-east, about which other noble Lords have spoken eloquently—are not regions in their own right with an important role to play in economic development in particular and in a series of regional associations, and in regional provision of services of many kinds, seems to me to be nonsense.
I forgot to declare my interest at the beginning of Committee stage as a member of Pendle Borough Council, so I do that now. Some of us who live perhaps in the fringe areas of the north-west get very uptight about what we see as the attempted dominance of the region by Manchester and Liverpool as Greater Manchester and Merseyside. Nevertheless, no one who lives in the north-west would deny that they live in the north-west, which is a clearly understood and accepted region of England. It seems extraordinary to me that our regional level of government is being abolished altogether.
I am all in favour of decentralisation and devolution within the region, but whether the local economic partnerships—which I hope will be set up in all areas, although we have not got them in Lancashire yet—will be the answer is a matter that we will need to see in future. If we are not careful, we could end up with a hotchpotch system in which LEPs will be very effective in areas such as Greater Manchester and Merseyside but much less effective in areas such as Lancashire, because they may not reflect the genuine economic geography there. There is a big argument going on within Lancashire, as some noble Lords will know, about exactly which areas the LEPs will cover. If we are not careful, there is a real danger that we will end up with a two-tier system, which would be unfortunate.