Public Bodies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Alun Michael and Lord Maude of Horsham

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

It is now slightly more than a year since the introduction of the Bill, and it has undergone considerable scrutiny and review both within Parliament and outside. I believe that the Government have responded positively and openly to that scrutiny. Both in this House and in the other place, we have worked with parliamentarians across the party boundaries to make a number of important amendments. My noble Friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach rightly paid tribute to noble Lords for their efforts in improving the Bill, and those tributes can be extended to this House. This has been a constructive process.

[Alun Michael]

Will the Minister acknowledge that there is real concern about the abolition of the Youth Justice Board, which we discussed earlier this evening in a time-limited debate? The concern is that by being taken inside the Ministry of Justice, it will lose the independence and spark that have led to its supporting youth offending teams in cutting youth reoffending. Will he undertake to keep an eye on that and, if it turns out that a system within the Ministry of Justice does not deliver as the YJB has, to look again at the arrangements?

[Mr Maude]

I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says, and I know that he has been hugely involved in the matter and has a passionate commitment to the cause of youth justice being delivered appropriately. I obviously take on board what he says, and my right hon. and hon. Friends have said both in Committee and in the House that we will keep the matter under review. Under the procedures in the Bill, before an order gives effect to the arrangements for bringing the YJB inside the Ministry of Justice, as is envisaged, there will have to be a proper consultation process and parliamentary scrutiny. That applies right across the piece to any changes that are implemented under the Bill. There will have to be full consultation and a proper parliamentary process.

It is important to put on the statute book, as I hope will happen under the Bill, a procedure for changing the arrangements for public bodies. In the past it has been far too easy for public bodies to be casually, almost incontinently created, and it has never been easy for them to be reformed when needs have changed. Anyone who has been in government knows the pressure that there is on primary legislation, and the need to make changes to the governance, funding arrangements and scope of public bodies cannot easily rise to the top of the pile. The procedure that we are putting in place for public bodies to be reformed, abolished or merged or to have their governance or funding arrangements changed is therefore really important, and I am grateful for the constructive approach that has been applied to the Bill.

Commitment to reforming the quango state is common across the political divide. All three parties entered the last election with a commitment to reforming the public body landscape, so we brought forward the Bill in the hope and expectation that there would be a consensual approach to it. Although there have been disagreements about some aspects of it—it was never likely that there would be absolute unanimity about every body for which changes were proposed—the approach has broadly been constructive. There has been agreement that the approach taken in the Bill is desirable.

Thus it was that last June, I told the House that we were committed to cutting the number of public bodies in order to increase accountability and cut costs. We always made it clear that the primary objective of the Bill was the former. Cutting costs would certainly happen, and I will say a word about the savings later, but the primary objective was to ensure that there was democratic accountability, unless the three tests that we set out for a body or function continuing in a way that was not democratically accountable were met.

The review that we carried out first established whether the functions of a body needed to be carried out at all. If so, we sought to establish whether the body should exist at arm’s length from government by asking three questions: first, does it perform a strictly technical function; secondly, do its activities require clear political impartiality; and thirdly, does it need to act independently to establish or measure facts in a clear and independent way?

We discovered that there were 904 non-departmental public bodies, non-ministerial departments and public corporations. We proposed that in excess of 200 would cease to be public bodies; that 120 would be merged into 56 bodies; and that 170 would be substantially reformed. In addition, we listed 15 as “under consideration” with further announcements expected in due course.

The Bill establishes a mechanism that gives Ministers a series of powers, which it outlines, to make changes through secondary legislation. As I have said, if we had always to wait for an opportunity to make primary legislation, we would continue inevitably to add to the landscape of unaccountable, and often very costly and not always very efficient, public bodies.