Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I think that I might change my wording to “custom”.

[Lord Greaves]

Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, might consider that the relevant statistic is the number of occasions on which the House divides on such instruments rather than the number of occasions on which the Division results in their being voted down. It is clear that the House divides on instruments rather more often than it votes them down, largely as a result of this Liberal Democrat group putting matters to the vote in the previous Parliament. The number of such Divisions is not huge, but there has been a handful of them in my recollection rather than none at all. If the House accepts that it can divide, it must accept that it is capable of voting instruments down.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

I have certainly noticed the reluctance of the Liberal Democrat Benches to put things to the vote; sometimes, they have to be encouraged to do so, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester, found out earlier today.

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is right that a number of developments have occurred in secondary legislation. Noble Lords have been encouraged sometimes to put down non-fatal Motions, which has been very helpful. Equally, there have been votes on some orders which have been lost. However, I accept what the Minister has said—that is, it is more the custom than the convention.

Notwithstanding the seeming withdrawal of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, from what we thought was a consensual agreement in relation to Cunningham, I am clear that this House has every right to vote down an order. I am absolutely certain that, unless this Bill is heavily amended, there will be a series of votes on each organisation and the Government will find themselves in very great difficulty. We agree with the principle, which is why it would have been much better if this Bill had been sent to a Select Committee. Well, we did not win the vote. It would be much better for the Government if they were to accept a super-affirmative procedure along the lines suggested in my amendment. They will find, in the end, that that will be a much more satisfactory way of dealing with these matters than with the implied possibility of each individual order having extensive debate and votes at the end of it.

The Minister has very kindly said that he will consider very carefully the report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee and the debate that we have heard tonight. I believe this to be one of the most important debates in the whole Bill until we get to Schedule 7, Clause 11. That debate clearly ought to be in prime time and it would be right for me to withdraw the amendment; I am sure that we can have good constructive discussions between now and Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.