Lord Greaves
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(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, I rise to move and speak to Amendment 195ZAZMAA.
I am doing some work at the moment on political engagement of young people and this amendment is the result of meetings that I have had with hundreds of young people up and down the country and with people who are working or have been working in youth services—that is to say, statutory youth services, which are fast diminishing, charities, and organisations such as Girlguiding UK, of which I am a very proud member. What happens to young people and the services that they receive is, of course, crucial to the well-being of this country and the future well-being of individuals and our society. We have the most fantastic young people in our country, who often get a very bad press thanks to a very small minority of them. Most young people in this country are full of energy and have real determination and a real desire to contribute to their communities. Sometimes, however, they need a bit of help. At the moment, rather than being helped, a lot of young people in our society are suffering disproportionately from the cuts, which we believe are too fast and too deep. In my part of the country, in Gloucestershire, the area that I know best, youth services have been decimated. While volunteers are doing an extraordinary job, volunteers are not enough. Young people in our country cannot just depend on volunteers. They need properly trained youth workers as well. The Minister may well say that it is up to local authorities how they spend their money. I think that is a bit of a smokescreen, but that is by the by.
We talk about rights and responsibilities of young people and the fact that they need to get that balance right from a very young age. We all talk about the need to engage our young people more in our communities, and we want to nurture democracy by ensuring that more and more young people vote and perhaps even become councillors or MPs. One of the best ways to engage young people is to include them and to make them part of the democratic processes in which we engage, including the decision-making process. At the moment young people, if they are under the age of 18, are excluded from the decision-making processes of councils despite the fact that so many decisions taken by local councils are extremely important for those young people and have a huge impact on their lives. I am not just talking about youth services. For example, when a decision is taken to cut bus services—sometimes for good reasons and sometimes I would question the reasons—it has a huge impact on the ability of young people to go to college or to sixth form college, and indeed to have a social life. Consequently those young people cannot reach their full potential.
I have tabled my amendment because I think it is very important that young people should have some means of engaging in the decision-making process. This is just one suggestion, on which I hope the Government will look favourably. However, if they cannot accept the amendment, I should be very grateful for an opportunity to discuss with the Minister and her officials how we can better include young people in the decision-making process in the future. Of course I understand that at the moment the voting age is 18. Personally, I would argue on other occasions that that should be reduced to 16.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon
My Lords, we will have that discussion at a later date. For the moment, we have a voting age of 18. Notwithstanding that fact, I think that it is very important that young people who are younger than 18 should have their views properly assessed and that they should have an opportunity to have proper discussions with the people who are taking the important decisions in councils and other bodies that so profoundly affect their lives.
There is another amendment in this group that relates to petitions, but I understand that there may be some other movement from the Government on petitions and referendums. If, however, the current proposals from the Government stand, I would argue that young people themselves should have an opportunity to petition the Government as outlined in Amendment 195ZAZNZA. I beg to move.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, in moving Amendment 195ZAZN, a relatively short number compared with some we have just had, I shall speak to 17 others in this group, some of which are even shorter. The purpose of these amendments is to make the Bill itself even shorter, which I think would benefit the people of this country generally.
The first amendment removes Clause 42, which is the duty to hold local referendums—a duty to hold a local referendum under ordinary local election rules if a petition received by a council signed by at least 5 per cent of the electors in a ward, a county division, or the whole authority, is received. If passed, the result of the referendum would be advisory on the authority. The first amendment removes this duty from the Bill; the other 17 amendments in the group remove the remaining 17 clauses in this chapter of the Bill, which set out how the referendum procedures would operate and how the referendums would take place.
The reasons why I would like to do this were fairly fully set out when I spoke at Second Reading and described this part of the Bill as “nonsense”, and in the discussions we had in Committee. It is a provision which is over the top. It would be very expensive in relation to its value, which would simply be advisory referendums, and if combined with a local election, it has the potential to distort that election. If it is free-standing, then it carries the whole costs of a local election. It is open to abuse by extreme groups; as I said in Committee, in my own ward, in Waterside in Pendle, less than 200 names would be required, and the last time I stood for election the BNP got more than 300 votes. It would also be open to people demanding large numbers of referendums on all kinds of things that the council would find it extremely difficult to refuse to hold.
There is the question of planning: the Government removed planning applications from the scope of this chapter, but not the plan-making process, where it really is superfluous to a process which already has provisions for public participation.
Councils already have the powers to hold referendums when they want to do so, and as I have already said, if passed, the referendums would only be advisory anyway. Councils could simply ignore them, and the whole thing would be a waste of money.
The Bill retains provisions for referendums in various specific cases, such as elected mayors, what the Government call excessive council tax increases, and neighbourhood plans. While I have views on those referendums I am not trying here to remove those provisions, but merely to remove the provisions for advisory local referendums in Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, my amendments take out the whole of Chapter 1 of Part 4. I would be quite happy to take out the whole of Part 4 but I do not think I would get quite so much enthusiasm from the government Front Bench.
Like my noble friend Lord Lucas, I have some concern that localism in this Bill is very rurally orientated—village-orientated and small-town-orientated—while over half the population of this country lives in large towns and cities. We have a lot of hard work to do in working out how localism will work in those areas.
I am grateful for the very welcome support of the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. I do not agree with him, as he knows, about the petitioning procedure which has been removed. When the Bill introducing that procedure came to this House, I struggled manfully to stop it. I am delighted that it has now gone, and I am delighted that struggling manfully against this Bill has had a little more success. That does not mean to say that councils should not deal with petitions properly, expeditiously and seriously: they clearly should. However, bureaucratic procedures laid down from on high are not the way to do so.
Finally, I congratulate and thank my noble friend the Minister, and the whole Government but particularly the Communities and Local Government Ministers, on and for their support for these amendments.
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Lord Shutt of Greetland
I do not know whether I can give the noble Lord any comfort. The problem is that, on the one hand, people are asking for localism and letting the locals decide and, on the other hand, the noble Lord is saying, “Let the Secretary of State be on their back”. We cannot have it both ways. We certainly hope that people will be reasonable. For example, to have an expression of interest that is open for five minutes would not be reasonable. I should have thought that there would be other ways in localities to put a stop to that. It is as a result of our earlier debates and concerns about the Secretary of State being too prescriptive in these matters that some of these amendments have been brought forward. I should have thought that that would be appreciated by the House. But we are seeing the other view, which I know exists from time to time, that there will be recalcitrant local authorities which will not get on with things as people hope they might. I think we have moved in the right direction and, if it goes wrong and the recalcitrant authorities become a multitude, clearly something would have to be done, but perhaps we ought to trust local people and local authorities.
Lord Greaves
I take it that that was not the Minister’s reply to the debate. I have three brief points to make. We are moving on to the community right to challenge, and some of us have found it quite difficult to understand how it will work and how some of the problems which might result will be overcome. I thank the Bill team for their time and patience in explaining exactly how they see it working and being fairly honest about some of the difficulties which might exist. This is a difficult part of the Bill and it is one which, when it is enacted, as no doubt it will be, will need a careful eye kept on it. I cannot say that we have not had an immense amount of co-operation in trying to thrash it out.
I very much support Amendments 197B and 197E to 197G on the timing issues. Those are clearly a result of responding to the public consultation, but also to the discussions in Committee. I do not share the worries of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about the timing issues. The way in which the timing issues are now presented in the Bill is much better and leaves a great deal of initiative to local authorities. It is much better than the existing wording which leaves it all to the Secretary of State to lay down rules and regulations. I wish that the Government had been more flexible on similar matters in the 100 or so areas in the Bill that we can point to as giving excessive powers to the Secretary of State. In this instance, the Government have listened and we welcome that.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, the Minister referred to the extension to Ministers of the definition of agencies which might be subject to the right to challenge. That is the burden of Amendment 197B. Perhaps in his reply the Minister might indicate whether that could also include next-step agencies of government, which might carry out functions. More particularly, when one looks at Amendment 197D in conjunction with Amendment 197B, it seems to me that something of an anomaly is being created. There would be a community right to challenge Ministers under Amendment 197B, and that would extend to parish councils, but it would not, by virtue of Amendment 197D, extend to other local authorities, assuming one defines parish councils as local authorities. So we could have the anomalous situation of a parish council being able to exercise a right to challenge a government department or Minister about a provision of a service, but not the principal authority in which it is situated.
I do not imagine that that has been deliberately constructed in that way, but I should be grateful if the Minister would undertake to look at that anomaly before Third Reading. Parish councils can be quite substantial bodies—there can be 40,000 or 50,000 people in a parish area—and they might bid for a government service, whereas the county or district in which they are situated could not. That strikes me as a situation which would be difficult to explain. Perhaps it has not been envisaged as a possibility, but it seems to arise from these amendments. Perhaps the Minister could indicate a willingness to look at that point before we get to Third Reading.
Lord Greaves
Before the Minister sits down, and without wishing to pre-empt the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is that an indication that there might be some tidying up to be done at Third Reading, and that that issue therefore could be considered then?
Lord Shutt of Greetland
If we can do this by writing a letter and giving comfort in that way, it will be done that way. If, ultimately, it really were needed, we would indeed have to come back to it at Third Reading.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this little group of amendments raises some important and fundamental issues relating to the community right to challenge. I shall speak also to Amendment 197DA. I think that there is also a Labour amendment in the group.
We are back in the Alice in Wonderland world of relevant bodies, relevant authorities and relevant services. Amendment 197CA would leave out the provision that two or more employees of a relevant authority—a local authority—can be specified as a relevant body, in other words, a body which can challenge to run a service. The Bill defines “relevant body” as,
“a voluntary or community body, … a body of persons or a trust which is established for charitable purposes only, … a parish council, … in relation to a relevant authority, two or more employees of that authority, or … such other person or body as may be specified by the Secretary of State”.
The term “two or more employees” of a relevant authority does not seem to fit in with that list of defined bodies. One assumes that the other bodies defined by the Secretary of State will be community bodies. Employees are different.
That is not to say that there are not circumstances in which employees can, and indeed ought to, take over responsibility for the running of services on behalf of the principal council. Many of us would like to see far more organisations such as mutuals and co-operatives, which provide what, in a long lifetime ago in the Young Liberals, we used to call worker control—my noble friend Lord Tope remembers all that. Employee bodies or groups of employees taking over the running of services in a co-operative way is a perfectly valid and desirable way in which, in appropriate circumstances, public services can be run. They may be arm’s-length or more than arm's-length bodies.
However, it is our view that if the Government are interested in that—they have given some indication that they may be—that should be addressed as a separate issue. It is not the same as allowing a couple or half a dozen employees to go off on their own initiative and to do their own thing regardless of what the rest of the staff think. The Labour amendment in this group suggests that any such initiative should have the support of at least half the employees. On the face of it, that seems sensible.
There is concern that a small number of employees could act as a proxy for commercial companies coming in on the back of the provision. In our discussion with Ministers and civil servants, we have been given many assurances that safeguards are set out in the Bill to avoid that happening. The Ministers we have talked to have been absolutely clear that they do not see that as desirable, that it ought not to happen and that it can be prevented. I am asking my noble friend today not just for a statement that the safeguards are there but for a clear explanation on the record of how local authorities will be able to prevent that possible abuse. It is possible, as Ministers have told us, that that is unlikely to happen very often, but that is not a reason for not taking action to prevent it.
As for the process in which the community right to challenge will take place, I am widening the debate slightly to avoid saying quite so much on the next group of amendments. The first process is that a relevant body has to be approved by the council. If it is a parish council, it is automatic. If it is a community or voluntary body, the principal council will have to approve it as being a relevant body. The second part of the process is that a relevant body may make an expression of interest to run a service and the principal council has to decide whether to accept that expression of interest. So long as it fits the rules and regulations, it will not be able to reasonably refuse it. The third part of the exercise is that, having accepted an expression of interest, the principal council has to carry out a procurement exercise.
The concern that a lot of us now have is not about the processes in this Bill for approving a relevant body, which are full of all kinds of safeguards, with the possible exception of the provision relating to employees. We are not too concerned about the process of accepting an expression of interest, which again seems to have a number of safeguards written into it. It is in the procurement exercise where the problems seem to lie. Once the expression of interest is accepted, the procurement exercise comes into effect automatically. It seems to us that safeguards against abuse of the process are crucial.
Amendment 197DA is a different amendment. In Clause 69(8), “community body” is defined as,
“a body that carries on activities primarily for the benefit of the community”.
This amendment would add on the end of that,
“and is actively engaged in doing so in the area in which the relevant service is being provided”.
The amendment restricts the definition of a community body to a body which is active in the community referred to. It restricts it to local bodies or to wider bodies which are already active in the area. Otherwise, it would be wide open, for example, to a large national charity that has no presence whatever in an area to move in and try to take over services. If it is about community bodies, surely it is about bodies which are already active in that community.
I look forward to the Minister’s comments on that and in particular to his explanation of how the safeguards will apply to prevent abuse, particularly of a small number of employees putting in a bid for a service. Also, in general, what safeguards will there be against large commercial companies using this operation to sweep up services, which is what Ministers are repeatedly telling us they do not intend to happen?
Lord Lucas
My Lords, I face in a slightly different direction from my noble friend Lord Greaves. I hope my noble friend on the Front Bench can give me some comfort that, when the regulations are set out for this, they will have in mind how desirable it is that we should encourage the creation of neighbourhood-based community organisations to take on services currently provided by the state. One of the difficulties that we face in cities is that people have become used to the comfort of state provision, although they are getting extremely grumpy in some cases with the way in which it is provided.
If a community in a city is to get together and go through the process of preparing to bid for a service which it values, it is going to need considerable comfort and assistance in the regulations to make sure that it is not going to get tripped up on technicalities and that the local council can offer advice rather than having to stand back and treat this strange creature as a competitor to any commercial interests which may come along to bid for it afterwards. We need to be equipping ourselves in this Bill to nurture local enterprises and communities in cities to give them a chance through the provision of services to generate a surplus for reinvestment in the community. That is what we are doing elsewhere in this Bill for rural communities, which will generate a comfortable surplus out of planning permission, but we are doing nothing for inner city communities. This is the bit of the Bill where we give relatively compact communities easy access to a diversity of resources. Cities exist because they have that advantage over rural communities.
We need to give the local elements of those communities a real chance to get involved in providing local services and in that way generate surpluses which they can reinvest in the community and do the things that they want to do. I should like my noble friend to give me comfort that the department has urban communities in particular in mind in this part of the Bill.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am very grateful for the long and comprehensive explanation. I am sorry—I have a cough, but I shall try to keep going until I get a drink of water. Thank you for that; I am glad that some of my elders and betters have got important things to do. I shall try not to spill water on the Bench.
I am grateful to everyone who has taken part in the debate. I shall simply say to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that I think that there are major problems with the whole of this Bill in urban areas, but these are matters to which we will come back time and again. To the noble Lord, Lord True, I will say that I do not think that the Liberal Party ever stood for workers control. There was a slight difference in the 1960s between the young Liberals and the party as such, as my noble friend who was in the young Liberals with me at the time will no doubt confirm.
The more explanations I hear about this, the more questions seem to come. I am extremely grateful for the efforts made to explain it all, but some of the answers that we get confirm that there are difficult questions that have not been resolved. As for the coalition programme and open public services, in a sense they confirm my concerns. Involving employees and staff in running or even handing over services to groups of staff is something quite different and requires a different approach to that of a community right to challenge. I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, that employees have to be seen as a group, as a body, and not as individuals. When councils recognise relevant bodies in the community, as I read it, they are recognising voluntary groups. They are recognising community groups. They are recognising parish councils representing the community. However, when it comes to employees, any two or three or half a dozen people seem to be able to come along and ask to be recognised as a relevant body, whereas what they seem to be is a group of individuals. I think that if transferring services to staff is going to be successful, it has to be done by negotiation and agreement across the staff, not just by two or three individuals, who may be disaffected because they have not been promoted and think they ought to have been, or who may be senior members of staff who think that they can run things perfectly well but do not have the support of everybody in their departments. There are serious problems here that will come out in practice. I suspect the matter will come back to allow a better and more comprehensive view of it.
As the Government have said in all the briefings, they would have to show how they propose to engage their staff in their proposals. Surely they should have engaged them and got their views before they put the proposals in, not afterwards. We were told that this would take up a lot of time, energy and resources, but if asking the people who are going to be working in this enterprise is going to take up too much time and energy, how on earth are they going to find the time and energy to put in the sort of comprehensive bid that, we are assured, is an absolute safeguard that it is going to be a serious bid?
Bulky Bob’s gets raised quite a lot in your Lordships’ House. I suppose most of us have been there to see it at various times, and it is great. However, Bulky Bob’s has done what it did under the present system by agreement and negotiation with the councils and the communities in which it works. It did not do it by challenging them from outside. In a sense, I do not think that it is a good argument for the Bill at all.
We are grateful for all the policy statements in the briefings that have been produced, even if some of them seem to confuse more than help. In Committee my noble friend the Minister said he hoped that we would have draft regulations by this time, so that at least we could look at them rather than the much vaguer policy statement. I know that he has made strenuous efforts to try to achieve that. It has not been possible, but it is not his fault at all. However, when we see the regulations, I think that we will have a better idea of whether this is going to work and how it is going to work. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Greaves
“(1A) The Secretary of State may by regulations specify an annual cost of a relevant service at or above which level a relevant authority may reject an expression of interest.
(1B) An annual cost of a service that is specified under subsection (1A) shall be set at the level at or above which a full open tendering process is required to take place by any Act or regulations.”
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this is the other group of key amendments in this part of the Bill. I speak to four others in the group, and there are two more in the group from my noble friend Lady Hamwee. These amendments are all about the process of procurement once an expression of interest has been accepted from the relevant body. The problem is that once the expression of interest is accepted, the procurement procedures roll forward automatically. The kind of procurement may vary according to the scale of the operation. It could be very small—for example, taking over a local pocket park. It could be modest, such as meals on wheels in a village. It could be a bit larger, such as running a village hall, an estate community centre in a town or a local library. It could be quite substantial, such as providing adult domiciliary services across a district, refuse collection and recycling across a large borough, or county library services. So the challenge, at least in theory, could apply to a wide range of services.
All these processes will have to be carried out according to basic standards such as openness, transparency, non-discrimination, equal treatment and proportionality, which, apart from anything else, are imposed by the relevant European directive, which was transposed into the public contracts regulations in 2006. As I understand it, and perhaps the Minister can confirm this, the underlying system is unchanged relating to contracts by local authorities that contract out services.
In addition, we have the standards of auditing and supervision by, at the moment, the Audit Commission, by the system that will replace it, by the councils’ own standing orders and by financial regulations. As I understand it, the community right to challenge contracts will all be bound by existing regulations in this way. The key cut-off is imposed by European rules and public contract regulations. Those regulations are set out in euros so the monetary threshold varies a bit according to how the euro goes up and down, but I am assured that it is around £156,400. That is the threshold over which the annual value of a service must be open to tender throughout the European Union.
The fear and the danger is therefore that the community right to challenge could open the way to a new and rather random form of compulsory competitive tendering and the takeover of relevant services by large commercial companies, even if that might be against the wishes of the principal council—the “relevant authority”, in the jargon of the Bill—and the community group, the parish council, the charity or whichever relevant body put forward the bid.
Again, we have had a large number of government assurances. Ministers at all levels have stated time and again that that is not their intention with this provision. If councils want to test the market, as they are able to, they should do so clearly and deliberately, not by accident under the community right to challenge. That is what Ministers in the Government assure us is their position. However, it is not clear how that can be prevented in the Bill as it stands. May we have a clear statement that the Government do not intend the community right to challenge to be a way in for large commercial companies, and that clear guidance will be given to councils on how this can be prevented? May we please know how it can be prevented?
Meanwhile, the amendments suggest two possible ways forward as safeguards. Amendment 197EZA says that the relevant authority can reject an expression of interest for a service above the annual cost at which a full tendering process is required. In other words, if it goes over that threshold, that can be a reason for saying, “No, we’re not going to put it out to tender because of the consequences”. In practice, this is the £156,000-odd threshold imposed by the public contracts regulations.
Amendments 197EB, 197EC and 197ED would allow a council, instead of going for competitive procurement by tender, to carry out a full and open public service review. New subsection (3A), which we are proposing, reads:
“A service review carried out for”,
this purpose,
“must include a consultation process with the relevant body, users of the service and any bodies representing them, employees engaged in providing the relevant service and their representatives, residents of the area and such other persons that the relevant authority considers appropriate”.
In other words it would be a very open, transparent and, one hopes, effective process, looking at how the service was provided to see whether the challenge from a particular group could in fact provide the service more effectively, economically and advantageously for the community.
These amendments may not be the best ways to provide safeguards against the problem that we have identified, but that there is a problem seems to be the case. There does not seem to be an answer to the problem that if you go for a competitive procurement you are bound by the European rules and regulations, and if it is a service that is worth more than £156,000 each year, then there is a real risk that you are putting it out to a commercial company. I beg to move.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, I have Amendments 197FA and 197FAA in this group, and I am well aware that my noble friend at the Dispatch Box will tell me that what I am proposing is not lawful. What I am proposing is that a local authority can apply its own criteria essentially in assessing the expressions of interest, and include whatever restrictions and requirements it thinks appropriate—to very much the same aim, the same end, as my noble friend. I have no expectation about the amendments being accepted but, like him, I am looking for reassurances.
My noble friend the Minister said in response to the previous group of amendments that an expression of interest by two or more employees would not be a proxy for a commercial organisation, and referred to that in terms of abuse. I wrote down what he said about that but confess that, having printed off the policy statement to which he referred some weeks ago, I have completely forgotten about it, and it is probably somewhere in a pile of papers on my desk at the moment. What he said was that those expressing an interest would have to show that they are capable of providing a service, that they had engaged with the staff, and that what they were doing was not vexatious or frivolous. I have to say that I would have thought that any commercial organisation will very easily satisfy those criteria.
A concern to which my noble friend Lord Greaves has not referred is that having set up the arrangement—and this of course is not just something that would apply to the two employees; it could apply to a community body as well—it could then sell the business or dispose of the shares in the company which it had formed to run the service. I have not seen any way in which this could be prevented. I suspect that I would be told that it would be improper to prevent it. But it concerns me that it is taking this proposal a good deal further than appears on the face of the Bill.
I turn to subsections (5) and (6) of Clause 71, the first dealing with an expression of interest, the second dealing with a procurement exercise. Both talk of the authority considering—and I will come back to that term—whether the activity would,
“promote or improve the social, economic or environmental well-being of the authority’s area”.
Well indeed, and well and good. But consider: it is not bound to apply those factors. It needs to consider them. I dare say that means that it must be able to show how it has considered them.
Turning to subsection (7), we are told that this,
“applies only so far as is consistent with the law”.
There is no particular assurance at all here, if I may say so. Subsection (7) refers to the procurement exercise but I am worried that an authority may well read this as applying to the expressions of interest as well. In general, I suspect that local authorities will need quite a lot of reassurance over how they apply these provisions.
I speak only for myself in this. I am finding it difficult to articulate some of the unease that is almost more instinctive than technical. However, general expressions of reassurance and consolation may not go quite so far, technically, as to amount to real reassurance. I have rambled enough. I hope that the House has a sense of my unease.
Lord Shutt of Greetland
It is extremely unlikely that the noble Lord will get it as quickly as that, but I believe that it will be available before 31 March.
Lord Greaves
Before my noble friend sits down and before I stand up, perhaps I may ask a question which has just occurred to me. If a service—for example, the refuse and recycling service—goes out to a contract and it is for well over £156,000, will an existing in-house provider be able to take part in that tendering exercise and compete against outside contractors in exactly the same way as it would under the old compulsory competitive tendering system or under the system in which councils sometimes put out a contract to test the market against their own in-house provision? Under the community right to challenge, if a contract goes out to tender like that, will the in-house provider still be allowed to take part in the exercise or will it be doomed?
Lord Shutt of Greetland
I may need to think about that and write to my noble friend. However, it seems to me that the in-house provider here could be the “two or more employees”. Those in-house people whom my noble friend speaks of would be the group of workers. That is how I think it would be done but, if I am wrong about that, I shall let him know. It seems to me that that is how the challenge would be used. However, if my noble friend is talking about procurement and there is an existing body, I do not see any circumstances in which that existing body will not be able to participate in the procurement exercise. I hope that that is helpful.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am grateful for that. I realise that my noble friend has not had a chance to think about that question but I think that the issue of “two or more employees” is totally irrelevant in this case. We are talking about a challenge made by an outside body or organisation. The contract is put out to general tender and there is not a two-person or six-person challenge from inside the organisation. There is an existing department full of staff who are currently working for the council and who may or may not be able to take part in the competitive tendering exercise. The more I think about this, the more it seems to be a crucial point, and it would be very helpful if the Minister could come back to us on it. This is a very new point and perhaps some clarification of it at Third Reading, if only to put the Government’s view on it on the record, would be extremely helpful. I hope that that will happen.
There are times when I listen to Ministers reading out their briefing when I think, “If that is the best they can do, I must be on to a good point”. The attempt to rubbish my amendment concerning a service review by suggesting that it would involve consulting every single resident, which would not be possible, was really rather derisory. I do not blame my noble friend for that; he has his briefing to read out. Councils and other bodies consult users of services all the time and they know how to do it. It is not difficult and you do not have to be absolutely certain that you have consulted every single resident. You put out a consultation by whatever means are reasonable. It might be through the internet, leaflets, articles in local newspapers or whatever. Therefore, I thought that that response was a bit pathetic.
The Trojan horse argument is important but the real problem arises when that Trojan horse is accidental. If you get a community that is really keen on taking over a service and it has real local support but the contract has to go out to tender and the community cannot possibly match what an outside commercial organisation can provide in terms of cost, then that community is not going to be very pleased. It is going to say, “We challenged and these people from outside who have come in to make a profit have stolen our services away from us”. They might well have preferred the service to stay with the council rather than for that to happen. That kind of scenario will simply lose public support. It is not about rights for communities, it is about communities potentially being set up to provide rights for the commercial challenges from outside. The advice to councils is going to be absolutely vital. It has got to be clear, it has got to be strong and it has got to provide councils with all the safeguards they need—not to stop communities challenging and taking services over—but to stop it being abused.
Lord Greaves
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I think we have thrashed this to death now. I do not think there is anything else to come. I will therefore not move it.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble
My Lords, concerns about the unintended consequences of the assets of community value provisions were raised at Second Reading and in Committee. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Cathcart and I tabled amendments because of our concern. Therefore, I thank the Minister very much for her understanding and determination to ensure that the Bill hit the right target in bringing forward the Government’s amendments tonight.
I also include in my acknowledgement and appreciation of the work undertaken the Bill team and, indeed, outside bodies such as the Country Land and Business Association for securing practical solutions. The common objective that we all share is vibrant communities for the future and I hope that the Bill as amended will help to fulfil that aspiration.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I thank the Government for listening to the debate on this matter in Committee and for coming forward with amendments which, by and large, are very sensible. I particularly appreciate their picking up the ancillary use point that I raised in an amendment, a great deal of which makes sense. Furthermore, I think that we all owe a debt to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, for the hard work that he put into this part of the Bill—not least because it meant that we could leave it to him and concentrate on other parts of the Bill.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, we have had an interesting debate at this late hour on this group of amendments. I can offer the Government some measure of support tonight, as there is lots to welcome in their proposals here, and they have clearly listened to the concerns expressed in the House.
The origin of some of the proposals can, of course, be found in the previous Administration. Amendment 201A, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, is not an amendment that we on these Benches can support, although his Amendment 202A , requiring the Secretary of State to publish criteria by which an asset must be assessed in order to be defined as being of community value, could be of some merit, as is the proposal from the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington.