Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, like my noble friend Lady Royall, I think that this is a bad Bill. We could describe it as the Donald Rumsfeld Bill, as it deals with known knowns, known unknowns and, in Schedule 7, unknown unknowns. This was best put in the RSPB’s excellent briefing, which states:

“In summary, the Public Bodies Bill is an enabling Bill framed along the lines of, ‘We’re going to change lots of things, some of which we know now, some of which we will work out soon and some of which we can't tell you anything about because we haven't thought of them at all yet, but please give us the power to do all of this’”.

Suffice to say that the RSPB—a big society with more members than all the political parties in this country put together—is very unhappy with the Bill. It is worried about the environmental consequences of the disposal of public land, it worries that environmental considerations will be secondary when these powers are used, and it is very concerned about the consequences for biodiversity of the measures against the Forestry Commission. It is among many organisations that have contacted noble Lords, urging opposition to the Bill.

Like so many noble Lords, I disagree with the Minister’s assertion that this brings in a transparent legislative framework. Rather, this skeleton Bill is an insult to parliamentary scrutiny—and I am afraid that the insult is doubled by Ministers claiming to act in the name of increasing accountability. It also feels so unnecessary. As has been said, few people disagree with rationalising the number and scope of arm’s-length bodies. The first Bill that I took through Parliament as a Minister became the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act, which among other things culled a large number of arm’s-length bodies—the agricultural levy boards—and also merged English Nature, the Rural Development Service and the Countryside Agency into Natural England and the Commission for Rural Communities. Section 8 of that Act also includes powers to transfer functions and powers between any of the arm’s-length bodies, including the Forestry Commission, within the Defra family—but with consent.

Therefore, I have my own track record in this area, and the possibility of cross-party consensus is there, if only the Government stopped rushing everything to get headlines and photo opportunities for their personal photographers. The previous Government published proposals for considerable rationalisation in their Smarter Government White Paper last December, and in the Treasury paper last March entitled Reforming Arm’s Length Bodies. My argument is not with the principle, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, said, with the application. Yes, I disagree with some of the detail relating to individual bodies such as the RDAs. We can also learn from the excellent report from the Institute for Government on how we as Ministers manage arm's-length bodies better. However, we need the Select Committee that I will tonight vote to establish to agree an acceptable process, because the principle of scrutiny must be respected.

As a Minister in the other place, I took five Bills through Parliament that included changes in primary legislation to 16 of these bodies, and the setting up of seven of them. This meant spending hours being scrutinised on the scope and functions of the bodies, which forced me to think clearly about what we were doing. In one memorable case, which concerned transferring to Ofsted functions relating to the inspection of independent schools, it forced the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and me to change our minds on the whole thing. That would not have happened if we had done it by regulation. I got a battering in the Commons, my noble friend faced a battering here, we discussed it and realised that neither of us disagreed but both thought the other one thought it was a good idea, we disagreed with the officials and we changed it. The Bill proposes jettisoning that scrutiny. It will mean, for example, that if the Young People’s Learning Agency were moved from Schedule 7 to Schedule 1, all the data-sharing powers that were debated at great length during the passage of the Bill to set it up would be transferred with no more than cursory scrutiny. Personal data is an issue of great sensitivity and importance. How many of these bodies have powers over personal data that may be redistributed in a cavalier fashion through the Bill?

The principle of independence must also be respected. Schedule 7—the zombie list, the list of the living dead—includes Ofsted, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills, Ofqual and the School Teachers’ Review Body, along with many other bodies with which I am less familiar. These bodies, by definition, must be independent of government. The publication of Ofsted’s annual report, for example, was always a very difficult day for me as a schools Minister because of Ofsted's authority born of its independence. My noble friend Lady Andrews made some powerful points about Schedule 7 bodies. How will they retain their independence when a Minister can abolish them by order thanks to the Bill?

Then there is the haste. Why have the bodies concerned barely been consulted? The national park authorities have contacted me to make important points about their special status and to tell me how little prior notice they had before this measure was announced. In his response to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, earlier, the Minister claimed that the devolved Administrations had been properly consulted. I gather that the Welsh Assembly Government were given one week’s notice of the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board and that the nature of the consultation was simply to ask what they were going to do now that the decision had been made to destroy the protection of low-wage workers in England.

Not all the bodies that are being abolished are on this list. Becta, for example, which is not on any of the lists, was given 24 hours’ notice of its demise and, true to the recent catalogue of shambolic decisions by the Government, the Secretary of State for Education was keener on headlines than on probity. Becta is a charity. The Secretary of State has the power to cease funding it but he has no power to close it altogether. As it was, he put the charity’s chief executive and board in a dreadful position, with their staff waking up to hear about their redundancies on the news.

Earlier, I mentioned the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board—a body that has continued successfully without any strike action in this country since 1923. In Schedule 7 is listed a similar body on which Mr Gove has already made a decision. The Minister claims that it is okay to bring in that schedule, but what about the School Support Staff Negotiating Body? That body was established after a huge amount of negotiation and trouble by me as the Minister and by many others, and its establishment was debated at length just over a year ago in this House. Like the Agricultural Wages Board, it protects some of the lowest-paid workers in this country, such as dinner ladies, school crossing patrollers, teaching assistants, caretakers, laboratory technicians and administrative staff, most of whom are women. Thanks to this body, people were given the chance of a career, not a one-off job, but that has now been lost at a stroke of Mr Gove’s pen.

We do not have to do this. If Schedule 7 were deleted, if another Bill, such as a localism Bill, were used to deal with bodies such as the RDAs, and if other powers, such as those over the Defra family in the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act, were used, we might begin to have a Bill worth proper scrutiny. Until then, we should give it to a Select Committee to try to lick it into shape.