To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the practice of excluding International GCSE results from value-added calculations in the post-16 school performance tables has the effect of artificially enhancing the results of independent schools against those of state schools; and whether they have plans to change the practice.

My Lords, the post-16 contextual value-added calculations are derived from a statistical model containing a number of factors known to impact on pupils’ post-16 outcomes. I recognise that excluding IGCSE results from the CVA calculations could potentially bias the results of independent schools in either direction. We have commissioned an internal analysis of this issue. I will be happy to provide noble Lords with a fuller reply when that analysis is complete.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that Answer. Is it not the case that the Government could simply ask the exam boards for the IGCSE results and incorporate them into the tables? There would then be no chance whatever of bias. Is it not much more important that the tables provide parents with the information that they need to help them choose schools than to keep the Government’s amour propre clean concerning a little dispute about what an exam is called?

My Lords, as the noble Lord is well aware, when the most recent statistics were prepared, only a few students were taking IGCSEs. We can reassure noble Lords that as regards the most current information, there is little likelihood of an impact. However, IGCSEs have not been submitted for accreditation to Ofqual. Therefore, until such a time as Ofqual has accredited those examinations and they are approved for use in maintained schools, we would not be in a position to collect those statistics.

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that, unless one is an expert in this particular field, her Answer is totally incomprehensible? She has promised us a further answer. Can we have it in English?

My Lords, yes. I will do my very best.

My Lords, notwithstanding the anomaly that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has highlighted, are the Government still committed to value added rather than bald results and league tables as a much better way of holding schools to account? Does Ofqual intend to sort this anomaly out?

My Lords, we are committed to value added. In fact, I took the trouble to have a look at the technical guide to the post-16 contextual value added 2008 model.

Oh!

My Lords, it takes a few hours to read, but I assure that noble Baroness that it is comprehensive.

My Lords, is the Minister aware that it is often destructive to use one and the same method for holding pupils to account by their exam marks as well as institutions; that is, schools? There is substantial evidence, such as in Warwick Mansell’s Education by Numbers: The Tyranny of Testing, of the damage done to education by using these exam results for school accountability. Can she suggest a better way to do it?

My Lords, the noble Baroness refers to what I am sure is some important research, which I will be happy to look at. The point about contextual value added is that it is not just taking the bald, bare exam results. It is taking into account progress that pupils make as a result of the efforts of their particular institution.

My Lords, will the Minister look at how independent boarding schools are performing compared with state day schools in terms of outcomes for looked-after children? Her noble friend Lord Adonis initiated a programme of encouragement to allow appropriate young people in care to join independent boarding schools. How is that progressing?

My Lords, I can inform the House that that work is progressing. I should be very happy to write to the noble Earl with an update, but there have been placements of looked-after children, and, as I understand it, the programme is progressing reasonably well.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, to stimulate the British automotive industry and to reduce emissions, they will extend the tax and duty benefits available to private vehicles to all commercial vehicles.

My Lords, fuel duty and vehicle excise duty apply to all vehicles, both private and commercial, while commercial vehicles already enjoy a range of tax and duty benefits. VED rates for heavy goods vehicles have been frozen since 2000, and heavy goods vehicles that meet European air quality standards are eligible for reduced VED rates through reduced pollution certificates. Business expenditure on vehicles may be tax deductible against company profits, subject to corporation tax rules.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that response. In view of the imminent European emissions regulation 6, is it not time that the Government considered extending to HGVs and light goods vehicles the requirement on vehicle manufacturers of private cars with regard to their CO₂ emissions and possibly extending it further to cover NO_x?

My Lords, the noble Lord is right that the European requirement comes into force in October this year, but we have already had in place over the past year an incentive to the industry to produce commercial vehicles with lower emissions.

My Lords, given the importance that the Government attach to making the UK a greener-vehicle manufacturing hub, can the Minister take another look at whether the current range of incentives might be strengthened?

My Lords, of course the Government look at the question of improving our performance on reducing pollution, but the noble Lord will recognise the vehicle excise duty incentives for reducing the emissions of cars and commercial vehicles. The greenest cars of all, which are not powered by carbon fuels, do not pay excise duty.

My Lords, nearly two months ago the Government announced to a great fanfare a multibillion pound package for the motor industry focusing on lower carbon initiatives. How much money has so far been paid to the motor industry?

My Lords, this is an ongoing programme, as the noble Baroness will appreciate.

Oh!

My Lords, she will recognise that the industry takes time to adjust to a stimulus of this kind, but the direction of travel is quite straight forward—it is low-pollutant travel. Industry will benefit, as will the private car owner, from reducing the pollutants which their engines emit. The level of vehicle excise duty is an important stimulus towards that.

My Lords, I am sure the Minister is aware that the lowest-emitting carbon-fuel-consuming cars are of course those with diesel engines. Their emissions are even lower than those with hybrid systems. Are the government schemes for the taxation and pricing of diesel fuels appropriate?

My Lords, the issues of the differential between petrol and diesel have a substantial history, and the differential is marked. However, the noble Lord will appreciate the extent to which the Government have put emphasis on low-pollutant vehicles. VED is the easiest signal to send because it is paid once a year or at six-monthly intervals and is a gross figure. We are signalling that we expect vehicles with low emissions to be purchased. We are also encouraging manufacturers; it is not as though manufacturers are not aware of worldwide pressure to investigate those technologies that produce fewer pollutants.

My Lords, in view of what the noble Lord, Lord Broers, has said, which was news to me, is there not some mechanism that would reduce taxation on diesel fuel, which would encourage more people to buy diesel cars, instead of petrol cars?

My Lords, it is easy to employ the concept that taxation should be reduced. However, there is a cost involved in the reduction of taxation. It is a reduction in revenue, which means that expenditure would have to be cut elsewhere. I am always interested in the Opposition’s proposals that we should cut revenue because I never get any suggestions of where they would cut expenditure.

My Lords, will the Minister congratulate those local authorities that have in mind the need to reduce emissions when they design their car parking policies, such as policies for residents’ parking and on-street parking in controlled parking zones? This makes it less expensive for lower-emitting cars to park. My borough of Richmond has been at the forefront of this.

My Lords, of course we welcome anything that local authorities can contribute. There is no doubt that a whole range of strategies can be deployed to encourage the use of low-pollutant cars. The message of the benefit of low-pollutant cars is probably widespread in the community. We need consumers to act accordingly.

My Lords, I revert to the Minister’s penultimate and ante-penultimate answers. Allowing for the fact that the Irish have a certain flexibility because of the Kyoto Protocol, they had no difficulty in taxing unleaded petrol higher than diesel. Why would the same freedom not be available to us?

My Lords, it reflects taxation strategy over many years. The Irish economy is often quoted as an exemplar for the British economy. On almost every occasion that it is quoted, I look at the facts and the comparison does not stand up. It is a vastly different economy with vastly different issues of motor transport—in the numbers of vehicles—from those of an advanced economy such as the United Kingdom. The issues facing Ireland and Britain are vastly different.

My Lords, given that transport is by far the greatest contributor to CO₂ emissions, and the urgency for this country to reduce CO₂ emissions, is it not illogical for the Government not to give some stimulus to the use of diesel, when diesel cars are now the lowest emitters?

My Lords, it is not that we do not give commercial industry any incentives to reduce pollutants. I have indicated the advantage that we have already given in grants to industry for the purchase of commercial vehicles that are lower emitters. We will emphasise that from October when the European directive becomes mandatory. We are concerned to ensure that, as far as possible, transport plays its part in lowering emissions. That is not as easy as the suggestion that one has merely to reduce the tax take on diesel.

My Lords, have the Government considered a scheme similar to that which, I understand, operates in some European countries, whereby cars that have high emissions can be traded in for scrap if the owners replace them with cars with low emissions? The scheme involves a €2,000 offset against the new car, which is financed by government, thereby helping both with the problem of emissions and the car industry?

My Lords, we are looking at that very carefully because it has merits if it is done well. One of the first countries to employ this strategy was France, but it is running into very heavy deficits and its Government are incurring much higher costs in developing the scheme. Therefore, it is not surprising that our Government are taking care to evaluate the effectiveness of the scheme before it is fully deployed.

My Lords, I am sure the Minister would not wish inadvertently to mislead the House but, when he says that the higher taxation on diesel goes back many years, is he aware that when I was Chancellor the tax on diesel was less than the tax on petrol, and at that time we had a budget surplus, not the horrifying and rapidly growing deficit that we have at present?

My Lords, how could I possibly spoil the fun? The noble Lord may refer to days gone past but he has to go back only one year to see that the decline in the cost of diesel fuel over the past year far surpasses anything that people have put forward in terms of a cut in fuel taxes simply because of the decline in world oil prices. Therefore, we have to put this debate not only into the noble Lord’s historical perspective but into the more recent and relevant perspective.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, in the light of current housing market conditions, they will abandon the requirement to provide home information packs.

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I declare an interest as I own a small number of farm cottages.

My Lords, the current problems facing the housing market were caused not by HIPs but by the global economic downturn. Independent research undertaken by Europe Economics found no evidence of any impact by HIPs on transactions or prices.

My Lords, for a decade the Government flooded society with regulations on the assumption that the good times would continue, and HIPs are of course a classic. Seventy-four per cent of the people who buy houses—these are the Government’s figures—take no notice of home information packs in their purchase deal and it is an inhibiting factor from the point of view of the vendor. However, the real question that I wish to ask is as follows. There are a number of factors in secondary legislation brought in by this Government which cumulatively are making it more difficult for the general economy to recover. Will the Minister ask her colleagues in government to commit themselves to a general review of secondary legislation so that any inhibiting factors which are discovered—I am sure that there are plenty of others—might be removed?

My Lords, I am sure the noble Lord will know that we are committed to an ambitious agenda of regulatory reform, cutting down unnecessary costs and improving the cost-effectiveness of new regulation. We have to do that while keeping essential protections for employees and employers. Abandoning the forthcoming changes on HIPs, which are intended to consolidate the regulations and provide industry with certainty and stability, would not help that process. I am delighted to say that, despite the current difficulties facing the housing market, a recent survey of 16,000 transactions by a leading estate agent, Connells, showed that, where a HIP was available, exchanges were completed on average six days quicker.

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am trying to sell a house. I can give the address to anyone who wants it. I bought a HIP last year and I have to buy another one. I simply say to my noble friend that of course it makes no difference to the housing market and of course on some occasions HIPs are useful but there are times when a HIP is simply an additional price that one has to pay to sell a house.

As I indicated, my Lords, we have seen some definite benefits from HIPs in terms of speed. The regulations we introduced in December will require sellers to provide a property information questionnaire that will include simple, basic information on matters such as electrical safety which one often does not remember to ask about when looking at a house. On the specific problems, I am happy to act as an estate agent for my noble friend. I can tell him that HIPs are valid for as long as the house stays on the market but that if it is removed, a new HIP will have to be done after 12 months. Even if the sale falls through after a year the seller can go back on the market with the original HIP as long as the marketing starts again within 28 days. So it effectively has a shelf life of a year.

My Lords, I am sure the Minister will remember whether she took part in our debates in drawing up the legislation on HIPs. It was said then that HIPs might be very good in a rising market but not very good in a falling market where people were having difficulty in selling. Unfortunately HIPs have not helped anyone and people are generally in disfavour of them because they feel that they are of no benefit. What can be done to reduce the extra burden placed on those wishing to sell now? It is all very well to have a HIP but, as has been said, they last for only a certain time. On the other hand, if it is more than three months old, it will rarely be accepted by a building society, bank or another solicitor and they will require it to be updated. What can be done about that? HIPs are not effective if they are not effective for the duration.

My Lords, as I said, they have a shelf life of a year. I agree with the noble Baroness that people need to see the HIPs. One of the things that has not succeeded is that estate agents have not been ensuring that the buyers, or the sellers, see the HIP. We have changed the regulations and removed the concession on first-day marketing so that from 6 April people will need to have a HIP when they put their house on the market. That will help the buyer and the seller to know that the HIP is in place and what it delivers. We should also remember that well over 2 million energy performance certificates have been issued through HIPs, all of which can save on costs. We have also seen a drop in the cost of searches of between £30 and £120. So, there are definite benefits to HIPs.

My Lords, the Minister’s departmental website, which I trawled yesterday looking for evidence and research on HIPs, does not show any recent research. I could not find the reference to the independent research that she mentioned. The website did tell me that I could subscribe to Ministers’ “twittering” but that is not entirely helpful in this context. The Government cite the need for an evidence base. What evidence do they have on the effect of requiring a HIP from the first day of marketing, a change to be introduced at the beginning of April, as she mentioned? What difference will that make?

My Lords, over the past year we have been working closely with the industry. The package that we brought forward in December is looking at different forms of simplification and working parties. I can send the noble Baroness a collection of evidence that we have gathered and put forward, but essentially it is counterfactual evidence because the HIPs were not being seen and we were told not least by estate agents and consumer organisations that it was important for buyers and sellers to be able to handle the HIP to make sure that they knew what they were getting for their money and what information it contained.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they have taken to prepare for public control of a railway franchise in the event of a train operating company defaulting on its franchise agreement.

My Lords, Section 30 of the Railways Act 1993, as amended by the Railways Act 2005, places a duty on the Secretary of State to ensure that passenger services are maintained in the event of a franchise failure. The Government have well developed contingency plans in place should a franchisee default on a franchise. These plans draw on the experience gained from the termination of the Connex South Eastern franchise in 2003 and the resolution of GNER’s financial position in 2006.

My Lords, I thank the Minister, but will he give me an assurance that a truly professional team of people is available to him in the event of a default of a franchise and that those people will know that they are going to operate the franchise for a long time, rather than the short time that South Eastern Trains was given, where the people running it were swept aside?

My Lords, the time was not that short for South Eastern Trains. The Strategic Rail Authority took over the franchise at the end of 2003 and ran it until April 2006, which is a fairly lengthy period. On the competence of those who will take on this role, my department has a call-off contract with First Class Partnerships, which is an organisation established by former senior British Rail managers, providing strategic, commercial operations, engineering and infrastructure rail consultancy and advice to leading rail companies, investors in rail, Governments and regulators around the globe. I have looked at the CVs of the principal officers of First Class Partnerships, whose experiences bear a remarkable resemblance to those of the noble Lord. Clearly, they are very well placed to take on these responsibilities.

My Lords, can my noble friend confirm that it is not his intention to allow franchise holders who may get into trouble mid-term to renegotiate the terms of their franchise? Does he agree that, if they were able to do so, that would send out entirely the wrong message for future franchise bids because the winners would be those who told the biggest whoppers about their projections rather than those who offered the best value for money?

My Lords, my noble friend is correct in every aspect of his question.

My Lords, in a time of considerable financial stress, some train operating companies may well be tempted to make unwelcome economies from the point of view of the travelling passengers, such as the shortening of trains, the early closure of stations, compulsory redundancies and so forth. Will the Government undertake to monitor that carefully and to take appropriate action if necessary?

My Lords, I can give that assurance. Those operating the franchises are expected to abide by the terms of their contracts, which set out their obligations in considerable detail, including their obligations in the provision of train services.

My Lords, can my noble friend confirm that, if one franchise hands the keys back, so to speak, all the other franchises operated by the same holding company will also be terminated? On that basis, can he assure the House that First Class Partnerships has enough people to run three or four franchises for an extended period, which might be required? Would there be any chance of it being allowed to go on to the end of the franchise period, as many of us asked for when Connex was being operated by the Government, because it was a rather good service?

My Lords, on cross-defaulting, we would take a decision on a case-by-case basis. We would certainly not expect to have to run a large number of franchises.

My Lords, which franchises on the Minister’s red list are more vulnerable to failure, those recently awarded or those that have been in place for longer?

My Lords, it would not be appropriate for me to give details of individual franchises and our assessment of them. That is commercially confidential information. However, I can tell the noble Earl that no franchise operator has come to the Government saying that it expects to be in default of its obligations under its franchise.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, my noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon will repeat the Statement on the spring European Council at a convenient point after 3.30 pm. Immediately after the spring European Council Statement, my noble friend Lord Bach will repeat the rights and responsibilities Statement.

That the draft orders laid before the House on 8 December 2008 and 11 February be approved.

Relevant Documents: 2nd Report from the Regulatory Reform Committee, 7th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments and 8th Report from the Merits Committee, considered in Grand Committee on 18 March.

My Lords, Amendment 97 was alluded to at the end of the previous day’s proceedings, and the procedures require us not to move it.

Amendment 98 would take out of the Bill Clause 29, which relates to scrutiny officers. In proposing this, I do not suggest in the slightest that we do not support good scrutiny. I did not explain my concerns terribly well in Committee, and therefore wish to bring back the amendment.

I will also ask the Government to expand on comments that the Minister made then. She said:

“The purpose of the clause is to raise the status, visibility and effectiveness of the overview and scrutiny function”.

She added that there was,

“substantial evidence … that officer support is an important condition. … If overview and scrutiny is to be effective, it is crucial that officer resources are in place”.—[Official Report, 3/2/09; col. GC172.]

I agree very much with that. I declare an interest as a member of the advisory board of the Centre for Public Scrutiny, which has worked with the Government on this. I agree that more resources and staff should, if applied well, lead to better scrutiny. However, designating an officer does not mean that there will be any extra officer resources. The Minister said that having a statutory officer was the critical thing, and that there was evidence to this effect. Will she—or perhaps he, as it looks as if the noble Lord, Lord Patel, will be answering—tell the House what that evidence is?

As regards funding, the Minister gave an indication—I could not find the reference when I looked for it—about the amount of funding. Certainly she said that the Government would provide funding, that this would be ring-fenced and that the costs would be met in full. I recall thinking when I heard the figure that it was not very much funding. However, ring-fencing and meeting the costs in full in the way that she described seem to be inconsistent with the assurances that the Government gave in the same debate that it will be up to the local authority to decide what suits it best. In short, we support good scrutiny, but we do not believe that the Government have found the key to unlocking it.

Also in this group are government Amendments 99, 100, 170, 171 and 172. We welcome these. The first expands on an amendment that we tabled at the previous stage. I believe it came from the Local Government Association. The Minister will explain the now rather longer clause, allowing for joint scrutiny by two or more local authorities. Given the constraints at this stage of the Bill, I will ask him some questions on his amendment, even though he has not yet had an opportunity to introduce it.

The new clause says that regulations may provide for arrangements for joint scrutiny to be made,

“only in circumstances, or subject to conditions or limitations, specified in the regulations”.

Will the Minister give us a clue what that might cover; and, importantly, do the Government expect that local authorities will take the lead in proposing any prescriptions that might come through regulations? Could he also confirm that this is not intended to be a provision that would allow the Secretary of State to take particular action against particular local authorities? I cannot think what the Latin equivalent for ad hominem would be, but I am sure that the Minister understands my point.

New Section 5C would allow regulations to provide that an authority must or may not disclose information to a joint scrutiny committee. I was surprised to see this. The essence of good local government lies in its openness and transparency. In providing for restrictions on disclosure, perhaps the Minister could tell us whether there is some equivalent that this replicates in the case of a domestic committee, an overview and scrutiny committee, within an authority. I am quite concerned about that restriction. I beg to move.

My Lords, a number of important issues have been raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. Before I address them, I would first like to set out the Government’s position on our proposals. We had a good discussion in Committee about proposals for overview and scrutiny, which together aim to raise the visibility and profile of scrutiny within the council and in the local community. We also want to improve its capacity and effectiveness so that it is better equipped to respond to issues of local importance. I am pleased that the noble Baroness agrees with the principle of what we are trying to do.

This grouping includes our amendments for joint overview and scrutiny committees as well as Amendment 98 on our proposal for the scrutiny officer. I will deal first with the amendments concerned with joint overview and scrutiny committees. We talked at length about the merits of cross-boundary scrutiny and how it could positively contribute to our overarching aim of raising the visibility and effectiveness of scrutiny.

We were in agreement that joint overview and scrutiny committees could provide an efficient and effective means of co-ordinating the scrutiny work of several local authorities. Indeed, it was for this reason that we provided for the setting up of joint overview and scrutiny committees between a county and one or more of its districts in Section 123 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, and why, in Clause 30 of the Bill, we sought to extend the scope of these provisions so that joint overview and scrutiny committees might make reports and recommendations on any matter affecting the area or inhabitants of that group of authorities, rather than on local area agreement matters alone.

However, noble Lords wanted us to go further and extend these arrangements so that any group of local authorities might set up a joint committee. My noble friend the Minister said that we would give the matter further consideration, and we have done so. We have concluded that there is merit in noble Lords’ arguments. They will be pleased to hear that the new clause introduced by Amendment 99 will enable us to make provision for the appointment of joint overview and scrutiny committees by any two or more local authorities. This will enable cross-boundary scrutiny of strategic issues affecting a number of local authorities, which supports sub-regional working between local authorities.

The new clause replaces Section 123 of the 2007 Act in its entirety and will also make the changes originally to be achieved by Clause 30 of the Bill; that is, extending the scope of what joint overview and scrutiny committees may do, so that they may make reports and recommendations on any matter affecting the area or inhabitants of that group of authorities, rather than on local area agreement matters alone. Broadening the scope of what these committees may consider will help maximise this more efficient and effective way of working.

Amendments 100, 170, 171 and 172 make necessary technical changes to the Bill and other legislation where references to joint overview and scrutiny committees need updating or where repeals are no longer needed now that we intend to insert a new Section 123 into the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007.

A few noble Lords, prior to the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, raised concerns about the need for clarification on the scope and content of the regulations that we intend to draw up and on the timing of these regulations. It is natural to want reassurance about the timing of the regulations and I am happy to provide that. The new provisions for the extended joint overview and scrutiny committees would, if accepted, come into force automatically two months after Royal Assent. The proposals for joint overview and scrutiny regulations that we set out in the Improving Local Accountability consultation will provide a firm basis for regulations on any new, extended joint overview and scrutiny committees, so we are not starting from scratch. We intend to continue to work with the LGA, the Centre for Public Scrutiny and local government stakeholders, consulting as necessary to ensure that arrangements for extended joint overview and scrutiny committees are practical and strike the right balance. With this in mind, we hope to be in a position to issue final regulations providing for joint overview and scrutiny committees under new Section 123 of the 2007 Act shortly after the relevant provisions of this Bill come into force.

On the scope of the regulations, my noble friend Lady Andrews said in Committee that we support the principle of cross-boundary scrutiny. She also said that any extended arrangement would need to be considered in the context of the powers that may be provided to overview and scrutiny committees under the 2007 Act. Our intention is that such overview and scrutiny committees—where they are established, which will be completely at the discretion of the authorities concerned—will be provided with appropriate powers, in line with the proposals that we set out for overview and scrutiny committees in our Improving Local Accountability consultation. These proposals were broadly welcomed by the local government community. Those are our intentions but, as I said, we will want to work with the LGA, the Centre for Public Scrutiny and other representatives from local government to ensure that any regulations for these extended joint overview and scrutiny committees are appropriate and strike the right balance.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, asked about disclosure and what we mean by,

“must … or may not disclose”,

information. This would simply allow us to make provisions regarding what information must not be provided by certain partner authorities. In our recent consultation, we set out proposals on this that were broadly welcomed by the authorities, which intend to follow this up using the same approach.

In talking to Amendment 98, which would remove Clause 29, I will address some of the other points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee. Clause 29 provides for a designated scrutiny officer in councils with a responsibility for LAAs. That will ensure that overview and scrutiny committees receive the officer support that they need to carry out this important work. The requirement is for one statutory officer who will act as a scrutiny champion. The clause is therefore central to our aims for improving the visibility and effectiveness of scrutiny.

Noble Lords have suggested that the approach that we have set out in the legislation is unnecessary and that it would be better to leave this matter for local authorities to decide on. Let me reassure noble Lords that we have consulted extensively on the proposals for scrutiny support set out in the White Paper, Communities in Control. Views were mixed but, if I lay them out, noble Lords will see where we are coming from. Some welcomed the commitment to require a scrutiny officer resource. The Centre for Public Scrutiny thought it essential if scrutiny is to benefit fully from the new powers and responsibilities outlined in the Communities in Control White Paper. It went on to comment that it saw a danger of there being simply a single officer and that it would favour more extensive requirements. Others, however, while agreeing that scrutiny should be properly supported, stated that how to do so should be left to the discretion of councils. Given the range of contrasting views expressed, I believe that the approach that we have set out strikes the correct balance in that it recognises the important role that officer support plays in supporting members to drive effective LAA scrutiny but carefully balances this with the need to allow local flexibility. That is why, for example, we have not attempted any complex definition of scrutiny support and resources.

While we are creating a statutory post, we are deliberately not prescribing detailed duties that the scrutiny officer must carry out or at what level the scrutiny officer should be, a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, in Committee. The level of other statutory posts, such as the monitoring officer and the finance officer, are implicit from the legislation because of the complex and extensive duties that they must discharge. We have not set out a list of the duties that a scrutiny officer must perform on the basis that the role of the scrutiny officer may need to vary from one local authority to another, depending on the way in which scrutiny is organised in any particular council. We therefore believe that it is better for local authorities to make arrangements that are appropriate for their own circumstances.

Noble Lords raised concerns in Committee that the provision in Clause 29 is not sufficient and that one officer is not enough. Although the requirement is for one statutory officer, we would expect local authorities to decide what resources they need to allocate to scrutiny to suit their particular needs. I am sure that noble Lords will agree that it is not appropriate for us to prescribe such detailed arrangements. As I have said, the approach that we have set out achieves the right balance.

On resources, studies on the development of overview and scrutiny have shown that officer support is an important condition for effective scrutiny. If overview and scrutiny is to be effective, it is critical that officer resource is in place to provide support and advice. An evaluation of the outcomes and impact of new council constituents, for example, made three key points that support this: first, that scrutiny arrangements are not as robust as executive arrangements; secondly, that less officer support is provided for scrutiny compared with executive functions; and, thirdly, that scrutiny works best and is more robust where resources are committed.

We have also consulted extensively on how to implement the proposals for scrutiny support that were set out in the White Paper Communities in Control. As I have said, views were mixed and we have chosen to strike the right balance in this process.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said that my noble friend had commented on this resource being ring-fenced. I should make it clear that it is not. If the provision is enacted, we will ensure that resources are provided through future finance settlements in line with the wishes of local government, but the vast majority of government funding provided for non-school services is through general grants, such as the revenue support grant or the new area-based grant, so local authorities have considerable freedom to determine their spending priorities. The Government are committed to ensuring that local authorities have the flexibility to ensure that they can make local decisions on the provision of funding for the services for which they have statutory responsibilities.

We have no intention of taking particular measures against particular authorities. We will regulate in line with our response to the consultation on implementation of the 2007 Act.

These provisions considerably strengthen the arrangements for overview and scrutiny. I am grateful to noble Lords who brought to our attention the fact that joint scrutiny should be made. We have listened carefully to those views and I hope that the explanation that I have given will provide sufficient assurances on Amendments 99, 100 and 170 to 172 and that the noble Baroness will withdraw Amendment 98. I hope that I have covered all the points that she made. If not, I shall respond in writing.

My Lords, I am not sure at what point I should speak on this, but it is important that I should clearly lend my support to the Government’s amendments. Both my noble friend Lord Hanningfield and I have put our names to the amendments tabled by the Minister. We have done so because the Government have clearly listened to what the Opposition and other noble Lords said in Grand Committee. I am grateful that the Government have heeded that advice and have been prepared to cede ground.

My Lords, it is not appropriate for the noble Baroness to respond to the Minister at this point.

My Lords, perhaps I might assist the House. I think that the noble Baroness may be addressing Amendment 99 when we are still on Amendment 98.

My Lords, they are grouped together.

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness. They are grouped together and she is absolutely in order to speak.

My Lords, the noble Baroness is absolutely right that the two amendments are grouped together. However, it is appropriate, I believe, for me to establish that the Minister was speaking early in the debate. It is now appropriate for the noble Baroness to respond and to speak to her amendments.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her guidance. As one of the newer Members of your Lordships’ House, I look to your Lordships for guidance.

I am grateful that the Government have heeded our advice and I am delighted to support their amendment. Although the amendment does not go as far as we would like, the Bill is improved by its inclusion and we welcome that. We on these Benches, however, would like to see greater flexibility and a greater ability for councils to set up joint scrutiny committees on specific projects or schemes where joint working is needed, often across county boundaries.

I am sure that my noble friend Lord Hanningfield will approve of my using an Essex example. On matters involving Stansted Airport, for example, it will be a question of Essex County Council working with East Hertfordshire, whereas on issues surrounding the Thames Gateway the appropriate partners might be the GLA or Kent County Council. The Government recognise the logic of allowing the joint scrutiny but have stopped short of allowing a more organic creation of such committees. An enduring theme of our debates on this Bill is the Government’s apparent reluctance to accept that kind of bottom-up flexibility rather than top-down centralisation. However, when the Government try to make this a better Bill, we support their efforts.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, for their support and I certainly heed the points that they have made. Before the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, replies, I would like to clarify the disclosure issue. Information that may not be disclosed, for example, would be information otherwise exempt under other legislation, such as data protection. Also, provision may be made to avoid duplication of requests. For example, if a partner has already provided such information, the same information might not be required a second time. Our proposals also set out the information that should be provided, such as on local area agreement matters to which the partners signed up. I hope that that helps to clarify what I said.

My Lords, perhaps I can take this in reverse order. First, on the points that I raised, I am grateful to the Minister for confirming that there will not be ring-fencing, as it was stated on 3 February at col. GC 173 that money would be ring-fenced. We are much happier that it should not be, although of course it is often quite difficult to identify whether there is any additional funding when it is not ring-fenced. This does not mean that there will be an extra officer. I fully accept that having a designated officer may raise the status of the work but it does not necessarily mean that there will be any extra officer resource.

I am reassured to hear what the Minister has said on disclosure under the government amendment, but the new clause is drawn very widely. I am sorry to bowl this at the Government without notice, but I wonder whether they might consider withdrawing this amendment now in order to use the period between now and Third Reading to reconsider this. I assure them that from these Benches we will be very supportive of the thrust of the amendment, which is a good amendment. I am waffling to give an opportunity for some thought, but the time until Third Reading could be used to draw up something more precise about the restrictions on disclosure. The noble Lord is quite right to remind the House that there is a positive and negative in the sentence on what must be provided, but the interests of transparency and open government have to be considered if we are to limit what must not be disclosed. If the Government would consider using the opportunity to improve their own legislation, we would welcome it.

My Lords, we cannot withdraw the amendment at the moment. We have consulted widely on it and consider it the most appropriate formulation based on the 2007 legislation.

My Lords, I am disappointed by that response; I thought that I was being constructive. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 98.

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 100A —I think to everybody’s surprise at this point. We debated the amendment in Committee, but the Minister’s reply was disrupted by a Division, so I return to the subject now so that we might give our concentration to it.

My noble friend Lady Hamwee and I need no convincing of the importance of good and effective scrutiny. As I said in Committee, we each spent eight years of our lives on a body devoted almost entirely to scrutiny—the London Assembly. We need no convincing of the need to strengthen scrutiny. My noble friend has just spoken of the limited effect that the designation of a scrutiny officer is likely to have. This amendment, if enacted, would have more effect than probably any other single measure in strengthening the visibility, status and effectiveness of overview and scrutiny committees.

The amendment would give local authorities’ overview and scrutiny committees the power to require the connected authorities to give evidence, either in writing and/or in person. In an ideal world, those authorities would respond simply to an invitation and there would be no need for any statutory requirement; in good partnerships, that is what happens now. However, it is more likely to be necessary where the relationship is either not as good as it should be or the particular issues under consideration are rather more contentious. If those other bodies knew that, if necessary, a legal power could be used by the overview and scrutiny committees to require their information, their evidence and, if necessary, their attendance, that alone would raise the standing and status of those committees.

That is the purpose of the amendment. I hope that in moving it again we are giving the Minister an uninterrupted opportunity to give a considered response. I again stress that our purpose is wholly consistent with the Government’s intention of raising the status and effectiveness of scrutiny. I beg to move.

My Lords, I hope that I can give a response without interruption on this occasion. Amendment 100A is concerned with those partner authorities set out in Section 22A of the Local Government Act 2000 that must provide information to overview and scrutiny committees. The amendment would add “connected authorities”, as defined under Clause 2 of this Bill, to Section 22A so that those partners would be under a duty to provide information to overview and scrutiny committees once this provision and the necessary regulations came into force.

It would seem, from what the noble Lord says, that he believes that this amendment would provide overview and scrutiny committees with the power to require partners to attend. It would not. This issue of partner attendance was discussed at length during the passage of the 2007 Act. Parliament agreed that partners should be required to provide information but that attendance before a committee should be optional. We said at the time, and I say again now, that we firmly believe that it is not necessarily appropriate to impose a blanket requirement on partners to attend in person. Where councillors are working in partnership with such a broad range of public service providers, some of whom are not based locally, it is not necessarily appropriate to allow overview and scrutiny committees to compel attendance.

We must also be mindful of the potential burdens that are placed on partner authorities, some of which will have limited capacity to respond. It is, of course, important to provide overview and scrutiny committees with the powers that they need to carry out their work, but we must strike the right balance. We think that we have achieved this. This is evident from our recent Improving Local Accountability consultation. We have consulted on the regulations that will provide overview and scrutiny committees with the power to require information from relevant partner authorities. We are now in the process of drafting these regulations. The proposals that we set out in that consultation were broadly welcomed by local government stakeholders. In fact, a significant number of responses opposed overregulation on the issue of attendance, taking the view that such matters should be left to local discussion and agreement, on the basis that it would not always be necessary, or cost-effective, to require attendance in person by partner authorities.

Given my explanation and the evidence that I have presented from our recent consultation exercise, I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment. A careful balance must be struck between giving overview and scrutiny committees the powers that they need to carry out their work and recognising the limited capacity of some partners to respond. Noble Lords will remember that this issue was discussed in detail during the passage of the 2007 Act. I believe that we have achieved the right balance of powers and that we should not seek to add partners outside those named under Part 5 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 without proper justification and detailed consideration of the potential new burdens. I hope that the explanation will be sufficient for the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for giving me a clear and uninterrupted response. If the drafting is inappropriate, I shall have a word with my parliamentary draftsmen, but I think that the purpose and intention of the amendment is clear. As things stand, if I understood the Minister correctly, these bodies may be required or requested to give information. However, there is an important difference between receiving information, desirable though that is, and the ability to question and cross-examine on that information, which is, of course, the principal purpose of an overview and scrutiny committee. I am, of course, disappointed that the Minister does not feel able to go just one more step along the road of making scrutiny effective, but under the circumstances I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister.

“With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a Statement on the European Council held in Brussels last Thursday and Friday, which I attended with my right honorable friends the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary, and which, once again, emphasised the importance of European and international co-operation to address the financial crisis.

In October and November, all European and then G20 countries agreed to recapitalise the banks. In November, both the European Union and the G20 agreed on co-ordinated fiscal action to support employment and growth. Just as, at the last summit in December, Europe led the way towards a global climate change deal in Copenhagen later this year, so Europe has now made proposals in advance of the G20 to reshape the global financial and trading system and do what is necessary to build economic recovery across the world.

First, we agreed that the global challenges we face today cannot be met if nations turn inwards to a protectionism that, history tells us, in the end protects no one. Our agreement to,

“avoid all forms of protectionist measures”,

requires monitoring by the World Trade Organisation. The Council agreed to encourage international trade by facilitating trade credits, and called for a,

“swift conclusion of bilateral trade negotiations and of the WTO Doha development agenda.”

Secondly, we agreed measures to put to the G20 for global agreements to reshape the regulation of banks and financial services. We agreed that all systemically important institutions should be subject to appropriate regulation and oversight; and that this would extend to include hedge funds and the shadow banking sector. We pledged to protect the world’s financial system from non-transparent, non-co-operative and loosely regulated jurisdictions, including offshore centres and tax havens. We welcome the progress which has already been made by Switzerland, Austria, Andorra and Lichtenstein, and look forward to seeing them implement the international standard rapidly. We call on those countries yet to endorse the international standard to do so urgently.

The Council agreed to improve supervisory co-operation by pushing forward with colleges of supervisors for all major cross-border financial institutions. We also agreed to adopt international principles on remuneration in the financial sector, based on an approach which rewards long-term success rather than excessive risk-taking. We called on the Council and the European Parliament,

“to rapidly reach agreement on the legislative acts relating to credit rating agencies, the solvency of insurance companies, the capital requirements for banks and cross-border payments and electronic money.”

At its next meeting in June, the Council will take the first decisions on regulation and supervision in the EU following the Larosière report. Our policy is that regulatory rules should be set at an international level but that direct supervision is a matter for our national authorities. The Council was clear that, by acting together, the EU can,

“put its financial sector on a sound footing, get credit flowing to the real economy, and protect its citizens from the worst impacts of the crisis”,

as well as helping to build a stronger economy for the future.

The Council also welcomed the Commission’s proposal to double, to €50 billion, balance of payments assistance so that those within the European Union have the support they need to deliver the fiscal stimulus required to ensure their recovery. But with global capital flows in 2008 down by more than 80 per cent compared with 2007, and the financing gap for emerging economies this year up to $800 billion, this is not just an issue for the emerging economies. Because of the continuing risk of contagion, this is an issue for every country in the world, so it is vital that we increase the resources available to the IMF in order to ensure that it can intervene to stabilise economies, stop the crisis spreading, and return the global economy to growth. The Council called for a very substantial increase in resources available to the IMF; and agreed that, for their contribution to this increase, as a first step EU member states should provide, on a voluntary basis, a fast temporary support of IMF lending capacity in the form of a loan of €75 billion or over $100 billion.

The Council called for continued,

“international co-ordination of fiscal stimulus measures”.

It agreed that,

“good progress has been made in implementing the European economic recovery plan”,

and that while we must ensure fiscal sustainability in the medium term,

“the size of the fiscal effort—around 3.3 per cent of GDP or over 400 billion euros—will generate new investments, boost demand, create jobs and help the EU move to a low-carbon economy”.

The Council also agreed a further €5 billion to be invested for stimulus projects in energy security, renewable energy and broadband. This agreement provides for at least €220 million of additional investment in UK carbon capture and storage, and offshore wind projects.

We have seen an unprecedented fiscal injection in every major economy—in France a package worth €26 billion with further, more recent, measures worth €2.6 billion; in Spain, an infrastructure package worth €11 billion alongside other measures, with the IMF estimating a total stimulus spend of 2.3 per cent of GDP; and, in Germany, not one but two fiscal stimulus packages, together totalling €82 billion; 1.5 per cent of its GDP this year and 2 per cent of GDP in 2010.

As the Council concluded, its determination is

“to do what is necessary to restore jobs and growth”.

The Council also reached important conclusions on energy security and climate change, on the Eastern Partnership and on relations with the United States. The Council remains committed to working for a worldwide and comprehensive climate change agreement in Copenhagen later this year. Following last December’s Council, Europe became the first continent in history to make legally binding the detailed policies required to set itself on a path to a low-carbon economy, with a commitment to a 30 per cent reduction in emissions, provided that other countries make comparable commitments according to their capabilities. Our success in Copenhagen, however, will depend also on unlocking negotiations with developing countries. The Council therefore agreed that the European Union will, within the framework of a future comprehensive climate agreement, take on its fair share of financing for green technologies, reducing deforestation and protecting the poorest from the impacts of climate change.

The global economic downturn is no time to walk away from our commitments to the developing world. The Council agreed that Europe should continue to play a leading role in supporting developing countries in order to avoid jeopardising the progress achieved in recent years and undermining their economic and political stability, and that commitments to increase development assistance and deliver on the millennium development goals must be honoured. The Council also emphasised the importance of promoting stability, good governance and economic development in its eastern neighbourhood.

Finally, in looking ahead to the informal EU-US summit to be held in Prague next month, the Council welcomed the inauguration of President Obama and reaffirmed the strategic importance of transatlantic relations. At this moment of international economic crisis, we are showing that Europe and the world can work together to achieve co-ordinated interest rate cuts, a substantial fiscal stimulus, banking reform, new rules for tax havens and remuneration. I commend this Statement to the House”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

My Lords, I thank the Leader of the House for repeating the Statement. Within it, and in its conclusions, there is much reference to the forthcoming G20 summit. Can the noble Baroness indicate what arrangements she will be making to report to Parliament on that summit, since it meets on that same day that we rise for the Easter Recess?

We welcome renewed commitments on climate change, but was the EU trading emissions scheme addressed at the summit, when the price of carbon is plummeting, which actually encourages more carbon emissions? Was there discussion of our renewables target of 15 per cent by 2020? The Guardian today says that everyone knows that that target is “hopeless”.

Can the noble Baroness explain the strategic purpose of the Eastern Partnership, involving nations with dubious regimes such as Belarus and stretching to the Caspian Sea? The Eastern Partnership excludes the three strategic powers impacting on that region, namely: Russia, Turkey and Iran. What talks have there been with those nations about the Eastern Partnership, and what have been their reactions? Also, what is meant by full visa liberalisation with Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova and Azerbaijan? What timetable do the UK Government advocate for that, and what thought was given to the risks of easing human trafficking from nations such as Moldova?

In this Statement there are, naturally, ringing phrases about the Doha round. We can all agree on those, but can the noble Baroness give us even one view of what specific progress has been made since the last summit? Were any questions raised at the summit about threats to free trade: for example, French comments on repatriating jobs to France from Slovenia?

It is vital to restore confidence in the financial sector. I know that the Government feel that we are fortunate, in this country, to have the noble Lord, Lord Myners, on the case. There was talk in the communiqué of tightening action on lightly regulated tax jurisdictions; perhaps the noble Lord will lead the Government’s drive on that.

It is right to explore areas of capital adequacy and transparency. Would that such key policy issues had been addressed earlier, and the present discredited and confusing regime of tick-box regulation had not been put in place by the Prime Minister.

Within the EU, we already have a common fisheries policy with rules laid down by countries with no serious fishing interest. We can all see the results of that in the North Sea. Will the noble Baroness assure us that she will save us from the nightmare of a City of London regulated from Tallinn and Bucharest or, perhaps even worse, from Frankfurt and Paris? We can all foresee the potential dangers of that. Better co-ordination may be desirable, but are there not real dangers in a single European regulator that overrides national regulation?

We are told that the Prime Minister is forging a world consensus behind the British solution. Is the noble Baroness aware that it is not the British solution that other nations are commenting on but the British disease? We are back to the humiliation of the 1970s. Other countries are talking of massive fiscal stimulus. Has the noble Baroness seen today's comments from the CBI that,

“a further significant fiscal stimulus is unaffordable and would lead to businesses and households retrenching”.

Paragraph 12 of the conclusions says the Council,

“reaffirms its strong commitment to sound public finances .... with sustainable public finances”.

The noble Baroness has enormous experience of the European Commission. Does she think that that bit was drafted by our own Prime Minister or by Mrs Merkel?

Last week saw the worst set of public finance figures in our peacetime history. We are forecast to have the largest budget deficit of any G20 economy next year—twice as large as the average for the G20 as a whole. We are in no position to lecture anybody. Is the noble Baroness aware that Europe is unanimous that cutting VAT was not the way ahead? Can she list any country in the EU that has copied this move?

Britain is in the humiliating position of having the worst deficit in Europe. The Prime Minister is now forecast to have delivered a longer recession than the United States or the eurozone; the deepest peacetime recession since the great depression; and, last week, the fastest rise in unemployment since records began. The policies that led the country into such a mess are not the policies to get us out of it.

Finally, does the noble Baroness know if there was any discussion at the summit about the sustainability of the euro? Are we not fortunate—here I give credit to the Prime Minister—that we are not caught like so many nations in the EU in the straitjacket of the euro and unable—dare I say it?—to find British solutions for British problems? As long as the Government stick to their no-euro line, they will be supported by the Conservative Party.

My Lords, I sometimes think of the old ITMA character who used to say:

“It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going”.

Certainly, when the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, reads out the litany of problems, with none of which I disagree, it is only fair that we face these issues firmly and resolutely.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, referred to the depression in the 1930s. Europe faced the issues in disarray and competitive beggar-my-neighbour trade policies. It is encouraging, and something to be welcomed, to find that, at a moment of not only national crisis but of world crisis, the Europe of today has been able to meet, as it has done, and the Prime Minister has been able to come back with positive gains in terms of co-ordinated action. We certainly welcome them. I do not think it is churlish to point out that it might have been even better if Europe had not been lectured for a decade or more both by the Prime Minister and Mr Blair about the successes of Anglo-Saxon capitalism as against the weaknesses and failings of old Europe. However, we shall let that pass. The co-ordination that is going on is really to be welcomed.

A little commercial: I welcome the statement on tax havens and hope that when we debate them in this House on Thursday on a Liberal Democrat Motion, whichever Minister comes along will be able to give us specific examples of how the Government are taking action on British-ruled tax havens.

On the Doha round, I recently went to a briefing by our own noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, who was quite optimistic that we could get Doha back on track. She estimated that something like 20 per cent of the issues were still to be decided. Of course, they will be the difficult 20 per cent. Nevertheless, do the Government have a timetable for the completion of Doha?

On eastern Europe, I share the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, for clarification on the Eastern Partnership. However, I feel strongly that one of the great triumphs of the EU has been shepherding and helping former east European communist dictatorships into democracy under its wing. Some of those democracies are extremely fragile, so it is important that the EU keeps up its responsibility for both good governance and economic stability in those areas. Similarly, we welcome the ongoing commitment to Africa. In the recent debate on aid, it was pointed out that this crisis might drag some 60 million people back into absolute poverty. It would be a tragedy if the positive actions on Africa were a case of one step forward and two steps back.

On the green agenda, it was interesting at Oral Questions today when the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, raised the German example of scrapping old, polluting cars with a payment as an encouragement to buy new ones. I wonder whether, rather than our simply point scoring over other countries, an exercise in best practice and good ideas would not be worth while.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, is right about the situation in the City of London. We must be alert to the fact that, in trying to get both European and global control of these now-tainted captains of the universe, we should not bring in a plethora of regulations that cripple what is still a great asset: the skills of the City of London. On the other hand, I say to the City of London that it must not believe that it can have its cake and eat it in this respect. It must realise that some of the exposed faults need genuine responses, and we would support the Government in those.

As for the euro, let us wait and see. I had always suspected that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, was a closet Guardian reader, and I noticed today that Mr William Hague, also in the Guardian, says “never, never, never” to membership of the Guardian.

The euro.

“Never, never , never” to membership of the euro, my Lords; although he probably says the Guardian as well. He goes on to say that that is not an ideological position. If it is not an ideological position, I do not know what is. We remain convinced that there may come a time when it is massively in British interests to be in the euro. Talking about cake and eating it, I suspect that the City of London cannot permanently get all the benefits of being the major trader in the euro from outside the eurozone. The City should think about those consequences.

This is a good work-in-progress Statement and we support it in that respect, particularly since, perhaps a decade too late, the Prime Minister seems to have discovered Europe.

My Lords, I am grateful for the support for this “work-in-progress” Statement, as the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, put it.

It was me.

Lords, I am sorry; I beg the pardon of the noble Lord, Lord McNally.

This is an important Statement which very much leads up to the G20 summit, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, who asked how I would report on it to Parliament. The G20 summit is on a Thursday, which means that there will be no immediate opportunity for me to report orally, but I am sure that the Prime Minister will make a Written Statement, and I will make sure that it is provided to noble Lords in the usual way.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, began by asking various questions about the carbon price and the renewables target. The December 2020 package committed the EU to reduce centrally the carbon targets. This will deliver substantial cuts in emissions and will place limits on the number of credits that can be bought in. This means that action will need to be taken in European countries. The economic context, of course, means that as output reduces, demand for carbon will fall, and we are confident that the tightening up of the EU ETS under the 2020 package will still deliver emissions reductions. Renewables were not discussed because the focus was on climate finance. We believe that the UK target of 15 per cent is ambitions in itself. I should draw noble Lords’ attention to the fact that in respect of renewables €40 million will be allocated for an Aberdeen offshore wind testing centre as part of the EU economic recovery plan. That is a very welcome step forward.

The noble Lords, Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally, mentioned the Eastern Partnership which will be launched in Prague under the Czech presidency. This is a very welcome move because, as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said, many of the democracies in those countries are very fragile, and for the peace and stability of our continent it is important that we work with them and assist them in whatever ways we can with democracy building, capacity building and so on. Essentially, that is what the Eastern Partnership relates to. I well understand the concern expressed that major countries such as Russia are “excluded”, but they can be invited on a case-by-case basis to take part in meetings or projects, although Russia will not be invited to the summit. Russia has decided not to take part in the European neighbourhood policy.

On Doha, my noble friend Lady Ashton was, in fact, in Washington last week. As I understand it, she had rather successful conversations with her new counterpart in the US Administration, but clearly their position on Doha will not be clear for a short while. There are also elections in India, the other key country in which there were problems in the earlier phase of negotiations. Until India has a new Government, we will not really know where the Indians are coming from. The Government are working very hard to ensure a successful conclusion to the Doha round.

The Government, like both noble Lords, believe that the City of London is a jewel in the crown and that we have to preserve it. Of course, it cannot have its cake and eat it. It must accept that there has to be better regulation. Both the Government and the European Council are clear that regulation and supervision must be strengthened. We have made it clear that this includes the sovereignty of national supervisors, such as the FSA. The key is for the EU as a whole to work together better. We are clear that the City of London should remain the jewel in the crown.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, asked whether anybody else has announced cuts in VAT. There was an agreement last week on new general areas where VAT can be cut. It includes the long-standing French priority of reducing VAT on restaurant bills. We expect a VAT cut this year in time for summer holidays. This is new information that has just arrived for noble Lords who are going on holiday to France. We must remember that there truly was consensus at the summit that fiscal stimuli, such as the one that we are engaged in, are important in safeguarding the economy of the European Union. It is great that the Government are working together with their partners and are not trying to work in isolation.

Manoeuvrability for possible future fiscal stimuli is a matter that the Chancellor will consider in the forthcoming Budget. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the fact that the IMF has said that there is room in our economy for further fiscal stimuli, should they be necessary. Tax havens are a matter that the G20 will, of course, address. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, raised more general principles, asking whether the Government were isolated in the European Union by what they are doing about fiscal stimuli, and so on. I draw the noble Lord’s attention to a table that I have before me, which I will make available to him and the noble Lord, Lord McNally. It shows that we are not at all on a limb and very much in the mainstream, working on projects similar to those of our colleagues in the European Union. I look forward to further questions.

My Lords, I thank the Leader of the House for the Statement. Before the European super-regulator joins the European army among the men of straw that get set up and knocked down regularly in this House, will she confirm that there is extraordinary consistency and coherence between the ideas put forward for regulatory reform in this country by my noble friend Lord Turner and those put forward by Monsieur de la Rosière to the European Union and endorsed by the European Council? If that is the case, I am not sure what we are all so frightened about. There is consistency between those approaches. My noble friend Lord Turner dealt with the European dimension in his report and he believes that it is reconcilable with continuing to regulate the City of London ourselves.

I have a couple of questions about the climate change and energy security parts of the European Council. I welcome the fairly modest progress that was registered there, but will the Leader of the House confirm that the European Union will quite soon need to come forward in the global negotiations on climate change with a rather clearer picture of what the European Union is prepared to put into the kitty to help developing countries to make the adaptations and transfer the technology that is needed if they are to undertake obligations too? I am sure that tactically there is a good case for not putting out a figure at this stage of the year but that will not last for very long. If it does, the negotiations will get nowhere.

On energy security, will the noble Baroness tell us whether the European Union is now moving from warm words to deeds—a process that has taken an awfully long time? When the Council conclusions refer to dealing with emergency situations in the gas sector, will she confirm that the Government will not exclude from consideration the possibility that member states should have a legal obligation to maintain reserves of gas, just as they already have a legal obligation to maintain reserves of oil? It would make an enormous difference if that obligation applied to all 27 member states, just as the measures adopted after the crises of the 1970s helped us to deal with an oil crisis. Perhaps the noble Baroness can say something on those points.

My Lords, in relation to regulation, there are many issues on which the reports of Monsieur de Larosière and the noble Lord, Lord Turner, agree, and the Commission is looking very carefully at them both, as are this Government. As I understand it, in the not-too-distant future the Commission will bring forward proposals and the Government will bring forward a White Paper. All these things will be on the table and there will be a further discussion at the European Council in June, but it is absolutely right for the noble Lord to point out that there is much agreement on many of these issues.

In relation to climate change, it is extremely important that, again in the not-too-distant future, the European Council makes clear exactly what it will be able to do to assist developing countries so that they can be positively brought to the table and so that we can reach agreement in Copenhagen. Again, we will return to this at the June Council meeting.

On energy security, I believe that we are moving from warm words to deeds. I cannot make any detailed comments on gas reserves but it sounds a very interesting proposal and I will come back to the noble Lord in writing. However, it is clear from various discussions that took place in Brussels last week that progress will be made very soon on projects such as the southern corridor and Nabucco. These have been raised in debate here in the past and are very important for diversity of gas sources. The European Union wants absolute action on these issues to ensure that we have security of energy supply.

My Lords, the Statement and the noble Lord, Lord McNally, referred to tax havens, but does the Leader of the House agree that the activities of tax havens have certainly not played a leading role in the present crisis? Is this not a classic example of Governments and the EU hoping to use a crisis to seize unrelated powers which they have long wanted, just as after 9/11 Governments sought and gained powers which affected the liberties of the citizen but had precious little to do with terrorism? Could we not be alert to this phenomenon, of which there have been far too many examples? In fact, do not tax havens create an element of tax competition and, to that extent, have a useful purpose, exerting some pressure on spendthrift Governments to moderate their demands on business in particular?

My Lords, I fundamentally disagree with the noble Lord. I do not believe that this is an opportunity for Governments across the European Union to grasp power, as he puts it. This is not just about EU countries; it is a global issue, which is why it is being discussed at both the European Union level and the G20 level. Many Governments feel very strongly about it. The Government are looking forward to the Foot review on tax havens as it will inform our approach to the UK’s own Crown dependencies and overseas territories. We are absolutely committed to meeting our international responsibilities to the proper standards. We are also determined to take action on this not just within the European Union but globally.

My Lords, the Minister has failed to respond with her usual clarity to one of the questions posed by my noble friend Lord Strathclyde. Paragraph 12 on page 4 of the presidency conclusions document published two days ago states that,

“The European Council reaffirms its strong commitment to sound public finances”.

At the end of the paragraph, it goes on to say that it looks forward to member states,

“returning to positions consistent with sustainable public finances as soon as possible”.

In view of that fact and the fact that the International Monetary Fund stated quite unequivocally last week that this country was going to suffer the deepest budget deficit of any country in the G20, precisely what steps are the Government taking to be consistent with the presidency conclusions that there should be sound public finances as soon as possible?

My Lords, I regret that I did not respond earlier to the question put by the noble Lord. Strangely enough, the stability and growth pact was not a subject of great debate at the recent Council meeting, because all member states are in the same boat. The treaty says that member states should endeavour to avoid breaking the stability pact—that is, the 3 per cent deficit and 60 per cent debt levels. We will endeavour to do that when the time is appropriate. In the Pre-Budget Report my right honourable friend the Chancellor set out how we will consolidate our position in the future. We know what we are working towards but now is not the time to take the necessary action. On the IMF, I think that the article which we all read in a newspaper stemmed from comments made by a person who worked for the IMF. That is absolutely fine. I am not sure that it reflects the IMF’s position as a whole, but I will come back to the noble Lord in writing.

My Lords, I have two questions relating to two issues in the Statement. The first is that the Council will accept international principles on remuneration. When is that likely to be agreed; how likely is it to be implemented; and when will it be implemented? The second is that the Council has agreed to improve supervisory co-operation by pushing forward with colleges of supervisors for all major cross-border financial institutions. Can we have some description of the colleges: how many will there be; what is the cost; and what is the timetable? It seems like bureaucracy, and there is a smell of Nero fiddling while Rome is burning.

My Lords, I think that an agreement on remuneration will be reached at the June Council when the Council considers the wider package of regulatory reforms stemming from the de Larosière report, the report by the noble Lord, Lord Turner, and so on. As for the supervisory colleges, I will have to come back to the noble Baroness in writing. This is not a question of Nero and people fiddling while Rome is burning: it is a matter of people seeking to act to ensure that our economic system is robust and can withstand all the pressures to which it is being subjected at present. I will certainly provide the noble Baroness with the information that she seeks.

My Lords, why do Her Majesty's Government believe that an organisation which has given us the common agricultural and fisheries policies and failed to have its accounts signed off by its own internal auditors for the past 14 years, there being no external auditor, will be of much help in the present very worrying circumstances? Surely the EU’s track record must lead us to fear that it will achieve disaster out of the present difficulties, especially as far as the City of London is concerned.

My Lords, the important thing about the European Union is that it brings 27 member states together so that they can agree on concerted action and work in co-operation. We believe that at a time of global crisis it is essential that countries work together in partnership. That is what we are doing in the European Union. We have every confidence that by working together and not in isolation we will soon come out of the crisis and be able to meet future challenges together.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will now repeat a Statement made in another place by my right honourable friend the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice. The Statement reads as follows:

“With permission, Mr Speaker, I should like to make a Statement on the Green Paper, Rights and Responsibilities: Developing our Constitutional Framework, laid before Parliament today. The Green Paper is the next stage in what has been described as a quiet revolution in our constitutional arrangements. Since 1997, we have had the independence of the Bank of England, devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, independence for national statistics, the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information and Data Protection Acts, reforms to the House of Lords and party funding.

This Green Paper deals with some of the most fundamental questions we face as individuals and as a society: how we live together; what rights and freedoms we enjoy and from whom; and what duties and obligations we owe and to whom. These issues are not abstractions removed from the practical politics of jobs and housing, healthcare and education, crime and disorder, because these constitutional arrangements determine how power is distributed and, therefore, the conditions in which every other question in our public life will be answered.

It is because of the centrality of these issues that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister chose to make his first major policy statement, within days of taking office, on exactly this matter of constitutional change. My right honourable friend told this House that it was right to involve the public,

‘in a sustained debate about whether there is a case for the United Kingdom developing a full British Bill of Rights and Duties’,

as a step towards a written constitution.

The Green Paper presents the arguments for such a Bill. It does not reach final conclusions—that is for the end of the process of national discussion—rather, it sets the framework for this debate. Indeed, if by the end of the process the Bill is perceived to provide protection to rights and freedoms, it will become effective in defining common values so that people in Britain of different backgrounds may feel ownership of it.

From the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Arbroath, the 1689 Bill of Rights and Scottish Claim of Right, to the great reform Acts of the past two centuries, our history illustrates the proud traditions of liberty on which our nation is built. Although the profound changes which these great texts initiated were the subject of intense struggle at the time, the United Kingdom’s experience of constitutional development has been unlike that of almost any other democracy in the world.

The constitutional arrangements of most other nations have emerged from rebellion, revolution, civil war, occupation or oppression. The United States, France, India, South Africa, nations across Europe and the world, have had to set down their arrangements in a single text: a constitution, underpinned by declarations of rights. Whether legally enforceable or not, they have become abiding points of reference on how their citizens should relate to each other and to the state, and they help to define the kind of nation they wish to be. This Green Paper sets out the case for how a Bill could become a similar unifying force for the United Kingdom; not least because our society is much more diverse in race, religion and ethnicity than at any point in our history.

We are launching this Green Paper at a time of great uncertainty and anxiety. Tackling the global recession must be our immediate priority. But acting at the same time to strengthen communities’ and individuals’ sense of a stake in society, by better articulating the responsibilities that we owe and the rights that we have, is not an alternative to decisive measures on the economic front, but an essential complement to them.

One of the most significant constitutional changes in the past dozen years is the Human Rights Act. I worked hard as sponsoring Minister to achieve a consensus behind it, and I commend the Official Opposition for the support that they gave the Act in its final form. Prior to the Act, accessing convention rights via the Strasbourg court was a time-consuming, expensive and difficult process and, as such, prohibitive for many. Now those rights can be accessed in UK courts, with cases heard by UK judges.

The Act better protects the family. It has benefited all sections of society, from the elderly couple wanting to live in the same care home to the loftiest newspaper magnate. In providing a more practical mechanism to access rights, as well as a positive obligation on the state to protect them, countless thousands of people have benefited from the law, without necessarily having to resort to the law.

Despite this, the Act has its detractors, primarily because the atrocities of 9/11 occurred less than a year after the Act came into force. Had those tragic events not occurred, I suggest that the HRA would have slipped comfortably into the fabric of our lives without controversy. As it was, those terrible events threw into acute relief the tension between liberty and security. We recognise these tensions, but the Government are proud of the Human Rights Act. We will neither resile from it nor repeal it.

The principles and rights set down in the European convention, and now in the Human Rights Act, are timeless. They are the mark and measure of any civilised society at any time. But in the intervening 60 years, these rights have been added to by a great extension of social and economic rights—of healthcare, dignity in old age, education, housing and social security. But as our rights have become so much wider and stronger, one question is whether their claim is balanced properly by an equally strong sense of the responsibilities that we each owe.

We believe that there is a case for drawing out more clearly and explicitly the responsibilities that go with rights. Duties and responsibilities are to be found in the convention, in statute, in common law and woven deeply into our social and moral fabric. We have a latent understanding and acceptance of our duties to one another and to the state. That said, responsibilities have been something of a poor cousin to rights. The Green Paper proposes that responsibilities are given greater prominence in our constitutional arrangements, the better to articulate what we owe as much as what we expect. This is how we can move away from a ‘rights culture’ to a ‘rights and responsibilities culture’.

Some responsibilities are obvious: obeying the law, paying taxes, jury service. Others are less obviously recalled at the moment that they should be exercised: a responsibility towards future generations by living within environmental limits; the duty we have to protect the well-being of children in our care; a civic duty to vote; responsibilities towards our neighbours; respect for those public sector workers who care for us; responsibility towards the taxpayer not to claim benefits if able to work.

If we are to fulfil our responsibilities, we have to have a clear understanding of what they are. As the Green Paper sets out, an accessible bill of rights and responsibilities could be emblematic of the fair society that we want to live in, where awareness of our rights is matched with a greater understanding of our responsibilities to each other.

Most of the social and economic rights to which I have referred are already embedded in law, but they are scattered across myriad legal texts. The Government believe that we should encapsulate these rights in a single document, bringing together the ‘new’ post-war rights of social justice and the welfare state, victims’ rights, rights of equality and of good administration.

A key question set out in the Green Paper is whether any Bill should have, directly or indirectly, the force of law. Bills of rights from around the world are a combination of symbolism, aspiration and law across a spectrum of legal effect. There need not be a binary choice between the justiciable and the declaratory. As the Green Paper points out, the Government do not necessarily consider a model of directly legally enforceable rights or responsibilities to be the most appropriate.

Even without full legal enforcement, words have power. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights contained no legally enforceable rights; rather, it was the global expression of a shared commitment, a recognition of humanity’s common dignity, what Eleanor Roosevelt described as the ‘Magna Carta for all mankind’. A bill of rights and responsibilities for the United Kingdom could be this kind of declaration to set in stone the values we cherish.

I have had the rare privilege to take through this House many of the constitutional changes of the past 12 years, or have been closely involved with their development. Throughout that time, I have looked to secure the broadest political consensus behind them. Reforms of such importance to our democracy require nothing less. Constitutional change should take place only on the basis of full and proper deliberation. This Green Paper has been through such a process within government and now it is time to take the debate out to the people we all serve. This deliberation must not and will not be rushed, and so this Green Paper will not precede any legislation this side of a general election. We are dealing here with the fundamental building blocks of our democracy, and as the Prime Minister made clear:

‘Constitutional change will not be the work of just one Bill or one year or one Parliament’.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/07/07; col. 815]

A bill of rights and responsibilities could form the next natural and necessary step in a process which began 60 years ago with the universal declaration. It is an opportunity to bring together existing rights and responsibilities in one place and better to define the relationship between citizen and state in a new and unifying constitutional document fit for this century. I commend this Statement to the House”.

My Lords, that concludes the Statement.

My Lords, I have had only a very short time in which to glance at the Green Paper, which is 63 pages long. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, has found himself in exactly the same boat.

Inevitably, in skimming a document as weighty as this, one’s eye is attracted to those passages in which one has been most concerned in one’s political life. In those circumstances, when responding to what I have to say, the Minister might find that he is in a position to point me to other parts that I have not been able to read that successfully refute my observations. That is a risk that I shall have to take.

I have the impression that the Green Paper is a massive exercise in sitting on the fence. If we needed any further proof that the Cabinet is deadlocked over enacting a Bill of Rights, here it is in this document. Nothing confirms the state of utter confusion that engulfs the Government more than paragraph 4.30:

“If a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities took the form of an Act of Parliament, there would be a range of options for dealing with the Human Rights Act and the Convention rights. The Bill might subsume the Human Rights Act as part of the new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. The Bill of Rights and Responsibilities might preserve the Human Rights Act as a separate Act. It might also be desirable to signpost the Convention rights in some way, for example by crossreference to make clear that neither they nor the Human Rights Act were affected by the new Bill”.

This is a monument to indecision.

Further confirmation of the Government’s state of mind is furnished by Chapter 5, entitled “New Steps”. I apologise to your Lordships for reading out another passage but I think it is the most telling way to make the point. At paragraph 5.3 the Government state:

“It is that process of consultation upon which we now embark. We intend to involve all parts of our country and our society in discussions both about the fundamental arguments for and against such a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the individual components of any such Bill. Full consultation and debate about such a constitutional development will inevitably take some time. It cannot be the property of one Parliament and one Government. All sections of the UK will have a view. As part of the consultation process, we expect that Parliament will want to make a contribution to the debate and we will bring forward proposals for that in due course. The need for such extensive consultation means that, if it were concluded that the time was right for a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, it would not be possible to bring forward any legislation before the next general election”.

If, by some remote chance, the Government were to win the next election, that should be substituted with “before the general election after the next general election”.

Behind this political paralysis lies a forbidding complacency about what has happened to individual rights in our society since the Government came to power, despite their much vaunted Human Rights Act. The undermining of personal privacy was described by the Joseph Rowntree Trust today as,

“the most invasive surveillance … of any western democracy”.

And it is soon to be amplified and further intensified by a centralised databank on all telephone and e-mail communications together with records of when we all travel abroad.

On the right to a fair trial and trial by jury, paragraph 3.30 states:

“Much of the argument for enshrining a ‘right’ to jury trial into a constitutional document may be driven by the deep cultural attachment to jury trial, originally deriving from its inclusion in Magna Carta. Notably, many other countries, including signatory nations to the European Convention, do not have jury trials even for the most serious cases—jury trial is not necessary for compliance with Article 6 of the Convention. Moreover, the arguments in favour of jury trial in some serious cases are open to debate”.

What better example do your Lordships need for establishing the proposition that, for the Government, British history began in 1997? In their attempts effectively to remove the protection of habeas corpus in this country—your Lordships will recall the famous attempt to extend arrest without charge to 90 days—to reduce the circumstances in which individuals are entitled to jury trial and to change the burden of proof from beyond reasonable doubt to a balance of probabilities, the Government have always justified themselves by claiming that these initiatives are consistent with the European convention.

The worrying thing about that assertion is that they probably do conform to the European convention because continental judges who sit in the European Court of Human Rights have no experience of our system of criminal procedure and often little understanding of it.

One might expect the Government to have seen the folly of their ways in this crucial area of rights—heaven knows, they have been reminded to do so often enough by noble Lords throughout this House—and to have taken steps to enshrine these great common law protections in legal form.

But not a bit of it. If we turn to paragraph 3.31, this is what we learn:

“Additional protections in relation to liberty of the person or fair trials may not be necessary as the belief in their fundamental nature is already so deeply entrenched, culturally and politically, and there is no fundamental threat to them”.

I stop in the middle of the quotation simply to ask: can we really believe that? The Government then go on to say:

“At this stage, the Government does not propose the inclusion of the principle of habeas corpus or a right to trial by jury in any new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, but it remains open to all arguments for and against as part of an informed public debate”.

Of the paragraphs I have read, I find that quite the most astonishing in the whole document; because nothing is more important to the rule of law and democracy in our society than these common law rights, which have been so severely undermined during the past 12 years.

The Green Paper is entitled Rights and Responsibilities. In a legal sense, of course, as your Lordships well know, these two are inextricably linked: a right generates an obligation to respect it; equally, an obligation not to do something to someone else gives someone else an implied right. But the Government may well be trying to define responsibilities in some other way; if they are, from my cursory reading, I am not clear what it is. If they are trying to redefine responsibilities in some way outside their strictly legal meaning, then I have reached the preliminary conclusion that they have failed.

The main reason they have failed is because they have concentrated on the responsibilities of the state and local authorities. The executive summary at the beginning of the document states:

“Now is the time to discuss whether a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities should bring together those rights which have developed in parallel with the European Convention, but are not incorporated into it. A new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities could present the opportunity to bring together in one place a range of welfare and other entitlements currently scattered across the UK’s legal and political landscape”.

But what about creating a society with room for individuals to exercise responsibility? What about the role of the family, where the fundamental values of life are imbibed, or at least ought to be? Indeed, one looks in vain in this document, at least in the short time I have had to study it, for any mention of the family as being the most important institution of all for establishing a responsible society.

My Lords, just as I thought the Government of Mr John Major would be remembered primarily for their cones hotline, so I thought that the only positive memory one would have of the Government who have been ruling this country over the past 12 years was devolution and the Human Rights Act, both the legacy of the late and much lamented John Smith. This Green Paper, in the very short time that I have had to look at it, is exactly about resiling from the Human Rights Act. For example, Article 2 on the right to life and Article 3 on the prohibition against torture are both absolute rights in the European convention. In relation to the prohibition against torture, we still have not had the inquiry that we have been seeking over the past few months about what has gone on in the torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Are these absolute rights to be undermined by making them contingent on responsibilities? That seems to be the thrust of the document. Paragraph 2.25 says:

“It is fundamental to human rights theory that human rights cannot be claimed or exercised by individuals without regard to the rights of others, and that most human rights (with exceptions like freedom from torture and slavery) are inherently subject to balance and qualification”.

The paragraph ends:

“It would be possible in a future Bill of Rights and Responsibilities to highlight the importance of factors such as an applicant’s own behaviour and the importance of public safety and security”.

So when the Government talk about rights and responsibilities, they are really saying that those responsibilities, in the sense of an applicant’s own behaviour, should be taken into account when he is seeking to exercise the rights we currently enjoy in the European convention.

The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, has referred to the familiar territory—old ground—about criminal justice. Again, there is an attack upon the right to trial by jury and an attempt to make it seem fusty and out of date by referring to its,

“deriving from its inclusion in Magna Carta”,

in 1215, as opposed to the fact that every day and in every major Crown Court in this country, jury trials, which have the confidence of the public, are being carried out. Here again we have this Government’s persistent, recurring theme of attacks on trial by jury.

The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, also referred to habeas corpus. It is said to be “seldom used”. I drafted a habeas corpus writ about four weeks ago which fortunately did not have to be used. It is a fundamental freedom which we have enjoyed in this country for centuries. The Government say:

“At this stage, the Government does not propose the inclusion of the principle of habeas corpus or a right to trial by jury in any new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, but it remains open to all arguments for and against as part of an informed public debate”.

We see, therefore, the return of the authoritarian attempt of this Government to cut down our traditional freedoms.

As I have very little time, I move on to welfare rights. One would have thought that if the European convention rights were to be expanded, something would be said about economic, social and cultural rights, which should be guaranteed. Paragraph 3.53, however, states:

“In drawing up a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, the Government would not seek to create new and individually enforceable legal rights in addition to the array of legal protections already available”,

in the field of welfare. Do not expect, therefore, this to be a charter for economic, social and cultural welfare rights.

One would have hoped that by now the Government would have considered incorporating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into English law instead of constantly saying it is an unincorporated convention which does not have any force. But they say:

“Any Bill of Rights and Responsibilities should allow for recognition that responsibility for many aspects of child wellbeing is devolved and the different ways in which outcomes are achieved for children across the UK”.

There is nothing about incorporating the convention into English law. As to how it is to be enforced, paragraph 4.25 states:

“The Government does not consider that a generally applicable model of directly legally enforceable rights or responsibilities would be the most appropriate for a future Bill of Rights and Responsibilities”.

In other words, you could not take a government department to court for a breach of a British convention on rights and responsibilities that is now being put forward as a pale reflection of the existing rights and responsibilities of the European Convention on Human Rights which British lawyers drew up to emphasise in a war-torn Europe that human rights apply to human beings. That is the important message that we should take away. This is just a muddle; it is an attempt to palliate the Daily Mail while trying to keep on board those of us who have a fundamental belief in the future and the continuation of human rights in this country.

My Lords, I owe an apology to the two noble Lords on the Front Benches for not having arranged for them to have copies of the Green Paper beforehand. I apologise for their not having had longer to consider it. However, when they have had chance to do so a little more closely, their attitude, which they put over with the eloquence that I would expect from both of them, may change and they may regret some of the expressions that they used at first glance at the document. They have got it absolutely wrong.

The noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, who is normally so fair, says that, by starting a debate on this subject, the Government are somehow showing weakness and not making up their mind. That is rather an unfair criticism. Let us just imagine the scene if I had come here this afternoon and said, “Well, we’re going to introduce a new bill of rights and responsibilities. Here’s what it’s going to say. We’re going to get it through Parliament before the next general election”. The noble Lord would have quite rightly castigated me and the Government harshly for doing something such as that without due consultation, without finding out what people thought, without a draft Bill and without deciding what should and should not be in it. I think that we have been rather unfairly treated this afternoon. This is a Green Paper to start a debate—as it clearly has done—on the merits or otherwise of having a bill of rights and responsibilities in this country. It is a perfectly serious issue that needs serious attention, which I am sure it will be given in due course.

The attack on the Government for restricting freedom again seems a little rich, bearing in mind that this is the Government who passed large amounts of equality legislation, devolution legislation, the Freedom of Information Act, the Data Protection Act, the Civil Partnerships Act, the Gender Recognition Act, the Human Rights Act, new proposals for a further equality Bill, a Bill on welfare reform and the NHS Constitution for England. I do not recall any of those measures being put forward by the party that now suggests that it is on the side of freedom and liberty. This legislation has made millions of our citizens free in a way in which they were not previously, which should be recognised.

Trial by jury and the right to a fair trial were lauded by the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland. I remind him that trial by jury is of course deep set in the British way of life, but his party restricted it for a number of offences when it was in power, as have all Governments. No party has for a very long time suggested that trial by jury should be the remedy for every criminal wrong. It should be available for those charged by the state with serious criminal offences. We stand by that, as I know does the noble Lord.

The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, really could not be more wrong when he claimed that the Green Paper is the death of the Human Rights Act because we are going to make those rights contingent on responsibilities. I know that he has not had long to look at the document, but I refer him to the first page of the executive summary, which states:

“The Government is clear that the rights in the European Convention cannot be legally contingent on the exercise of responsibilities. However, it may be that responsibilities can be given greater resonance in a way which does not necessarily link them to the adjudication of particular rights”.

There is no question of fundamental human rights being diluted or made conditional on fulfilling responsibilities. A criminal may lose his or her right to liberty by going to prison, but nothing could lawfully detract from his or her right to a fair trial or to be free from ill treatment by the authorities. A bill of rights and responsibilities provides an opportunity to set out the relationship between rights and responsibilities and to emphasise that most rights must be exercised responsibly, bearing in mind the rights of others, rather than in isolation. Of course we believe in absolute rights—for example, freedom from being tortured—so I think that the noble Lord’s criticism was unfair, if I may say so, although I concede that he has not had long to read this document. I am disappointed that his response was not slightly more welcoming for what is, in many ways, an opening up of this serious subject, which needs discussion in this House, in another place and around the country.

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s intention to promote discussion and debate on human rights. While paying tribute to the achievement of this Government in securing the enactment of the Human Rights Act, I ask the Minister whether he agrees that it is difficult to promote public enthusiasm and indeed understanding of the Human Rights Act, a measure that simply implements an international convention and does not attempt, as a fundamental constitutional document should, to express its contents in terms specific to the history, the values and the needs of this country. Does he agree that that is the potential that a British bill of rights and responsibilities offers? Does he agree that only such a document can perform the educative function that a constitutional document should perform? Finally, does he agree that, if we are to move to a British bill of rights and responsibilities which is a fundamental constitutional document, which is principled, which commands public support and which speaks to the ages, it is vital for the discussion and the debate to try, so far as is possible, to avoid party-political considerations?

My Lords, I certainly agree with the noble Lord on that last point—we shall look for consensus. I thank him for his general support for the Green Paper and the ideas behind it. I think that he has a point as far as the introduction of the Human Rights Act is concerned. He wrote an important article in the Times newspaper some months ago in which he made the same point, among others, arguing that the Government may have missed a trick when it introduced that Act in not setting out more clearly and in more detail the values and history behind its principles. I take the point and I hope that, if we got it wrong, we will learn from that experience if there is to be a bill of rights and responsibilities in the future. Of course, one of the values of such a bill would be its educative effect and the way in which it would point out the history and tradition and bring up to date the rights and responsibilities that are crucial to the United Kingdom. There is nothing in what he had to say that I can disagree with and I look forward to his contribution to the debate.

My Lords, is it not important that the public should be aware of something fundamental said by the Minister, Mr Wills, and in the Statement—namely, that the Government have not even made up their mind whether the new rights specified in the Statement should be enforceable in the courts? Does not that really expose an enormously difficult problem? If the Government determine that the new rights should be enforceable in the courts, will there not be legitimate fears of a flood of litigation? If they decide that the new rights should not be enforceable, how on earth can they guarantee that outcome? Have there not been plenty of examples in the past few years of the courts and the ECHR claiming jurisdiction when the Government thought that they had cast-iron safeguards written into the legislation that they were passing to prevent that from happening?

My Lords, my right honourable friend Mr Wills was quite right. One issue for debate is that, if there is a bill of rights and responsibilities, what should be the consequence of breaching those requirements of an Act of Parliament? A bill could take a variety of approaches across a spectrum of legal effect. Even if it had a merely declaratory effect, as some bills and Acts around the world do, such an instrument could still have considerable political and symbolic value. The bill of rights and responsibilities could also provide for different legal effect in relation to different rights. Of course, they would have to be set out clearly; some could be enforceable through the courts, whereas others could be expressed as principles that Parliament has passed and that courts could take into account when trying cases. Principles could be intended either to have symbolic resonance or to act as guidance for politicians making the law, administrators applying the law and courts adjudicating the law. There is no need for every single right and responsibility as legislated for in such a bill to be justiciable. It is not necessarily the case. This is one matter that is crucial to the debate, which is really in two parts: should we have such a bill and, if so, what should be in it?

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that I am in the strange position of having spent 15 months as the unpaid independent adviser on these questions. I eventually resigned in November because I became convinced that the Government would not propose anything that I thought was sensible in terms of constitutional reform. He will be aware that I saw no reason to have two documents, one called the Human Rights Act and another called a bill of rights and responsibilities, the latter not proposing any new enforceable rights or even adding new responsibilities. Today, we have heard the Minister seeking to justify what is now in this document. I must disappoint him by saying that nothing that I have seen and heard about it makes me think that I was wrong to leave my post.

I have a couple of questions. I shall certainly not detain the House with a further explanation of why I think that the poet Horace might have said something about the mountains labouring and producing something not very satisfactory. First, why does not the Green Paper deal with the real, practical problem created by the YL decision, which means that private bodies exercising public functions are outside the scope of the Human Rights Act? Why does not the Green Paper or any other measure propose to fill that gaping hole in the Human Rights Act as it stands? Secondly, building on a question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I wonder why the Green Paper does not address the question of the language in which the Human Rights Act is expressed. Does the Minister accept that we are the only country in the world for which the first question is the very odd, “Is this compatible with a convention right?”, whereas for the rest of the world the first question—apart from “Is it right?”—would be, “Is this compatible with our bill of rights”? If the Government wished to persuade the public to feel warmly about human rights, would it not have been more sensible to produce what we hoped that they would—a bill of rights and freedoms that did not detract from the convention but added those few extra rights that are lacking in what we now have? Why was that strategy of building on the convention and the Human Rights Act as I have described not even mentioned in this document or, as far as I know, in any other?

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and thank him for the help that he gave when he was advising the Government. I put on the record the fact that we regret that he felt the need to resign when he did. However, I am disappointed that he is not in some ways enthusiastic about this Green Paper emerging to start a national debate on moving the whole human rights debate forward. I would have thought that he, of all people, would in many ways like to see the possible addition of other rights related to the social and economic changes that have taken place since the post-war convention was negotiated and signed. The Green Paper does not deal with all the issues that he raises because, frankly, it tries to look forward and ask whether it is in this nation’s interests to have a bill of rights and responsibilities. It poses some of the issues that need to be considered if such a course is taken.

My Lords, without wishing in any way to resile from the Human Rights Act and the discussion so far, may I ask the Minister whether he agrees that there is a danger of the discussion being set up in terms of the power of the state and the rights of the individual in a way that is too exclusive of all the other institutions of society that, it seems to me, embody our values? The noble Lord mentioned the family; it is, in fact, mentioned in paragraph 2.33, but very briefly. In our society, beyond the family or other groups, we now have whole communities with particular ethnic traditions and backgrounds. How we allow them an opportunity to flourish and to continue their traditions within the framework of British values is, it seems to me, part of the key discussion that needs to take place. Let me choose the issue of education as an example. A constant sniping at faith-based education tends to occur in our society. There must be a way of enshrining a right to education, coloured by the traditions of particular communities, which nevertheless respects the fundamental values of our society. In the consultation that is about to take place, may I urge that a particular effort is made to consult the new communities and ethnic traditions that are part of our society? The success of this operation will largely depend not on a binary dynamic of the state and the individual but on that whole area of society in between, which Governments cannot control and which transcends individuals.

My Lords, I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his remarks. We of course want this discussion and debate to go much wider than the political classes. We want it to involve all of society. One difficulty is in getting people interested in a debate such as this, which is why I hope that there will be a programme later this year to take these ideas out into communities. That will of course include ethnic minority communities and have an emphasis on families. One argument for the proposed bill is that it may be desirable to have in one place, although they may not necessarily be suitable as legally enforceable duties, the key responsibilities that we all owe as members of society, one of which might be safeguarding and promoting the well-being of children in our care. That issue really affects everyone, as the right reverend Prelate was saying. Therefore, his comments will be taken very much on board.

My Lords, I share my noble friend’s surprise about the puzzling situation of the two opposition parties confessing that they had not read the paper but then going on to say that it is muddled. It reminds me of the student who knew he was going to have trouble doing his homework so he got his strike in first. Both these parties have—if I may use an inelegant legal term—form. Both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats supported the Prevention of Terrorism Act with its internal exile, and the Conservatives supported a ban on Gerry Adams being broadcast on the BBC. They also supported certain aspects of locking people up without trial in Northern Ireland, as indeed did my own party at times. It shows the delicacy of the relationship between society and government.

I have two brief points for the Minister. First, I very much welcome the rights and responsibilities argument. However, does he not accept that the responsibility bit has to be at least in part about education, because it is difficult to legislate for that? The other point we need to remember in this debate is that technological change has a dramatic effect on society. The data collection methods available to us now are a very important part not only of the protection of society but of the need to enhance the rights of individuals. Perhaps we have not given enough attention to the principles underlying the complexity of data and the scientific methods of collecting them as we should have done. As a result of this change, society is fundamentally different from what it was even 50 years ago, never mind 100 years ago.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend, and I take his last point. One of the reasons we have raised the issue now is that British society has changed so hugely over recent years, not least in the field of technology. As for responsibilities, education of course plays a crucial and vital part in those. We hope that regardless of what view is ultimately taken on whether or not to have a Bill, the effect of the debate will be to bring out more into the public domain the issue of the responsibility that we all owe each other and the responsibility that the state owes the citizen.

My Lords, perhaps I will be pardoned if I do not join with the noble Lords, Lord Kingsland and Lord Thomas of Gresford, in the icy welcome that they gave to the Green Paper and the Statement. If one looks at the views expressed by juridicial constitutional writers over the past century, one finds such a huge range of views expressed that one could well say that it was a muddled situation. I have not read the Green Paper but it seems to me that it refers to both the treasury of possibilities that exist and the thicket of problems that are clearly attached to almost every consideration. Perhaps I may therefore ask the Minister the following. Even though it is sensible and inevitable that there should be no legislation before the next election, will he consider publishing even before the next election a White Paper—not a paper of pristine whiteness; a paper possibly with green edges—that sets forth some leadership on the part of the Government on this crucial, central question which is the heart and kernel of it all, as to whether the rights and responsibilities that we are talking about should be of a declaratory nature or whether they should have the binding force of legislation.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his support. The initial plan is for the consultation responses to be submitted by 15 June, in 12 weeks’ time. We will use the evidence gathered from written responses for our proposed regional events, which will take place over the summer and into early autumn. We need to discuss with the devolved legislatures their position on this. As I say, we do not propose to bring forward any legislation in this Parliament. Before legislation is brought there will undoubtedly have to be a White Paper, and probably a fairly pristine White Paper in this case. I fear that that White Paper may well not emerge until after the election.

My Lords, does the Minister agree that one of the greatest threats to our civilisation, perhaps the greatest threat, comes from violent Islamism? Does he further agree that all must be equal under our law, including women, gays and those who wish to convert from Islam to another faith, and that Sharia law should therefore not be allowed to go on holding sway in this country? Will this or any more urgent legislation achieve that?

My Lords, Sharia law does not hold sway in this country.

My Lords, the Statement refers to paying taxes as a responsibility. However, the duty to pay taxes is not mentioned in the Green Paper. If we are to have a bill of responsibilities as well as of rights, should not the use of artificial tax avoidance schemes be made a breach of the responsibilities in that bill?

My Lords, I am delighted to say that I think the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, will be playing a leading role in the debate that will take place on this Green Paper.

My Lords, I shall speak also to the other 44 amendments in this group that are in my name and the name of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. Mention of 45 amendments in one group seems sufficient to clear the Chamber. I reassure noble Lords that 40 of these amendments say exactly the same thing and relate to the name of the proposed body.

The Bill refers to the Boundary Committee for England, but 40 of these amendments change its name to the Local Government Boundary Commission for England. These amendments are supported by the Electoral Commission, and the change that they would make makes sense. The capacity for confusion between the present Boundary Commission and the Boundary Committee for England is obvious, and that confusion must recur again and again. The only explanation I have heard offered for choosing this name was that it was the most minor change possible. Generally it seems preferable to make as little change as possible. It does not seem sensible to seek to cause the greatest confusion possible.

Although the proposed name of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England is a little longer, it has the great merit of actually describing what it is and what it does. Giving a body a clearly descriptive title is obviously desirable. It would also bring it into line with the Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales and the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland. To have a similarly named body for England also seems sensible.

I hope that I shall achieve some success today in getting the Government to accept 40 amendments from me. At that point I may well decide to quit. I see that that is very tempting to the government Front Bench. I did not mean it.

Amendment 106 refers to the appointment of the chairman of the committee—or the commission, as I hope it will be—being made on the recommendation of the Secretary of State. The Electoral Commission has some concern, which I share, about the continuing part to be played by the Secretary of State. That does not mean that there are doubts about any individual, past, present or future. However, it is important that these matters are not only done impartially but seen to be done impartially. We therefore propose that the appointment should be made on the recommendation of the House of Commons rather than the say-so of the Secretary of State. It may seem like a small change, but it is an important one to ensure that absolute impartiality is seen and is beyond question.

Amendments 107 and 108 relate to the appointment of the deputy chair. The post is important, and should the chairman be unavailable or cease to be able to hold that office, the role of the deputy chair will clearly be as important as that of the chair. We therefore propose that the same appointments process and procedure should take place for the deputy chair as for the chair.

The effect of Amendments 142 and 143 is that there should be no transitional arrangements. The Electoral Commission and the Boundary Committee are very concerned indeed that if there is a gradual process of separation, the period of uncertainty for their staff and others will be all the greater. They state very clearly that they see no need for this period and that the transfer should take place cleanly on the specified date.

All of the amendments are sensible and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s acceptance. I beg to move.

My Lords, I must admit that the noble Lord’s earlier offer nearly made me jump to my feet, and it is a shame that he withdrew it.

Let me first address the amendments in relation to the name of the new body. When introducing these provisions we sought where possible to minimise change, as the noble Lord, Lord Tope, said. As a result, we were of the view that the existing name should be retained. There is of course an argument that changing the name of the Boundary Committee will in itself cause confusion. However, I recognise that retaining the name of the Boundary Committee for England could also result in continuing confusion with the Parliamentary Boundary Commission for England, which deals with parliamentary constituencies and is commonly known as the Boundary Commission. There have been occasions in the past where those in Parliament and members of the public have been confused about the separate roles of these two bodies.

The noble Lord, Lord Tope, and the Electoral Commission have put forward the name Local Government Boundary Commission for England, which is of course in line with the names of the Local Government Boundary Commission for Wales and for Scotland. I assure the noble Lord that we will give full consideration to whether the proposed name is appropriate. On a technical point which I should draw to the House’s attention, despite the noble Lord’s best endeavours, the amendments as they stand remove references to the existing Boundary Committee, which would need to be retained. We would also need to ensure that all references to the Boundary Committee are captured if we agree that a name change should be made. I hope the commitment that we will give further consideration to the proposed name change provides the noble Lord with the assurances he requires to withdraw his amendment at this stage.

I should now like to address the amendments to Schedule 1, which relate to appointments to the new body. First, in relation to Amendment 106, I set out in Grand Committee why we believe that the Secretary of State should be responsible for recommendations to Her Majesty on the appointment of ordinary members of the new Boundary Committee. The Secretary of State’s role in making appointments to such bodies is well precedented and is, in our view, wholly appropriate in this instance. I gave clear assurances during the debate in Committee that the appointments process will ensure that impartiality and independence are maintained. The Secretary of State would of course adhere to the guidance of the Public Appointments Commissioner.

As I set out in Committee, there will be oversight and audit of the process by the Public Appointments Commissioner; recommendations for appointment will be based on recommendations from a panel of officials, including an independent person; and a process of advertisement and executive search will be followed. In addition, by providing the Secretary of State with a role, knowledge of the local government sector will be brought into the appointments process.

The Electoral Commission has stated that these assurances have allayed its fears about the appointments process for ordinary members. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord’s fears can also be allayed and that he will withdraw Amendment 106.

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for a very full reply. On the question of the name and the 40 amendments that apply to it, I understood the Minister at least to express sympathy with the point that is being made and to give an undertaking to look at it. Of course I understand that the Government must be sure that, if it is to be done, it is done properly and in all the right places. I hope very much that they are able to do that in time for Third Reading so that when the Bill leaves this House we have at least achieved a name change here, and do not have to go through the same process all over again in another place. I am grateful for that.

I am also grateful for the explanation on the other points that I raised. They were points of concern raised by the Electoral Commission itself. As the Bill progresses, I am sure that discussions between the department and the Electoral Commission will continue. I hope that these concerns can either be allayed or met during the passage of the Bill. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

My Lords, when we come to all the other amendments, to save reading out every single one, may I assume that the noble Lord will not wish to move any of them?

My Lords, the Deputy Speaker may so assume.

My Lords, I will also speak to Amendment 146. These amendments, which, I am delighted to see, have been endorsed by the Minister, are designed to keep ownership of economic assessments with the local authorities that conduct them. They get rid of the overbearing role of the Secretary of State, which would have allowed her to tell a local authority to revise any aspect of an assessment that she did not like. Quite why this should ever have seemed like a suitable idea is unclear. In Grand Committee my noble friend Lord Hanningfield made it clear that he would be totally against the Secretary of State directing these assessments, because they should be conducted to assess the economic needs of the local authority, not the needs of the Secretary of State, which might be very different. I am pleased that the noble Baroness has taken our advice that these powers are not necessary and I welcome their removal from the Bill. I beg to move.

My Lords, we have Amendments 147, 151, 152, 153, 154 and 155 in this group. They follow those moved in Grand Committee, to which my noble friend Lord Greaves and the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, spoke quite forcefully about the position of non-unitary districts. We think that having a duty to undertake an economic assessment is unnecessary, like much of this Bill, but we were told that,

“Such a duty would help local authorities and their partners to work more effectively, supported by a comprehensive and robust economic evidence base”.—[Official Report, 9/2/09; col. GC 255.]

It was confirmed that the powers are within local authorities’ current powers but that,

“we need to provide a consistent framework”.—[Official Report, 9/2/09; col. GC 261.]

We were also told that there are clear advantages in having one body in the lead.

As I said, the two noble Lords spoke forcefully about the role of the districts. I shall not seek to repeat at any length their description of the diversity of districts within quite close areas, the districts often being the authorities with which the public identify. Therefore, it seems to us that a district should be able, if it wishes, to take advantage of the benefits that we are told this clause will bring. Some economic policies and plans will be very local, and I stress the voluntary nature of my amendment, giving districts the option to buy into the arrangements.

The Government’s response at the previous stage and the provision smack of an agenda for bigger unitary authorities. As we have said before, there may be things to commend a unitary system across the country but we should debate that on an open and clear basis. We on these Benches find this quite difficult, coming at it all somewhat crabwise.

Amendment 151 is consequential on the first amendment. We have tabled Amendments 152 and 153 because Clause 65(6)(b) seems to us very narrow. It states that the county must have regard to the material produced under Section 13 of the 2004 Act. As we have lost so much of our debating time this afternoon, I shall not find the flag and read Section 13. The reference to the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 reminds us of the importance of the link between economic generation and planning for an area. Of course, the district is still responsible for much planning by way of the local development framework and development control. The Bill provides for other considerations prescribed or directed by the Secretary of State, and there may be other very relevant material. That is why our Amendment 153 inserts the words “or otherwise”.

Rather than co-operation going only one way, with the district co-operating with the county, I propose in Amendment 154 that both district and county should co-operate with each other. Amendment 155 would allow for an assessment made before the commencement of the section to fulfil the duty that the section will impose. The world did not start this year and will not start when the Bill is enacted and the relevant clause comes into force. It seems very unnecessary for local authorities to have to repeat what they have already done when they can simply point to work which many of them are doing at the moment in assessing the economic condition of their own areas. In our view, having carried out the work, the duty should have been fulfilled.

My Lords, this group of amendments concerns the proposed local authority economic assessment duty. I shall address Amendments 145 and 146 first. The Minister has put her name to the amendments, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, said.

We have listened carefully to noble Lords’ concerns that a Secretary of State power to direct an individual local authority to revise its assessment would give the Secretary of State undue control over how the assessments are taken forward. The power of direction was only ever intended as a safeguard and, as we are confident that local authorities will wish to keep their assessments up to date, we are very keen to keep government prescription to a minimum. For that reason, we are happy to support these amendments.

Amendment 147, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Tope, would allow a non-unitary district council to elect to be placed under the duty, so that in two-tier areas both the county council and district council would be under a duty to prepare an assessment for their respective areas. Amendment 151 is a consequential amendment.

I understand the fear expressed by noble Lords that district councils would have a peripheral role in the preparation of local economic assessments in two-tier areas and that countywide assessments would fail to take account of the important contribution that district councils make to wider economic development. I assure noble Lords that we do not underestimate the vital role that districts play in supporting local economic development and regeneration. Indeed, we fully intend county councils and district councils to work in partnership in preparing their economic assessments.

The Bill, in Clause 65(6), already requires the county and district councils to work in partnership in the preparation of the countywide economic assessment. It includes a requirement on the county council to consult and seek the participation of district councils within its area and to take account of the evidence gathered by the district council in the course of its role as planning authority that may affect the development of the area. It also includes a requirement on the district council to co-operate with the county. We do not believe that the amendment would further strengthen partnership working between the county and districts.

The amendment would place a separate duty on the county council and the district to prepare an assessment. As noble Lords are aware, local authorities have general powers to discharge their functions jointly. Thus, the county council and district councils electing to be bound by this duty could decide to prepare a joint county assessment. Although, in the best case, districts and counties might choose to exercise their duties jointly, nothing in the amended provisions would require them to do so. Therefore, we cannot discount the possibility that a district council would want to produce its own assessment rather than work with the county. In such a scenario, the district’s assessment would have the same statutory status as the countywide assessment, which could lead to unnecessary duplication of effort. It could also mean that regional partners would be presented with two potentially conflicting assessments for the same area in preparing the regional strategy. Furthermore, if a district council was to go it alone, Amendment 151 would result in there being no requirement for the county to consult it and seek its participation in preparing the countywide assessment.

As I explained in Committee, we believe that it is important that assessments should reflect the local economic geography as much as possible. We do not dispute that district councils have a key role to play in economic development and regeneration. However, economic linkages or economies do not stop at district council boundaries; the solutions to local economic problems can often lie in the wider economy. For example, skills shortages and shortcomings in connectivity often require a county or sub-regional response. Counties provide a better match for real economic markets and are better placed to build a broad strategic understanding of the drivers of the wider economic area. For these reasons, we believe that it is better to prepare the assessment at a county level.

Therefore, we believe that the best way to take forward local economic assessments is to place the duty on county councils but with a clear requirement for the county to work with the districts. Counties are particularly well placed to lead on economic assessments, as they have a strategic overview of the economic, social and environmental well-being of the county as a whole. They are already the responsible authority for preparing the local area agreement in two-tier areas and they tend to be better resourced for this type of work than district councils. We consider that the Bill, as drafted, requires both the county and district councils to work in partnership in preparing the local economic assessments and that it provides district councils with a specific role in recognition of their important contribution to the assessment. Such an approach is simple and transparent, provides clear lines of accountability and will, it is hoped, lead to high-quality, consistent assessments. We believe that it strikes the right balance between ensuring that district councils are fully involved and the need to have clear lines of accountability. I hope that I have addressed the noble Baroness’s concerns and that she will understand why I think that the amendment is not necessary.

Amendments 152 and 153, also tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Tope, would require a county council to have regard to any material produced by a district council, regardless of whether it relates to the district’s planning functions. Amendment 154 would require the county council and district council to co-operate with each other. The Bill makes specific mention of material held by the district council in the discharge of the district council’s functions under Section 13 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, because the local economic assessment is expected to inform the preparation of local development frameworks. In view of this, it is important that there is consistency between the evidence assembled at a district council level in preparation of the local development framework and the evidence gathered for the local economic assessment duty. We should also not lose sight of the fact that the material collated under Section 13 is wide-ranging and is not restricted to economic data, as I think the noble Baroness mentioned. Section 13 requires local planning authorities to keep under review any matters that may affect the development of their area. This would include, among other things, principal physical, economic, social and environmental characteristics of the area.

Many district council functions relate to economic development and regeneration. Both district councils and counties contribute in different ways in supporting economic development, often working in partnership. For instance, both tiers work together alongside other partners in tackling skills challenges. There is a range of evidence that local authorities can draw from in developing local economic assessments, some of which is held by districts, some by counties and some elsewhere. Local authorities should also, where appropriate, draw on the evidence assembled in developing other key strategies such as local housing strategies, which are assembled by districts, and local transport plans, which are assembled by counties, in putting together their economic assessments. It is important, therefore, that county and districts work together with other partners in agreeing the range of evidence needed to assemble the local economic assessment, aggregating it and disaggregating it where necessary so that it both informs local priorities and gives a broad strategic picture that can properly inform the regional strategy. Our intention is to address these issues clearly in future guidance. We do not, therefore, believe that there should be an open-ended requirement on the county council to have regard to any material that the district council decides to provide. However, there needs to be a genuine dialogue between the county and districts. We believe that the Bill as drafted will help to achieve that.

Amendment 154 would place a requirement on both the county council and district council to co-operate with each other in the preparation of a local economic assessment. We do not believe that this amendment is necessary because, as I have explained, the Bill already includes a requirement on the county council to consult and seek the participation of district councils and the district councils to co-operate with the county councils. It is implicit within such a requirement that the county council should work closely and co-operate with district councils within its area. I can assure noble Lords that we will emphasise the need for co-operation in guidance.

Amendment 155, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, would provide for an assessment prepared prior to these provisions coming into force to be able to fulfil a local authority’s statutory duties in relation to Part 4 of the Bill. Noble Lords are understandably keen to ensure that existing work done by local authorities in developing an economic evidence base is not lost. We completely agree that local authorities should, wherever possible, build on existing work in preparing their new assessment. The important point is that the assessments be fit for purpose and give an accurate and up-to-date assessment of local economic conditions. As the policy statement on local economic assessments, which was placed on the Communities and Local Government website in January, makes clear, a local authority that has already carried out an assessment will need to consider it in the context of the new duty and any government guidance. While such local authorities may need to make some changes and will certainly need to ensure that they meet their new statutory obligation to consult, we do not intend that the work that they have already done should go to waste. I hope that noble Lords will, therefore, understand why we believe that these amendments are not necessary.

My Lords, in moving the amendment I shall speak also to Amendments 149 and 157. I return to the simple point: we agree with the principle of conducting assessments. We agree that when a local authority is conducting an economic assessment of its area it is right that relevant bodies and persons should be consulted. Where we disagree is on the need to spell out in such great detail which those partner bodies must be. This has been a recurring theme throughout the Bill. The Government have gone into prescriptive overdrive and at every stage we have suggested a more flexible approach. This is another such situation. Our amendments would leave in the duty to consult but leave it up to the local authority to choose who the consultees will be.

One of the concerns that I have with putting lists into the Bill is that it may encourage a tick-box mentality, whereby a local authority may simply go through the list in the Bill but may not go any further. By placing the onus on local authorities, we will encourage them to consider every possible body that they should consult. We would therefore free up local authorities and allow them to think creatively when consulting, rather than adopting a mechanical approach and thinking, “We’ve have done our bit”. The list of partner authorities in Clause 66 is no doubt exhaustive and complete, or so the Government suggest, but that list may change. The Secretary of State may have to keep laying down orders to update the list to keep it exhaustive and complete. I suggest to the Minister that this Bill could be improved with the removal of Clause 66. I beg to move.

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, have tabled Amendment 148, which would remove the requirement for local authorities to consult named partner authorities in preparing their local economic assessment. Amendment 149 is a consequential amendment, while Amendment 157 would remove Clause 66, which lists those partner authorities.

We discussed these provisions at some length in Committee. We explained that we have included these provisions in the Bill because we believe that there are partners that local authorities should be required to consult in carrying out their assessments. The authorities that are listed are already working closely with local authorities in local strategic partnerships. We believe that it is important that these partners should be given the opportunity to engage with the principal local authorities in assessing the economic conditions of the area. The list of partner authorities takes as its starting point the list of partner authorities which is set out in Part 5 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 for the purpose of agreeing local area agreements and which responsible authorities must consult when developing their sustainable community strategies.

We have taken this approach because local economic assessments are expected to form part of the evidence base for the sustainable community strategy and for the local area agreement negotiations. All the partners listed have a duty to co-operate with local authorities in determining local area agreement targets and must have regard to these targets in the exercise of their functions. In view of this, we believe that it is only fair that these partner authorities should have an opportunity to contribute to the local economic assessment. Involving these partners at an early stage in identifying the economic strengths and weaknesses of the local economy will help to strengthen the impact and effectiveness of targets agreed through local area agreements further down the line. Also, we should not lose sight of the fact that local economic assessments will inform the preparation of the regional strategy. It is important that the regional strategy should be informed by the best possible advice and knowledge. Many of the partner authorities listed in Clause 66 will play an important part in that process as well.

However, as I explained, our intention has been to ensure that local authorities at the very least consult those public bodies that are working closely with local authorities in determining local area agreement targets and delivering them. We are keen to keep prescription to a minimum and to allow space for local flexibility. In Committee, we heard the arguments put forward by the noble Baroness and the noble Lord against the inclusion of partner authorities. I undertake to table appropriate amendments at Third Reading to deal with those concerns. With that reassurance, I am sure that the noble Baroness will be happy to withdraw the amendment.

My Lords, I am delighted to hear what the Minister has said. It has taken me a little by surprise. At this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Bates, I beg to move the amendment standing in his name. Your Lordships debated this matter last week. It concerns retrospective non-domestic rating of ports. We had an excellent debate. I expressed my extreme concerns regarding the current situation. The noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, gave a very careful and detailed explanation of the problem and why the Government believe that nothing more can be done to improve the situation. The House then divided and voted to accept my Motion to regret that the regulations would not prevent several port companies from becoming insolvent. The underlying SI was approved as it actually improves the situation, but in my view not enough.

Today, the Minister in another place, John Healey, made a Written Statement to the effect that the Government will ignore your Lordships’ determination and leave the way open for councils to issue rate demands forthwith. Your Lordships will recall that local authorities are bound to collect the rates due diligently. My question for the Minister is: what happens next? Exactly when will local authorities issue rate demands and when will the amounts first due have to be paid? I beg to move.

My Lords, I was unable to be in the House on Wednesday when the noble Earl moved his Motion, but I read the debate with interest. Clearly, this Bill cannot stop the orders; that is not within the scope of the Bill. However, there is something, which I take from the debate, which the Government could do. I was glad to see that the Minister's response answered the point about trading while insolvent. Given that the rates due in the future are a future liability, she talked about,

“the directors’ reasonable expectations of being able to meet their liabilities as they fall due in the future”.—[Official Report, 18/3/09; col. 304.]

She said that they are not in such an extreme position as seems to have been suggested in some quarters. I was glad she said that because it confirmed what I had understood to be the case although my professional experience of this is by no means recent.

The Government can impress on banks and on lenders that that is the position. The concern expressed was the difficulty in which individual companies are being left because lenders are taking the view that they are either insolvent or in such a precarious position that one must not lend to them. In saying that, I am not in any way trying to diminish the seriousness of the position and the problems faced by some companies. We own a large part of the banks so we should always use opportunities to persuade them to act in a civilised manner. That is a specific point which the Government could take up.

My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, was absolutely right: we had a very good debate last Wednesday and we put many things on the record. I am happy to reiterate our concern today, without going into any detail, about the predicament of some businesses faced with unexpectedly large backdated bills. I went into some detail about the history of that and why it was such an unfortunate occurrence, coinciding with the downturn and so on.

I recognise the anxiety in the House and I recognise that the non-fatal Motion was lost by the Government. I put the same Statement into Hansard today, recognising and respecting the response of the House but reiterating, as I said in the debate, that we had gone as far as we could within the limits of the law because we could not waive tax liability—no Minister could. I am grateful to the noble Earl for not rehearsing that today. Facts concerning tax liabilities that are now known cannot simply be disregarded, as he will understand, and of course port occupiers are not alone in having backdated liabilities as a result of ensuring that the ratings list is accurate and up-to-date.

We know that some businesses may struggle with significant and unexpected bills for more than 33 months from 1 April 2005 and that is why we have come forward with the new regulations which give businesses more time to pay those liabilities in certain circumstances. Under those regulations, businesses facing such bills will not be required to pay their backdated liability within the current financial year. Instead, the new legislation will give qualifying businesses the facility to pay their back-dated liability for previous years in equal interest-free instalments over eight years. As I told the House last week, that is absolutely unprecedented and it has been welcomed. We think it will help about 1,500 properties a year across England, within and outside ports, and will give help with cash flow problems faced by some companies.

On the specific question posed by the noble Earl, my advice is that bills can be sent out any time now. Local authorities will have to issue demands and bills now because there is no reason not to bill and payment of bills is due 14 days from the issue of the due bill. The schedule of payments, as agreed with the local authorities, would be eight equal instalments, if a company falls into that situation. That is what will happen.

The point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, is pertinent. I was happy to put on the record the situation about insolvency, as it is important information, so that people would not feel that immediately they receive those bills on their balance sheets they will be bound to be declared insolvent. The point made by the noble Baroness about making it clear to the banks and to the lenders that that is the position is very important. I said in the debate that we would look for ways to ensure that that information was held by local authorities and that we will seek to put it on websites and so on. Bearing in mind what she said, let me think about how we can ensure that that information goes to the lenders as well. The debate on the issue has raised considerable public interest and a letter sent from both Stephen Timms and John Healey to the Treasury Select Committee received a fair degree of publicity. Nevertheless, we should ensure that we make as much of it is possible.

I must address the amendment before us. Obviously we do not think that the specific amendment in this context would be appropriate. We do not agree that matters that should be addressed in local economic assessments should be placed on the face of the Bill because it is up to local areas to determine what is relevant in terms of their economic assessment and how it is best deployed. It would also unnecessarily constrain local authorities and make it more difficult to respond to changing economic priorities. Local authorities should be free to determine what to include in their assessments, taking account of local priorities.

I am grateful for the opportunity to reaffirm what I said and to add further information about port businesses that are affected by the situation described on Wednesday in the debate on the Motion.

My Lords, I am extremely grateful for the Minister’s reply. I do think that we are heading for disaster, but it is helpful that the Minister has told the House that rate demands will be issued probably in the next two weeks. Matters will then come to a head, and the clarity for businesses will be helpful because they have been in limbo for some time. We will see what happens next. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

My Lords, Amendment 156 is an amendment to Clause 65, which concerns local authority economic assessments. My amendment would provide that the new clause shall in no way affect a local authority’s powers or duties in relation to the social or environmental well-being of its area.

The Government will say that the amendment is unnecessary. The Minister grins at that: perhaps it is his first line. However, the amended clause would make a very important statement that is not currently in the Bill. I tabled an amendment, framed a little differently, in Grand Committee. It required local authorities to have regard to social and environmental issues alongside economic ones. It provoked the comment from the Government that my amendment would “unnecessarily constrain” local authorities. If the assurances about the importance of all three pillars of well-being—economic, social and environmental—mean anything, I do not understand how my amendment would constrain local authorities. The phrase makes me fear that the assurances are not as I would like to understand them.

The Government relied in Grand Committee on guidance that we have yet to see and referred to the policy statement that we have seen. I acknowledge that the policy statement covers wider ground than the narrowly economic. It mentions, for instance—just to show that I have looked at it—the transition to a low-carbon economy and the causes of worklessness. However, that is in a policy statement; it will not be in statute.

If this or any future Government become even more panicky about the economy, there will be no statutory backing for the balance. We on these Benches believe that it is necessary to consider all three aspects at the same time: they all support one another. The social and environmental well-being of an area in itself supports the economy of that area. I beg to move.

My Lords, unfortunately it is my third sentence that says that the amendment is unnecessary. I will try to reassure the noble Baroness, who has raised some important points. She mentioned the policy statement and her concerns about ensuring that social and environmental well-being is not left off the agenda. The fact that I am reassuring her in the House will, I hope, add strength to the argument that this amendment is unnecessary.

Amendment 156 would insert the provision that the duty to prepare an assessment of the economic conditions of an area shall not affect the powers and duties of a principal local authority in relation to the social or environmental well-being of the area. I assure noble Lords that nothing in Clause 65 would have an effect on any local authority’s powers or duties relating to social and environmental well-being. I understand that noble Lords are concerned that the new duty would give too great a prominence to economic issues at the expense of social and environmental matters. However, this is not the case.

As the noble Baroness said, we set out in our policy statement that we believe that local economic assessments will contribute to the overall aim of delivering sustainable economic development. A primary function of the economic assessment is to inform the preparation of the sustainable community strategy, which sets out the long-term vision for the economic, social and environmental well-being of an area. The local economic assessment, however, will form only part of the evidence base for the sustainable community strategy. In preparing the strategy, local authorities will need to weigh the findings from the local economic assessment alongside all other factors that must be considered, including the need to promote social and environmental well-being.

We do not expect economic assessments to be prepared without any reference to wider social and environmental concerns. Some of the main barriers to economic success are social issues such as lack of skills and poor health. Economic conditions in turn may have social consequences. We know that worklessness is often linked to worsening social outcomes such as increased crime. At the same time, it is obvious that economic development has potential environmental consequences, and all areas need to think about how well placed they are for moving towards a low-carbon economy. The noble Baroness was right: we will address all this in government guidance.

In determining the long-term vision for the places that they serve, local authorities will need to bring together all the relevant issues in the sustainable community strategy. The economic assessment duty means that local authorities will have a good understanding of local economic circumstances, based on sound evidence. However, it is not the case that this evidence somehow trumps other considerations: it will be for local authorities to bring together all the evidence on economic, environmental and social issues, and balance the different considerations. The economic assessment duty will ensure that local authorities have a good understanding of the economy of the local area. There is no provision for these assessments to change existing local authority powers or duties on social or environmental matters. I hope that these reassurances will enable the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

My Lords, I thought that the first part of the Minister’s speech was very much better than mine at making the same points. However, I did not agree with his conclusion. We have sustainable community strategy duties, so why is it necessary to have the new economic assessment duty? The imbalance worries me. As the Minister said, the three aspects are interwoven. I should like to see something about this in the Bill. I should like to test the opinion of the House.

My Lords, the purpose of this group of amendments is to make sure, as the Government have said, that the whole thing is more bottom-up than top-down. Amendment 157A would make sure that the Secretary of State is not the ultimate power in all this and does not have the ultimate say. Amendment 157E goes back to the point that I made in Committee, which was that the economic assessments should form the main part of the evidence base for the regional authority in drawing up the regional strategy. For all the glowing comments that we had earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Patel, about the way in which district councils and counties were going to have a great say in the economic assessments, we want to make certain that the assessments are the base of any regional strategy.

I hope that the Minister will agree that these amendments would strengthen the role of the local authorities in the process, which is something that we will return to with future amendments. This seems an entirely logical step. The Minister agreed with some of our earlier comments and I hope that she can agree with these as well, because they involve local authorities in the whole process. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, talked about,

“considerable opportunities for local authorities to play a stronger role in economic development and regeneration … As local place-shapers, authorities are well placed to lead and facilitate the delivery of economic growth and regeneration”.—[Official Report, 9/2/09; col. GC 255]

These amendments present that opportunity and would provide a clear picture across the region. As I have said before, there can be a real problem of differences across large regions. In my county of Essex, for example, there are enormous differences between Clacton on the coast and parts that border London. I beg to move.

My Lords, I understand why the noble Lord has tabled these amendments again.

My Lords, I was going to speak to my amendments.

My Lords, I beg the noble Lord’s pardon.

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. I should remind the House that I am honorary president of the Friends of the Lake District, which represents CPRE in the whole of Cumbria, and honorary vice-president of the Campaign for National Parks. I am going to speak to Amendment 160.

My Lords, we are speaking to Amendment 157A.

My Lords, Amendment 160 is part of the next grouping.

My Lords, the amendment under discussion is Amendment 157A.

My Lords, I am quite clear about that but it is always nice to hear from my noble friend. I look forward to the next group of amendments.

As I was saying, it is understandable why the noble Lord has brought back these amendments on the preparation of regional strategies and the relationship of local authority economic assessments to regional strategies. I know that he is concerned that we should demonstrate how much this is an organic and bottom-up process.

On Amendment 157A, we debated the notion of the regional strategy being established by the responsible regional authorities in Committee. There will be a touch of déjà vu, because I raised concerns then which I still hold. The problem with the word “establish” is that, rather than helping the cause of the noble Lord, it adds to the confusion. I will address the issue of who publishes the regional strategy in my response to the next group of amendments, but this amendment simply confuses the nature of what is involved in the process. We have made it clear in Clauses 69 and 70 that the responsible regional authorities would prepare the regional strategies. That is quite right because, as the noble Lord says, it is not the Secretary of State’s job to do this; it is very much in the hands of the joint authorities. I am happy to put on the record again that the Bill establishes what I believe will be a genuinely equal partnership between the RDAs and the local authorities with a genuinely collaborative approach in the drafting of strategies to achieve the regional objectives. I am happy to reassure the House again about that.

The noble Lord is right that local economic assessments have to be the fundamental bodies of evidence for the regional strategy. Amendment 157E would make it explicit that new integrated regional strategies must take account of local economic assessments. I am sorry to disappoint him but I do not think that it is appropriate to go into that degree of prescription in the Bill. As we said in the policy document that we published alongside the Bill, we expect the local economic assessments to form a key part of the evidence base, which is why we have debated them at such length and put so much emphasis on the quality and consistency of that evidence base. They will inform the preparation of regional strategies.

We also said in our policy statement that local economic assessments will form part of the evidence base for the examination in public of the draft regional strategy. That is where they will be challenged and scrutinised by people from many different disciplines and experiences, which is an important iterative part of the process. We have said that we will set out more details about how the assessments should feed into the regional strategy in future guidance, when we will have an opportunity to explore and emphasise their significance and to go into some of the issues that local authorities would find helpful. I hope that that provides sufficient assurance for the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her answer. We are going to discuss this again in the next group of amendments and I am sure that we will be pursuing this theme for a while. We all want to achieve something and make certain that we can build houses in and benefit the economy of our areas. I think that the Government often come from an urban perspective, considering groups of authorities that can easily relate together, such as in London, Manchester, Birmingham or Liverpool. However, most of the country is still divided into counties. Some of them are now unitaries; a lot of them still have districts with small or fairly large towns but not many cities. Getting coherent strategies on building houses and development is very different in those areas from the situation in London or Manchester. I will withdraw the amendment now but we will come back to this issue in the next group.

My Lords, this group covers a wide range of amendments. My Amendment 157B is a Local Government Association amendment as well. Some of these issues were discussed in relation to the 2004 planning Act, when the Government accepted the will of this House. As I said, it is vital that the planning process for regional strategies should be bottom-up. Otherwise, one is going to get resistance rather than acceptance for building houses. You have the district doing local development frameworks and the counties above that with the highway powers, waste and mineral powers and all the social powers. That is a coherent policy, which is tied to the economic, environmental and social strategies that we talked about in relation to the amendments tabled by the Liberal Democrats. It is important that all this should tie together and then go up to create the regional strategy.

The Government suggest that leaders’ boards working with the RDAs might be the answer. I fear that it will not be if you really want to achieve success, develop the economy, build houses and provide a satisfying solution, given that, as I have just said, a vast amount of the country is covered by two tiers—it is very rural with a series of large towns in it. I have been involved in this process for a long while. I want to see agreement on the building of houses and development, but it works much better from the bottom up than it does from the top down.

The amendment sets out a number of bodies that should be part of creating the regional strategy; it should not be only the leaders’ board. Obviously the RDA and the leaders’ board will decide ultimately, but the process should be bottom-up, with lots of people participating and being involved; if it is not, it will not work. I think that everyone agrees that the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 has not worked terribly well in giving planning powers to the regional assemblies, otherwise we would not now be giving them to the RDAs; the Government have admitted that by proposing something different two or three years later. The Government should acknowledge that the process should be much more bottom-up and that these various bodies should be consulted and involved in the construction of the regional strategy. I beg to move.

My Lords, I apologise for having jumped the gun a moment ago, but all these amendments cover much the same territory. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, moved his amendment very well. While I take second place to no one in my support for the Government in wanting to get planning streamlined and to be able to get ahead with it and so on, it will not work unless people have been properly consulted. It will run into all kinds of problems if people feel that they have been bypassed.

I shall speak to Amendments 160, 164, 165 and 168 and, in doing so, I should remind the House that I am president of the Friends of the Lake District and a vice-president of the Campaign for National Parks. I shall speak for a little longer than noble Lords have been speaking so far today, but that is because I shall be speaking to all four amendments. On aggregate my time will not exceed four minutes per amendment.

We all realise that leaders’ boards will be very important bodies. They will be responsible for the development and sign-off of the regional strategies. The regional strategy under planning law, once approved, becomes part of the development plan covering the national parks and other areas. Amendment 160 seeks to ensure that each leaders’ board has on it representation from each type of authority. There are good reasons for ensuring that all types of authority are represented, but I shall focus on the area that I know best—the national park authorities.

The critical question is whether the arrangements will provide adequate representation. There are strong grounds for believing that they will not. The statutory purposes and functions of national park authorities, as set out in Parliament, are unique. Arrangements therefore need to reflect the “national” in national parks. I am well aware of much of the work that the national park authorities are doing to support local communities, as they take it very seriously, but we should not forget that national parks are just that—national—and that local authorities are responsible for their areas and local communities.

This significant difference needs to be recognised in the institutional arrangements. It may well be possible for district councils within a region to come together and establish a form of representation, but it would not be possible for local authorities to represent the interests of national parks, because the functions, purposes and audiences are different. Planning is the key to delivering national park purposes, and Parliament has decreed that national park authorities must have spatial planning powers. Indeed, spatial planning is a crucial tool in delivering national park purposes for the nation. The new regional strategies will be pivotal to the region—indeed, they will form part of the development plans of the national parks—and yet if a region wishes to exclude a national park authority from the leaders’ board, with the effect that it does not sign off the regional strategy, it is perfectly entitled to do so under this legislation.

My Lords, since this is the first time I have spoken on this Bill, I should declare an interest as a vice-president of the Council for National Parks and vice-president of Friends of the Lake District.

I gladly put my name to the four amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Judd, and I am glad that two of them are subscribed to by the Liberal Democrats. There is not much more that I need to say. It is difficult to find a hole or gap in the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. He put a comprehensive argument for the amendments. I reiterate the point that national parks are not the same as local authorities—they are national. They are a provision of the 1949 Act. Their interests are national—they represent the nation and not local authorities. It is extremely important that that is recognised at all stages in a Bill whose provisions I find difficult to understand.

I will close on the point about national parks. I hope that the Minister will look with favour on what the noble Lord has been saying.

As the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, has just said, there is little to add to what the noble Lord, Lord Judd, has just said in speaking to Amendments 164 and 165. My noble friend Lady Hamwee has added her name to Amendment 164. If there had been room, I would have added mine as well but we both managed to get our names down in time on Amendment 165. We therefore readily support the amendments. The noble Lord has moved them so well and so fully that there is little that can be usefully added other than again to express our support.

Before I move to our amendments, perhaps I may also say that we fully support Amendment 157B, which stands at the head of this group. As the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, said in moving it, it commands wide support, including that of the Local Government Association, and we add to that.

Amendment 160A stands in my name and that of my noble friend. We had assumed that Clause 68 would expect all authorities within an area to participate in a leaders’ board, but the debate in Grand Committee and subsection (3) suggests that it may not be the case. Amendment 160A has therefore been tabled partly to clarify that, but also, if it is not the case, to add the words, “and which determine to participate”.

Amendment 160B returns to a point that was raised in Grand Committee, which is to ensure that leaders’ boards enjoy full party and non-party representation. If they are drawn solely from the leader of a party in control or their representative, that will often not be the case—indeed, I think that reference was made in Grand Committee to the fact that, as things stand at the moment in the south-west of England, the party of national government would have no representation on a leaders’ board, which is absurd. If the leaders’ board is to command widespread support, to have credibility and genuinely to be able to speak for the communities, a way must be found to ensure that all the political parties represented in that area are represented on the board and that, if and where there are independent members, they, too, have an appropriate voice.

Amendment 164A would add the simple word “effective”. I am sure that the Government would say that they want involvement to be effective, but, as things stand, nothing requires it to be effective; it may simply be a consultative process that is gone through for the sake of it. We wanted to add a word to the Bill that made it very clear that community involvement needs to be meaningful, and to be meaningful it has to be effective. Therefore, that one word has an important meaning in the Bill. Those are our three amendments, all of which would add clarity and emphasis to the Bill.

My Lords, perhaps I may speak to the amendments from a north-west perspective. Before I do, I declare the interests which I declared in Committee. I was for some time the chairman of the North West Regional Assembly’s executive board, which became 4NW. I resigned from that position when I became a member of the Northwest Regional Development Agency in December.

As I think the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, would recognise, as well as two big cities, the north-west contains quite a considerable rural area. I do not think that you can get more rural than Cumbria. In creating 4NW, which is essentially the leaders’ forum before the Bill cuts through, we had to make sure that all the different parts of the north-west were effectively represented. We started off by saying that each of the sub-regions should have three representatives, and that within those sub-regions, which had different kinds of authority, all the different kinds of authority should be represented. For example, if it was a unitary authority, there should also be a county and a district member.

At the end of last year we also started working with the NWDA on a regional strategy which, I again assure noble Lords, does not work in quite the way suggested. We started off by issuing a consultation draft on issues of principles which has gone out to all the partner agencies and local authorities. We will develop the strategy over the summer and more than 50 participating partners will be involved in the consultation. After the draft is produced towards the end of this year there will be a longer period of consultation before the strategy is agreed. At each stage all the local authorities and partner agencies will be able to contribute. My noble friend Lord Judd was concerned about the Lake District National Park. I assure him that it is a full member of 4NW and that it participates in it, as do the other agencies that are not included formally. Health needed to be included, so we got the strategic health authority involved. The new HCA is also involved. Those are some of the participating bodies. If you went to the meetings, you would not know where you were.

I am concerned by the amendments on party politics tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tope. I am not sure that we want the leaders’ boards to become party political. One of the problems that we had in the North West Regional Assembly was that it became very political and we were not talking to each other; in fact, we were arguing. When I became chairman of the executive board, I set out deliberately to be consensual. I would not let the Labour group or any of the other groups meet on their own, because they wanted to represent each other’s sub-regions. I said to my Liberal Democrat colleagues in Stockport, “I’ve got more in common with you than I have with the Labour representatives up in Cumbria”. We needed to make sure that we represented not just our own interests as a particular local authority but the collective interest. We had to listen to each other, participate in debate and make sure that we did not divide along party lines, because collaboration means working together. Therefore, automatic inclusion of political parties is a difficult matter. One has only to look at some of the local authorities these days—Stoke-on-Trent would come to mind—to see the number of splits, splinters and parties. If you had to have one representative from every one, you would probably need to hire a room much bigger than this one to get all those different parties in it. The leader needs to represent not an authority or a political party but his area, whether it is urban or rural, and try to make decisions which improve the lot of the people in it. I was very proud when I stepped down from my previous role to hear people comment that we had not had a vote—that is not true; we had one vote on the name 4NW, which I lost. Working in that way meant that people had to think and listen to each other and not argue along party political lines.

My Lords, the noble Lord’s approach is exactly right and admirable. But does he agree that in order to be listened to, one has to be present?

My Lords, that is true. However, although there are two Labour members and one Liberal Democrat member in Greater Manchester we ensure that we also represent the two Conservative councils in the area, because we have a collective view on the issues that we raise. If we want the bodies to be effective, as the noble Lord’s amendment seeks, we also need to think about their size.

My Lords, what an interesting and lively debate. Many of the amendments relate to the composition of the boards and the danger of prescription. We have tried in the arrangements that we propose to give regions greater flexibility to devise detailed administrative arrangements which suit their regional circumstances. That came though in our sub-national report and is also the view of the LGA, which agrees that it should be for local authorities in a region to determine these things. I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Smith for having just spoken about how it is working in practice.

We debated this matter in Committee, where I said that the principle that we were trying to hold on to is non-prescription and explained why the Government have deliberately shied away from covering within the Bill matters that we thought inappropriate for national government to prescribe, such as the detailed composition of the leaders’ board and consultative arrangements. However, in recognition of concern about these points and in response to requests for greater certainty, we also indicated that further details would be covered by guidance and/or regulations, such as a list of statutory consultees to be set out in regulations. However, we are trying to strike the right balance between flexibility and assurance, and meeting different expectations.

My noble friend Lord Judd, supported by the noble Lord, Lord Chorley, have tabled amendments which would include the national parks as representatives in every region in which there is a park and necessitate consultation with them. We want the leaders’ boards to be small enough to be effective, streamlined, managed and properly representative of local areas, but the noble Lords have made an important case. On Amendment 160, I recognise the importance of my noble friend’s argument regarding the national parks. I have listened to the concerns expressed and we will come back with a proposal to ensure that the Bill enables national parks to be properly represented without undermining the principle of regional self-organisation.

On my noble friend’s Amendment 165, on the consultation arrangements, it is clear to me that noble Lords consider it important to spell out in more detail the relationship between the responsible regional authorities and the local authorities boards and individual local authorities. Again, I am willing to take the matter away and consider how we can address noble Lords’ concerns by setting out more clearly in the Bill the reciprocal duties of the responsible regional authorities to consult, engage and take advice from local authorities in the region and the responsibilities of local authorities to engage in that process. I hope that noble Lords will be happy about that.

On the amendments laid out by the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, I think that we had a similar group of amendments in Committee. Amendments 157 and 164 require the responsible regional authorities to seek advice from the county and unitary councils, the national parks and broads authorities, and so forth. The noble Lord makes a powerful case about the different geographies of this country, in particular the rural as opposed to the urban. This is a restatement of amendments we considered in Committee, particularly in the light of concern expressed by the Local Government Association that the Bill does not replicate the Section 4(4) provision of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 and is therefore perceived as weakening the role of strategic authorities held in principle under the previous legislation.

I sought to reassure noble Lords and the LGA that counties and national park authorities will have a number of clear statutory roles. I subsequently wrote to the LGA and the ENPAA setting these out. They include different levels of responsibility; a new duty to prepare economic assessments, which will be a key input, as we have just described, into the evidence base of the regional strategies; and a crucial role in establishing and configuring the leaders’ board in their region. Many county leaders will be members of their leaders’ board and therefore have direct management control of the regional strategy and process. They will also have a role as statutory consultees in their own right and be consulted on draft revisions to the regional strategy. We will set out our consultation expectations in regulations and guidance, including a list of consultees. That will additionally be covered in the statement of community involvement.

I believe that this package of provisions give counties and national parks much more real, practical influence over the regional strategy than they had over the RSS via the regional assembly, which had a much looser arrangement, and certainly more than they ever had in relation to the regional economic strategy. We have a range of ways in which counties and districts can take advantage of input and participation to get a better level of influence. I think it will be a challenge and although I agree that we have not replicated it in exactly the same way as in the PCPA, there will no loss of opportunity or access to influence.

I turn briefly to Amendment 168 in the name of my noble friend Lord Judd and the noble Lord, Lord Chorley. We will shortly be debating the need for an integrated strategy and I know that this amendment will keep the current system of regional spatial strategies by retaining Part 1 of the 2004 Act. I will not rehearse my arguments now but will say that we urgently need a single strategy to bring together the spatial expression of the need not least to provide more housing but also to manage our resources, with the economic strategy which is more closely focused on economic considerations such as jobs, skills, enterprise, business, investment and innovation. That is what a single regional strategy will do for the first time. It is long overdue in some cases. However, if noble Lords will allow me, I will come on to that debate later.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that very comprehensive answer. I do not think that it totally addresses the points that I made at the beginning. If the economic assessments are going to be carried out by counties in conjunction with districts—we did not win the concession that they should be automatically involved, but we are assured they will be—then when it comes to the actual regional strategy, since the bodies we have just been talking about are not going to be properly, statutorily consulted on it, I do not see how the thing is going to be joined-up. I do not accept what the noble Baroness said about the regional strategy being joined-up and from the bottom up.

The noble Lord, Lord Smith, made a convincing argument about what was happening in the north-west but he was actually talking about how the leaders’ board would operate. The ultimate power will be the regional development assembly—that is my point as well as the point of the noble Lord, Lord Judd—and my amendment would make the national parks a consultee in the regional strategy. This is an LGA amendment. It is an all-party amendment from the LGA and I do not see why the Government cannot accept it. It would put into the Bill what should happen and who should be consulted about establishing a regional strategy. It is very important to test the opinion of the House on this.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government why the National Health Service does not provide doctors to treat critically injured and ill patients outside hospital anywhere in the United Kingdom except London.

My Lords, I think that we shall, unhappily, be a reduced number in a few seconds. I shall try to explain to the House why my debate probably has a small number of people who will be contributing, but to whom I am enormously grateful. I knew very little about this subject until a few months ago, so I can understand people’s bemusement when they read on the Order Paper what we are debating.

My question is whether the National Health Service is actually fulfilling its remit to provide the best possible service at point of need. We all recognise, of course, how it does that to the best of its abilities and within great financial constraints. Yet we are deficient in one area, because what I am about to describe does not exist in most of the countries of Europe or, indeed, other countries in the civilised world. Those who are taken ill or involved in a serious accident outside the London area—that is, roughly within the M25—are treated by dedicated emergency crews that consist largely of paramedics and the police, with ambulances present. Yet there is no doctor present who can cope with critical care for someone who has been involved in a serious motor or sporting accident, or one that involves crushing of the spine or head injuries. Outside the London area, there is no critical care doctor present to make sure that those injured people can get to the appropriate hospital within the time that may save their lives.

In fact, figures tell us that in the south central area—the area on which I have been briefed, through my long friendship with people in the Hampshire Police Authority—for those patients who are seriously injured in accidents of the kind that I have described, there is a 40 per cent mortality rate because of the delays in getting them to a hospital that can deal with them quickly, and with specialist care, within the time. That is because of the paramedics. I would not dare suggest that the paramedics do not do their job admirably; they are dedicated people, underpaid for what they do—with no bonuses whether they do it right or wrong—who go out in all weathers. Up to the level of their competence and training, they do the best that they can. Yet people who are severely injured—who may well be unconscious, have crushed chests with damaged airways, or the head injuries about which one reads of so often in the newspapers—need expert attention very quickly.

I have been briefed for this debate by a group of doctors who do not get paid for what they do, but work under charitable funding through an organisation called the British Association for Immediate Care—a sort of umbrella charity. If such doctors volunteer, when they are available and can get out there, people have a chance of surviving. The losses in the southern central area, the one about which I know most through my briefing, indicate what prevails throughout the British Isles. A properly organised, doctor-led service could certainly save 141 lives a year in the southern area; in money terms, I believe that that is roughly calculated as saving the area £186 million a year.

Birmingham, for example, suffers the same in that there are innumerable accidents in that conurbation. In last year’s records, it had 389 call-outs for specialist doctors and 1,978 arrivals. Compared with other parts of the country, that is quite a good record. Yet the number of people in need of the special care of qualified doctors who have to act immediately to get patients to a hospital that can deal with their particular trauma is certainly evidence of a need to overhaul the service. That will entail a National Health Service commitment for funding. My noble friend Lady Tonge is much better qualified than I to talk on these subjects. This comes as less of a surprise to her, with her medical training, than it might to others. She will elaborate in more detail on these matters.

The competence of paramedics is not in question, but when it comes to anaesthetics or opening airways or things that need particular expertise and time, a doctor really is required in quick order—if it is possible to get them there. Once there, those doctors can speed up the process of getting the patient to the right hospital. The job of the paramedics is to get the patient to the nearest general hospital, from where they may then have to be transferred again. It might take as long as 12, 13 or 14 hours before someone with serious head injuries gets to a place where they can be treated, by which time they may be so injured that they are no longer able to function, or they may be dead.

That is the sum of my introduction to this debate, and I do not think that many paramedics would disagree with it. There is nothing that they would like better than to have a qualified doctor working alongside them, but should charitable organisations really be funding those doctors? They can only free themselves when they are not working in their daily jobs but, when they are called, they go out in all weathers and do an admirable job. Is it not time, then, for us to follow the rest of Europe, and the world, in providing a properly funded and doctor-led critical care service? Why should people who are not in hospital but are on their way to it get worse treatment than those who go to hospital and are treated in the normal way?

My Lords, I thank the noble Viscount for this Question, which will have made several people think, “What happens outside London when patients are critically injured and ill?”. The Minister and I have both been involved with the Red Cross. We know how important emergency medical services are. One Red Cross activity is planning and helping in disasters. More and more paramedics are being used in emergency situations these days. They are now much better trained than a few years ago, and can use much more sophisticated equipment. Regarding an emergency response, however, although paramedics have good assessing skills, they do not always have the competence to prioritise certain treatments. If a doctor could be present, it might be possible to start urgent treatment early, which might reduce serious injury or loss of life.

In TV programmes such as “Casualty”, crash teams with doctors go out to serious incidents. Is that realistic or does it not happen? Perhaps the Minister can let me know whether they give a real or a false impression.

When not in London, my home is in north Yorkshire. The North Yorkshire and York Primary Care Trust is the size of Belgium. It covers 3,200 square miles, much of which is rural. For people living in the Yorkshire Dales, their nearest hospital can be 30 or 40 miles away. Without the air ambulance service, many lives would be lost. Some local GPs are trained to be part of the pre-hospital care team. In this country, all doctors are initially trained by the National Health Service. This important service would not exist without much fundraising.

Seriously injured people are taken to the most appropriate hospital, which may be a long way from home as it is vital to get specialist treatment when the condition needs it. I say to the noble Viscount that some paramedics now carry out this task. They have been trained to take a patient to the nearest specialised hospital. That has recently happened.

The principle of a doctor/paramedic team was first used by the London Helicopter Emergency Medical Service. This fundamental break from the usual paramedic-only model radically changed the dynamics of the crew and the level of care available to patients in the pre-hospital environment. In 2003, the Great North Air Ambulance Service integrated physicians into its team. Several air ambulance services are utilising this approach to pre-hospital care, including in Kent, Surrey, Sussex, the east of England and the West Midlands.

HEMS physicians may originate from a number of specialities, including emergency medicine, anaesthetics and general medicine. Regardless of specialist medical background, doctors should have a strong grasp of the fundamentals and demonstrate practical ability in the other acute specialities. For example, an anaesthetics specialist should have completed a significant period of emergency medicine, and an emergency physician should have a background in anaesthesia and critical care. To this end, most HEMS operations require similar criteria.

Serious illness often presents out of doctors’ hours. It can be very difficult in rural areas for seriously disabled people and people who do not drive to get access to a doctor. Doctors have to cover events such as horse shows, race meetings, rugby games and all sorts of occasions. Organisers of the events have to pay for that, but it shows the importance of doctors being present where there are risks. I think the answer to the noble Viscount’s Question is that there is an important need for doctors to save lives, but the NHS cannot afford to do everything. At times there has to be shared co-operation, communication and co-ordination.

Some years ago, a GP called Dr Easton living near Catterick started a rota of GPs linked up with the police, who went out to serious injuries on the notorious A1 and surrounding roads. This excellent scheme was highly commended and appreciated by the local people, but it was in the days when doctors’ hours were more flexible. I hope that strategic health authorities and PCTs across the country will look very carefully at what happens in their locations to critically injured and ill patients and how improvements can be made across the country.

I am reminded of the tragic young rugby player who broke his neck and was paralysed from the neck down. Finally, he went to Switzerland to end his life, which he found intolerable. His mother recently stated that when he was taken from the rugby field to a hospital, his arms were still moving. After having been x-rayed, and twisted and turned, he became totally paralysed. I am told that he should have been operated on within four hours to relieve the pressure on the spinal cord. It was too late by the time he was admitted to a spinal unit.

I end by quoting from the 2007 report Trauma: Who Cares? It states:

“To be effective all processes, including”—

acute trauma life support—

“and other components of care of severely injured patient, must be embedded in practice at every stage: the scene of the accident; alerts to the hospital; the journey from the scene to the emergency department; preparations made there; expertise accessible on arrival and at all subsequent stages, including transfer to specialist services … It is by sympathetically, and analytically, studying where things go wrong that we can learn most”.

When critically injured patients are being handled and treated, it should be of the utmost importance in the minds of the medical personnel that further damage must not take place and the correct procedures must always be followed.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on securing the debate. This is an important subject. I must confess that the more I look into it, the more amazed I am at how inadequate the provision is. In the 10 years since I stopped practising in the health service, I had not really thought about it. It really is quite astonishing.

Let us just recall what happens. After a serious accident, an ambulance is called; 75 per cent of accidents are attended within eight minutes. That is not a problem; the ambulances get there. It is pretty good. We have heard of the wonderful services given by the ambulance crews and the paramedics. However, the victim’s survival depends crucially on their airway being kept open and their brain being supplied with oxygen. That is a basic need that we human beings have; we need oxygen to our brains if we are going to stay alive.

In the past paramedics used to intubate, which means putting a tube down the windpipe of the patient. They could do that only if the patient was unconscious. They are not allowed to do it now. The difficulty comes when the patient is semi-conscious and needs to be anaesthetised before the tube is put into their windpipe to give them essential oxygen. That can be done only by a fully trained doctor anaesthetist, someone who really knows what they are doing. It is quite a delicate procedure. Then the patient can go to hospital and, one hopes, the right hospital. Sometimes, as we have heard, they will go to an A&E department, where they are assessed and sent on to a specialist centre. Valuable time is lost. The worst scenario is if a doctor is not at the scene of the accident quickly to ensure that the patient’s brain gets oxygen. That is the crucial thing.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that the mortality rate for severe trauma in this country is 40 per cent higher than in the United States of America. Recently, there was a national confidential “inquiry” into patient outcome and death, called Trauma: Who Cares?. Incidentally, why is that a confidential “inquiry”; surely it should be an inquiry? Will someone please educate the Department of Health as to the difference? The inquiry said that many trauma victims, including children, as well as stroke cases and those in diabetic comas—people with all sorts of conditions need oxygen given to the brain during the transfer to hospital—are dying in this country through a lack of appropriate care. The Department for Transport accident report in 2006 said that there were 3,172 deaths and 28,673 serious injuries across the UK. With proper care at the scene of the accident, studies have shown, over 2,000 lives could have been saved; two out of each three people who died could be alive today if proper care had been available.

In the USA, Australia and many countries in Europe, such as Germany, there is 24-hour, seven-day-a-week pre-hospital care provision. In London, an NHS-funded critical care doctor and paramedic team are on call during the day. That is rather typical of the NHS, I have always thought. Apparently people do not have accidents or get seriously ill at night. If you are going to be ill or crash you car, you should do it in the daytime, for heaven’s sake. In London, there is a pretty good daytime service, anyway: as we know, there is the air ambulance and good road transit when the roads are free. At night, however, the service is covered by volunteers and the ambulance crews. This should be available countrywide, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In fact, severe trauma is the only area of the NHS where a patient dies through the lack of a doctor.

The British Association for Immediate Care—BASICS—consists of volunteer doctors working in their spare time to give care to the desperately injured; they must be tired, and they are not paid. This is a patchy service across the country and yet another example of the postcode lottery. I pay tribute to Dr Phil Hyde, Dr David Sutton, Dr Charles Deakin and many others who work in Hampshire. They not only provide this service voluntarily but have campaigned hard and long to bring it to our attention and to that of Members in the other place. My honourable friend Mark Oaten introduced a debate in Westminster Hall last June, which I hope the Minister has seen; it was a very good debate.

We have recently heard of the appointment of a “trauma tsar”. New Labour loves its tsars; I never understand why it loves them so much, but perhaps that says something about its mentality. We are told that strategic health authorities will be required to have trauma centres, but there is still no planned national service; it is dependent on strategic health authorities. The response is the usual message that primary care trusts and the SHAs are responsible for assessing need in their area. I am sorry, but I do not understand them assessing need in their areas for trauma patients and serious accidents. There must be a pretty uniform rate of accidents throughout the country. This service is needed everywhere and should not be left to the whims of individual area managers.

We know that people will die if they do not receive proper care and oxygen to their brains before they reach hospital. We cannot say that often enough. Again, it is not just trauma patients, but cardiac patients, stroke patients, people in diabetic comas and many, many children. It is a scandal that our health service does not recognise this and ensure that this service is provided. If anything is to be decided locally, maybe it could be whether the service is provided by air ambulance or a fast road vehicle, as that will depend on local conditions, but not the trauma itself.

I repeat: trauma centres, yes, but the patients have to get to them alive for them to be any good. That takes time and trained doctors who can attend the scene of the accident in the first place and ensure that the patient arrives alive. The operating framework for the NHS in England for 2008-09 tells PCTs what they must do, but I did not see anything about critical care at the scene of an accident or the requirement to ensure that local emergency care services will provide such a service.

I repeat: a team of one doctor and one paramedic. Those doctors cannot be the doctors who work in the trauma centres or those who work in accident and emergency, who must stay where they are. I acknowledge that extra staff are needed, but we are talking about one paramedic and one doctor, qualified to give anaesthetics and perform intubation at the accident site, on call 24 hours a day. I hope that the Minister will relieve my distress and save lives by telling me that, among the paper storm that comes from the Department of Health, there will soon be one setting up this service.

My Lords, the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, has done us a great service by tabling this debate. I thank him for that and for his powerful and persuasive speech. Trauma care is a topic that has received precious little attention in this House during recent years, which I regret because trauma is the fourth leading cause of death in people below the age of 40. In terms of serious injury and long-term disability, it represents an enormous burden on society and the NHS, so it deserves a lot more parliamentary air time. In a given week there are reckoned to be 240 severely injured patients who are taken to hospital across the UK. Collectively, that is a lot of patients. The natural and obvious question that arises is how well or badly we are doing in looking after those people.

Sir George Alberti, the emergency access director, has been studying that very issue. I know that one aspect that he has been examining is the lessons that we can learn from abroad. Comparisons with other countries are never totally straightforward, but it seems that we in the UK are not doing as well as we should or could be. America, for one, is far ahead of us in the percentage of trauma patients delivered alive to hospital. In Germany, there is a nationwide network of air and road ambulances that can, and do, get a skilled doctor to the scene of the vast majority of emergencies within a quarter of an hour, with impressive results. Here, as we have heard, the presence of a doctor at the scene of an incident is a hit-and-miss affair, depending on where you happen to be. That really cannot be a satisfactory situation.

What difference does a doctor make? The noble Viscount and the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, summarised it very well. The answer is that it depends on the nature of the trauma but, in general, if you have a patient whose airway is blocked and who needs intubating, only a doctor can see to that. Only a doctor can administer the drugs and pain relief that the person is likely to need. If someone has been knifed, only a doctor is capable of opening up the chest at the scene of the incident.

Saying that is not to belittle or detract from the skills of paramedics, who are highly professional and dedicated people, but paramedics are trained only to a certain level. They are not doctors. The 2007 report Trauma: Who Cares?, which has already been mentioned this evening, pointed to a high incidence of patients arriving at hospital with a partially or completely obstructed airway and an unacceptably high incidence of failed intubation. It is interesting that 41 per cent of patients treated by a helicopter-based system were intubated at the scene of the incident. That is nearly six times the percentage of patients intubated by road ambulance crews.

Of course, response times and intubation rates are only proxy measures for what really counts in trauma care, which are long-term outcomes. Here we are in the age of quality indicators and quality accounts, but the amount of public discussion about quality in trauma care has been minimal. I am aware that PCTs and ambulance trusts have been devoting attention to this area and we must hope that the result of this will be a sharper focus on best practice and greater uniformity of care across the country. Published studies have provided clear evidence that an ambulance crew consisting of a doctor as well as a paramedic delivers significantly higher survival rates and lower morbidity. The College of Emergency Medicine has added its weight to this analysis.

The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, has previously indicated his view that we need to move towards developing dedicated regional trauma centres where specialised services can be concentrated. I agree with that, but it is of course only part of the answer, because the logical consequence of having fewer specialist centres is longer distances for very seriously injured patients to travel. That is why there is now so much interest in developing a network of air ambulances. At the moment, air ambulances are run by some 18 air ambulance charities. The financial contribution that the NHS makes, or does not make, to the running costs of those charities is a debate for another day, but I am slightly worried that, when it comes to developing and enhancing air ambulance services, the Government are leaving rather too much to local determination. That point was powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge.

Certainly, the local NHS and the charities should sit down and work out how to move the service forward and how in particular more doctors can be put into helicopters. However, the question that this raises is what benchmarks the NHS and the charities are able to use to agree on an appropriately high level of service. What standards for trauma care should we expect them to aspire to and what in human resource terms does it take to deliver those standards in a given set of circumstances? Those questions can surely be resolved only at national level. I should like the Minister to say whether she agrees with me about that.

We need to grasp the point about standards, which of course applies equally to land ambulance services. The Trauma: Who Cares? report came to the sobering conclusion that nearly 60 per cent of trauma patients received a standard of care that was less than good practice. It said:

“The organisation of prehospital care, the trauma team response, seniority of staff involvement and immediate in-hospital care was found to be deficient in many cases. Lack of appreciation of severity of illness, of urgency of clinical scenario and incorrect clinical decision making were apparent … the provision of suitably experienced staff during evenings and nights was much lower than at other times … this is a major concern”.

That is a pretty serious list of failings and, while some of it can no doubt be addressed by concentrating trauma care into fewer centres, some of it points to the need for national clinical standards and clear guidance on best practice.

I am aware of the framework document published last year that set out a number of recommended management and service standards for air ambulances, but this is not quite the same thing as trying to define the standards that should apply to ambulance care overall. We need to recognise, as that document points out, that pre-hospital emergency care is now a speciality in its own right. There is no doubt whatever that expert critical care at the roadside, if it arrives early enough, has a significant effect on patient outcomes in cases of serious injury. Some ambulance trusts now provide fast response unit cars staffed by individual paramedics. These are helpful in a lot of cases such as heart attacks, but they cannot be a substitute for a fully fledged ambulance, nor can they do anything to speed up a patient’s journey to hospital. Speed of response is important, but we need to be very careful; targets imposed on ambulance trusts that are expressed in terms of response times and nothing else carry dangers, because they fail to address what really matters, which is the quality of care that patients receive once help has arrived.

Reading about this subject, I have been struck by the absence of useful statistical information. Over the years, there have been various studies relating to the care of trauma patients, but there has never been a nationwide study looking at the overall care of such patients. The Government should seriously consider such a study. A good deal of the data that we possess has come from TARN, the Trauma Audit and Research Network, which was instigated 20 years ago following a working party report by the Royal College of Surgeons. That database is extremely valuable, but participation in it needs to be rolled out more widely if we are to gain an understanding of where the most serious shortcomings in trauma care exist.

I hope that the Minister can illuminate these issues and give us cause to hope that the concerns raised by the noble Viscount and, indeed, all speakers will be satisfactorily addressed.

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to respond to this debate about such an important issue; I agree with the noble Earl on that and I congratulate the noble Viscount on persisting with this debate, which was delayed due to snow. This issue of the treatment of critically ill and injured patients outside hospital and the role of doctors in that treatment, NHS support and otherwise, is critical.

NHS services have to deal effectively with critically injured and ill patients and give them the support and treatment they need, as and when they need it. The job of central government is to provide strategic direction, as the noble Earl said. However, it is surely right that local services determine the best organisational arrangements to ensure that the right services are in the right place at the right time and to provide appropriately for the needs of patients in this area.

Perhaps I should declare an interest. My brother is an ambulance driver in Yorkshire and, I think, is qualifying as a paramedic right now.

What matters is that patients get the right care at the right time, whether that is from a paramedic, an emergency care practitioner, a doctor or another service, and whether that care is provided by the NHS or by partners such as BASICS doctors or air ambulances. It is for the local NHS to commission and manage these services. I shall come on to talk about the framework that is necessary to deliver that, and what we hope will happen.

Noble Lords mentioned London. Its environment presents special and unique circumstances in which those dispatched to treat the seriously ill and injured have to operate. I am pleased to be able to acknowledge that London’s air ambulance is recognised worldwide as having led the way in the treatment of advanced trauma. The London Ambulance Service is also fortunate to be able to call on an extremely well established team of BASICS doctors who possess a wealth of experience in this kind of care; but of course circumstances and demands differ across the country.

My Lords, before the noble Baroness leaves the subject of London, can she explain why there is not a 24-hour service there and why we have to depend on volunteers for part of the 24 hours?

My Lords, it is a 24-hour service. Perhaps I may continue with my remarks to explain what happens.

The work of BASICS doctors differs from area to area. I do not pretend that this is a perfect service, but I am trying to explain how we are making progress in this area. We absolutely welcome the invaluable support that BASICS provides in advanced trauma cases.

On the front line we have an ambulance service that deals with more calls than ever before. It is still treating the critically ill and injured more quickly; it is saving more lives. During 2007-08, 77.1 per cent of category A—that is, immediately life-threatening—calls received a response at the scene of the incident within eight minutes. This is the ambulance service’s best ever emergency response rate. The new “call connect” method of measuring response requires ambulances to respond, on average, 90 seconds faster than was previously the case. As further evidence of how critically ill and injured people are benefiting, we need to consider that survival rates for cardiac arrest show a year-on-year improvement in the number of people resuscitated after cardiac arrest.

We know that we need always to seek better ways of responding to critically injured and ill patients and the victims of trauma. In this context, we welcome the findings and recommendations of the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death, or NCEPOD, report of last November. The report made strong recommendations about how the treatment of trauma care could be improved. The Government and the NHS have taken the recommendations to heart. The key recommendation of NCEPOD’s report is that planning for severe trauma care should be done at a regional level. This allows for the pooling of specialist skills and equipment, to offer patients for whom every second counts the best quality of care available, from specialists in specially designed centres.

There is a relatively low incidence of severe trauma cases in the UK, with the majority of hospitals seeing less than one such patient per week. The question is how to have the best qualified people available on that basis. Surely, it is more important to have more and better qualified paramedics backed up by BASICS doctors. The Government agree with NCEPOD that it is not necessarily the proximity of the nearest hospital or accident and emergency department that matters most in some emergencies, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, pointed out, the care that patients receive from ambulance staff and paramedics, and the quality of the care that they receive once they arrive at hospital.

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt. The Minister is being very generous in giving way. Yes, of course, the care that the trauma patient receives at the site of the accident will determine whether they survive. Trauma centres are great, but you need to stabilise the patient as quickly as possible and get oxygen to their brain before you get them to the trauma centre. The Minister is still saying, I think, that this service will be provided by ambulance crews and paramedics, with the help of BASICS doctors. BASICS is a charity. Are we to depend on volunteers to assist the most seriously injured people?

My Lords, I was trying to explain that not every single call-out for every single ambulance requires a doctor to be on board. Is that what the noble Baroness is suggesting? What you have to do is ensure that ambulance staff and paramedics are as well qualified as they can be. I will talk about their training in a moment. You have to ensure that the best possible care is available as quickly as possible, but clearly that does not include, or depend on, having a qualified doctor on every ambulance crew, unless that is what the noble Baroness is suggesting. Clearly, that would not be a proper use of qualified doctors.

Strategic health authorities, as part of the Government’s next-stage review, have to set out their visions for improving the provision of trauma care services. I am pleased to say that the majority are planning to set up one or more of these centres. I also welcome the appointment of Professor Keith Willett, the Government’s new director for trauma. I have not, in any of my briefings, seen the word “tsar”, so I certainly do not intend to use it. His appointment comes into effect on 1 April. He has extensive experience in trauma care and medical management. His appointment sends a clear message of intent from the Government on this issue. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, is quite right: we expect to hear more about trauma. Indeed, we need to hear more about trauma.

Two issues deserve special mention. First, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, mentioned research. Research has shown that air ambulances can provide particular assistance in cases where the patient has suffered major blunt trauma, especially in rural areas and where road access is a problem, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham. They can be an effective way of getting better and faster access to hospitals and are valuable in supporting inter-hospital transfer. The department continues to encourage the air ambulance charities and ambulance trusts to work together to agree how both services can maximise their contribution to high-quality patient care. In recognition of the contribution that air ambulances make, in 2002 the Government directed NHS ambulance trusts to meet the costs of clinical staff on air ambulances. That includes, where appropriate, doctors.

Secondly, I welcome the valuable work of those who work for the British Association for Immediate Care—BASICS—as volunteers. We acknowledge the valuable support that these doctors offer local NHS services and recognise that the availability of the medical advice and assistance that they bring has advantages for some seriously injured patients. However, central government currently has no plans to require the NHS to fund BASICS doctors. As I have already explained, it is for the local NHS to decide how it uses BASICS doctors. I understand that in some places ambulance trusts have clear systems to allow them access to the control room to call on the expertise of BASICS doctors immediately when they are required.

In response to a question from the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, it is worth noting that some paramedics are now trained to intubate. Various trusts across the country have a cadre of specialist trauma paramedics who have, and indeed use, these skills.

The noble Viscount raised the issue of South Central Strategic Health Authority. This SHA advises that there is no commissioning of doctors outside the hospital environment within its area, but it uses the BASICS voluntary scheme on occasion. The strategic health authority considered the skills required in the pre-hospital environment and felt that the priority was to expand the capacity of emergency care practitioners, who have an enhanced range of skills when compared with paramedics, for the care of critically ill patients. Paramedics in this region are now able to administer a variety of 40-plus drugs and medications and are also able to perform procedures such as crypto thyroidotomy, chest X-rays and so on, in additional to intubation, infusion and other advanced life-saving skills. That occurs within the noble Viscount’s strategic health authority.

The noble Baroness, Lady Masham, referred to Yorkshire. The Yorkshire ambulance service receives support from a network of volunteer doctors across the county. These medics are affiliated to BASICS, they have specialist training and their skills are particularly valuable. Their 999 communication centres are linked to the BASICS doctors by pager so that they can be called upon when needed.

The noble Earl, Lord Howe, referred to the new director of trauma, who will be working with the strategic health authorities and PCTs to help them to implement best practice. Professor Willett’s priorities will include ensuring regional excellence in dealing with severe trauma. He will be expected to work with each strategic health authority to develop the plans that arise out of the NCEPOD report, Trauma: Who Cares?, and to take forward the next-stage review of my noble friend Lord Darzi.

In conclusion, we believe that the NHS, guided by the outcomes of the next-stage review, is providing a better service than ever before. However, we are not complacent: we know that there is room for improvement. We welcome this debate and the questions that have been raised, and the new director is taking note as noble Lords speak. I am sure that this will not be the last time that we debate these issues.