[Nick Beale]

katiebenton Wrote:It seems crazy to me that a Private Members Bill can still be taken through parliament by someone who is suspended from their own Parliamentary Party! Anyone aware of what the rules are on this? Seems the court summons are set for March 11 - could this rock the boat in terms of timings for the Bill? Talk of the office here...

It gets better. The Impact Assessment is signed by Barbara Follet and she's just been told to pay back about £40,000.

[Ed Hammond]

AFAIK, David Chaytor's membership of the PLP should have no bearing on the progress of the Bill - although it does render the whole exercise rather surreal.

The timing of his court appearance may well have an impact on how things progressed - I have asked CLG if this is something they are looking into. I suspect it is a matter for the Commons authorities though. Presumably, if anything "happens" to David Chaytor, the Bill is lost - although that is just an assumption on my part.

[Josh Mynott]

I note that the Conservatives aren't keen on Section 9, preferring to leave it to local authorities' discretion. Seems a significant thing to me.

Also that the CfPS was called the Centre for Policy studies several times, until corrected by Nick Raynsford.

[Nick Beale]

One positive out of all this is a passage from the impact assessment on "the benefits of overview and scrutiny." It could usefully be quoted to any inspectocrats who come our way:

"There is no available evidence on the monetised value efficiencies or otherwise arising from local authority led scrutiny, save to say that respondents to the CfPS (2008) Survey largely regarded such scrutiny as being 'effective'. Nevertheless, some case study evidence is also available which demonstrates the impact that effective scrutiny can have on service provision.

The particular constraints to quantifying the benefits of scrutiny include: (i) scrutiny committees cannot make binding requirements they can only make recommendations; (ii) the very mixed nature and scope of any outcomes resulting from scrutiny pose particular measurement problems; and (iii) it would be difficult to distinguish the exact impact of scrutiny from other processes at work.

Nevertheless, it does seem reasonable to argue that local authority-led scrutiny and the threat of such scrutiny can lead to the better use of local public sector resources. For instance, a review which benchmarks the performance of a local service against other better performing authorities should drive improvement in performance. In the case of partnerships, benefits could arise from improved joint working across individual partners through improved coordination of activities."

[tim gilling]

Anyone who wants to watch the second reading debate can follow a link from the BBC Democracy Live website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/r.../25797.stm

[Sunita Sharma]

Ehammond Wrote:AFAIK, David Chaytor's membership of the PLP should have no bearing on the progress of the Bill - although it does render the whole exercise rather surreal.

The timing of his court appearance may well have an impact on how things progressed - I have asked CLG if this is something they are looking into. I suspect it is a matter for the Commons authorities though. Presumably, if anything "happens" to David Chaytor, the Bill is lost - although that is just an assumption on my part.

I've had a brief chat with my Deputy Head of Legal and he feels that as the Bill has made it this far, it doesn't matter what happens to David Chaytor, for our purposes that is! I'm sure DC will mind what happens to him!

My legal colleague feels that because of the cross party support the only thing that will stop the Bill will of course be timing.

Sunita

[Philip Whiteman]

This may be idle speculation but I have heard from a couple of sources that Chaytor's Private Members Bill was a means for CLG over coming its embarresment of not including same the provisions in its own LDED&C Act of 2009. The latter of which was a sweeping act to tie up the loose ends not included the the LGIPH Act 2008. Perhaps they may get it right in the end!

As an aside, I have just returned to from two districts where their exclusion is causing some consternation.

[Ed Hammond]

We will continue to lobby strongly in favour of including districts in the Bill and as soon as the membership of the Bill committee is released (or we know who is most likely to be involved at committee stage) we will be setting up meetings as relevant to press our case.

It is always possible that this was an attempt to "tie up loose ends" from the last few Acts but with these Government handout Bills it is always difficult to tell - ostensibly David Chaytor chose this one over others for his own reasons, but beyond that it's difficult to second-guess people's motivations!

[Sunita Sharma]

Can someone help explain the assumed staffing resources set out in the impact assessment please? I'm worried about its overreliance on the returns from the Centre's annual survey. Not that I have any problems with the Centre's analysis , this is good but rather the data supplied and its accuracy in terms of actual time resources.

As some of you know I facilitate the LGG course "An essential Guide to Overview and Scrutiny" and from the participants who have attended over the past 4 years I am aware that the staffing time on scrutiny reviews is not always accurately accounted for.

The impact assessment doesn't take this into account. Especially the workload generated on health and social care matters. This resource pressure has been discussed before by many of us and I feel its important that CfPS and others who are able to influence point out that common experience shows that at least one scrutiny officer time is taken up by suporting health scrutiny activity.

Clearly the purpose of impact assessments is to focus on the intended change but I would have expected this to also to look into detail into what the current pressures are and current level of staff resources?

Sunita

[Ed Hammond]

Thanks Sunita.

We have always issued our survey with a strong health warning - namely, that while it provides an extremely valuable snapshot of scrutiny nationwide, it is difficult to use it to back up big spending or policy decisions - as you have pointed out. It is as representative as any survey on this subject could be (we think), but as you say the recording of time spend on different responsibilities is difficult and the figures used in the impact assessment seem to be quite general. We would be particularly interested to see the methodology used to arrive at the result they present.

On a slightly different subject (but still connected to the Bill) John Denham gave a speech on scrutiny yesterday at a conference I attended. The full text can be found here - http://www.communities.gov.uk/speeches/c...titlements

I will be uploading a short report on the conference itself, and what happened. It was mainly for members of the voluntary and community sector but some invited scrutineers were present.

Angela Woodhouse from Maidstone asked the Secretary of State directly about the omission of district councils from the Bill. His reply centred on the need to ensure that partners are not overwhelmed by requests from scrutiny - a rationale which I think we can fairly easily counter both through argument and through the many examples of districts working effectively with partners.

No word yet on committee stage. If we end up into next week with no date announced, it becomes increasingly uncertain whether the Bill will have time to go through before dissolution. From having been quite confident a fortnight back, I'm now unsure again. We'll see what happens.