19 November 2004
The government should use next week's Queen's Speech to introduce legislation to halve the £730m councils spend on inspection and regulation, council leaders are urging.
The Local Government Association is engaged in last-minute lobbying to persuade ministers that a Bill on school inspections, thought likely to be announced on November 23, should be broadened to cover regulation across the public sector.
A briefing paper sent to all MPs this week and seen by Public Finance urges them to put pressure on the government to set up an integrated, substantially streamlined inspection regime spanning all public services.
LGA leaders have set a target of halving the hundreds of millions that local authorities have to spend on complying with inspection and regulation requirements.
Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, chair of the LGA, told PF> that root-and-branch reform of the regime was the only feasible way of achieving this aim. 'There should be a few nationally agreed minimum standards and all the other plans, guidance, performance indicators and inspections should go,' he said.
'Authorities with a good Comprehensive Performance Assessment rating and a satisfactory external auditor report should not have other inspectorates crawling all over them.'
At the same time, the LGA wants the power of the inspectorates and other quangos to be tamed. 'Currently, too many public bodies run or regulate public services and spend billions of pounds of public money and are unelected,' the briefing paper says. 'A quango audit to see how and where power can be transferred back to local councils would begin to tackle this problem.'
Bills expected in the Queen's Speech include 'cleaner neighbourhoods' legislation to tackle environmental blights such as dumping waste; charities reform; the introduction of identity cards; and the setting up of a single equalities watchdog.
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