Mr Clive Betts
MP for Sheffield South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“I wholeheartedly welcome the Foreign Secretary’s statement, both its content and its tone. I would like to ask about his discussions with our colleagues and allies in other countries who are looking to implement similar sanctions.”
“I offer two congratulations: first, to my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour, the First Secretary, on her well-deserved promotion—I am sure she will do an excellent job. Secondly, I congratulate her and the Prime Minister for their real commitment to devolution, which I have wanted to see for an awfully long time.”
“I apologise for the fact that—as I have explained to you, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will have to leave straight after my question to chair Westminster Hall. I thank my right hon. Friend for doing this very challenging piece of work. I think that the theme of fairness, for the people who need benefits and for taxpayers, is right.”
“On the other hand, so many constituents with really serious conditions get turned down for PIP, and can get it only if they struggle through the appeal system, sometimes without any help at all. So the system is not fair to anyone at present.”
“When the previous Government let the contract, we were in a situation in which procurement could not properly take account of the past record of companies, and I understand that the Government have now changed that.”
“I will dive very deeply into the question, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Chair of the Committee sends his apologies for his absence; he is presently in a Committee meeting.”
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“The budget has not yet been finalised, however, so no one can quote a figure of 250. Several hundred jobs are likely to be lost as a result of the budget—many times the figure given today. There are real problems with the settlement, but the fundamental question that comes across from local councils and the Local Government Association is, “Why are the cuts front-loaded?” Can the Government please provide an explanation? That fundamental problem is causing chaos in local authorities and massive cuts to services throughout the country.”
“So, when services are contracted out, could the requirement for transparency about salaries of more than £58,000 be transferred as well, and applied to contractors across the piece? That would be a way forward for the Secretary of State, and his Cabinet colleagues might like to look at it as a good example of transparency in practice. The figures on Sheffield are misleading. The figures that have been quoted are for those redundancies that have been announced so far. Many vacancies in Sheffield are being held unfilled, and they are going to affect services. We know of several hundred posts that will not be filled by one means or other, and we also suspect that the Lib Dem administration there is trying to delay and avoid decisions, waiting to pass them on to the new Labour administration that will take office in May.”
“I will of course send the letter to the Secretary of State, and I look forward to his response. On the question of putting salaries above £58,000 into the public domain, the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) ought to be pursued. If the Secretary of State is right, and he encourages local authorities to put more and more services out to the private sector, to the voluntary sector and to social enterprise, he will find that fewer people on those salaries are employed in the local authority sector. Somebody with responsibility for a service might be “TUPE’d” outwith that service to the private sector or to a social enterprise, in which case his transparency will therefore decline.”
“The right hon. Gentleman refers to past debates. Can he point to any occasion over the years when the Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson said that the Government were providing too much money to local councils? Can he provide one example of a Conservative MP saying, “My council’s getting too much money in this settlement”?”
“When the Select Committee examined the standards in 2004, quite a lot of suggestions were made—such suggestions were made again in our more recent report—about what additional things might be included in the decent homes programme. Noise insulation, particularly in flats, was one. That has never been included, although we can see reasons why it might be. There is always a temptation to go on and on trying to add things to programmes. To have a pretty certain standard from the beginning, in 2001, and continue with it was probably the right thing to do.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” We get that sense of pride and a dream fulfilled with many people as a result of the works being carried out. The standards for kitchens and bathrooms have been widely welcomed and well implemented. The repair standards, too, seem to have been well implemented. In the middle of the programme, there was a change from the old fitness standards to the new housing health and safety rating system. That is a bit more complicated and perhaps a bit more difficult to understand. I think that there are problems for private landlords in understanding it. It is not as simple as the old system. For social landlords, it should not be as difficult, and I do not think that there has been a real problem with implementing it in the social housing sector. It has been pretty well integrated into the decent homes programme.”
“The age requirements of the decency standard come into effect as a property gets older, and then work is required that was not required a year before. As the programme is postponed and work is put off further, more houses can fall within its scope. About £40 billion of public money—about £12 billion from Government and about £28 billion from local authorities’ own resources—has been spent bringing properties up to a decent standard. If we look at the standards, we can see a number of key factors. Incidentally, I still get great delight from going into the homes of tenants, because in the end these are people’s homes. We can talk about thousands of houses and billions of pounds, but to the individual, it is their new bathroom or new kitchen. They have a sense of pride when they open the door and say, “Mr Betts, come and see my new home.”
“It is probably slightly more—perhaps 12%—but it is somewhere in that region. As the Committee’s report identified, there were problems with counting. To some extent, counting was done by individual authorities, and they had slightly different methods. Sometimes the definition of a decent home varied from authority to authority. For example, authorities sometimes counted as decent those properties whose tenants had refused to have the work done. The programme passed them by and the property was then counted as decent because no work was immediately able to be done on it. That was clearly nonsense, and I hope that it was eventually corrected. Another issue that comes up is that the standard may be fixed, but homes can fall in and out of decency. They can come into decency through improvement works, but fall out of decency over time.”
“Back in 2001, there was the challenge of a £17 billion backlog of disrepair and neglect in social housing in this country. That is a salient lesson that we must always hold at the forefront of our minds. It is a stark reminder of what can happen if we put off dealing with maintenance projects and maintenance necessities for too long. A backlog of disrepair builds up and must at some point be addressed. The longer we leave it, the worse the problems are and the more money we have to spend on them. The reality in 2001 was that, of the just over 4 million homes in the social rented sector, nearly half were not up to the decent standard. By 2010, that figure—there are slight variations on it, depending on the calculations that are done—was down to about 10% of the total.”
“The report went on to make comments about future regulation, which are probably redundant now, in the light of changes that the present Government have made with regard to the Tenant Services Authority. However, the report also said: “We have recommended another important extension to the existing decent homes criteria: the addition of a specific minimum standard for energy efficiency…Setting standards is of course no good, however, unless the means are available to achieve them.” I will try to refer to those issues as I go through my speech. Finally, the report said: “The decent homes programme in the private sector, meanwhile, has been much less effective.” Again, I will make comments about that. Let us consider the overall situation.”
“A substantial backlog of repairs and maintenance in social housing existed thirteen years ago and a significant percentage of council rented properties were of unacceptably poor quality: whilst it has yet to be completely eliminated, huge progress has been made, improving the lives of millions of tenants…The main means by which Government can ensure that standards of decency in social housing are maintained in future will be the regulatory framework designed and implemented by the Tenant Services Authority. That framework sets some important national standards but is not over-prescriptive”. That sets the context of a very successful programme. It has not been fully implemented—it is not absolutely complete—but it has improved the lives of millions of people.”
“That said, I do accept—it is a pretty obvious fact—that the political and governmental climate has changed since then, and I shall refer at one or two points to circumstances that have changed since then to bring matters up to date. It will be appropriate to begin by quoting one or two extracts from the conclusion, because it was a Committee report and I want to reflect fairly what the Committee as a whole believed to be important, rather than what I as a member at the time and now Chair believed to be important. The conclusion began by saying: “By any standards, the Decent Homes programme can be counted as a very significant public policy success.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for what I think is the first time, Mr Bone. I will address my comments, as the title of the debate suggests, to the report by the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government in the previous Parliament called “Beyond Decent Homes”. The report built on a previous report by the Committee—its proper title at the time was the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister—back in 2004. That report examined the decent homes programme, which was then in the fairly early stages of development. Obviously, the report was written at a certain time, but its analysis of what had happened and its conclusions are relevant today.”
“For housing associations, the figure was around 35%. As for major works contributions and oversight, 70% of ALMOs got a good or excellent rating and just over 50% of housing associations did so. ALMOs did very well indeed and some of the best ALMOs are clearly some of the best performing housing organisations in the country.”
“The Government at the time refused to give funding directly to councils for the decent homes programme; that was a matter of contention and I personally did not agree with that policy at the time. None the less, many tenants agreed to go with a transfer of management, but not ownership, to an arm’s length management organisation. Social housing in this country has undergone a revolution. There has been an improvement not only in the management of council housing and the delivery of major programmes, but in the management and delivery performance of housing associations. I know that this is sometimes an uncomfortable point for housing associations to address, but the report, on page 45, sets out clearly that, when an assessment was done of the overall performance of ALMOs, 75% had a good or excellent rating.”
“Certainly, fuel poverty is a real problem, but once we try to link the issue of fuel poverty with the standards in a building, real complications emerge. For example, we could get properties moving in and out of an appropriate standard depending on the incomes of the people who live in the property, and that is an issue of which we must be aware. As for the methods of achievement so far in the decent homes programme, stock transfer clearly dealt with a lot of properties. Tenants voted to move to housing associations because the associations could raise the money on the private markets and deliver the decent homes programmes that were required. Many other tenants resisted the idea of their homes moving out of council ownership.”
“When the National Housing Federation did an estimate of what it would need to do to get the emissions in its homes down to 20% of their current levels and to meet the challenge of bringing down emissions by 80% by 2050, it said that it would need to spend £25,000 on average on each housing association property in the country. It is a long-term challenge, and we need some indication from the Government that they have a strategy for national standards and for targets to be hit. I know that the Government do not like targets very much, but we have overall climate change targets. Perhaps we should find a way forward by improving our energy efficiency standards. When the Committee considered that, we felt that energy efficiency standards were the right way to go.”
“Effectively, there would be a warm homes standard in the social sector that would almost be a decent homes-plus standard. We understand from the current Government’s response—it would be helpful if the Minister could say a bit more about this—that those various initiatives have now been subsumed in the idea of the green deal. It is not quite clear at this stage what that will mean for social housing and private sector tenants and owner-occupiers in terms of bringing their homes up to a standard where they can feel comfortable in them and can afford to heat them—bearing in mind the current and future increase in energy costs—and for us as a nation in meeting the challenge of climate change.”
“This is not merely a question of comfort for the individual living in their home. It is a question of a national requirement, a public need requirement, because of the need for the country as a whole to meet the climate change challenges of which we are all acutely aware. I shall say a few words about the issue of energy. From the beginning, there was a feeling that the standards in the decent homes programme were set rather low. All right, they are minimum standards and could be added to, but we really need to move on and address those minimum standards. The previous Government promised, through the household energy management strategy, to deal with that. They promised that, by 2020, 7 million homes that did not have adequate loft or cavity wall insulation would get it.”
“Other issues that we considered were the environment, the appearance of an estate as opposed to an individual home, and communal areas, which have caused difficulties under the programme. By and large, where stock transfers took place, housing associations could raise more private finance and were able to cope with those issues. Where work was done within the authority, through the arm’s length management organisations, often, on the environment, they were limited to 5% additional funding in the programme, so all the environmental works and communal area works that were needed were not necessarily tackled. That perhaps needs to be addressed in the future, although in this case it is very difficult to be prescriptive about national standards. An issue that we considered in some detail in both reports was energy standards.”
“I am sure that there are ways to do that. The Committee concluded that, given that the decent homes programme was running to a certain standard from 2001, it was probably not the right thing to do to try to add things halfway through the process. As the Government said at the time, they were basic standards but there was no reason why authorities should not add to them. Indeed, for kitchens and bathrooms, my city had the Sheffield standard, which went beyond the national standard. Perhaps the other way in which the problem can be tackled—I may be corrected—is through building regulations. Perhaps there could be a legal requirement to deal with the issue, rather than adding something to the decent homes programme at this stage, rather late in the day.”
“As I understand it, as Lewisham Homes has not started its decent homes programme, it will still be entitled to bid for the total amount, but as the total is 50% less than it was, how much it will get is still open to question. Perhaps the Minister will be able to address that issue in his summing up. To be fair to the Government—this is an interesting matter of debate— they have relaxed the rule that only two-star ALMOs can get funding. That means that the previous situation in which a tenant could be penalised and not have the work done on their home because their landlord was not performing properly will be removed. On the other hand, the requirement to have two stars as a basic to obtain the funding has driven up housing management standards as a whole, and therefore has achieved considerable success.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for her remarks. Clearly, a number of issues are intertwined in that problem. Under the Labour Government’s policy, if an ALMO reached two stars or better, it would automatically have access to the funding necessary to bring its homes up to a decent standard. In the comprehensive spending review, the money available for decent homes was cut by about 50%. Authorities that have not completed their programmes are entitled to bid for funding, although if less than 10% of their homes are not decent at present, they are not likely to get any funding. If up to 20% of their homes are deemed not to be decent, they are likely to get only half the funding that they previously might have been entitled to.”
“Those numbers are staggering. There was no general requirement to get all those homes up to a decent standard—only to do something to improve the numbers. While there probably has been some improvement in numbers, there has not been the same drive and the same co-ordinated programme as there has been with social housing tenants. Other problems come from many owner-occupiers of these homes not being able to afford the necessary repairs. They are potentially asset rich but income poor, and that is a real challenge for them.”
“Any future Government will have to address that challenge. Other Members want to speak, so I shall conclude with some remarks on the private sector. The private sector was added to the decent homes programme as an afterthought, and it is often forgotten that it exists at all. It was not there at the beginning, in 2001, and adding it in has not been a great success. One fundamental problem was that the new fitness standards in the private sector, which came in in the middle of the programme, immediately added about 10% of private sector homes to the number of non-decent homes. The analysis showed that 3 million private homes with vulnerable households were non-decent when the programme began: 40% were homes with private tenants, and 65% were homes with owner-occupiers who were considered vulnerable because of the benefits they received.”
“We have taken expert advice, which has indicated that under the Labour Government’s proposals the major repairs allowance in the housing revenue account was due to rise by about 25%. We understand that this Government also propose that, but we have not yet seen the precise figures. To maintain homes at a decent standard, and in particular to keep repairs up to a proper standard and replace the sanitary and kitchen fittings that were included under the decent homes programme but would have worn out, the figures show that a 40% to 60% increase in the major repairs allowance is needed, not the 25% proposed. It is worrying that there is an inbuilt disrepair element in both the previous Government’s proposal and that of this Government, and that sufficient funding might not be available to maintain the standards.”
“One of those changes is that councils will now not be allowed to keep 100% of their right-to-buy receipts. There will also be extra borrowing controls, which are slightly worrying in that they will constrain councils’ ability to expand their resources to maintain homes to a decent standard. On the other hand, the removal of the need for rents to converge might provide a bit more flexibility in rent increases. I am not talking about the rents necessarily increasing to 80% of market rents, but councils that have put in a new heating system or insulation measures that reduce tenants’ heating bills, could put a bit extra on the rent. The tenants would contribute to the cost, but would probably pay less overall under the joint arrangement between landlord and tenant. That bit of flexibility might be welcome.”
“This is a three-star ALMO that has managed its money very well indeed. On the decent homes standard, there has been a challenge and, as the report clearly spells out, there is also a challenge for the future. There is no point in bodies getting up to the standard if they then fall away from it. Another thing that we identified was the reform of the housing revenue account. I welcome, in principle, the Government’s proposals to reform that account, to give a say and control back to local authorities. The reform will give some certainty for the future, and is based, with one or two changes, on the proposals that the previous Minister for Housing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), introduced under the Labour Government.”
“The real problem, however, is that if Sheffield Homes and Sheffield city council use all the funding they currently have to bring the remaining homes up to a decent standard by 2013-14, without additional Government funding they will still be about 7% of homes short, though by and large those will be properties on which people have not wanted the work done and others that have become non-decent since 2010 because of their age. With every bit of Sheffield city council and Sheffield Homes’ capital expenditure being used for that, there will be an end to all heating replacement programmes in other properties that are crying out to have their heating replaced for energy efficiency and other reasons. Therefore, even when other money can be found, it will be at the expense of other important programmes.”
“Work worth some £3.5 billion is still to be done to bring all social housing up to a decent standard, and there will be about £1.6 billion in the programme for the next four years. In other words, we are probably talking about 10 years before all homes are brought up to a decent standard. The Minister will, of course, say that councils can use their own resources, and indeed Sheffield Homes and Sheffield city council are planning to do just that.”
“It is the only ALMO in the country which has had three stars three times running. It has improved the management and maintenance, reduced the costs and got tenants involved. There are still challenges to be faced, such as moving on to a more co-operative style of development in future. Sheffield Homes has been successful; it can be built on for the future and not reversed away from. At the end of the day, however, it is a matter for the tenants. I would like to think that, if there were any possibility of the council changing the management arrangements or the ownership arrangements, it would ballot the tenants, so that it will be the tenants’ views that are taken into account; that is what matters at the end of the day. I have mentioned the reductions in capital funding as a result of the CSR.”
“At least Lambeth tenants now have the option to move back, if that is what they want. Some authorities have seen ALMOs as a method of getting in the money, making the homes decent and then having the properties transferred back to them. In the end, what matters is not what the landlord or councillors think but what the tenants think. The Government’s attitude so far is that when an authority wants to bring back the management in-house, it should go through the same process that tenants went through to create the ALMO in the first place. However, I would welcome something a bit stronger. The management of people’s homes is almost as important as the ownership, so we should have a ballot to ensure that the proper will of tenants is carried out into practice. I have Sheffield Homes in my constituency, so I see a different perspective.”
“The evidence suggests that it probably did, but successes in general do not mean successes in every particular case. Clearly, there are some bad examples, and my hon. Friend has highlighted one from her constituency. Tenants should be free to choose their landlord, taking into account their own circumstances. If they want to revert back to council management, I see no reason why they cannot do that. The Minister may say a bit more about the funding possibilities. My understanding is that Government are now prepared to put money directly into councils for the decent homes programme. To be even-handed and balanced, I would suggest that to say that there should be funding irrespective of who manages the houses is a helpful move. Where we would disagree is over the amount of funding; there probably is not enough of it.”
“Another issue that we need to consider is the very worrying decline in construction activity in the last quarter of last year—the weather might have had a bit to do with it. Cutting back on the decent homes programme, which is more labour intensive than building new homes is, because pro rata more labour than materials goes into refurbishment than into construction, means even more job losses for every £1 million that is cut from the programme.”
“To my mind, it makes no sense at all, and it means asking people to remain in non-decent properties for a long time. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. In many ways it is the tenants who have been waiting the longest for the work who will now have to wait even longer: people at the back of the queue will find the head of the queue disappearing, and that is very worrying. At the rate of spending currently proposed by the Government, it could be 2020 before the backlog is cleared, remembering, of course, that the backlog will be added to because in the meantime more homes will fall into the non-decent category, through age or increasing disrepair. Unless we get increased public spending, the problem will be compounded rather than improved.”
“To conclude, the Committee said, “We congratulate the Government”—the last Government, I should add— “on its achievements so far in the decent homes programme. Notwithstanding the difficulties of the current public sector spending climate and the importance of continuing to make progress towards eliminating the remaining backlog, however, now is the time to build on those achievements, not to sit back on them. The Government needs to look beyond the existing decent homes programme and plan for a future in which social tenants, private tenants and owner-occupiers all have the opportunity of living in a warm, well-maintained and reasonably well-equipped home.” I think that is a reasonable point on which to finish.”
“As I have explained, the report was generally congratulatory as regards the success of the decent homes programme, but we recognised that this is also about individual tenants. For the many thousands who are satisfied, a substantial number are still waiting for work to be carried out, as my hon. Friends have indicated, and they are now likely to have to wait even longer. There are challenges, and we need to ensure that standards are maintained—it is a question not just of achieving standards, but of maintaining them. In terms of energy efficiency, it is also about doing something to improve standards. There is still a long way to go in the private sector, because the decent homes programme really has not had a major impact there.”
“By and large, we concluded in our report that it would be difficult simply to take decent homes from the social sector and transfer them to the private sector, but under the new homelessness provisions, landlords will be able to discharge their obligations to homeless families by allocating not social housing but a property in the private rented sector. If homeless families can be allocated such properties by local authorities, are the Government prepared to do something about the standards of those properties? They should not allow any council to put a family in a private rented property unless it meets very high standards indeed. Some form of regulation would be another way we could seek to drive up standards. I have spoken for a while and taken interventions.”
“The Government have said that there will be proposals that reasonable tenant requests for energy efficiency improvements should not be refused, and proposals for minimum benchmarks for energy efficiency in properties, but there were caveats about them being subject to the availability of funding. I do not know how far the Government are prepared to go on that but, along with the repair requirements, it is a starting point for putting some basic energy efficiency requirements into private sector homes, which could be done separately.”
“The Rugg report into the private sector proposed that we should have a register of all private sector landlords, but the Government have said that they are not going to go ahead with that. There were also proposals to have licensing of managing and letting agents, but the Government have said that they are not going to go ahead with that either. The possibility of regulation is, therefore, probably disappearing. The previous Government’s proposal for the household energy management strategy, which was going to cover all sectors, has been taken away and replaced by the green deal.”
“There are ways, and some of them have been rejected by the Government, but I do not think that the decent homes standard is necessarily one of them because it was not enforceable. That is probably one reason why it did not really succeed. The new fitness standards are an improvement, and are tougher, but the problem is that many authorities do not put the resources into the private sector to ensure that the standards are implemented in a co-ordinated way. There should be a strategy for private housing in every local authority area, but many local authorities do not have one, and co-ordinated enforcement action is rarely taken in many parts of the country.”
“Where councils let a property which is not decent and the tenant moves in, there is a guarantee that once they have been in for a short period of time, it will be brought up to a decent standard, which is a condition of the letting being accepted. In such a case, the money might be taken away and the council might not honour its promise, which would be a real problem for a tenant who had moved in under such circumstances.”
“The right hon. Gentleman is right that these are matters for local decisions, but they are also a matter for central Government if the first group of houses—blocks or individual houses—have been done under the first part of the programme, and suddenly central Government funding is cut, as some of my colleagues discussed earlier, perhaps before the right hon. Gentleman came in. Therefore, half the houses in the ALMO have been done, and the other half remain to be done, but then money is cut off as a result of the CSR, so it is surely a central Government rather than local government decision whether the programme continues.”
“I have a note based on information from the scrutiny unit of the House, which indicated that the reduction was from £2.6 billion over three years to £2 billion over four. It said that that was a cut of 42% without taking account of inflation, so I think that my figure of a 50% cut is about right.”
“Is the Secretary of State aware of two interesting companies in my constituency? First, ITM Power produces and develops hydrogen-powered cars, with the ability to produce hydrogen in domestic units at home. Secondly, Magnatec attaches electric motors to diesel-powered vehicles, increasing efficiency by 30%. That system has been running on buses in Denver for more than 10 years, but British buses do not seem interested in taking it up. What steps is the Secretary of State taking with the Department to encourage those firms? Would he like to visit the constituency?”
“I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is aware that, peculiarly, electoral registration officers are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, so obtaining information from them if they refuse to give it is extremely difficult. Will he examine this point, because it seems that all other local authority officers are subject to this legislation, but electoral registration officers are not?”
“The Localism Bill, which we will discuss later, has more than 140 new order-making powers for the Secretary of State. Is not that the Government saying that there will be new freedoms and powers for local communities and then being very prescriptive about how they should operate? Why is it necessary to have among those new orders and powers a raft of regulations imposing non-elected mayors on places such as Sheffield, where there is no demand for them from either the council or the public?”
“I welcome the transfer of powers from the Infrastructure Planning Commission so that it will be elected politicians who eventually sign off decisions on major infrastructure projects. I argued for that when I was on the Government Benches in a previous Parliament. I am pleased that local authorities will be able to return to local committee systems if that is what they want, but why can a local authority with a committee system not have the same devolved powers as an elected mayor? Why does the devolution of those powers depend on which system of governance the local authority chooses? That is not a particularly localist measure.”
“I welcome some aspects of the Bill, such as the power of general competence, although I wish we had set it more clearly in a new constitutional settlement for local government—we will come back to that in due course. I am concerned about the Secretary of State’s power to revoke any council’s ability to do anything it wants to do under the power. I am pleased about the reforms to the housing revenue account, but concerns have been expressed that local authorities will not be able to keep all their right-to-buy receipts and that extra borrowing controls beyond prudential borrowing controls will be imposed on them. I do not think those measures are particularly localist or decentralising.”
“If this is genuinely a decentralising measure, why is it necessary to have all those order-making powers and so many regulations about how local authorities should exercise scrutiny? There might be elements of genuinely good policy in neighbourhood planning, the community right to challenge and in dealing with community assets, but why is there so much prescription from the Secretary of State and Ministers about how local authorities may use their new powers? Why can we not allow local authorities to get on with the policy within a general broad framework? I am disappointed that we have not taken further local authority involvement in the remits of the Departments of Health and Work and Pensions—those are genuine missed opportunities.”