National Citizen Service Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-12-07
Topic: Culture
Robin Granville Hodgson (Conservative, Centre-right): I shall speak to Amendment 12 in this group. As the noble Baroness said, I raised the issue in Committee, although I was looking for a review after one year and she is looking for it after five. I am now thinking about three years. It is like Goldilocks’s porridge—a bit too cold and a bit too hot. Three years might be just about right It is a few minutes past 10 so I shall not weary the House with a long diatribe about issues that we have already covered. It is really about how we will protect the position of small providers—the ones who are rarely able to get to the hard-to-reach groups—and avoid their getting squeezed out. The noble Baroness has touched on some of the issues that I am sure the committee of the noble Baroness, Lady Pitkeathley, has been looking into. As I have said, it is a combination of risk-aversion on the part of commissioners and the ease they have in dealing with a single supplier. That can result in a small supplier becoming what is known in the trade as bid candy. That is to say, an attractive, small organisation is put up as the front of a major contractor’s proposal. Not only is the bid candy an unattractive aspect of the situation, the bid candy often finds itself squeezed into the most unattractive part of the contract. The bid contractor takes the vanilla stuff and the small supplier is left with the most difficult aspects of the contract to fulfil My noble friend has heard me on this again and again. He will be weary of my saying that I still remain keen to believe that there is a real case for an independent review of the commissioning process after it has begun to settle down and we can see how things are starting to work My noble friend said in Committee: "The Government will be working with the trust during this period to ensure that it abides by the latest best practice for commissioning and procurement. There is a dedicated team in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which works with the trust to oversee and support its contracting rounds and I assure my noble friend that we will continue to review the trust’s commissioning behaviours as a matter of course".—[Official Report, 22/11/16; col. GC 183.] I shall not say a word against the good men and women of the DCMS. I am sure they are doing a splendid job but they are not reviewers or commissioners. They have a day job to do; they work in the DCMS. I just do not think they will be able to get into the detail required to make sure that the squeezing out that the noble Baroness and I fear is not taking place. It is too likely to happen My noble friend went on to say that as a backstop there is the National Audit Office. Again it is a terrific organisation and does tremendous forensic investigations, but it does so at a very high level. We are talking about being right down in the muck and bullets in how these things work. The NAO is not, therefore, equipped properly to do the sort of thing that my amendment and that of the noble Baroness have in mind. I hope my noble friend will give this some further thought. It is a small thing to do but an important way of showing the voluntary sector as a whole that the Government, the NCS Trust and this House have the interests of the small provider and the small battalion at heart, and that we will put a provision in place to ensure that—once we test how the commissioning is going and see that it has set itself out in the way that I am sure everybody in the House believes is appropriate—local providers have a real role to play in establishing and building the National Citizen Service.