Sustainable Communities Bill

I absolutely agree with the Minister. We need to celebrate diversity. Business Link is a good example of that. My constituency, and Cornwall more widely, have more small businesses at micro level per head of population than anywhere else in the country. Business Link provides services across Devon and Cornwall, and even in that small area there will be a real need for a diversity of solutions to meet diverse problems. The Minister is right. We need to celebrate diversity by finding a mechanism that allows diversity to be captured. At the moment, we have a snapshot of how central decisions have an impact on funding at local level, but no mechanism to give us a sense of what will flow from that and how local communities will be able to take real decisions. Function follows power, and that is followed by money. At the moment, that chain is broken.