Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

Thank you. It is a long list—there is no doubt about that. Yet some bodies are not included. Therefore, in my proposal on joint boards and joint committees I am trying to put in a description of an organisation that would be included and would fit local circumstances. The Minister is including specific organisations and missing some out. There is a difference of approach and ours is much better. I did not understand at all what the Minister said about the Homes and Communities Agency, other than that the aim is to raise the profile of what the agency does. That could apply to regional development agencies, regional arts councils or any number of organisations—it could apply to British Waterways. There are a huge number of organisations that are not going to be included, even though they have an important local impact in different ways. The reason for that, going back to what she said previously, is that they do not have arrangements for involvement locally—they are not democratic local organisations and do not deliver local services. The Homes and Communities Agency does not deliver local services but does what English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation did previously: it funds and supports people who do so. There is a real difference. The idea that there are democratic arrangements within the HCA that people might be interested in is slightly extraordinary. On the other hand, the Minister might be saying, ““Well, the HCA provides all this money to local housing associations and perhaps to local authorities, while its English Partnerships wing will provide money to regeneration projects, town centre projects and all the rest of it””. Of course it does. But money never comes from the Government without some sort of handles on it, and they will therefore have an influence on what happens. They will say, ““We will fund this, but we won’t fund that””. The local authority might want to do the second instead of the first, but will do the first because that is what it will get the funding for. That is the real world, and no one is arguing about that. But if you put all that in, you are not producing a map of local organisations that have democratic involvement in how they do things; you are producing a map of the whole structure of government—all the government departments in the north-west, in Yorkshire and Humberside or wherever. They are in exactly the same position as the Homes and Communities Agency. Are we going to include all those? Of course not. Frankly, I think that the Government are in a muddle. They need to think about this a bit more clearly. Our view is that this is much too prescriptive. The Government ought to look at giving the local authority a general duty to include everything relevant in their area and then have a description of what is relevant. That is a far better approach. We will return to this with a later amendment, but in the mean time I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.