Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

In moving Amendment 160D, I shall speak to my other amendments in this group. In presenting the amendments, I shall give a general introduction to the situation as we see it. When the Government first raised the idea of a sub-national review, most of us welcomed it. When the initial discussions were going on, it seemed that the Government were devolving powers from the RDAs to more local systems, which is certainly preferable. But now we see the proof of the pudding in the legislation. As we have discussed over the past few days, so much is set by the Secretary of State. We are now going through a series of amendments and discussions where the Secretary of State has this or that power and there is not much localism in it at all. It is even further away from local government than we are now. That will come out in a lot of the amendments proposed to this clause. I have been involved in several pieces of related legislation as they have gone through this House, as have most of my colleagues on this side. I think that the Minister has not been involved for so long, as most of the earlier legislation was taken through the House by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. We had many discussions about a lot of this. I was never very keen on the RDAs when they were set up. The legislation that set them up also created the regional assemblies to scrutinise them. That has not really worked at all. Since then, the regional assemblies have been given different powers of their own and will do different things. They have never been an effective scrutiny committee for the RDAs. Some RDAs work better than others, when there is a grouping of authorities that work together anyway. The RDA that I know in the eastern region has not really worked at all. That is nothing against the individuals, but it has been a grouping of authorities that do not have very much in common, and it has not achieved very much at all. In fact, it has been a big waste of money, and the money could have been much better spent at a local level. I hoped when we saw a sub-national review that we were going to get some sense of it. I do not like to keep quoting Essex, but obviously I know it very well. The county that I am leader of has Thames Gateway, which relates to London and Kent, which is in the south-east region. We have Haven Gateway. At least we are in the same region, but it is across two counties of Suffolk and Essex. They are the sort of things that make sense. It would have been much better to have given more autonomy and more help to things like that, than it would to give it to this legislation. As the Minister knows, I am a great supporter of LAAs—they work well in my county—and I am now a great supporter of MAAs. Much of the future could have been in MAAs instead of setting up the machinery which the Government are going to set up. This series of amendments from me probes what the Government expect to get out of this. We all carry out economic assessments now; we ought to do so. Any large authority does work on them, and I do not see much point in making them statutory. On the other hand, I am not that against making them statutory, because we are all doing quite a lot of work, particularly in the current situation, to support the economy in our own area. That is often done very much better at a local level than through a wider body such as an RDA. However, we see from the Government’s suggestions that the economic assessments will not even feed into the regional strategy, which I simply do not understand. It is complete nonsense that an Essex strategy carried out in conjunction with our two unitaries or our two Gateway areas has no power to feed into the regional strategy. The Government do not describe what an area is or say whether it is small or big. Obviously a county such as Essex would work with the areas that I have just talked about. I am sure that we will have a lot of debate about what the Government expect from these economic assessments and who will participate in them. Will they be directed by the Secretary of State, which I would be totally against, or will they come up from local initiatives, which is what happens in my county now and is much more powerful and important, particularly at this time and when the recession is likely to go on for some time? This is also true of times of prosperity. We know locally what we want, so we should be able to help and get on with it. If we are going to have regional strategies, we should be able to feed our bit into them. The thing that has been set up now does not work at all. I am not talking about housing numbers; we can talk about that later. During consideration of the planning legislation some three years ago, I said that we would revisit the subject because I never thought that the RDAs would deliver houses, and we are revisiting it because the RDAs did not deliver them before this legislation: not that anyone is delivering houses at the moment because of the recession. We will have a whole series of debates and questions about this. As I said, these amendments are probing, and are designed to hear what the Government have to say at the initial part of this discussion. I beg to move.