Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

On my first amendment, the Minister said that we can leave it to the county and district councils to sort out. I would be perfectly happy with that. It is not what the Bill says. It says that the district council gets involved as a planning authority. I accept that planning functions impinge on everything else, but it should get involved as a local authority with all its functions in so far as they are relevant. An enormous number, perhaps most, of district functions are relevant to economic development, prosperity and regeneration. It would therefore be better to put a statement that the district council will co-operate with the county council as an authority, not as a planning authority, in the Bill. That is a fairly simple thing that the Government might think about, rather than just saying that I am wrong. I am not in this instance. The Minister also said that boundaries should be based on economic geography, and there is a lot of sense in that. Very often the county is the economic unit, but it can also be a group of smaller unitary authorities. But it is also true, and here I admit that my experience is very much coloured by my own county of Lancashire, that the economic unit is smaller than a large county. That must be the case for some of the bigger counties in the south as well. For example, in Lancashire it is generally accepted and understood that our economic units are central Lancashire, the Fylde coast in west Lancashire and east Lancashire, now known as Pennine Lancashire. In these areas the districts are traditionally strong because they used to be boroughs or county boroughs and have played a large part in driving economic development. In Burnley, which the noble Lord knows well, the borough council is as important as the county council in the attempt to rescue the local economy from the decline of the past decades. The borough council is the driver behind local projects, not the county council. It is a fact of life in areas like Burnley, and I do not think the Government understand that as well as people on the ground might.