Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I have one brief comment to make about LSPs. The Government need to sort out their status in a sensible way sooner or later. I do not suggest that they should be made into fully fledged alternative local authorities, which we fear is a course the Government may take with the economic prosperity boards later in the Bill. They have a purely spectral status, where they exist but they do not exist, and they float around in the clouds but do not have any real status in law—indeed, the Minister said that they have no legal identity. Yet, these are the bodies that the Government have used as a conduit of preference for vast amounts of investment in the past few years. How does money come for this or that project, whether economic, social or whatever? It comes via the LSP. It is extraordinary that on the one hand the Government give them such a huge status but, on the other, deny their existence. Some kind of status that can be defined in legislation needs to be sorted out for them, if they are to continue to exist. One sometimes thinks that the Government are happy with them at the moment because they can abolish them overnight on the whim of the Secretary of State. I want to pick up the Minister’s point about the onerous burden in having to consult too many people. He referred to the fact that there are thousands of parish councils. Every principal local authority knows which its parish councils are. It almost certainly has an e-mail distribution list for those councils because it will be communicating with them. If not, it ought to have such a list. Communicating and consulting—sending things out—is simply a matter of sending things once to an e-mail distribution list and perhaps having stuff on your website that people can consult. The idea that there is a huge onerous burden in writing to 25 or 200 parish councils, however many there are in a particular local authority, is a myth.