Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I am very happy to do that and to answer both questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, because it gives me an opportunity to update the Committee in general about the Bill. Shorter legislation is not necessarily easier to implement. I shall exemplify this by explaining why we have had to take our time over the process that was generated by the Act. As the noble Baroness says, a Secretary of State is required under Section 6 of the Act to make the first arrangements for the production of local spending reports before 23 April 2009. She asked how this fits in with the Bill. I thought about this as she asked the question. There is an overlap in building up an evidence base for the way in which local economies—which involve a whole range of sustainable provisions for housing, transport and so on—fit into the sustainable economy, society and community of the local area. We will see what will help and what will hinder. All this will overlap directly with the economic assessment and reinforces the point that a lot of information and methodologies will come forward that we have not used before. That underpins the necessity of having an enabling framework around the economic assessment. That will all feed from the bottom up into the regional strategy. It will become part of that bedrock and that platform of information about the nature of sustainability, the priorities and the emphasis that we give to different part of the policy. It very much has a synergy with the whole process that we will be talking about from now on. A local spending report is a report on expenditure by such authorities, in such areas, and over such a period as are determined in accordance with arrangements made by the Secretary of State. The duty was put on the Secretary of State to provide the information. The authorities may be a local authority, a government department or any other person exercising public functions. The area must be one or more local authority areas, one or more parts of a local authority area, or a combination of those. Providing information about these things in this way is a major, new challenge, and it is complex. We were very keen to see some discretion in the Act as it went through because of that complexity and the need to be flexible. We have been working across the department and with key stakeholders from other departments, such as the Audit Commission and the LGA, to map out what information is currently available. I shall be frank that this has taken longer than we thought. We had originally planned to consult in 2008, but it has proved more complex than we initially expected. We are now at the point where we are preparing to run a consultation on what it is proposed will be provided in the first tranche of information about expenditure about local authorities. The idea is that the first arrangements will be the first tranche of information about expenditure, which will go to every local authority, which the Secretary of State is required to do. The consultation will be on whether we have got it right, whether it is the right sort of information and so on. That is the first stage. We are planning to do it in two stages. There will be one document, and we will try to bring that forward as fast as possible. We will certainly do that before 23 April. Then there will be a longer stage, when we will consult on the longer-term arrangements. That brings me to the amendment. The intention behind local spending reports, as the noble Baroness knows, because she was heavily involved in the passage of the Act—I was not involved, for reasons that escape me at the moment; maybe I was doing the Housing Bill or something—is to promote the sustainability of local communities by providing access to information about the public funding that is available in local areas. The aim is to inform local authorities’ consultations with local people and to enhance the operation of the new LAAs by ensuring that there is greater accountability and transparency, so that local authorities, their partners and communities can take more informed decisions about priorities and sustainability. We need to ensure that local spending reports are closely linked with the regular and accessible information on local services that we have committed to providing. What we are looking at here is very much a living document. It is iterative. The amendment suggests that we should bring this forward and make sure that it is secured in 24 months, but the Act intentionally provided flexibility on what local spending reports must contain. We do not want this to be a snapshot; we want it to be an evolving document. Putting in dates and timetables would not be appropriate. The important thing is that the documents reflect a true picture of what is going on and can anticipate what is likely to happen; so they have got to be able to adapt to future policy. We want to make sure that they can do that over time. I hope that is sufficient to update noble Lords about where we are, what they can expect in the next few months and how we see the documents evolving over time.