Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

Perhaps I should ask a question first, because we are going to have a long discussion on regional strategy. What do the Government expect to get out of a regional strategy? In London it is difficult, but you can have a London strategy. You can have a strategy around Manchester or Birmingham. In the large regions, such as the eastern region, which I am part of, or the south-east region, the strategies that we have been trying to work out over the past few years have not worked at all. If the Government want housing numbers, they have gone about it totally the wrong way. It would be much better to involve smaller groups of authorities, as we talked about earlier. This seems to be a whole bureaucratic nightmare, and nothing is ever going to be achieved out of it, because the regions are so disparate and have such different problems. At this stage, will the noble Baroness tell us why the Government are doing it? It seems totally unnecessary, it will create a lot of bureaucracy and it will cost a lot of money. RDAs spend a lot of that money now, but they have a lot of staff. I am not talking against the staff of the eastern region. They have around £200 million to spend and around 200 members of staff. If you shared that around the local authorities, we could spend that money rather better on economic development and regeneration for about 10 members of staff. That is honestly true. What do the Government expect to achieve out of this? We will go through the debate later about regional strategies, leaders’ boards and everything else. It would be better to leave it to elected members in elected authorities to work together to solve these problems, rather than creating this tremendous bureaucratic nightmare of having strategies all over the place. Are they going to deliver anything?