Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I shall address, first, the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves. I am relieved to find that it is a probing amendment. I thought he was teasing me, but it is a perfectly respectable amendment and I shall be happy to answer it as best I can. Bearing in mind that this is work in progress, the reason we have put the implementation plan into legislation is that it is important for people to understand that we are serious about implementation as well as about drawing up strategies. The implementation plan sets out how the plan will be delivered. If I were to sum it up, I would say that it will set out the programmes, the processes and the timetables which will deliver the objectives and the policies in the plan. It will identify who is going to do what and who are the responsible people; what funding will be delivered by key agencies such as the RDA, the Highways Agency, the Homes and Communities Agency and the Environment Agency; what local government bodies will do through their own spending programmes; and it will identify other processes, such as the planning system that guides investment, and the commitments from other partners, the private sector and the utilities, who will also deliver the strategy. As we have said throughout this part of the debate, the key win here, the prize, is the opportunity to start aligning investment with priorities, which are informed both by spatial imperatives and the economic geography of the region, so that we get better outcomes. Most regions are already producing implementation plans. Our feedback suggests that they welcome the opportunity to formalise the work and, as I have said, some regions are producing joint RSS and RES implementation plans. Sometimes the implementation plan itself is overlooked and the great drama is in the creation of the plan rather than in its implementation. We are requiring one document at regional level in the implementation plan, but it is clear that the strategy will be implemented also through local and separate plans—the noble Lord was absolutely right to pick out the local development framework. The noble Lord asked about the local development framework. The regional economic strategy, because it will bring together the spatial strategies and the economic strategies, will be a planning document. It will be material to the planning system. It certainly will not affect the role or the significance of the local development frameworks, but, as the noble Lord well described, it will be part of the planning system and the LDFs will be situated within it. In response to the questions raised about monitoring the budget, I should say that I have debated this Bill in terms of being a salient and timely response to the collapse of the banking systems—they are a unique set of circumstances which require us to have the most robust apparatus in place. However, these are long-term plans; they are not simply reactive plans that will help to focus our economic development work in the next year or two. The resilience of the structures and the clarity of objectives will be extremely important in serving long-term objectives across the regions. The noble Baroness was absolutely right to press us on value for money. I do not think that the amendment serves a very good purpose, because requiring every region to do annually what she suggests is not good value for money, but measuring the costs and benefits of the strategies and making sure we know where success lies and whether we are achieving it is vital. Measuring costs and benefits for regional strategies is not easy, partly because they are long term, with a 20 to 25-year time horizon. It is an investment in the future. There is a problem also with dealing with counterfactual evidence; that is, what might have happened without the strategy. This highlights the importance of regular, close and clever monitoring, which is what the annual monitoring report is about. It is about tracking whether the strategy is on course; for example, on skills, jobs, houses or renewable energy. In response to the noble Baroness’s specific questions, I say that we currently have an annual budget of £20 million for regional spatial strategies, which would be used for all regions. How much each particular body is given will depend on the working arrangements that they agree between them. The £20 million does not include local authority costs, but it is the budget that we are working to at the moment. I understand why the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said that subsection (3) is heavy-handed. Her Amendment 180G is helpful in the sense that it enables me to reassure her about it. The reason that we have included it in this form is that it is based on the experience that we have gained from regional spatial strategies, where there is also a current requirement to produce such a report. We have found that there is real value in enforcing an element of conformity across regions in terms of both data and timing so that there is an ability to collate data and get a national picture, thereby giving us a comparative basis. To do this, we would use a mixture of regulation and guidance as appropriate, but given the significance of the regional strategy and the need to be sure that all the investment and planning is working, putting the key elements into regulations is important—it reinforces the point that I made earlier about the need for close monitoring. It means that the report has greater status, but, much more important, that it becomes more useful as a tool for the regions and the partners in delivering their strategies. However, I take the point that the noble Baroness is making in these amendment; that is, given the weight that will attach to the regional strategies, there needs to be a clear understanding of how effective they are and whether they are on track. I think that the legislation as it stands has got the balance right between flexibility and encouragement. The clause requires that the annual report contain such information as may be so specified in regulations. We might also provide a little more detail in guidance—we would want to explore that further before committing the regions and resources to it. However, we want the annual report to be relevant, as useful as possible and proportionate. I hope on that basis that noble Lords will not press their amendments.