Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

I shall speak also to Amendments 193A, 194, 194PA, 194VA, 194ZA and 195 and on the Question whether Clauses 83 to 98 and 100 to 115 shall stand part of the Bill. The opposition amendments in this group would do two things. In the main, they would make economic prosperity boards voluntary for the participating local authorities, and they would strike all the economic prosperity board clauses from the Bill. The latter seems a dramatic step but I believe that, if economic prosperity boards were presented in a reasonable form which we found acceptable, ironically there would be no need to have them in the first place. Conversely, if the Government persist with their current model, we cannot go along with them. I shall use the stand part debate to ask the Minister to set out expressly why these new bodies are needed. What need are they intended to satisfy? What specific problems do they solve? It is very firmly the position of this party that the Government’s repeated efforts to create regional bodies have failed. Regional assemblies were not wanted, and RDAs are too frequently ineffective and always too remote from the people that they are supposed to serve. The Government have made repeated attempts to impose a regional structure on what we argue are artificial regions. The arbitrary boundaries that the Government have designed all too often completely fail to take into account the natural local economies that have formed as a result of transport links, technological links, clusters of natural and human resources and the choices made by businesses and their customers. How exactly will the creation of these new Secretary-of-State-directed bodies fix that problem? The answer is that they cannot. With this Bill the Government are simply creating a new awkward structure of bodies that are one more stage removed from local communities. The system is bureaucratic. What is needed above all at a time of economic hardship is a flexible, responsive mechanism that allows local authorities to get on with the business of helping their communities rather than forcing them to waste time nominating members to sit on EPBs, which will then talk to RDAs to implement the SNR. What is needed is simplification, flexibility and a return to direct local accountability. Amendment 183A would remove the power of the Secretary of State to form economic prosperity boards and would give it instead to groups of authorities. We have had many long and interesting debates over the past several weeks about the appropriate role of the Secretary of State. I do not need to weary Members of the Committee with an exact description of where we stand on that; I think they will have a clear idea. However, in this part of the Bill the interfering and controlling role of the Secretary of State is particularly intrusive. The Secretary of State should take a back seat and let local authorities act in their own best interests. The Opposition firmly and fully believe that they are capable of doing so. Is that position shared by the Minister and the Government? Amendment 193A would remove the power of the Secretary of State to make changes to or dissolve EPBs and give it instead to a vote of the membership. I see that as a necessary and reasonable step. It is for local authorities to decide with whom they should co-operate, not for central Government to dictate that. The Secretary of State should not corral local authorities into predetermined groups whose only relevance is to fit a masterplan in a Whitehall office. Amendment 194 would allow any local authority to withdraw from an EPB at a time of its choosing. That is an obvious consequence of this sequence of amendments. If a local authority can be deemed fit, as the Conservative Party believes it should be, to make its own decisions on co-operation to further its own interests, then it stands to reason that local authorities should be able to determine when those interests are not being met, when their goals have been achieved and, generally, when it is time to end formal co-operation on a particular matter. They must therefore be able to withdraw from that co-operation. Amendments 194PA, 194VA and 194ZA do much the same thing with combined authorities. I apply the same arguments to this area of the Bill, and I am most interested to hear a clear explanation of how the Government see these combined authorities fitting in with the explicit aims of the Bill—that is, we were told, to help local areas out of the Government’s recession and to improve the accountability of subnational structures to the local population that they serve. I cannot see how these positions can be reconciled with the content of the Bill as it stands. On Amendment 195, I am pleased that the Minister has agreed to look at the issue again. From reading her letter, which I expect has been placed in the Library, I hope that the Government will bring forward an amendment on Report to address it. I beg to move.