Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

The majority of people on this board will be elected members of the authorities. We are saying that they should have the freedom and flexibility, if they so choose, to bring alongside them people who will help them to achieve their objectives. They could be, for example, people with medical expertise or employment expertise; it will be entirely up to the EPB. They could even be drawn from local authorities in adjoining areas so that there is a wider scope of interest. Precedence for this approach can be found in the membership of the national park authorities, the joint police authorities, the integrated transport authorities and the leaders’ boards. Amendment 186 would remove that flexibility. On Amendment 188, we want to keep the subsections because they mirror provisions made for ITAs in the Local Transport Act 2008. They are designed to ensure that EPBs are local authority-led by restricting the voting rights of non-local authority members, but again they give local authorities the freedom, if they so wish, to make the change to amend that. Again, the intention is to provide flexibility. It is not something the Secretary of State will determine but something the authorities may find helpful. Amendment 185 would also remove the flexibility for local authorities to give different weights to different kinds of members if they wished to do so. They may wish, for example, to give more weight to the votes of authorities which represent larger populations. It will be up to them. Amendment 187 provides that the membership of an EPB should be politically representative. That is added to by Amendment 170A. I support the intention behind the amendment. Local authorities will be subject to the rules on political balance set out in the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 when they appoint members to an EPB. Indeed, by virtue of paragraph 81 of Schedule 6, EPBs and combined authorities will also be subject to those rules. I hope that noble Lords’ concerns will be allayed on this point. Rather than accept the amendment and have to decide what constitutes a political make-up which is reflective of the constituent local authorities—which would be open to extensive interpretation—it is better to apply existing rules from the 1989 Act and to allow authorities to come up with arrangements with which they are content than to try to make provision for this on the face of the Bill. It is another example of how we are leaving the decision to the constituent authorities on the EPB to do as they see fit and appropriate.