Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

In a minute, I will follow up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield. I was fascinated by the explanation given by the noble Baroness of what socialism was all about and how it was all to do with the perfectibility of human beings. From my perspective, she got that rather more from her Methodism than from her socialism, but I was wondering, in all this discussion of socialism, whether she was speaking collectively on behalf of the Government. That would be interesting to know, but I do not expect her to answer that. The noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, made an important point. The MAA may or may not, in the Minister’s phrase, be a "robust delivery vehicle". There is no reason why it cannot be associated with a robust delivery vehicle. The point that some of us would make is that if a delivery vehicle is required that is not there at the moment, either because it does not cover a large enough area or because there is nothing that can carry out the scale of investment and development that is required among any of the existing local authorities, it can be created. Local authorities can create companies that can carry out development, which can be robust and purely voluntary, and do not have to go cap in hand to the Secretary of State: perhaps cap in hand is the wrong phrase. They do not have to keep giving pieces of paper to the Secretary of State to sign and say, "Yes, we agree with this and we do not agree with that". That is certainly what the people who have set up the multi-area agreement in Pennine Lancashire have in mind. In a different context, I might argue whether it was desirable to set up such a delivery vehicle. That is what they intend to do and that is what will happen. At a purely district level in Pendle, we have set up a joint venture company between the council and a major local developer, which is a pretty robust delivery vehicle. You can already see some of the impressive results of that delivery vehicle in Nelson. It is designed at a district level. It is possible to set up these things at the moment and to achieve development, and it will be possible for multi-area agreement authorities to do so collectively, jointly and voluntarily if that is what they want to do. It seems to me that an EPB is a more bureaucratic, legalistic, entrenched and difficult way of doing it, as the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield suggested. The Minister will be pleased to learn that this is the last time that I shall stand up to say anything in this Committee. I genuinely thank her and her colleague the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, for their tolerance and forbearance in the face of an overt attempt to point out the dangers of the Bill and the idiocies of parts of it. We do not apologise in any way for doing that; it is what the Committee is for. It has performed a useful function, and done what it should have done. We have discovered that we disagree on some things, and on others have discovered that our aims are the same but we disagree on some of the details, mechanisms and so on. I hope that we will find a meeting of minds on some of these issues on Report. Where we disagree, we will continue to disagree, but at least we will not spend so much time over it as we have established the lines of engagement. I genuinely thank both the Ministers. They have found some of us to be a total irritation in this Committee, but that is what we are here for: to ensure that this legislation is not nonsense and is not dangerous.