Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, perhaps I may speak to the amendments from a north-west perspective. Before I do, I declare the interests which I declared in Committee. I was for some time the chairman of the North West Regional Assembly’s executive board, which became 4NW. I resigned from that position when I became a member of the Northwest Regional Development Agency in December. As I think the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, would recognise, as well as two big cities, the north-west contains quite a considerable rural area. I do not think that you can get more rural than Cumbria. In creating 4NW, which is essentially the leaders’ forum before the Bill cuts through, we had to make sure that all the different parts of the north-west were effectively represented. We started off by saying that each of the sub-regions should have three representatives, and that within those sub-regions, which had different kinds of authority, all the different kinds of authority should be represented. For example, if it was a unitary authority, there should also be a county and a district member. At the end of last year we also started working with the NWDA on a regional strategy which, I again assure noble Lords, does not work in quite the way suggested. We started off by issuing a consultation draft on issues of principles which has gone out to all the partner agencies and local authorities. We will develop the strategy over the summer and more than 50 participating partners will be involved in the consultation. After the draft is produced towards the end of this year there will be a longer period of consultation before the strategy is agreed. At each stage all the local authorities and partner agencies will be able to contribute. My noble friend Lord Judd was concerned about the Lake District National Park. I assure him that it is a full member of 4NW and that it participates in it, as do the other agencies that are not included formally. Health needed to be included, so we got the strategic health authority involved. The new HCA is also involved. Those are some of the participating bodies. If you went to the meetings, you would not know where you were. I am concerned by the amendments on party politics tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tope. I am not sure that we want the leaders’ boards to become party political. One of the problems that we had in the North West Regional Assembly was that it became very political and we were not talking to each other; in fact, we were arguing. When I became chairman of the executive board, I set out deliberately to be consensual. I would not let the Labour group or any of the other groups meet on their own, because they wanted to represent each other’s sub-regions. I said to my Liberal Democrat colleagues in Stockport, "I’ve got more in common with you than I have with the Labour representatives up in Cumbria". We needed to make sure that we represented not just our own interests as a particular local authority but the collective interest. We had to listen to each other, participate in debate and make sure that we did not divide along party lines, because collaboration means working together. Therefore, automatic inclusion of political parties is a difficult matter. One has only to look at some of the local authorities these days—Stoke-on-Trent would come to mind—to see the number of splits, splinters and parties. If you had to have one representative from every one, you would probably need to hire a room much bigger than this one to get all those different parties in it. The leader needs to represent not an authority or a political party but his area, whether it is urban or rural, and try to make decisions which improve the lot of the people in it. I was very proud when I stepped down from my previous role to hear people comment that we had not had a vote—that is not true; we had one vote on the name 4NW, which I lost. Working in that way meant that people had to think and listen to each other and not argue along party political lines.