Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not really expect the Government to accept this amendment, but I want to talk to it. We talked a lot about regional strategies, their success and how they are going to happen or not going to happen, and I am sure that we will talk more about leaders’ boards and other things. Our contention is that regional strategies are not successful, do not work and that we would do better without them. When the Government published their proposals for this legislation, I thought that something might be happening that one could begin to agree with. We talked about economic assessments and EPBs, which are sub-regional, as well as MAAs and the development of LAAs, which everyone can support because their local authorities are working together for the best for that area, or groups of areas. They could all be successful because there are people on the ground who know the problems. As long as they are on EPBs and are mostly elected rather than appointed members, all three are recipes for success. The noble Lord, Lord Smith, has talked about the north-west, and I accept that in some places it works differently. But that is my argument; the Government’s whole approach should have been more flexible. Flexibility and different arrangements for different places would have delivered better results, because the country is very varied. In the east and the south-east, the regional strategies that we have had so far have not worked at all; they have resulted in a lot of arguments, with one area arguing against another and no decisions or conclusions being made about anything, even after four or five years. No real conclusions have been reached and no real sites have been developed in the south-east or the east, which contains 20 million people—a great chunk of our country. As I have said several times during the passage of this legislation, I have spent most of my life in local government trying to get things to work and things to happen. I want to see housing and the economy improving, and a more flexible approach would have been much better. The Government have missed a tremendous opportunity here in developing that. I know that with legislation it is difficult to be flexible, but I would have liked to see some attempt to do that. The House of Commons Business and Enterprise Committee published a report a couple of weeks ago on RDAs and this Bill. Some interesting, revealing and illuminating evidence was given to the inquiry, which has produced a report. Paragraph 89 says: ""Many witnesses raised the lack of RDAs’ skills in relation to spatial planning. RDAs stated that they were already addressing this shortage and would both inherit some staff from regional assemblies and recruit new staff"." That does not sound very encouraging to me, when many local authorities, whether at unitary, district or county level, have very good planning officers and the capacity to do more of that work. We were defeated on an amendment a little while ago that might have involved different tiers of authorities in creating more of the planning requirements. The committee said other things about this legislation, which have not been addressed at all in our debates. I know that the Government will not agree with this amendment, but it is not too late to have a bit more flexibility in this legislation. It would have helped if the EPBs had more power, and perhaps that is the future. If there is a change of government in the not-too-distant future, EPBs could become much more responsible bodies, because they are at a sub-regional and more local level. They might get local authorities to work together to deliver what we all want to see. I beg to move.