Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

Yes. Having attended several Westminster Hall debates on the issue, I could bore for most parts of England about the ineffectiveness of the process. Even the process of deciding where houses are allocated bears no relation to the needs of communities. There is no way of dealing with the needs of more rural areas, where the growth of some villages might increase the sustainability of the community more than in-filling every available space in an urban area. What is even more galling in my constituency is that some of the areas for which thousands of houses are proposed were not even passed though in a car. Given that it is difficult to understand the impact of proposals when policy is set regionally, it is even more difficult to understand how the Secretary of State can increase numbers at the stroke of a pen. It would be preferable to have a radical review, get rid of the existing system, and start with a clean slate. The Bill provides an opportunity to do that, so I hope that we will be able to have a more fundamental debate. The proposals on leaders' boards and economic prosperity boards give us an insight into the Government's concept of democratic accountability. The Government's view is that we need to replace the unaccountable, remote and unelected regional assemblies with leaders' boards, which will be not directly accountable, just as far away and not directly elected. Basically, we are to have another top-down arrangement. The set-up will still leave smaller authorities feeling that their voice will not be heard, and we still do not really know quite how the arrangements will fit in with the Regional Select Committees, which are also supposed to provide scrutiny at a regional level. Instead of tinkering, and rearranging the deckchairs on a regional policy that is clearly sinking, we need to look much more widely at Government policy. Questions should be posed, asking the regional development agencies to justify their existence. I do not see any reason why a lot of their powers should not be pushed down to a much lower level. I have another example, from the debate in the Lords, of how the Government seem to think that the accountability process works. It just amazed me. Baroness Andrews, who speaks for the Government, used the word "accountability" when justifying why not to push down powers. She said, in response to a question, that a "deliberate decision" was taken to set up leaders' boards and to leave the decision-making powers where they were in order to""preserve the current flexibility…in the RDAs' single-funding arrangements, and to keep the direct line of accountability to RDAs for the use of money voted to them by Parliament."—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 December 2008; Vol. 706, c. 896.]" Most people would think that the accountability should flow from the people at the bottom, rather than from the decisions at the top. The way to get better accountability is to do anything possible to get resources and decision making closer to the people affected. Only the fag-end of a Labour Government could come up with such rhetoric in desperation. Let me draw on my experiences of the accountability and accessibility of the regional development agencies. I get letters about once a month from my local RDA telling me how difficult its funding situation is, and how it is having to review its programmes because it is not sure that it can deliver everything that it initially thought that it could. When all of Cornwall's MPs wrote to the RDA to say that we were very worried about that, given the impact that it could have on regional funding and big regeneration projects, we did not even get an answer, let alone an offer of a date on which to meet. In terms of having open and accountable organisations, a lot of people think that the current set-up leaves an awful lot to be desired, and we Liberal Democrats will certainly make the most of any opportunity to re-open that debate that is presented by the Bill. Exactly the same is true of the economic prosperity boards. Once again, there are the same concerns. Functions currently undertaken by locally accountable bodies are to be transferred to a new quango that individuals and businesses will have to get their head around. It will not be closer to the people, and, again, there is no guarantee that everybody on the board will be directly elected. The Government should pay heed to the concerns of the CBI, which said that it already finds it very difficult to engage with regional bodies, and was worried about additional responsibilities being transferred to the board.