Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members' Interests as a columnist for the Local Government Chronicle. It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford). He talked about the black hole into which the Lyons report has fallen, but I think that Sir Michael himself has fallen into something fairly akin to a black hole, too, given that he is chairman of the BBC Trust. He has had a number of incarnations, and, no doubt, that is not the final one. We lack another report today: the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government has written a rather hard-hitting report on relations between central and local government—more hard-hitting than I expected, quite frankly. It is a pity that we do not have the benefit of the advice of its members today, but there is a direct clash between this debate and a meeting of the Committee. The Government will have been aware of that, and it just shows that although we talk about joined-up government, sometimes very close parts are not joined up, so it is not surprising that the more remote parts are never joined up. I want to step back and see, strategically, where the legislation fits with the decade-long struggle by the Government to find good answers to two related questions. First, what institutions and agencies are necessary to deliver growth and meet the needs and aspirations of a growing population at the level below national Government? In what body can we place our confidence to deliver those things—to devise some form of regional architecture, which is the Government's preference? Secondly, what mechanisms will make the institutions on which we decide accountable? It has been a long and troubled journey, and it still has no destination in sight—perhaps because the destination does not exist. Indeed, it may be sensible to think of a different journey or agenda, because we have been going round in circles, and we are nowhere near a sensible safe haven. The Bill represents a further attempt to answer those questions, but the Government's answer is wrong for three reasons. The most substantial reason is that, yet again, the Government have succumbed to their obsession with capacity—size matters, and they have to have scale. We saw it with the failed attempt to merge the police forces and with the mergers of the PCTs. Wherever we look, we find that the Government want bigger scale. However, we lose identity, accountability and flexibility through such measures. The regional development agencies are to be enlarged with huge new powers, and there will be a vast regional machine, but the irony is that, in a funny old way, the Government have failed their own test. We can argue about whether the old RDAs were good, bad or indifferent—I think that they fall into all three categories—but they were never given one key instrument of economic development, which is skills. Instead, we had the Learning and Skills Council. The hon. Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer), a former leader of Manchester city council, made some remarks about the LSC's expertise in budgetary control, but, given that people wanted a regional structure whose principal target was economic development, it seems ironic that an effective skills base, which every single business tells us every single day is the most important thing, was never part of the agency's remit. The LSC is, of course, disappearing and giving way to a different body, so the relevant organisations will still not be brought together under one roof. Accountability through the advisory leaders' board is also wrong. I never thought that I would see a college of cardinals raised from the ranks of local government leaders. I hope that the wonderful people selected to sit and advise have cloaks, hats and a special uniform; at one time, the Leader of the House referred to people running the quangos at regional level as hugely powerful. Such people are too remote from the citizen. The means by which a citizen can register their views—a common theme today—are suffocated by that form of bureaucracy. The leader of Leeds, Wakefield or Bradford council will not be susceptible to the individually expressed views of the citizen however many petitions or texts they receive, because the bureaucratic haze is too impenetrable for the necessary process of give and take. The Bill fails to follow the logic of the Government's sub-regional strategy, which involves their broadly sensible steps towards creating city regions. A huge regional machine is being imposed, yet at the same time the Government are discussing the notion of the large city state, which has a lot going for it and is the one sensible thing that they have suggested. Furthermore, an enormous amount has happened without a legal framework to compel people to do what they find easier to do through voluntary agreement. The RDAs are a mixed bag. During my ministerial career, I was dealing with City Challenge and the regeneration bodies, and I was always queasy about the intellectual validity of claims about jobs having been safeguarded or created. How on earth would that be judged? We constantly see statistics about virtuous activity. I do not care whether PricewaterhouseCoopers has done a report, because it is almost impossible to apply intellectual rigour to such statistics. Some of the RDAs have not been too bad, although they were better at the beginning, when they were sharply focused on economic development. Since then, however, all sorts of peripheral tasks have been imposed on them—renaissance towns and the impedimenta of all sorts of mini-initiatives that have drained away their central role. There is certainly no evidence that the RDAs have narrowed regional economic disparities; in fact, there is significant evidence that such disparities have increased, as was inevitable. I see nothing in the proposals that will make the citizen less convinced that planning is a top-down process. I am thinking especially of housing. We can all say sanctimoniously to our hearts' content that we need more houses. However, as we all know, the one thing that unites most of our citizens is their opinion that new houses are not needed in their vicinity. Any plan to build 30-odd houses as an extension to an estate or in a field, no matter how unsightly, is bound to raise protest. The citizen should feel that the process is something other than a top-down one imposed on them. Craven, in my constituency, is part of the Leeds city region structure. As part of that, it accepted a programme that would have meant a relatively modest number of houses being built annually. However, the cumulative total looked big and Craven saw the nearest thing to a citizens' revolt for a long time. The politicians responded to local pressure and backed away from the programme. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) that the Bill will push power upwards, not downwards. It will create a huge motor that will take decisions that are crucial to people's lives, and that power will be exercised by a quango—with the ornament of the advisory cardinals who will sit and give their opinions. I see the merit in the local area and multi-area agreements, which I welcome. But however virtuous they may be, we still have to accept that to a significant extent the contracting parties are themselves not directly accountable. We are building structures without direct accountability. We can praise their administrative efficiency and capacity, but we must be careful before we lend ourselves to the notion that they are genuinely accountable. The leaders' board—this college of cardinals, this cosy coterie of local authority aldermen—will do nothing to make the citizen believe that their voice has been reinforced. We should bring back the term "alderman" for the people nominated to meet the regional development agency. I pass over the Regional Select Committees, which are largely phantom and certainly fugitive bodies, so ham-fistedly and belatedly, and with such obvious reluctance, were they introduced by the Government. The Government will make a great deal of the bells and whistles of empowerment, such as petitions and the like. I say to Front Benchers from my party that I hope that under a future Conservative Government the citizen will not be subject to text messages on the progress of Bills. I do not wish a Government to intrude on my privacy to tell me about the progress of Government Bills, thank you very much. I am reluctant enough to text as it is, and my reluctance will be reinforced if I feel that the Government are to intrude on me by telling me about the progress of Bills, in most of which I will not have a huge residual interest. Those bells and whistles are at the margin. The central point is the accumulation and reinforcement of powers at the RDA level without effective scrutiny. We have seen a lot of joint working, but like many colleagues I do not see why it has to have a mandatory, statutory and regulatory framework to work. When people feel the need to, they will work together. The Bill is packed full of things that would be much better left to people's common sense and willingness to work together. The economic prosperity boards have a wonderfully Stalinist ring about them—they have overtones of a Soviet plan for tractor widget manufacture in the 1930s. If we called them "economic recovery boards", at least that would admit that we started from a point of recession rather than suggesting that we are building on unparalleled progress in prosperity. However, I am willing to be convinced. If, in Committee, good arguments are made for a statutory framework—and provided that people are to opt into it, rather than being required to become involved—I may be convinced. However, the incubus of the regional framework on top of the sub-regional strategy, to which I am attached, will be stultifying. The dilemma at the heart of the Bill has not been mentioned, and it may be a psychological as well as a political dilemma. We all talk about devolution, localism and decentralisation, but we are often not terribly precise about what we mean by those three concepts or what the difference is between them; in fact, there is a significant difference between them. The real issue is where the balance lies between representative and direct democracy. I have heard the Secretary of State say that time has moved on from representative democracy and that we are now into direct democracy. That is a dangerous notion. Putting democracy into the hands of groups of citizens who have no responsibility beyond the subject in which they have passionate interest, who do not have to make the relevant choices and who inevitably become dependent on the Government for the stream of funding that enables them to carry on their activity, would be dangerous indeed. It is essential that we assert the clear primacy of representative institutions if our democracy is to be reinforced.