Local Government Finance Bill

From what I hear from my councils, that is not the prospect that they are looking forward to. Lancaster council wants finally to build a third bridge, for which Lancaster has been waiting years. Wyre district council has been waiting years to open a railway line to Fleetwood, where a railway line currently exists, and by borrowing through some of these schemes it could open up new development plans to business. It is looking forward to being able to close the north-south divide. My support for the reforms is based on the need to achieve growth. Like many Government and Opposition Members, week after week I meet businesses in the north-west, particularly in my constituency, that have the potential to grow but just want a little extra support. That might mean doing up the road on the industrial estate or providing a bit of extra shedding so that they can meet their orders. With these changes, councils will finally have an interest in encouraging that business. [Interruption.] Opposition Members might scoff, but as was pointed out, in particular by my hon. Friends the Members for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) and for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart), the problem is that local councils, for good or ill, have divorced themselves—or have been divorced by the system—from any real interest in encouraging and supporting economic growth. The best councils have wanted to encourage growth. I take my hat off to those such as the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander), whom I have met before in relation to this matter, for all the work that they have done to encourage that growth, but the fact is, as we all recognise, that some councils and council officers have seen little benefit in going out there to support and encourage business because it has not directly affected their income. These changes will at least start to address that situation. I shall finish on a point that I have raised elsewhere. I think—I might be wrong—that under paragraph 37 of schedule 1 the Secretary of State could allow new types of enterprise zones. Why are we not encouraging university campuses to have their own enterprise zones? I know that that would cause problems with Treasury mandarins and their calculations, but we seem to have missed a trick, because we are talking about something that could be the very basis for creating and developing new businesses, albeit not on such a large scale. Once those businesses got that extra bit of employment, they would have to move off by definition, because of the nature of university campuses. That would mean getting the turnover that we want and would deal with the criticism of the old enterprise zones—that businesses moved in from other areas and stayed there.