I do not disagree that Redcliffe-Maud was a sizeable problem. I did quite a lot of work on this and thought that the senior minority report looked at one stage as if it was going to be the main way through. As the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, will also remember, before that there was the Kilbrandon report on regional government, which some of us were also involved with. So we both have long memories of what has happened to local government, going right back to the mid-1960s. The point I am trying to establish—and I am not trying to say that it is one party especially, rather than the other—is that by taking slice after slice of local government authority, responsibility, functions and resources, central government have knowingly and with collusion undermined the local government that we all want to see. I am sure that the noble Lord is right that we want to see that local government revived. That is healthy and appropriate, but what you should not do is to say, “You can only have that revived local government on my terms, of having an elected mayor, if you want that earned autonomy of the combined authorities”.
I was a local authority leader, first in the county borough and then the district. I was also a county councillor, et cetera. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, that as the leader of my local authority, directly elected in my ward by my constituents and, further, directly elected by other councillors, there was nothing I could not do that I could now do as mayor. In addition, I had the support of a majority group, I could share power and devolve it down through committee structures, which a mayor would not so easily be able to do, and I had the full financial backing of that local authority. As a leader, and with consent, I effectively had more power, potential and resources than any elected mayor as presently prescribed by Whitehall would have. So I say to him that one model does not fit all and we cannot decide that we want autonomy and bottom-up, local decision-making in some territories and not in others. If individual local authorities or groups of local authorities want an elected mayor, I will cheer them on. If they decide that it is not right for them, the Government in London, and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, should give them the respect and dignity of their choice. That is what localism is about.