My Lords, because these are bespoke deals, it will be very much a conversation between the local areas and the Secretary of State. The Government are clear about two things: first, any proposals have to be proposals for growth and, secondly, they have to be fiscally neutral within the Government’s spending envelope that would have usually gone into those devolved matters. We have deliberately avoided specifying and putting down criteria because it is a bespoke deal between local areas and the Secretary of State. So no prescriptions are laid down; it is a matter for discussion between the local areas and the Secretary of State.
I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, because I talked about the Localism Act but actually councils can resolve to have an elected mayor under the Local Government Act 2000. I just want to correct that mistake.
There have been different views on local government over the past decades and the past 150 years. I was a baby of the 1960s so cannot remember some of the reorganisations that took place then, but my noble friend Lord Heseltine made the compelling point that government has centralised over a period of 150 years. No matter how it has done it and how it has been prescribed, it has ever increasingly pulled power towards the centre. This is our golden opportunity to reverse that and it is the right thing to do.
We are now pursuing an unprecedented process to reverse that and we demand an accountable form of governance to support the powers being devolved. We have made it very clear that we want to hear from areas on their proposals. As to opposition to mayors, we are not trying to impose them anywhere but, where mayoral powers are devolved, there must be a clear, single point of accountability. International experience shows that where cities have a mayoral model it is a powerful form of governance, and the Chancellor has said that we will devolve major powers only to those cities which choose to have a mayor.
Going back to subsection (3)(c) of the proposed new clause, it is already part of the Secretary of State’s consideration about whether to establish or change an existing combined authority. The Secretary of State has to consider whether there is convenient and effective local government.
Finally, the provision in proposed subsection (4) seeks to prevent the Secretary of State imposing on a combined authority the Government’s model of an elected mayor. This is unnecessary. The Bill requires that all appropriate authorities must consent to governance change, as I said before. The Secretary of State could not and would not impose a metro mayor on any combined authorities that did not wish to adopt such a model.