My Lords, the serious point here is whether responsibility for economic development measures, which are the purpose of the shared prosperity fund, will be devised, agreed and undertaken with the consent of the devolved Administrations and devolved bodies in England.
Last time I spoke on this, the Minister claimed that the distribution of EU funds was decided in Brussels. That is not the case, as she well knows. As I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, would confirm on the basis of his great experience of European matters, the EU established criteria against which funds should be spent and rules for determining the areas of greatest need, which were based on the relative GDP of an area in the European Union—which areas were
Objective 1, which were Objective 2, and all the rest. It did not decide on individual projects. That was never determined in the Commission.
The way individual projects were decided under the structural funds—as I think Conservative and Labour Governments have practised since the 1990s—was on a bottom-up principle, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, probably started off agreeing with. If we were to have effective economic development, it had to have the buy-in of local areas, and of the nations when we had devolution. The best way to do this was through mechanisms that brought together locally elected people with businesspeople in bodies at local, regional and national levels to determine which projects should be prioritised.
As I understand it, the present proposal is that, instead of this devolved system, which has worked reasonably well over the past few decades, this Government want to take power to centralise decision-making. The precedent for this—as my noble friend Lord Adonis mentioned—is the towns fund, which is a completely centralised pork barrel dished out to Members of Parliament representing constituencies that the Conservative Party has recently won. That is what the towns fund is. I know from my own county, Cumbria, that Carlisle, Workington and Barrow will be recipients of towns fund money. Why? Yes, they have great needs, but it is because they have recently elected Conservative Members of Parliament.
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Now we are told that we will have a levelling-up fund as well as a towns fund, and this shared prosperity fund. These are significant amounts of money, which Ministers will decide and civil servants will implement. What will the role of local bodies be? For instance, I noticed that when the Minister was talking about her plans to consult people, there was not a single mention of the role of local enterprise partnerships in England, yet they were the great innovation of the coalition in 2010. What has happened to them?
There are also the mayoral authorities and the devolution of economic powers to mayors; many of us on the Labour side were strong supporters of this, but George Osborne also drove it very strongly with the proposals for the northern powerhouse. I heard nothing from the Minister—perhaps she will come in on this and tell me I am wrong—about the northern powerhouse, what mayors should be doing or what the role of local enterprise partnerships should be. I find all this very puzzling.
This is extremely serious when it comes to the nations of the United Kingdom. The biggest beneficiary of the proposals the Government are insisting on pushing through will be the Scottish nationalists. They will say that this is the Westminster Government taking back their spending powers and instituting a totally centralised system, when we know from experience all around the world that centralised decision-making on economic development questions simply does not work. I ask the Minister to think again.