My Lords, today’s debate has not progressed very fast in terms of groups, but we have covered a great deal of ground and, through the debate, have almost developed a shadow Bill, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, suggested. I agree with much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said, as I often do. It is clear that the structure of the Bill needs to be rethought. One crucial area is the place for local authorities and regional and city mayors in making skills plans, which a large number of amendments in this group address.
Although the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about the economic strategy of the region, I would rather talk about a transformation strategy for a region. Levelling up is about much more than just the economy. It is not even about just the environment and the economy; it is about the well-being and social capital of the region contributing to every aspect of life, the community and family. You might even call it a public health approach to skills and post-16 education. If we are thinking about public health on that broad scale, this is something that clearly needs to be democratically decided. Elected people should be leading the development
of skills development plans, or perhaps, as an alternative suggestion, we might want to think about drawing up a people’s assembly approach, something to put on the table at least, and something that the Minister might like to talk about to her colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, because I know that she has had very good experience with such direct, deliberative democracy.
The term “employer representative body” reminds me, very uncomfortably, of local enterprise partnerships. Some noble Lords have spoken of them with great approval and, in some places, undoubtedly some good work has been done, but they are not in any way representative of the people or the community. They are, by definition, the status quo in an area. They are invested in the way things are, in our current, unequal, poverty-stricken, planet-destroying system.
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During this debate, I was thinking about joining the south-west regional Green Party in a detailed consideration of the Heart of the South-West LEP’s Strategic Economic Plan 2014-2030. We went through that plan page by page and found a focus on nuclear power and on aerospace in advanced manufacturing, and nothing about the crucial place of food production, small-scale farmers and growers and artisan food production, things that are so important to the region but had not found their way into the LEP plan.
Local authorities and elected mayors are in many respects problematic. The former are elected through the undemocratic first past the post system in England, the latter by putting a single person into an essentially impossible position to represent a whole region. However, they are what we have, and they have hugely more knowledge and representativeness than a handful of large local employers which will surely dominate employer-representative bodies or far-off Westminster. On which point, in the interests of balance, I must applaud what we have been hearing from the Minister about the importance of local decision-making, but if we are going to have that local decision-making it must be democratic.