My Lords, I had not intended to intervene in this debate; I hope that the Minister will forgive me. I know that the role of the Government Back Benches is to sit there and keep quiet. I apologise for giving way to temptation, but I do so in a genuine spirit of inquiry.
I was very interested in what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said about the question of a map. I have a personal reason for being interested because, dare I confess it, very many years ago—I try never to talk about the past—when I was a Minister in the Commons,
for what was then the Department of Industry, I was responsible for radically altering the map that existed for assisted areas in the early 1980s. We decided that this needed doing partly because of the cost but also because the assisted areas map had grown so large that it covered most of the country. There had been pressure to add to it and successive Governments had given way, so the map had got bigger and bigger. Also, rather than being given as the noble and learned Lord implied it should be, the assistance was given automatically. It was thought that there was therefore a lot of deadweight cost in the subsidies system—that is, people got a subsidy if they went to area X simply because they went there. That is what persuaded us that we should radically curtail the map to make it more concentrated.
Over the years, I have reflected on whether that was the right decision because what has happened in this country is that regional inequalities seem to have grown rather worse, while many of the most deprived urban areas have got even worse. I spent many of my teenage years living in Grimsby, a town that has been devastated by industrial change and had huge problems. I do not think that the move away from automaticity and a map, looked at over decades, has perhaps had quite the benefits that we thought it had.
One argument, of course, was for moving to a more selective basis of help because you were more likely to satisfy the criterion of additionality. In the arguments put forward by the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, about equity we have already had a little discussion about additionality—that is, if the Government or a public body give assistance, is it assistance that would not have been given otherwise? That was an important criterion. However, as I say, when I look at the thing in the round, whatever the logic of a more selective approach, I am a bit sceptical as to whether a wholly discretionary and selective approach can work.
There is something to be said for looking at degrees of automaticity and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, said, having a map. He posed the question of how it would be done and what the criteria would be, which is a difficult question. It used to be done on the basis of unemployment combined with travel-to-work areas. I think you would not be able to do it without giving some such weight to unemployment; obviously, it would have to be in a travel-to-work area.
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Given that the Bill talks about guidance and equity, this poses the question of how on earth it is actually to be achieved. I read the evidence given by various academics before Second Reading in the House of Commons. There was an academic from a university in Sheffield—I forget his name; forgive me—who argued strongly for the concept of the map on the grounds that, unless really deprived areas were given a degree of certainty, you would not get the flow of investment into them. This is said in a spirit of inquiry, so forgive me, but there is quite a lot to be said for the concept of a map. We are going to get this White Paper on levelling up but I do not really see how, by just selecting a few towns here rather than a few elsewhere, you can halt this widening gap between the more and less prosperous areas.