My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It has shown that this is not a party-political issue, but an issue for those of us who believe that you cannot deal with levelling up unless you give real fiscal powers to local areas that require them, to be able to make autonomous decisions in the locality on where to invest and where to make the biggest changes. It is also about stopping this particular view in England that local areas have to look to Westminster to be able to make decisions that many local areas across the vast majority of the western world, whether they are federal or not, can take.
I reiterate what my noble friend Lord Shipley said: we are not a unitary state. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, fiscal devolution exists. We are talking predominantly about 56 million people in England, where fiscal devolution is totally off the table at the moment. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, was quite right to point out that, in itself, the Bill does not bring about fiscal devolution; it brings about departmental decentralisation, with predetermined spending limits being able to be made a little differently at the local level. Everything that the Minister said reinforces that view. Nothing in the Bill significantly gives further fiscal devolution to local areas if they so wish. In fact, she made the same mistake again: she talked about the trail-blazers in the West Midlands and Greater Manchester that have been announced today. As welcome as they are, they are not fiscal devolution. They are the decentralisation of departmental spending decisions; that is the fundamental issue.
This debate, on all sides of the Chamber, has stipulated that the Government are not going far enough and the Bill does not go far enough. We may have to return to this on Report, but at this stage I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.