My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young, for reminding us how we got to where we are. He was absolutely right on every single point he made. This is terribly important, and I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, for giving us the amendment. If I have one criticism, it is that I am not sure we are yet at a Bill stage. Although it says “draft legislation” in subsection (1) of the proposed new clause—I understand that—I personally favour a royal commission or something that would actually look at the nature of local government and central government powers.
The noble Lord, Lord Young, has rightly identified the difficulty of devolving and at the same time levelling up, which, as he said, requires a greater element of centralised control. I have said several times over the course of this Bill, and before, that you cannot run England out of London; with 56 million people, we are steadily learning that. One of the reasons we are having these constant changes in the Government’s intentions for Bills is that they do not know either what they want to do—so, in the end, the Civil Service carries on and Ministers carry on trying to move forward.
There are elements in the Bill which are very important in assisting us down the road of greater devolution, and they lie in the combined county authorities. The more we have combined county authorities—much though I do not like the centralisation which can result, because they do not have, for example, a Greater London assembly; they do not have a structure such as that to underpin them—the more we will have a move away from Whitehall.
I do not want to say any more about that; I welcome what the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has proposed in this amendment. I think we should note what the noble Lord, Lord Young, said about the overall situation that we are in, but I hope that the Government and the Minister will see the importance of trying to bring all this together, because inevitably we are going to come back to this on Report anyway, as we look at the first parts of the Bill that, in Committee, we debated many weeks ago. I welcome the amendment and I hope the Government will see that there would be benefit in moving us forward, not just with structures like the combined counties but actually with real devolution of real things.