Oral Answers to Questions

Annette Brooke Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

For exactly the same reason that the hon. Lady and her party maintained precisely the same policy in the private rented sector for 13 years. That spectacular act of inconsistency may seem normal to a party that is used to crashing the economy and then claiming that nothing was wrong, but I hope that she will agree that the benefits bill generally and the housing benefits bill in particular need to be brought under some semblance of control. We need to take difficult decisions. We need to provide hard cash, as we are, for hard cases. That is why we have trebled the discretionary housing payment.

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

T6. Given the success of the city deals and the emergence of city regions, what plans does the Deputy Prime Minister have for further decentralisation to include more rural areas?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

That is one of the reasons why I so warmly welcome the appointment of the Minister of State, because he has demonstrated extraordinary personal commitment to this wider agenda of devolution and decentralisation. As my hon. Friend will know, we are examining the case for 20 more city deals, and we will then be seeking to roll out a much more extensive programme of decentralisation on the back of the Heseltine recommendations, which I hope will leave all of our country far more decentralised now than we found it back in 2010.