Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I support the call for more time for deliberation from the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan of Rogart, and I shall certainly support the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, to refer this Bill to a Select Committee of the House.

A lot of the debate has focused on the grave constitutional issues that the Bill raises, but I should like to focus attention on what I regard as the worst of rushed decisions and bad public policy contained in the Bill. I take as my case study the abolition of the regional development agencies. I accept that there had to be cuts in public spending, but in a very difficult economic environment one would think that the Government would take especial care in refashioning the regional and local levers that they have to generate economic prosperity when they know that their spending decisions will result in loss of jobs. That kind of proper consideration has not taken place.

I freely accept that arrangements for regional economic development were not perfect. I speak as someone with an interest as the chair of Cumbria Vision, a body in a sub-regional partnership in north-west England. We were not granted authority or direct control over the money, and there was too much duplication, but arrangements could have been made to streamline delivery within the existing structures and save money. It would have been a much better course to have had radical reform of the development agencies rather than their outright abolition. So far as one can tell, that option was never seriously considered by the Government; instead, we go for the course of what I would describe as institutional vandalism, which this Bill contains. It is an example of bad governance and bad public policy. My suspicion is that it reflects the long-held prejudices of a former leader of Bradford City Council—the right honourable Eric Pickles, no less—against the more successful parts of the Yorkshire region. When government makes this kind of rushed decision, it is Parliament’s job to try to hold it to account.

There has been no evidence-based decision making in this case. A major study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers before the election showed that the RDAs generated £4 of benefit to the economy for every £1 that they cost. So where is the evidence base for public policy making in this decision? What is more shocking, in a way, is the way in which the Government have decided not to carry out any assessment of the impact of what they propose in the Bill. I have asked the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, on several occasions what the consequences for jobs and growth of the abolition of the regional development agencies are going to be. On 16 September, I got back the wonderful and depressing Answer:

“No such assessment has been made”.—[Official Report, 27/9/10; col. WA 553.]

Yet this dismantling of the economic capacity to promote regional development comes at precisely the moment when, because of the spending review, that capacity to generate private sector growth is needed.

The support infrastructure for economic development is being thrown into chaos. Most of the staff working on it have been put on 90-day redundancy warnings. At the time when the whole energies of government—national, regional and local—ought to be focusing on a priority task of what they can do most to stimulate new jobs, the government machine is going to be bogged down in wrangles about who owns the RDA assets of these bodies being abolished and what will happen to ongoing projects. There will be lots of work for lawyers and accountants but very few jobs created in the economy that will benefit ordinary people.

The RDAs, for all their faults, had built up an institutional capacity to assess projects and manage them effectively. I fear that that project management capability is being permanently lost as a result of the arbitrary decisions being taken in this Bill. Of course, the Government’s answer is that they have a policy; they are setting up something called local economic partnerships. The truth is that most of those are starting off with a blank piece of paper and very little capacity indeed to get anything done. It is a cover for the abolition of the agencies. There will be no central government funding of the economic development resource and my county, Cumbria, faces a very cruel choice between reducing care for the elderly and vulnerable, slashing school transport, or finding the funds to have a properly resourced local economic partnership.

As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, in the public spending debate last week, the crunch facing local government will be especially severe with a 16 per cent cut in its grant in the coming year. There is really no alternative provision being made, which is why I oppose very strongly the institutional vandalism of the Bill. There is still time for the Government to think again and to allow a more rational and evidence-based approach to policy to be adopted. I hope very much that the House will provide the Government with that opportunity.