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Local and Regional Government

With the Government's plans for regional assemblies dead in the water, we are left, as my hon. Friend has said, with the centralisation of services from fire control rooms to secondary education and much else besides, plus a regional tier that is unelected, unaccountable and, frankly, extraordinarily bureaucratic and inefficient. Is it not true that the only way to rescue that is to revitalise the process of democratisation of regional and local government by making it closer to the people and allowing them the opportunity to take the decision to have assemblies that are genuinely accountable and local? We are told that the Government have considered that idea for urban areas. I hope that they have. They should certainly be considering it for rural communities that have a genuine sense of identity. What is wrong with the Government's plans is that their regions have no proper identity.