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Local and Regional Government

: I am not sure that it is regional government by stealth. It is the bolstering of an unaccountable Government zone, potentially supported by various cronies and placepeople and certainly not accountable to the zone—the south-west is not a region, as far as I am concerned, and I cannot talk about Mercia—that it is supposed to represent. The issue that the hon. Gentleman talks about needs to be drawn out, and the Government need to reflect on it. The debate in this Chamber on 12 July and the paucity of the Government's response to the vacuum in policy demonstrate that the Government appear to be on the nursery slopes of the debate. They are not engaging in the debate: they do not wish to. If they do engage in it, they demonstrate that they are still on the nursery slopes by coming out with the same twaddle about needing economies of scale. One needs only to lift one's eyes beyond the narrow horizons of the Government's view of what Britain should be like to the wider world, and to look at regions and provinces in other countries. Those grown-up countries do not take the view that they need economies of scale in order to deliver services, and they do not take the view that they need to dictate to those regions and provinces what size—