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United Kingdom: Treaty of Union

My Lords, I am a Yorkshireman who lives in Lancashire and have never really thought of myself as being English. I am certainly British. The question ““what is English?”” is mixed up, and the Tory party—but not all noble Lords here—are dabbling in a dangerous way with English nationalism. It is something we should deplore and they should think hard about where it is taking them. Like my noble friend Lord Shutt of Greetland, I want to talk about the English regions. The English question is an important one in the light of the new constitutional position, and a lot of the answer has to lie in devolution within England. Two years ago we saw the result of the referendum in the north-east. It was an ill-conceived proposal, and I am not surprised that people voted against it, as I would have been tempted to. The result was announced at about two o’clock in the morning on bonfire day, and everybody thought it was English regionalism put on the bonfire for ever. I am not sure that is the case. My noble friend Lord McNally referred to a book from the Constitution Unit of University College, London. I refer to another by Mark Sandford, The New Governance of the English Regions, which clearly sets out just how much government is already taking place at regional level within England. He wrote: "““Regionalisation has slowly and quietly colonised an increasing range of policy debates, becoming an almost ubiquitous feature of the sub-national governance of England””." He makes an interesting and useful distinction between ““regionalism””—an advocacy or belief in the regional tier of government, particularly a democratic tier—and ““regionalisation””. This latter has been taking place surreptitiously but strongly. The system is still developing and growing. It includes a much stronger central government presence in the regions through the government offices, which started off as vehicles for the delivery of the single regeneration budget and other structural funds and has steadily come to encompass other government departments in the regions. Large numbers of executive agencies and national quangos have strong regional offices to deliver their agendas. I apologise for using ““delivering agendas””— this ““new Labour””-speak catches up with you. Regional development agencies exist in all the regions. More and more planning takes place at regional level, particularly the regional spatial strategies following the last Planning Bill that went through your Lordships’ House a couple of years ago. Structural planning has now been moved up from local government to the regional level in a way that affects us all. Regional economic policy is more and more important, and there are business organisations working at regional level to match this. A plethora of forums, boards and other groups are forming a veritable network of regional policy-making groups, with meetings and a huge amount of internet and personal communications. What ties all these things together is that a great deal of the membership is appointed from above by the Government, and a great deal of the funding comes from above, too. This is how central Government are able to develop and impose their own policy agendas and priorities in a top-down way. I referred to the executive agencies, the regional quangos. There is a huge list of them: Learning and Skills Councils; the Environment Agency; the Arts Council; Sport England; English Heritage; the Countryside Agency and English Nature—which are coming together as Natural England and including the rural development service. The Housing Corporation and English Partnerships are both strong at regional level. We now hear they are to be amalgamated under the rather ludicrous New Labour name of Communities England—I really wish they would not do this. It will take over the whole of the housing market renewal functions, which are certainly important to many parts of the north-west region. There is then the Highways Agency, the strategic health authorities and many more. There are also the strategies and policies that come from these—regional economic strategy, regional spatial strategy, regional transport strategy, regional housing strategy, cultural and waste strategies, strategies for biodiversity, tourism, energy, health, sport and the rural action plan. Of course, because all this exists there have to be integrated regional strategies to try pulling the whole thing together. I do not in anyway criticise the people who are working on this. They are all working hard, doing their best for regions such as the north-west. Yet the democratic accountability is minimal, to put it mildly. In the north of England, some of these organisations come together to form the body called the Northern Way, which seems to have a lot of influence. Nobody quite knows what it is, what it does or how it do it. Every so often people say something is from the Northern Way, and so you have got to do it. If devolution is a process and not an event, the process that is taking place in the English regions is administrative and bureaucratic, and certainly not democratic. It is about strategic co-ordination and planning, a lot of administrative decision-making, a lot of scrutiny, and what the Government call—again I apologise for these words—““the engagement of stakeholders””. The noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, said that people do not want another layer of government, but we have got it. The problem is that the democratic accountability is not there. Of course there are the regional assemblies, what used to be called chambers, which bring in local government. Yet the real purpose of that is to bring in the local government, get it involved in the top-down decisions and get on board. It is not in any way a democratic, accountable system as we would normally know it. Again in the words of Mark Sandford, it is ““mimicking democratic practice””. As a democrat, I want to see real democracy. Democratic regional government has to be revisited. Two years after that miserable failed referendum, it is time to talk seriously again.