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County Durham (Structural Change) Order 2008

I am grateful to the noble Lord for following on on that point. I shall raise the question of elections again. I hope the Committee will forgive me, but because of the length of the last debate and the interruption for the Division, if the Minister replied, I missed it. She has just said again that the order refers to elections taking place this May in order to start work next April with the next set of elections in 2013. That was certainly the understanding of the people in Durham. The county council has written to me to say that the Boundary Committee has raised the possibility of an election in 2010 and it is very concerned that the people of Durham will go to the polls in May and elect someone who will take office in April for 11 months, and that then there will be another set of elections and another a few years after that. It believes that the cost and confusion of having three sets of elections in five years is unacceptable. I would be grateful if the Minister could take that up. That gives me the opportunity to make the more general point that I am not clear about the extent to which the Boundary Committee takes these wider considerations of governance into account when it makes its decisions and who is the final arbiter in all this. If the committee digs its heels in and insists on this happening, does Durham just have to accept it or would the Government be able to intervene if they felt that that was appropriate?