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Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

The hon. Gentleman has perhaps anticipated some of the comments that I was going to make about the level at which various local government services fall, which the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon referred to. In an ideal world for local government, we would get right the point at which services, arrangements and activities fall in the sub-national spectrum. It is fair to say that regardless of Government, for many years we in this country have made a real pig's ear of working out where in sub-national government things should be dealt with. The truth of the matter is that local government, as we call it, is not just a number of local authorities, the boundaries of which have been determined by the local government boundary committee or, in the case of county councils, largely by the Plantagenets. Since the county boundaries were put in place, the black death and the industrial revolution have been and gone, and local government has come into its modern form. Aldermen have come and gone, and still we have counties based on the local government boundaries of 1383 or similar. The reality of sub-national government and what people want from their local services is that those services work at different levels of sub-national determination. Sometimes they work within the local government boundaries as they are now, and those boundaries themselves appear to be rather centralising in the case of some services. Sometimes what we call local government services fall at neighbourhood level and sometimes into local government areas as we have currently decided them. Sometimes they fall at sub-regional level and sometimes at regional level. The issue to consider is not just the level at which services fall but at what point they should be accountable. Should we determine that at each level of sub-national services, there should be complete representative accountability for them? I have personally considered for a long time that a number of services and functions properly fall at regional level. The question is whether we have got the delineation of the regions right. I believe that the regions of England are based on those originally devised by a Conservative Prime Minister to relate to regional development in the European Union, after which they were declared to be "the regions". The idea that democracy might conceivably be based on those regions is perhaps a problem for regional development.