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Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

I suspect that it might be rejected, but I was pleased to see that new clause 15 refers specifically to resources. My real concern is that powers and responsibilities are easy to hand down, but unfortunately the resources that should go with them never seem to make the full journey. What the Minister was saying was bizarre. She was saying that the Government have an excellent track record on pushing these responsibilities down to regional level and that they want to focus on getting councils to push responsibilities down to communities—I do not have a problem with any of that. My problem is that the bit in the middle is missing: why can regional bodies not have a duty to push down responsibilities to the local authority level too? The Government's approach is strange and the thinking is certainly not joined up, particularly in respect of the group of provisions that we are dealing with today. The issue raised by new clause 15 is a theme to which we will return, if we get the opportunity to do so, because a number of other amendments that are to be considered further down the line deal with the powers of regional development agencies. RDAs still exercise a huge amount of reserve powers, and concerns have been raised about the number of decisions being taken by people who have not been elected and who have power over people who have been elected. It is not just one narrow area that is being raised here, because there are much broader concerns about the priorities of RDAs and where their powers go back to—ultimately they go back to the Secretary of State. I hope that we get the opportunity to return to this issue. The Liberal Democrats have no problem with the very narrow new clauses that the Government have tabled, but we feel that if this really is a Bill about local democracy it is very disappointing that the Government are not prepared to be more wide ranging in the powers that they are explicitly prepared to pass down to the local authority level.