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Norfolk, Suffolk and Devon (Local Government)

I shall decline that opportunity, as I do not even know what remarks the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport made. All I can reiterate is that officials and Ministers in the Department for Communities and Local Government behaved entirely properly and the letter was not leaked. On the question of releasing advice to Ministers under freedom of information legislation, which the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk raised, we will, of course, be making available relevant material to the courts as part of a duty of candour. We will make all relevant representations available under FOI, but it is right and proper that certain correspondence between Ministers and officials should be withheld to ensure free and frank exchange of views. Section 35 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 allows for that. The assessment of the proposals, which was made in great detail by my right hon. Friends the Minister for Local Government and the Secretary of State, was difficult, because we had seven unitary proposals to consider. We had to measure them against the five criteria: affordability, a broad cross-section of support, strategic leadership, neighbourhood empowerment and value for money for services. Those criteria specify outcomes that should be delivered if the proposed changes to unitary structure are made. Accordingly, our assessments against the criteria involved making prospective judgments about the likelihood of the outcomes being delivered. To cut a long story short—given the fact I have only two minutes left—in the end, Ministers decided that the economic situation in both cities merited going against the five criteria, and that the economic situation in a unitary Exeter and Norwich would be stronger because they had accountable self-governance. We did not change the criteria, as the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton suggested; they were central to our decisions, but there were compelling reasons why we went against them. We also looked at the role that the Total Place initiative, which was launched in April 2009 as part of our operational efficiency programme, could play in bedding down the new unitaries. That initiative takes a whole-area approach to delivering public services in a geographical location and will be very beneficial indeed in the implementation of both the unitary proposals.