---

Local Government (Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk)

I am just coming to an explanation of that. We looked at the wider consideration of the merits of each proposal. The suggestion that this is somehow a new or novel procedure is not true. In December 2007, when the then Secretary of State took her statutory decisions, she approached them in the same way. She recognised that it was in principle open to her to conclude—on the basis of the information available to her—that all the criteria were not met, but there was none the less a good reason to implement the proposal, or conversely that all the criteria were met, but the proposal should not be implemented. In the event, she decided that, having regard to all the circumstances then prevailing, it was appropriate at that time to implement the nine proposals that met the criteria and not to implement those proposals that did not meet the criteria. This conclusion was made clear in the statement by the then Minister for Local Government on 5 December 2007, in which he expressly explained that the basis for those decisions was the Secretary of State's assessment of the proposals against the five criteria set out in the original invitation, which had the status of guidance under the 2007 Act, and to which councils should have had regard when making their proposals. This approach to decision making was reflected in the Department's letters of 29 June and 7 December 2009 to councils in the affected areas. These letters made it clear that an assessment against the criteria, while central to our decision making, would not be the sole determinant as to whether a proposal was implemented. In contrast to the unitary proposals that we considered in 2007, we judged that the circumstances today for Exeter and Norwich are very different, as I shall explain. We concluded, when looking at the merits of the proposals in the round, that there were reasons—which we found compelling—why the unitary proposals should, despite not meeting all five criteria, be implemented, given the circumstances. In the case of Norwich, that was not least because when the Total Place approach is factored into consideration of service delivery, the outcomes for services in Norwich and Norfolk could be as good as, if not better than, the outcomes envisaged by the value-for-money services criteria.