---

Local Government (Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk)

That reinforces a point made in an earlier intervention, and I accept that there are many factors that need to be taken into account. Unitaries are proposed—and indeed accepted by the Government—in dubious circumstances, as already mentioned, for two parts of the counties involved, but the third county of Suffolk, which has not yet been much debated, has been offered the possibility of having a county constitutional convention. My hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) said publicly at the beginning of this process that he felt that this would be a way forward for Norfolk. If people across Norfolk had had the opportunity to make proposals with the prospect of gaining some measure of consensus, this might well have been an entirely different exercise.