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Building Britain's Future

No, the hon. Lady cannot assume that. The problem with regional policy is that development agencies, which were originally designed to be very business-focused, have become less so over the past few years. They are commanded to affect statistics relating to general well-being, for example, or indeed to certain health objectives, all of which might be worthy in their own right but are not necessarily the proper functions of an economic-based regional agency. The agencies have therefore become funding organisations that hand out a bit of money here and there, all of which might be very useful in their individual ways, but they are not the business-focused organisations that they were originally designed to be. Our policy is therefore not to force their total abolition or anything like that, but to let them re-focus on proper business and economic objectives and for their powers to be devolved where appropriate to county councils or to a combination of county councils. We accept that there must be an economic focus, but I do not believe that that is what they do. For instance, their administration costs, including the cost of personnel, have increased by mammoth percentages over the past 10 years.