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Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, I find this argument really quite strange. The LEPs are being dictated. That is the only thing that we are being offered, even though the Secretary of State said in one of his first statements on this, when he was newly appointed, that he saw the rationale for the north-east to retain a RDA. Indeed at the beginning of June, after the election, he appointed the new chair and it was only two or three weeks later that he then decided, no, he was going to impose a different structure. What the Government are saying may be true for the rest of the country—it is for others to argue that—but it really is not true for the north-east. I am trying to get the Minister to understand that very different positions come from the north-east, and that somehow, if the Government are looking for bottom-up proposals, they are going to have to accept that and go back to the drawing-board on the north-east.