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Greater Manchester Combined Authority Order 2011

It is quite clear that we all arrived happy. It is very nice, as a Minister standing in for a colleague, to get such a warm and congenial reception across the board for a statutory instrument. Perhaps I should volunteer to do this more often. It is a very pleasant experience. It has been interesting, too. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, for his involvement in Manchester and for the way in which he welcomed this measure. I acknowledge the work of AGMA in serving as a nursery for this. What is so useful about it is the way in which both AGMA and Whitehall have worked together to make a success of the opportunity that the GMCA represents. I hope that that can be built on. During the debate, various noble Lords have suggested ways in which it can be built on. In many ways, it forms a model and is very much the pioneer. Of course, Manchester would say that it is always the pioneer. I stand corrected on the history. In the hope that we could make the debate run a little faster, I rather recklessly threw away a small portion of my speech on the grounds that it covered a bit of the history. Therefore, I stand corrected, and the record will note the correction made by the noble Lord, Lord Smith. I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for his tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Smith, and the concept of voluntary sector involvement across the Greater Manchester area. In fact, we had a debate in the dinner hour last night on the voluntary sector and the big society bank. The debate highlighted the importance of voluntary and community action. Co-ordinating that with the professional services that local authorities are providing is also very important. As I see it, there are opportunities for a number of functions to work together and form a platform. The authority’s powers are of course limited to transport, economic development and sustainable development, but inevitably that will lead to the co-ordination of planning activities and of the location of services. I hope that the local authorities will find that working together creates not only efficiencies but strategic purpose which they can share. My noble friend Lord Bradshaw, with his enthusiasm for the railways, hit upon the importance of railway development and, in particular, the northern hub. I think that I can reassure him on that point. The protocols to which I referred will cover that. We are also determined that the local enterprise partnership’s involvement will mean that there is proper co-ordination between the investment by Whitehall and the interests of the local community expressed through the local enterprise partnership and the GMCA. My noble friend Lord Tope got quite carried away with the perfection of the order. It is most unusual to hear a noble Lord refer to perfection when you are presenting a statutory instrument, but I thank him for his support. He, too, has great experience of local government and I think that he recognises the potential of this model. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for welcoming the measure. It has taken a while but this was the first combined authority to be established under the legislation. Ministers wanted to consider the case for it and see how it fitted in with the new local enterprise partnership policy, and that, probably above all, accounts for the delay. However, I do not think that it has delayed the way in which those on the ground have been getting together, and I am pleased that that is the case. We do not object at all to local authorities considering how they can operate across boundaries. We hope that co-operation can be, as it has been in this case, on a bottom-up basis. It has worked well here, and where a community of interests exists, I hope that local authorities will not hesitate to work together for the efficiency and economic prosperity of the areas they represent. That is one of the most important things to come out of this development, which I agree has a cross-party basis to it. There are differences of politics, and I would not share all the views of either the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, or the noble Lord, Lord Smith, but I think that we all recognise that in areas of policy such as this the priority should be to give democratically elected councillors the opportunity, through the services and economic opportunities they offer, to improve the lives of the communities they represent. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, asked me about a city mayor. As he will know, there are no powers in the order to elect a mayor. Currently, a mayor can be directly elected only for a single authority and on the basis of a referendum. The noble Lord may have been talking about a primus inter pares. I doubt that that would necessarily be appropriate in this area. Any councillor who was at the same time mayor—as the noble Lord will know, you have to be an elected councillor in order to be an elected mayor—