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Regeneration

I can bring the hon. Lady right up to date on this. There have been 176 bids in relation to the first 2 rounds, and conditional allocations of £1.4 billion. She may well be right to say that not all the money has been paid out. Just as it takes time, as she argued earlier, to do regeneration, it also takes time, as she well knows, to spend money even on very worthwhile causes. None the less, the purpose of the regional growth fund is of course to try to rebalance the economy. If people do not accept, as the Government do, that we have to fundamentally shift and change the dynamics of the economy to make areas that have been regenerated continue to work in the future, perhaps it is difficult for them to understand why we think that the regional growth fund is essential. It does not stop there, however. We have talked about the £35 million doubled up to £70 million of public money that has gone into bringing the disastrous HMR programme to an end. We are in the process of legislating to localise business rates. That is an enormous potential benefit for towns, cities and areas across the country. It will not, as it has sometimes been characterised, disadvantage deprived areas of the country. In preparation for the debate, I got hold of this list. We can look back at previous changes that would have occurred if business rates had been localised and look at the additional power that the measure will therefore give local areas. It is interesting to note that Liverpool would have had a 37.2% change in its business rates from 2005-06 to 2009-10. If it were able to keep that money, it would be 37% better off than under the old system, whereby all the money is centralised and then doled out. The figure is 38.2% for Knowsley, 36.3% for South Tyneside, 31.1% for Manchester, 26.9% for Sunderland, 26.8% for Sefton, 26% for Doncaster, 25.1% for Middlesbrough. The point that I am trying to make with those figures, very graphically, is that another policy that will provide the tools to local areas to enable them to regenerate in a manner appropriate to them is the localisation of business rates. It is absolutely critical to regeneration and, for some reason, entirely overlooked in the response.