Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle Upon Tyne, North Tyneside, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Sunderland Combined Authority Order 2014

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Scott of Foscote (CB)]

My Lords, I have a short point about the order, which came in front of the scrutiny Select Committee of which I have the honour of being a member some weeks ago; I made the same point there. It relates to the name of the new combined authority. It will of course be a corporate authority in its own right. It may sue and be sued in its proper name. My recollection of the wording of the order is that it states that the combined authority shall be “known as” and then sets out the name. I said on the previous occasion—I repeat it—that it is an absurd name for a corporate entity. It would be easy for somebody to make a slight slip and get the name wrong, upon which the lawyers might go to town and deny the proposition that action has been properly brought or defended, as the case may be. In the Select Committee, I suggested that a provision be added to the order to say that the new combined authority may sue or be sued as the “north-eastern combined authority”. I do not know whether that has been done; I imagine that it has not, but if it has not it really ought to be.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

Part of the problem is that the new combined authority does not cover the north-east. I am sure that the Minister replying will want to—I am sorry; I thought that the noble Lord from Teesside was replying. However, this problem is where we are and I am very supportive of what we have got.

However, I must be getting old. We have been around these houses time and time again. When I was first elected to Parliament in 1987, my good friend and neighbour, now my noble friend Lord Radice, brought forward a Private Member’s Bill to establish a north-east assembly. Governments have responded to these proposals, but the next Government then want to unpick everything that has been done and we start again. I do not want to bear a grudge today, but the Government have taken us around the same sort of territory yet again. We will do it, because what we in the north-east want more than anything else is for our region and the people living in it to have every possible opportunity. I am sorry that the region has now almost been split in two. It is not a large region, and the region as a whole should be coming together and acting together. However, that was undone in the first years of the coalition, and we are not going to get back to that, even though folk like me get a bit worried about it every now and again.

I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Adonis. He did a magnificent piece of work for the north-east LEP—as it is called, even though it does not include Teesside. He did a really good job of getting people who were fed up with what was being done to them from London around the table to think about the future and what the priorities should be. In his report he identified the key priorities for the region. I looked on it as an exemplary piece of work from a member of the Opposition working in a cross-party way and making sure that the Government knew exactly what was going on. We in the region owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.

I did not have quite the same view of Tyne and Wear met as the noble Lord, Lord Walton. Apart from anything else, the one good, important thing that it did—even if it did nothing else—was to identify and secure large pieces of land for development. I suspect that Nissan would never have come to the north-east if it had not been able to get permission on such a large site with the potential for further development. You needed a large organisation, working across authority boundaries, to come up with those sites. That has been important in our development. I hugely welcome Hitachi coming to Newton Aycliffe with the promise of many more jobs.

As the noble Lord, Lord Wrigglesworth, said, that also really heightens our focus on getting skills. This morning I was with people from Sunderland and the chair of the university council, Paul Callaghan, who was for a short period chair of the regional development agency until, two weeks later, the Government had a different idea about them. He runs a significant global IT company. He has just opened his offices in Australia and is now looking to four other countries; he has them already in America and goodness knows where else. That is a Sunderland-based company that is at the absolute forefront of IT. He chaired a conference a couple of weeks ago on bringing together IT companies in the region, and said that while they do not have problems with premises or local authorities, the one thing they have problems with is getting a suitably skilled and educated workforce. That was from about 70 local companies. This needs addressing, and the combined authority is really going to be pushed to come together to address this across the board. It is a real challenge to our universities. We have good universities in the region; Sunderland has been acknowledged as the university that does most in the country about widening access, and that is very important in our region because we still have the lowest proportion of young people going into higher education.