Baroness Browning
Main Page: Baroness Browning (Conservative - Life peer)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Hanham)
My Lords, there is very little more that I should say, except that I reiterate slightly what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said. In the heat of the moment, we forget where all this started. It all started because the previous Government decided that Norwich and Exeter's bid did not fulfil the criteria for unitary government.
Baroness Browning
Not very much has been said on this side about Exeter. I represented a parliamentary seat around Exeter—the Tiverton and Honiton seat—for 18 years, and I was involved in quite some detail in the earlier stages of the Bill in another place. On the point that my noble friend is making, the five criteria set by the Government originally included a requirement to consult across the county of Devon. When that exercise was completed, the Government refused to publish the results, which does not stand well in terms of them listening to people. Had Exeter become a unitary—I am well aware that people in Exeter, particularly the Labour Party, wanted that to happen—the consequences for the rest of the county of Devon would have been extreme. It would have been a beggar-my-neighbour policy.