Oral Answers to Questions

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

The Labour party stuffed the House of Lords year after year. More than that, we debated hour after hour how we could take all party leaders out of the equation and bring the British public into it by introducing a smidgeon of democracy in the House of Lords, and what did the Labour party do? Having lectured people for decades about the need to reform the bastion of privilege and patronage, when it had the chance to reform the House of Lords, it voted against it.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

Mr Speaker—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We must hear Mr Opperman. [Interruption.] Order. Hexham must be heard.

[Guy Opperman]

Returning from planet Bolsover, devolution has been one of the successes of the coalition Government, and the city deal for Newcastle and the north-east local enterprise partnership are two of the finest successes in the north-east, but will the Deputy Prime Minister go one step further and consider expanding the city deal to a rural deal so that the most sparsely populated counties, such as mine in Northumberland, get the same opportunities as cities?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s comments and I strongly agree with him. At the end of this Parliament, we will have left England in particular significantly more devolved in how money and powers are allocated than it has been for a very long time. For instance, the devolution of business rates, which is often unremarked upon, is probably the greatest act of fiscal devolution for a very long time. I strongly agree that devolution should be not just an urban phenomenon, and at the heart of the local growth deals lies exactly the promise that city deals in urban areas will be extended to rural areas too.