North East Mayoral Combined Authority (Establishment and Functions) Order 2024

Lord Beith Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Grand Committee

I reiterate my support for this order and hope that the election and its aftermath will be highly successful for the north-east region.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, resident as she is of the constituency I used to represent. She is a tireless supporter of the north-east. I particularly endorse her point that the creative industry and cultural work have a very important place in the economic successes of the region, and could much more into the future. Of course, we are both veterans of the referendum to which she referred, when the Labour Party sought to introduce a measure of devolution. In my view, it was a very underpowered one, which did not help to achieve success in the referendum. It was opposed tooth and nail by the Conservative Party, so it is a slightly strange experience to be discussing a scheme of devolution put forward by the Conservative Government. This has the same problem of being underpowered in some important respects.

I tend to view this from the standpoint of the more rural and remote parts of the region, partly because of where I live, in Berwick-on-Tweed, and partly because we are so outnumbered and outvoted in the region as a whole. I tend to look at what is proposed here as, in some respects, an enlargement of local government or a more distant local government, which we have already seen with the amalgamation of authorities—things are decided far away, not locally to us, and dominated by an urban area that is 60 miles away and obviously far more numerous in population. In fact, many parts of the area we are discussing today are 120 miles from where I live.

When we look at functions, we must see that there are dangers and limitations in what is proposed in this order. For example, if you take transport, which the Minister rightly referred to, there are quite a lot of things that cannot be done under this order. The continuing failure to deal with the A1—a subject of constant promises and abandonment of promises by successive Governments—is outside the remit of the authorities created by the order. The slashing of train services from Berwick—I have just come directly from a meeting with a Minister about the halving of train services from Berwick-on-Tweed—will be outside the remit of the bodies we are discussing in this order. There is more scope for the provisions in the order to be used for the problems of operating rural bus services, but I am worried that they will be outnumbered by the need to deal with the urban bus problems.

The Minister made reference to skills and adult education, and she said this was tailored to the needs of the area. Well, there is no college of further or adult education in north Northumberland at all, and those who seek further or adult education find themselves involved in 50-mile or 60-mile journeys each way, if they are able to persevere with getting the qualifications they need for their work. All we have is one or two outstations of a college 50 miles away, dealing with hairdressing, the construction industry and one or two other things like that. But the absence of any centralised institution that is even partly centred locally seriously limits people becoming equipped to do jobs or change jobs, which is one of the functions that adult education seeks to meet.

Clearly, I hope that this new authority will address these and other concerns, but I fear that it does not have the resources to do that. The figures the Minister produced sound very good until you work out over how many years they are to be spent, and recognise that the cost of a small piece of new road soon eats up a large part of the sort of figure she cited.

I worry that we will be constantly outnumbered and outvoted when rural and remote area needs are considered. I worry that this is a concentration of power in one person. I supported a regional assembly, and I would have supported a trimmed-down regional assembly on a slightly smaller scale if it had the powers. With the powers, I will accept almost any system that is genuinely democratic. But I am worried by a heavy concentration of power in one person, who is elected because of legislation we have already passed by the first-past-the-post system, which again limits the influence of the remoter and minority areas. I have hopes for what will be done, but I have anxieties about some of the problems inherent in what we are agreeing today.