Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)

Yes, the noble Lord is right, but this is quite a high level of criteria. There are some financial aspects, but the fact that the authority must not have been subject to a best value notice, an independent review, a statutory inspection or intervention in the previous 18 months covers a wide variety of activity in a strategic authority. There is a rigorous process and a very high bar for those authorities to get over. When we look at the established authorities that I mentioned in relation to the progress on where we are with these now, they have been in place for a long time. Some of them are requesting additional powers to do things that were not traditionally in the framework for mayoral authorities. It is important that that is a high bar for them to get over. As the noble Lord rightly pointed out, having an integrated settlement is an important step forward for those authorities. We hope that this will be a transformational process and that all the combined and combined county authorities will strive to get to that process once they have a mayor in place. We do not want it to be something that slips back. Let us hope that we can set these criteria, setting the bar high, which indicates the direction of travel we have for devolution, and move forward so that our authorities have the powers to do what they need to do locally.