Lord Shipley (LD)

My Lords, there are three very important amendments here, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. I have two caveats. The first is that it is quite difficult for central government to undertake some of the detailed analysis across the whole of England, with its population of 56 million, and to manage that effectively. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester has raised a slightly different issue, which is about community empowerment. We talk a lot about English devolution, but community empowerment is a much more locally based, neighbourhood concept. The problem that communities will face is that they will have no money to do the work that they would like to do. I am very supportive of anything that can be done to assess how community empowerment is working, but my second caveat is that overview and scrutiny committees are supposed to be doing this very job within their own areas. There are people who have the responsibility of scrutinising what is happening—having an overview of what is happening. It seems to me that we should go to those people first to assess the success of the Bill when it becomes an Act, rather than going straight to central government and expecting it to do it all.