Lord Shipley (LD)

My Lords, now that we are starting Report, I remind the House that I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, just said. To me, the word “culture” means a lot of things: tourism relates to culture; heritage is part of culture; leisure can be part of culture; and the creative industries are certainly part of culture. I commend the Minister for the decision that the Government have made to extend that list of competences, which is absolutely right. But whatever we say—or whatever the Government say—I suspect that the strategic authorities and mayors will say, “Well, this all interlinks, so let’s join it all together”. That is the role of the strategic authorities. So I welcome all this because it is helpful. All the contributions we had—from the noble Lords, Lord Freyberg, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay and Lord Bassam of Brighton, the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar—have given us a dimension of what we mean in this debate. However, I briefly repeat a note of caution that I raised in Committee: we would not want local authorities to think that somehow all these matters are transferred to the mayoral level. Heritage and culture—all these things—are actually very much a function of existing local government. With those words, I commend the Government for their decision.