Lord Fuller (Con)

If I may speak before my Front Bench, of course we welcome the introduction of multi-year settlements. Local authorities have been crying out for that for many years, and I can see that this is part of the path that we are going down. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, identified the importance of incentives—incentives for councils to do the right thing and go the extra mile. Sometimes those incentives help the council, as a promoter or joint enterprise with those people who wish to invest in an area, to make the case to local residents who may not necessarily welcome development. In my nearly 20 years as a council leader, I used the new homes bonus, as well as business rates retention, as powerful examples to otherwise semi-hostile or reluctant residents for us to make those investments. Back in those days—the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, talked about 10 years ago and it must have been all of that—there were really powerful and compelling reasons for our authority, which was a high-growth authority, to pal up with all our neighbours, not all of which were quite so pro-growth as we were. By giving away some of our growth, the pot over the entirety of Norfolk was greater; there was that compelling case for co-operation. But I can tell the Committee that, over subsequent years, particularly more recently—I should stress that I am no longer the council leader doing these negotiations, but they are fresh in my mind—