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Baroness Hamwee: My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for repeating the Statement.

One must acknowledge that the Government started their devolution programme seven years ago with great energy. The result last week may have something to do with that energy appearing to have run out. The Deputy Prime Minister referred to devolved government in the city region of London, in Scotland and in Wales. Indeed, although the Welsh would like more powers and although he said that London has a Mayor powerful enough to run a global city, I do not think the Mayor or many members of the Greater London Authority would consider their powers nearly wide enough. They want powers as great as those which were on offer to the north-east.

One of my disappointments about the result is that we will not have the vehicle with which to argue that powers for the current devolved governments might be widened. That is an opportunity we will have to seek elsewhere.

The Deputy Prime Minister talked eloquently about the programme of devolution that is encapsulated in the quangos. That is not devolution, it is decentralisation. The term "co-ordination", which the noble Baroness has just used, is very telling. It is the co-ordination of central government policy at a regional level rather than true devolution.

The government offices have been mentioned. The Government Office for London has grown since devolved government was put in place. Having said that, I hear what the noble Baroness said about devolving powers down to local government. I cannot resist saying that this comes well from the Conservatives. They are comfortable with government from the centre, but I think that all of us—I include the Conservative Benches—need to recognise that devolution will not go away. It will not go away, in part because of the existing regional bodies which are not democratically elected.

Our sadness is that the Government have failed to pursue the regional agenda with sufficient enthusiasm, which must have, inevitably, communicated itself to the electors, along with the lack of powers on offer.

The campaign was inadequate; no message is much easier than that advocating a new body, but even its proponents seemed to have relatively little faith in it. I cannot help drawing comparisons between this campaign and the seven and a half years in which the Government have failed to campaign for the European ideal. We believe that that is wasted time, too.

I have heard from those who have been closer to the north-east campaign than I was able to be that although turnout was indeed respectable—it is,
 
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however, a sad reflection that we think 48 per cent respectable—the postal ballot was regarded as something with which people were fobbed off. They thought that it was not good enough for the other two regions, but it was used for theirs. I remain sceptical about relying on mechanistic measures to deal with turnout.

It is incumbent on all of us who believe in regionalism to apply our minds—and I do not mean that we should dismiss the voters' verdict on this proposal; far from it—to advocating the democratic way. We on these Benches are prepared to explore what we might do to support a good regional delivery over the next few years.

I suspect that in years to come academics and commentators will be looking at what has happened in the past week in the context of attitudes to government generally. The irony is that perhaps the people of the north-east simply did not trust government enough to feel that this was a robust enough proposal for them to support.

Lord Rooker: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, asked me about embarrassment. No—what she misunderstands is that we spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of letting the people decide. I know that that sticks in the craw for the Tories, but that is what we did. The White Paper was called Your Region, Your Choice; what we extolled was letting the people decide, and they have decided that they do not want what is on offer. I freely accept that. But the people decided that, which makes it a more substantial decision.

The noble Baroness asked me a series of questions about whether the Government knew that the Boundary Commission spent X, the Electoral Commission spent Y and our department spent Z. The answer is yes—of course we knew what was being spent. The figures she quotes are correct; they are subject to public examination. There is no problem about that. It is a bit unfair to say that the overall costs should be divided by the one referendum in the north-east, because some of that expenditure covered the soundings for the other two regions, such as the information campaign. But that is a minor point.

Yes, that money could have been spent on other things, but I am not taking any lectures about an increase in the number of teachers and police officers under this Government from the Tory Party, which usually opposes us every time we try to increase services. If you are going to ask the people to make a decision, you have to make the money available. It will cost something. Pro rata, it probably cost less than London, which looked cheap because there was a population of 8 million to divide it between. Running a campaign to enable people to make a decision costs money—it cannot be done for nothing. That is part of getting a good decision; the decision is the people's, so it has to be a good one.
 
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The noble Baroness also asked whether we will make changes to the regional boards and the voluntary regional assemblies. They were set up on a voluntary basis—the Government did not force any of the regions to do this—and, as I have already said, some of them are chaired by Conservatives. The answer to that is no. However, we have tried to learn lessons from the past, when local government was abolished by the Tories—the GLC, the metropolitan counties and the Royal County of Berkshire, I think. They never asked anybody beforehand, they just rammed the measures through Parliament. They thought they knew best, rather than asking the people, which, as I have said, I think is probably a good idea.

With regard to the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, I am not going down the road of the euro. There is a point about decentralisation and devolution. Both terms are used in the Deputy Prime Minister's Statement. It is true that government offices are there to co-ordinate central government policy in the regions. We have tried to make sure that it is more joined-up than it was. I am not saying that it is perfect, because it is not. But there were only three such departments to start with, and something like 10 are now involved at the regional level in the government offices. It is much better when it comes to a more joined-up, seamless policy, but it is the co-ordination of central government policy for the regions. I do not deny that. It means that for the foreseeable future there will be quangos, which is not a dirty word.

The regional assemblies consist of elected councillors, business, trade unions and other bodies doing a good job for their community. We should leave it at that for the time being. They are fairly new bodies anyway in the scale of things, and I am glad that the Deputy Prime Minister's Statement has been greeted with such acclaim as a sensible decision based on last Thursday's vote by the people.

Lord Waddington: My Lords, will the Minister, who is well known for being fair-minded, bring himself to concede that the Deputy Prime Minister was, to put it mildly, foolhardy in pressing ahead with his plans for referenda when his own soundings exercise showed minimal support? I remind the noble Lord that only 323 individuals in the whole of the north-east said that they wanted a referendum.

Will the Minister publish details of the cost of the whole of this dismal exercise? That includes the cost of the White Papers, the preparation and passage of the legislation, the soundings exercise, the local government reviews and the north-east campaign? Is it not a crying shame that there is no machinery whereby the Deputy Prime Minister can be surcharged and made to pay back some of the money that he has squandered on this wholly irresponsible exercise? Will the Government now scrap the whole farce of regional government, including the unelected regional assemblies, and concentrate on real devolution to existing units of local government?

Lord Rooker: My Lords, that is an excessively trivial question from the former Conservative Minister. All
 
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the costs that he has just requested are from public money, which is in the public domain, either in Government statements, Parliamentary Questions, and perhaps even in Select Committee. There is no hidden expenditure. One may disagree with it, but we cannot ask people to make a decision on the cheap or for nothing.

The Lord Bishop of Newcastle: My Lords, the referendum result in the north-east showed that the people of that region were not convinced by the offer on the table. The north-east is a region with a strong identity. We have a strong sense of who we are. It is the land of the northern saints. The people of Northumbria—if I dare call it that—are suspicious of innovations, especially if they think they will not make a significant difference to their lives. As someone who lives and works in that region, I understand that the proposals did not give any significant powers to the Assembly. There was considerable fear that it would become nothing more than an expensive talking shop, which would do little to address some of the deep-seated economic and other problems that the north-east faces.

I live and work in the city of Newcastle, which, as the regional capital of the north-east, is an exciting, vibrant and thriving place. But get past all the visible signs of really good and often culturally led regeneration and one will still find some of the most deprived estates and some of the most deprived former pit villages anywhere in the country. They are places that, in a sense, have lost their raison d'être.

The limited powers that would have been given to the proposed Assembly were not such that convinced the people that they would make a difference. We still have double the national rate of unemployment in the north-east, and there is little sign that that will change in the immediate future.

If the Government are serious about plans for regionalisation, devolution, decentralisation or regional government, I urge them to rethink their policy. They should come back to the people only if they are prepared to give significant power to the people of the regions. I believe that if the people in the north-east had felt that they had been given a real opportunity to exercise some real power to shape their own destiny, the vote might well have been very different.

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