Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

To pursue the matter of the housing market renewal set-up, I must admit that I do not know what the set-up is in other parts of the country. All I know is that in east Lancashire there is an organisation called Elevate, which is a partnership with a board and all sorts of things, which produces sub-regional plans and investment strategies way beyond the narrow question of housing, housing improvement and housing market renewal. It gets involved in all these other different things. If there is to be a local area agreement in east Lancashire, whether it is part of a county one or an east Lancashire one, it is difficult to see how it can be done without the integral involvement of an organisation that is one of the prime sources of public investment in the area. Rightly or wrongly, it has ambitions to be more than a partnership—and I do not know how it will be integrated into the local area agreement system. If the local area agreement is to mean anything at all, will it include all the investment that is going in from central government via Elevate in east Lancashire and the other pathfinders in the other parts of the north of England and the Midlands? Will the investment be channelled through county level through the LAA, or will it continue to be channelled direct to Elevate? That is a crucial question for those of us in east Lancashire who think that we have had a 15-year guarantee of continued investment. There are great worries that through the Lancashire local area agreement it will be diluted round the county. That is just one example of the kind of concerns that people have.