Localism Bill

I shall also speak to Amendment 133ZB and I shall be very brief, because a number of the issues that I would have raised were raised earlier in amendments on this section. It is interesting that in this chapter, which has four pages, the Secretary of State is mentioned 19 times. It seems very odd that in a Bill about localism, the Secretary of State has to have 19 separate possible roles. My amendment is simply about how the timing and consideration of expressions of interest could be progressed. Put simply, relevant authorities would have to specify when these would be. It seems to me that local government can be trusted to do more things for itself. Given that councils will have a power of general competence under this Bill, we might consider allowing them to prove that they are generally competent to do things for themselves and do not need the constant intervention of the Secretary of State in a whole range of ways which do not support the principle of localism. There is a key principle here: this is an example of where the powers of the Secretary of State could simply be written out of the Bill and local authorities could be given a responsibility for defining when expressions of interest could come in and when the authority would then consider them. As a consequence, the role of the Secretary of State and a considerable number of the 19 separate roles of the Secretary of State in this four-page chapter could be reduced.