In that case, I suggest that she is wiping out the possibility of effective devolution over half of shire England. Only if you are a fairly large unitary, possibly in combination with some adjacent districts, can you offer the full range of services, from the very local to the very large. With the two-tier structures that we have—and no one is suggesting a complete overhaul of local government—you cannot do that. Therefore, you have to have appropriate partnerships or appropriate combined authorities for different issues, requiring a different sense of scale. Perhaps you will need a smaller one for local housing, local transport, local skills training and connectivity issues, but a bigger one for the interface between health and social care, for example, and a still bigger one for major transport and planning issues, as with a LEP. If the Minister is saying that you cannot have combined authorities within combined authorities, that strategy of having services appropriate to size and scale of partnership is denied us. Counties are perhaps too large for personal services but probably too small now for strategic services. I sympathise with my noble friend on Yorkshire, for example; we could do the same in East Anglia.
I ask the Minister to reconsider. Whether she uses the phrase “combined authorities within combined authorities” or says that there is an “economic prosperity board” here, a “combined authority” there and a “consortium” somewhere else—I really do not care what the nomenclature is—what matters is that we have the capacity to deliver services at the size and scale appropriate for the services that they are, working in partnership. If she says that we cannot have combined authorities within combined authorities, we can say goodbye to effective devolution for two-tier shire county England.