I support my noble friend’s amendment. I was not expecting to speak on this but, if I may, I want to challenge the view expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. As far as I can see, it is a view supported very strongly by former Secretaries of State, who think that basically local government should be led by people like them, ideally swishing round in cars and flying off to Japan to make contracts and so on. However, that is not what local government is about; it is about a sense of place.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, seemed to suggest that local government has declined since the 1960s—when I came into local government, and stayed with it right through to the 1990s—because of a lack of local leadership, but I say to the noble Lord that the primary reason local government has declined is that my Government to some extent but his Government notoriously have taken away our powers, our responsibility, our finance and our accountability. They have centralised us in field after field after field, and have tried their best to turn us into postboxes of central government decisions.
I respect the position taken by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in favour of devolution. However, if his answer is that leading local authorities should be strong people—mainly male, I guess, but not necessarily so—who are just like Secretaries of State so that in local government we get a mirror image of what is happening in central government, then I say as someone who has lived my life in and trained in local government that that is not the route that I want to follow. A sense of place means collaborative, consensual arrangements that local people want and support. If they choose to have a mayor, that is fine by me, but if that does not fit their sense of place then it should not be imposed on them by the swagger factor.