My Lords, I thoroughly agree with my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe about this. But this is not a fire-and-forget piece of legislation; in the levelling-up part, it has its own metrics. The metrics are all there in the White Paper.
I want to add two requests. The first is that this is not good enough: we are two general elections away from 2030, when it is intended that these metrics are reported. That is too far away. We need a sense of what is being done, how it is being achieved and the progress being made.
Secondly, we have talked a number of times about the advisory council on levelling up. We now know that it has a work plan and some of the subjects that it will address. Some will be very useful—for example, understanding precisely what the Government’s intentions are for investment zones would be useful to people in many parts of the country.
In place of Andy Haldane giving interviews in which he says, “It’s all a mixed bag”, we actually want some of these subjects to be reported by the advisory council, transparently and openly. It is important that Ministers engage with the advisory councils, but they should not be purely internal. As the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, rightly said, they should enable those charged with levelling up across the country to see what the Government are doing, why they are doing it and what progress is being achieved. I hope that my noble friend will say more about the transparency of the advisory council.