Clause 17 - Payments to Electoral Commission
Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill
11:45 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I have to press the Under-Secretary further because, apart from the obvious discrepancy between sizes of regions, the actual amount surprises me. He tells us, in effect, that the marginal cost of conducting a review of local government boundaries in the south-east, the population of which is 6.5 million, as compared to the north-east is only £250,000. That draws my attention to the long-time scale—a year, give or take—that he suggested would be required for such a local government review.
How much resource is going into that effort? The sad fact in these times is that we cannot get a lot of resource for £250,000. Why will the Under-Secretary allow the review process to take a year when the Minister for Local Government and the Regions suggested that the availability of resources to the boundary committee was a restriction that had to be taken into account? He said that that was not necessarily a reference to money, but a reference to physical resources. Are we talking about so few people being available that £250,000 of incremental salaries represents the maximum resource that could be deployed in a boundary committee review in, say, the south-east region?