Clause 28 - Expenditure
Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill
9:30 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I return to a debate that began when we were considering clause 17 and which you directed, Mr. Butterfill, should be completed when we arrived at clause 28. I must confess that at the time I did not realise that you were doing me a huge favour. I have taken the opportunity in the intervening period to consider much more carefully the issues that were touched on in the few exchanges that we had before you closed the debate, and have realised that the position is even more bizarre than I had understood.
The Under-Secretary told the Committee that the estimate for the cost of boundary committee reviews ranged from £750,000 to £1 million; that is, that the cost of the review for the smallest region would be 75 per cent. of the cost for the largest region. He assured the Committee that that was based on the boundary committee's estimates for carrying out reviews in all the regions of England.
I had in my mind that we were talking about the north-east region, with a population of 2.5 million and the south-east region with a population of 8 million. However, when I looked again, I saw that the ratios were yet more dramatic because the costs of the boundary committee reviews will be driven not so much by a region's population as by the number of two-tier authorities that need to be re-organised in that region. As the Under-Secretary well knows, the Yorkshire and Humber region has one county and nine district councils; the south-east region has seven county and 55 district councils.
The Under-Secretary is asking us to believe that a boundary review in the Yorkshire and Humber region, with nine districts, will cost £750,000 and that one in
the south-east region, with 55 districts, will cost £1 million. Either he has got it wrong—I suspect that he has, and that the question considered by the boundary committee has been how much the first batch, which presumably will not include the south-east region, will cost—or this raises a very serious issue of public expenditure. If it is the latter, and the Under-Secretary is really saying that a review will cost about 10 times as much in the Yorkshire and Humber region as in the south-east region, I will want to refer that to the Public Accounts Committee for consideration. Although the expenditure has not yet been incurred, surely when Members of Parliament see such an apparently outrageous misuse of public money, it is appropriate that they draw it to the attention of the proper authorities before, rather than after, that money is spent.