Summary
3.The Act extends only to England and Wales.
4.This Act provides the Secretary of State with the power to order referendums on the establishment of elected regional assemblies (“assembly referendums”), in any of the eight English regions outside Greater London. If an assembly referendum is to be held in a region, the Act also requires the Secretary of State to hold “local government referendums” in areas with two tiers of local authorities about the Government’s proposed options for single-tier local government in those areas. The assembly referendum and associated local government referendums in a region are to be held on the same date.
5.Before ordering an assembly referendum, the Act requires the Secretary of State to have received recommendations from the Boundary Committee for England (“the Boundary Committee”) as to the restructuring of local government in the two-tier areas of the region into a single tier. So the Act provides him with the power to direct the Boundary Committee to carry out a local government review of a region to produce such recommendations, if he is considering holding an assembly referendum there.
6.In carrying out a review the Boundary Committee must recommend at least two options for single-tier local government for each part of the region that currently has both a county council and district councils – referred to by the Act as a “county area”. The Act also requires the Secretary of State to seek the Electoral Commission’s advice on such matters as the electoral areas for a regional assembly, following the holding of an assembly referendum. And it creates a new power for funding the existing regional chambers.
7.This Act is the first step towards implementing the proposals in the White Paper Your Region, Your Choice: Revitalising the English Regions (“the White Paper”), which was published on 9 May 2002 and set out how the Government proposes to deliver the Labour Party’s 2001 manifesto commitment that:
““provision should be made for directly elected regional government to go ahead in regions where people decided in a referendum to support it and where predominantly unitary local government is established.””