Another broken promise

9:40am Thursday 3rd July 2008

ANOTHER one-year anniversary was reached yesterday, but with rather less fanfare than last week's "celebration"

of Gordon Brown's arrival in No.10.

Five days into his new job, the new Prime Minister unveiled big plans to give the North- East and the other neglected English regions a more powerful voice at Westminster.

Mr Brown promised a monthly Regional Question Time in the Commons, at which the newly-appointed Ministers for the Regions would be held to account.

Nick Brown (Newcastle East and Wallsend) was to be the North-East's "regional champion"

- with Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central) for Yorkshire - also answering written questions and speaking for the Government in Commons debates.

And select committees would be set up for each of the eight English regions, with the power to hold evidence sessions with ministers and quangos and produce reports.

There was even talk of MPs vetting crucial appointments, such as the board members running strategic health authorities (SHAs) and regional development agencies (RDAs).

The shake-up, designed to end the paralysis since the embarrassing collapse of plans for elected regional assemblies, was a key plank of the Prime Minister's constitutional change agenda - or so he said.

What do you mean you have never heard of this Regional Question Time, or even that Nick Brown is Minister for the North-East?

Perhaps that is because - like Gordon Brown's pledges to remove most troops from Iraq and to stop cuddling up to George Bush - we are still waiting for action.

Looking back at my story one year ago, I wrote that the exact make-up of the changes "rests with the Commons modernisation committee".

Believe it or not, it still does.

This modernisation committee - or procrastination committee, as it should be known - launched its inquiry in October and started taking evidence from councillors, SHAs and RDAs. Behind the scenes, there were cries of betrayal amid suggestions that the Government now wanted a "grand committee" for each region, rather than a select committee.

The difference is crucial, because only a select committee can launch investigations, call witnesses and make recommendations to ministers.

A grand committee is a talking shop.

Some MPs feared the Government was going cold because of the extra expense of staffing eight new committees. Others suspected civil servants were neutering a potential threat to their power.

Whatever the truth, there is still no sniff of the procrastination committee's report - with just three weeks to go before MPs pack up for their summer holidays. At this rate, David Cameron will be riding his bike up Downing Street before anything happens.

IT'S stick-my-neck-out time - to predict the event that would, I think, topple the Prime Minister.

Surely, if the Scottish National Party overturns a 13,507 Labour majority in the Glasgow East by-election on July 24, Mr Brown will have to go? The result would be so disastrous that, repeated across the region, it would leave our Labour MPs able to meet somewhere little bigger than a telephone box.

Only John Cummings (Easington), Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West), Fraser Kemp (Houghton and Sunderland South), Kevan Jones (Durham North) and Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) would be left standing.

Yet one Scottish bookie has the SNP as odds-on favourites...

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