Campaigners were hoping the Government would support a regional assembly in Yorkshire in today's Queen's Speech. But do we really need one? We seek out

views for and against.

YES ...says Mark Hill, of the Campaign For Yorkshire and Co-ordinator of the Yorkshire Green Party :

DECISION-making in this country is too remote. We have just decided at the General Election who is going to govern the country, but the truth is that most of the decisions taken over the next five years will be unaccountable to us.

The government departments taking vital decisions for people here in Yorkshire are all in London.

Look, for example, at efforts to promote business in Yorkshire, from the rural Dales to industrial Sheffield. All these decisions are taken by the Department of Trade and Industry in Victoria Street.

Decisions about farming from the Dales to the Wolds are made by the Department for the Environment, Food and the Regions in Whitehall. Transport issues are decided by the Ministry of Transport, Marsham Street.

These departments are all in London - 200 miles away.

Do they really understand the communities their decisions affect?

There are more and more issues coming up which are of an 'intermediate' nature between local and national government - the regeneration of depressed areas, funding and efficiency of public transport, large scale planning issues and promotion of local businesses.

People need to have more of a say about how the money for these public services is spent on their behalf.

We also need more regional leadership - people with a democratic remit to speak up for Yorkshire, to demand action to redress the North/South divide, to preserve independent food manufacture and distribution, to control the privatised regional utilities, to support Yorkshire's tourist trade and to reverse the move of people down south.

Parish, district and county councils have a vital role to play in local democracy, but they have not got sufficient control over broader policies.

That's not to talk them down. They are just not large enough.

To describe a regional assembly as an extra wasteful tier of government is to do down the democratic process. We already have a weight of bureaucracy working at regional level in the form of the various unelected quangos.

If that work fell within the remit of a single, elected regional authority, instead of all those organisations and quangos liaising with each-other at various levels in various unsystematic ways, it could all be more effective and more accountable at no extra cost.

The centre of political gravity is moving out from London.

Many Yorkshire people are looking jealously at what they already have in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and London.

We are due our own assembly for Yorkshire.

I would like to see a referendum on whether we should have a democratically elected regional assembly held within the lifetime of this parliament.

The time is right. Tony Blair should make the time now.

NO ...says Anne McIntosh, Conservative MP for the Vale Of York:

I REMAIN very much opposed to the idea of a regional assembly. I did take soundings from constituents on the doorstep during the General Election campaign and I did not meet one constituent who was in favour of what would be another layer of bureaucracy. There is no grassroots support for it at all.

You have to ask what would the role of any new assembly be - and who would the electorate be? Certainly a regional assembly would not provide more nurses, more doctors, more public services, smaller class sizes. These are the issues that people want to have addressed, but a regional assembly would actually divert money away from these crucial areas.

Some people argue it would address an imbalance of power between London and the regions, and give local people more of a voice. That is a load of rubbish. I am elected as the local representative for the people of the Vale of York. I'm there to represent their views at the national level. That's what an MP is for.

What it would do is diminish the power that local people on parish councils, district councils and county councils have to make decisions. Already, we have a situation where decisions on economic development policy are being taken by the unelected Regional Development Agency, not the county council.

Were they to extend that to other regional policies, the powers of the county, district and parish councils would be further diminished - as also would the powers of MPs at Westminster. So I would see a regional assembly as a further deterioration of democracy.

A regional assembly would be a form of federalism, and I don't think federalism works in this country. Look at what happened during the recent floods. There was a decision not to spend more money on vital flood defences for North Yorkshire that was taken by the regional flood defence committee. Some areas of South Yorkshire have got their flood defences already paid for. Then they vote to stop ours being approved. The only person who spoke up in favour of the required spending was the local North Yorkshire county council representative, Peter Sowray. He was outvoted.

North Yorkshire is entirely different from East Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire.

We have different priorities and different needs. What happened with the flood defences is an example of what happens when those different needs come into conflict. That's why federalism and regionalism have been proved not to work.

I do not see that there is a need for a regional assembly - and I certainly don't see that there is a demand for it among the electorate.

Updated: 10:56 Wednesday, June 20, 2001