Grand Committee

Monday 9th February 2026 Grand Committee

Monday 9 February 2026

Arrangement of Business

Monday 9th February 2026 Grand Committee

Announcement

15:45

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Scott of Needham Market) (LD)]

My Lords, if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, this Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and resume after 10 minutes. Just to remind noble Lords, the previous Grand Committee on the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill adjourned during the middle of the debate on Amendment 158, so we will resume with that. Noble Lords may speak in this group only if they were present at the start of the debate on the group last time.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Committee stage
Monday 9th February 2026 Grand Committee

Committee (6th Day)

Relevant documents: 45th Report from the Delegated Powers Committee, 16th Report from the Constitution Committee

15:45

Clause 44: Health improvement and health inequalities duty

Debate on Amendment 158 resumed.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I was waiting for the Minister to reply before I summed up.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Scott of Needham Market) (LD)]

If I can help the noble Lord, at this point I think that we are expecting the two Opposition Front-Benchers to speak and then the Minister.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak on a number of amendments in this group that relate to health. They illustrate just how far this Bill stretches and the breadth of its potential impact on matters of public interest. Health is now firmly brought to the fore. Clause 44 inserts new provisions into existing legislation to place a duty on all combined authorities and combined county authorities to have regard to the need to improve the health of the people in their areas and to reduce health inequalities when they exercise their functions. The same duty is applied to mayors of mayoral combined authorities and mayoral combined county authorities.

This represents a welcome shift. It means that health and health inequalities are no longer seen as an issue solely for the NHS or public health bodies, but I hope that the Department of Health and Social Care is aware of these proposals. If it is not and is not fully engaged, we will not get too far. Instead they must be taken into account across the full range of decisions made by combined authorities, whether they relate to transport, housing, planning, skills or economic development. That is an important change, because many of the factors that shape health outcomes sit well beyond the health system itself.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for her Amendment 159, which seeks to broaden the list of health determinants and health outcomes to be considered as part of this new duty. The concerns that she raises are understandable and I am sympathetic to the desire to reflect the full complexity of what really drives health inequality. However, I ask the Minister whether she believes that combined authorities will have both the capacity and the practical power and resources to deliver against such an expanded list. In the Government’s view, is this expansion feasible? While ambition is welcome, we must ensure that any duty placed on local institutions is deliverable and affordable, rather than well intentioned and unrealistic.

In opening this group, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, spoke about public access to fitness, sport and recreational facilities. These issues are clearly important and, as always, he made a compelling case for the role that access to physical activity plays in improving health outcomes. Many noble Lords will agree with the principles that he set out. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister whether she believes that placing such matters in the Bill is either necessary or proportionate.

The amendments to Clause 44 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, seek to align the list of health determinants more closely with academic research. The points that she raises are thoughtful and well made. I would be grateful if the Government could explain how the existing list of health determinants was arrived at. Who decided what should be included and by what process? Was there any consultation and were academic experts involved? Understanding how this list was developed is important so that we have confidence that it is robust and evidence based. In particular, I found the reference to “educational opportunities and attainment” in Amendment 161A especially interesting. Education is widely recognised as a key driver of long-term health outcomes and I will listen carefully to what the noble Baroness has to say on this matter.

I also note the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, particularly those that relate to climate and pollution. These amendments raise issues that are often cited as having implications for public health. However, they also serve to underline a broader issue that runs through this group. The difficulty is not simply whether individual factors can be linked to health outcomes but how far such a list should extend. If climate-related risks and pollution are included, should the same apply to noise pollution, as raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman? What about resilience to heat waves, which was also raised in this group? Each of these can be argued to have relevance but, taken together, they illustrate the challenge of scope. At some point a judgment must be made on where the boundary of general health determinants is drawn. That judgment is important for maintaining clarity and focus within the Bill and ensuring that the resulting duties are workable.

This returns me to the underlying question raised by the group. Who determined which health determinants should be included and on what criteria? What evidence or metrics were used to reach these conclusions? Without greater clarity on this point, it is difficult to assess whether the approach taken is sufficiently defined and proportionate. In that context, will the Government commit today to publishing an explanation as to how these decisions were reached? In particular, will the Minister set out who was consulted in the development of this list, what evidence was relied on and what criteria were used to determine inclusion or exclusion? Providing that clarity would assist the Committee in understanding the rationale behind the approach taken and assessing whether the duty, as framed, is appropriately defined and justified.

Before I sit down, I go back to my plea in the last group. As I have said before, if any of this is going to work, the Department of Health and Social Care will have to be involved. It will also have to work with local government and, by working with it, be willing to devolve power and moneys locally. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have submitted amendments on health improvement, which is an important topic. I am pleased that we will have this duty on local authorities at mayoral combined authority and combined county authority level. As other noble Lords have said, it is an important step forward.

The Government are committed to building a fairer Britain. To do that, we must ensure that people can live well for longer and spend less time in ill health. Our response, our reimagined NHS, will be designed to tackle inequalities in both access and outcomes, as well as to give everyone, no matter who they are or where they come from, the means to engage with the NHS on their terms.

With our colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care, we remain committed to reducing the gap between the richest and poorest in healthy life expectancy—an ambitious commitment that shows that the Government are serious about tackling health inequalities and addressing the social determinants of health. We support NHS England’s Core20PLUS5 approach, which targets action to reduce health inequalities in the most deprived 20% of the population and improve outcomes for the groups that experience the worst access, experience and outcomes in the NHS. As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said, tackling health inequalities requires a whole-government effort, as does making sure that the best facilities are available across the country. That is why we are working across departments, from housing and education to employment and welfare, to make sure that health is built into all policies and runs as a golden thread through everything taking place.

I now come to the specific amendments, a number of which would make additions to the list of general health determinants. Before I turn to the individual amendments, I note that the scope and definition of “general health determinants” in the Bill has been intentionally and carefully crafted to be broad and flexible. I will write to noble Lords in answer to the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, about how those determinants have been drawn up and what consultations have been done on them.

The Bill lists some of the broad and interconnected factors that shape health, life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. Combined authorities, combined county authorities and mayors can directly impact these factors, such as standards of housing, employment prospects and environmental factors, through the delivery of their wider functions. Given the importance of these factors as inarguable determinants of health, the Bill strengthens the duty and adds clarity by listing them explicitly. Although some examples are provided, it is not our intention to set out a definitive list—we feel that that would be constraining. We recognise that combined authorities and combined county authorities are experts in their local areas and are therefore best placed to decide how to determine and act on the factors most relevant to improving health and reducing health inequalities in their own areas.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for tabling Amendment 158 and, as ever, for championing the importance of public access to fitness, sport and recreational facilities. This amendment would require combined authorities to consider the level of public access to fitness, sport and recreational facilities when exercising their functions. The general health determinants already include matters affecting lifestyle, access to services and environmental factors, and explicitly allow for consideration of any other matters that affect life expectancy or the general state of health. I am not being pedantic—nobody loves a clever clogs—but, to be specific and clear, I note that the amendment would apply only to combined authorities and not to combined county authorities, thereby creating inconsistency in how the duty operates. I apologise that I shall have to point that out with a number of these amendments, but it is important to clarify that.

I now turn to Amendments 159 and 167 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. I appreciate that her intention is that the health improvement and health inequalities duty, and the definition of general health determinants within the duty, are broad and impactful. A driving purpose behind the health improvement and health inequalities duty is to support combined authorities and combined county authorities in reducing health inequalities and adopting a “health in all policies” approach. The effect the amendments would have is unclear because of the potential interactions with both “health inequalities” and “general health determinants” in Clause 44.

As I mentioned, the Bill has been drafted to provide a broad and flexible definition of “health inequalities” to ensure that differences in aspects such as life expectancy, general health, mental health and disabilities can all be captured in its scope. This allows combined authorities, combined county authorities and mayors to focus on the broad underlying causes of health inequalities and to tailor their responses to key local issues. Similarly, the framing of “life expectancy” or “general state of health” is intentionally broad and does not exclude mental health, disability or healthy life expectancy, all of which are legitimate dimensions of what one might regard as health and are reflected in mainstream methods for describing health states or health impacts.

I turn now to the large group of amendments: Amendments 159B, 160A, 161A, 163A, 163B, 165ZA, 165B, 167A, 167B, 167C, 167D, 167E, 167F and 167G. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, for her diligence in tabling them and recognise her assured intention to ensure that the definition of general health determinants reflects academic research and is impactful.

As drafted, the list of general health determinants already requires combined authorities and combined county authorities to have regard to environmental factors, employment prospects, earning capacity and access to public services, and explicitly allows for consideration of any other matters that affect life expectancy or the general state of health. Health inequalities are already defined within the duty as inequalities between people of different descriptions living in an area, and it is therefore not necessary to restate this within the general health determinants.

16:00

A driving purpose behind the health improvement and health inequalities duty is to promote a focus by combined authorities and combined county authorities on reducing health inequalities and the adoption of the “health in all policies” approach that I have already mentioned. Combined authorities and combined county authorities are experts in their local areas; they are best placed to decide how to consider general health determinants for their communities. The Bill, as currently drafted, allows them to do this without being restrictive. There is clearly a balance to strike, and the Bill illustrates a number of important health determinants to give clarity to our intent and indicate areas where authorities are likely to be able to act.

Setting out large numbers of individual determinants runs the risk of restricting flexibility, because it can be seen as implying that the specific determinants to be considered are only those which are set out in detail in the Bill. We must strike a balance here between having an exhaustive list, which people feel they cannot go beyond, and a more general determination, which is the way we have chosen to go, so that people can tailor it to their local needs.

I am glad that we are aligned on the overall merits of the new duty, but I am concerned that the suite of amendments proposed would risk opening the door to an ever-expanding list, which would, in turn, undermine the outcomes-focused and locally responsive nature of the duty. Over time, that might impede the creativity and ambition for local areas to tackle their own needs.

I turn now to Amendment 160. The Government recognise the importance of warm, affordable and sustainable energy in supporting good health and reducing health inequalities. As with the previous group of amendments, setting out many individual factors in the definition of general health determinants risks narrowing that flexibility and, as I said, opening the door to an ever-expanding list.

Of course, we recognise that too many households in England cannot afford to heat their homes at a reasonable cost, and that this may lead to cold homes, as well as damp and mould, which affects the health of residents. The Government recently set out, in the new Fuel Poverty Strategy for England, our approach to lift 1 million households out of fuel poverty, alongside the warm homes plan. Our plans to bring forward regulations in the rental sector implement the warm homes plan and make energy more affordable for low-income households; it will deliver a step change in progress to alleviate fuel poverty. Our actions will upgrade the nation’s homes, help families to cut their energy bills and tackle fuel poverty. Ultimately, the Government have been clear that the answers to the challenges around energy security, affordability and sustainability all point in the same direction—to clean, low-carbon energy.

In December 2024, we launched our Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, which set out a detailed plan for achieving the target of clean power by 2030. Our clean power target means transitioning to an electricity system that produces at least 95% of Great Britain’s electricity generation from clean, low-carbon sources by that date, so that clean energy could be supplied to all consumers through our national electricity networks.

I turn now to Amendment 161, also in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, which highlights the importance of exposure to water pollution and resilience to flooding and heatwaves. I answer this question when it has been raining for about 50 days—it feels like it has—so it is a pertinent question. The Government fully recognise these environmental factors in shaping health outcomes and health inequalities. Clause 44 already includes environmental factors and explicitly allows for consideration of any other matters that affect life expectancy or the general state of health.

For clarification, this amendment is another one that would only apply to combined authorities, not to combined county authorities, thereby creating inconsistency in how the duty operates.

Amendment 163 highlights the importance of communities being able to meaningfully shape local decisions that impact their health and well-being. This Government recognise the importance of ensuring that local decisions reflect the needs of communities and support better health outcomes. The definition of “general health determinants” already includes matters of personal behaviour and lifestyle and explicitly allows for consideration of any other matters that affect life expectancy or the general state of health. Furthermore, the Bill already introduces a new requirement on all local authorities to make appropriate arrangements for effective governance of any neighbourhood area under Clause 60. This provision will strengthen the ability of local people to shape decisions made by their local authorities. Adding Amendment 163 to the Bill would risk duplication between the duties of local and combined authorities. This ambiguity would make it harder for local authorities to engage coherently with their communities on the issues that matter to them.

I turn to Amendments 164 and 165 on the importance of diet and nutrition, including concerns about the consumption of ultra-processed foods. The Government encourage healthy eating and exercise, and our 10-year health plan clearly sets out a mission to tackle obesity and encourage healthier diets as part of our shift from sickness to prevention. The definition of “general health determinants” already includes matters of personal behaviour and allows for consideration of any other matters that affect life expectancy or the general state of health. More broadly, the Government are taking decisive action to tackle the obesity crisis, including banning the sale of energy drinks for under-16s, cracking down on junk food advertising, extending the soft drinks industry levy to sugary milk-based drinks and making it mandatory for large food businesses to meet targets and report on the sale of healthy foods.

I turn to Amendment 165A. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath for this amendment and recognise his intention to ensure that combined authorities and combined county authorities have regard to wheelchair and community equipment provision as they consider how to address health inequalities. I recognise all the issues that he and the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, raised the other day. I just say anecdotally to my noble friend that when my father was very ill, the most efficient part of the whole social care system, in my county, was the aids and adaptation process. It would be lovely if that were the case everywhere, and I recognise my noble friend’s point.

Local authorities in England already have a statutory duty under various legislation, including the Care Act 2014 and the Children and Families Act 2014, to make arrangements for the provision of disability aids and community equipment to meet the assessed eligible needs of individuals who are resident in their area. In terms of delivery, NHS England supports integrated care boards and wheelchair providers to reduce regional variation in the quality and provision of NHS wheelchairs and to reduce delays in people receiving timely intervention and wheelchair equipment.

I appreciate that my noble friend’s concern, and that of the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, was about the time it takes to provide this equipment, and I will take that back to colleagues in MHCLG and in DHSC to find out what data is available about variations around the country in relation to that service. Again, the scope of “general health determinants” within the Bill should explicitly allow for consideration of other matters that affect life expectancy or the general state of health, which should mean that access to wheelchairs or community equipment provision can come under that where necessary.

Amendment 166 would require combined authorities to prepare and publish a health inequalities strategy setting out how they will operationalise the duty under new Section 107ZB. We want the need to improve health and reduce inequalities to be embedded in the work of these authorities. There is nothing to prevent local partners agreeing that they wish to align around an area-wide approach or strategy, and a shared sense of local ambition would be important in such activity. Of course, local areas may have different local priorities, and we must allow that flexibility. We do not want to add bureaucratic burdens by, in essence, setting detailed process requirements. The Government will pay close attention to how the new duty embeds in the work of combined authorities to understand the impact it is having over time, including the different ways in which authorities respond to it.

Amendment 168 relates to the advertisement consent regime. The purpose of the advertisement control regime is not to control the content of advertisements. That is dealt with through a separate regulatory system overseen by the Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA already has rules on adverts for products such as alcohol, gambling and food high in fat, sugar or salt. They must not target children, which means they must not be placed near schools or similar areas. All adverts must be socially responsible, and the content of alcohol and gambling adverts is additionally restricted. They must not harm or exploit children or vulnerable people, for example by presenting their products as a solution to difficulties or linking them with social success.

The Government have already implemented the manifesto commitment on robust advertising restrictions for less healthy food and drink. This includes a 9 pm watershed on television and a 24-hour restriction on paid-for advertising online, which took legal effect on 5 January. The restrictions are expected to remove up to 7.2 billion calories from UK children’s diets per year and deliver around £2 billion in health benefits. I therefore do not think it is necessary, or indeed sensible, to create an overlap between two regulatory systems where at present there is a clear distinction.

Furthermore, on mayors exercising these powers, the Government are clear that their focus should be on strategic planning matters, which will deliver the growth their areas need most. Therefore, although I understand what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is trying to achieve, I think that the current scope of the advertisement consent regime remains appropriate.

Amendment 169 is on allotments and community gardening. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for raising this important issue of community access to green space. Indeed, we had many discussions on similar topics during the passage of the levelling-up Bill. I reiterate that the Government recognise the importance of allotments and the immense contribution they make to the health, well-being and spirit of communities.

However, we cannot accept this amendment for several reasons. First, local authorities already have clear statutory duties regarding allotments. District, unitary and parish councils have a duty to provide allotments where there is sufficient demand and acquire land if necessary. They also benefit from long-standing protections. Statutory allotment land cannot be disposed of without the consent of the Secretary of State. Tenants also receive security of tenure and compensation rights under the 1922 and 1950 Acts. These duties form a comprehensive legal framework for the provision and protection of allotments at the local authority level. Secondly, the amendment would place operational burdens on combined authorities—bodies that do not own or manage allotments—and the publishing requirements would duplicate duties that sit with local authorities. Thirdly, combined authorities are intended to operate at a strategic level, not to take on detailed service-level responsibilities already covered by existing legislation. Finally, the amendment would create an unfunded new burden on combined authorities, against our commitment to ensure that new devolved responsibilities remain deliverable and do not impose avoidable costs or duplicate existing statutory frameworks.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank the Minister, but half of the amendment is not about allotments. Having run this scheme in London, I know that allotments are almost impossible to get. It is also about the right to grow on meanwhile lease bases within communities and councils. Meanwhile leases are available online. It is extremely easy: it just needs the local authority to agree that wasted spaces can be used for growing and then taken away if a builder, developer or council wants them back.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I do not disagree with the noble Baroness. I am saying that this is a local authority duty, and it does not need to go up to the strategic level of a mayoral combined authority. That is why we do not need the amendment for combined authorities, but I accept her point about local authorities. A statutory duty is probably not applicable anyway, but I will give that some further thought, if she is happy for me to do so.

We recognise all the benefits of allotments and community gardening, but we do not want to duplicate existing legal responsibilities or place burdens at the wrong tier of government, which would run counter to the Government’s approach to devolution. I am sorry for going on for so long, but there were a lot of amendments in this group. As I have explained the Government’s rationale for resisting these amendments in detail, I request that they are not pressed.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

This is an important group of amendments, particularly if health does decide to devolve down either power or money in the future. But if local areas have specific health needs that the Government identify, and if they are not seen by the Government as dealing with them, do the Government intend to take a power to intervene?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am not sure about powers of intervention. We have a very specific competence that points our combined authorities towards health issues. The Government have made it very clear that we want to see mayors, in particular, sitting on ICBs; I hope that this will start to address some of the issues raised by noble Lords about not having a voice around the table with health colleagues. I know that Manchester has new powers relating to health issues. We will want to monitor those, have a look at them and watch what is working. We will then decide whether we need to take any further action.

16:15

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

At the end of the clause, in the list of health determinants, there is a particular exclusion for genetically inherited characteristics. Is that supposed to exclude people suffering differences in health due to the colour of their skin?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am sure that that is not what is intended, but I will revert to the noble Baroness with a written reply.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I want to say a few words about the amendment I introduced. I think that this is the longest I have ever done on a group, returning on a Monday after a Wednesday; but I am sure that it is not setting a record.

The tone of what came out in the debate was, “Okay, maybe there’s a difference between the new combined authorities and the mayoral authorities, in terms of what’s going through, but the fact is that most of the things raised here have a degree of relevance to health, so you might argue about how relevant they are”. Most of them should be recorded and looked at. Going back to sporting and recreational activity, they should be, because, if you do not know that you have structural intervention and somebody who can intervene, what are they supposed to do? They cannot do anything without having some overview.

I will take away what the Minister said and have a think about how we can introduce this. I accept that the wording may be wrong, but at least having it done in one set of authorities would be a step forward. Having said that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 158 withdrawn.

Amendment 159 not moved.

Amendment 159A had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.

Amendments 159B to 167G not moved.

Clause 44 agreed.

Amendments 168 and 169 not moved.

Clause 45: Functions of police and crime commissioners

Amendment 170

Moved by

[Baroness Pinnock]

170: Clause 45, page 49, line 37, at end insert—
“(c) arrange for the deputy mayor for fire and rescue to exercise one or more of the Mayor’s fire and rescue authority functions.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires a Mayor with Fire and Rescue Authority functions to delegate those functions to a Deputy Mayor for Fire and Rescue, ensuring governance arrangements parallel to those for policing.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, this amendment was tabled by my noble friend Lord Goddard of Stockport, who is unfortunately not able to be here today. It seeks to insert a vital safeguard into Clause 45, ensuring that the specialised governance of our fire and rescue services is not diluted as the powers of regional mayors are expanded. As the Bill currently stands, it enables the transfer of fire and rescue authority functions to elected mayors, yet it does not mandate the same dedicated oversight and accountability that is necessary for this important emergency service. Amendment 170 would rectify this by requiring a mayor with these functions to arrange for a deputy mayor for fire and rescue, specifically to exercise those responsibilities.

The prime strength of this amendment is that would ensure governance arrangements for fire and rescue services, which would then run parallel with those already established for the police service. As the Government have rightly sought to abolish police and crime commissioners, they have abjectly failed to ensure that governance and accountability to the public are paramount. A reflection as to how potentially fragile our governance arrangements are can perhaps be informed by events in the United States of America, where the governance arrangements of policing have apparently been overturned with ease.

Can the Minister explain how replacing an elected police and crime commissioner by an unelected appointment, accountable to no one but the mayor, is an improvement in terms of public accountability? By extension, how will governance work if, as proposed, the fire and rescue service loses its direct governance and becomes the responsibility of an unnamed mayoral appointee? Further, there is a real risk that, as this Bill establishes a new tier of “strategic authorities” with broad “areas of competence”, the elected mayors will become “Lord High Everything”, as was the arrogant Pooh Bah in the “Mikado”.

Amendment 170 would ensure that fire and rescue functions receive the dedicated attention they require rather than being treated as a secondary concern within a massive strategic portfolio. This role would provide a clear point of contact for local public service partners and ensure that the strategic direction of emergency services is managed by an individual with a specific, focused mandate—albeit not a specific and focused democratic mandate.

Proper accountability is also lacking within the Government’s plans. The idea that a scrutiny panel, as with the police service, can be effective when only able to consider decisions post hoc is for the birds. I hope the Minister can agree to think about the challenge that Amendment 170 provides in the interests of public accountability. What we need is structural consistency between policing and the fire and rescue services and the dedicated and democratic accountability necessary to protect both our fire services and the communities they serve. I beg to move.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I hope I am not causing any confusion by having moved to these Benches. It was simply because the other Benches are very congested; I continue to support the same party that I supported when I came into this House as a Conservative Peer.

I would like to use Amendment 170—I congratulate the noble Baroness for speaking so eloquently to it—to probe the Government on an issue that is causing great concern, not dissimilar to that expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. I think from memory we were the only two Peers in this very Room who spoke against the orders for the combined authority of North Yorkshire.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

It was thee and me.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

It was thee and me, yes—that was the sum total who voted against. I think that we were right and history has proven that to be the case. I am still trying to get my head around where the fire and rescue service sits in the combined authority of North Yorkshire. I am concerned that now it is going to be even more complicated if, having elected a mayor for York and North Yorkshire, as the noble Baroness has highlighted, this will now pass to the mayor.

This is causing me concern because I raised the point elsewhere about the number of BESS projects—basically clean energy projects, particularly battery storage projects and solar farms—across North Yorkshire and the lack of consulting with fire and rescue authorities, because they are not statutory consultees. I believe that that has highlighted a gap in the structure at the moment. I use this opportunity to ask the Minister—I see that we have switched places; sliding doors and switching places is a theme for today—how that will impact on a county such as North Yorkshire, or York and North Yorkshire, if there is going to be no democratic oversight and no accountability, if that is the current understanding in the Bill.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, is on to something here and I would like to listen carefully to how the Government plan to monitor this. I do not believe that rural counties have really been considered in the mix of things. Clearly, it is an oversight if fire and rescue authorities are not being consulted as statutory consultees to such major projects. For all the reasons that she gave, I think that another lacuna has been identified by Amendment 170 in the great scheme of things and I look very much to hearing the Minister’s reply.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I am rather confused about this amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, which seeks to require a mayor with fire and rescue authority functions to delegate those functions to a deputy mayor for fire and rescue. In an earlier discussion, the Committee debated the appointment of commissioners to assist mayors with responsibility for matters such as police and crime and fire and rescue.

I strongly agree with the observation of the noble Baroness that it is not very democratic to replace elected police and crime commissioners with appointed commissioners assisting strategic mayors, or indeed to replace them with deputy mayors. But I think that we need more consistency, because the public will become very confused that quite a number of authorities are going to have commissioners assisting mayors, and the Bill seeks—especially in the clause that we are now discussing—to appoint deputy mayors. I want to ask the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, how they see the difference between commissioners and deputy mayors. Are they effectively the same and is that not going to be confusing?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise that I was unable to be here at the previous sittings—I had clashes of different obligations in the Lords last week.

I want to pick up from what my noble friend Lady Pinnock called the structural consistency issue. In preparing for the speech that I am going to make on Amendment 195, in the past few days I have read through a number of recent reports, including Labour Party as well as government and parliamentary reports on the governance of England, and I am struck with the frequency with which everyone from Gordon Brown through to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee say that one thing that we should be aiming for is consistency in the boundaries of different authorities so that, as far as possible, they coincide and the question of accountability is therefore relatively clear.

I was therefore struck when the Ministry of Justice produced a White Paper on policing that suggests that we might change the current structure of police forces in England—in Yorkshire that at least now coincides with the four mayors—by perhaps six to eight police authorities, which would not coincide at all with the 30 to 35 strategic authorities that we are heading towards in Britain.

16:30

The same applies to fire and rescue, to public health and to another area in which I am actively interested, which is the response that we have to the new threats to our national security, as set out clearly in the strategic defence review. Indeed, the strategic defence review talks about the need to have an enormous upgrade of local resilience, civil defence and local services working together to meet not only floods but foreign threats of one sort or another. As I have said on other occasions, I was always struck by the way in which the public health officer of the district council in Salisbury led the response to the Skripal poisoning at a point where national authorities were flummoxed as to what to do.

My question to the Minister, which relates to that, is: to what extent do different departments in Whitehall consider, as they restructure the various public services, the need, first, for boundaries to coincide wherever possible and, secondly, to ensure that accountability is not simply to one part of Whitehall at each local level but that there is the maximum possible co-ordination? Chapter 6 of the strategic defence review talks about the need for local leadership and local resilience across various public services, absolutely including fire and rescue, but in the Bill as it currently presents I do not see that sort of cross-boundary and cross-departmental set of issues being addressed. It seems that we are dealing with a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Bill that has not really been sorted out with other departments in Whitehall.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, some time ago in the teens, from 2015 until about 2022, I was a member of the fire services pension fund, which exposed me to a world that I had had no real previous experience of. I learned that there were 40 fire and rescue authorities in the UK and it astonished me that, of the 40 fire and rescue authorities, there were seven different structural constructs within them. I am speaking in violent agreement with the noble Lord who has just spoken.

For example, there were the single county authorities such as Norfolk or Suffolk, and there were the joint county authorities such as Dorset and Wiltshire, working together under a single canvas. There were joint committees, for example, as you might find in the West Midlands—I am not quite sure whether the Yorkshire ones that the noble Lord just referred to are in the same bucket as the West Midlands or indeed whether they form an eighth different variant. There are the mayoral ones in Manchester, the London Fire Brigade stands alone and, of course, within the police and crime commissioners there is the one in Essex, for example, which is different from the one in Hertfordshire. We are now going to add combined county authorities, so I think that makes eight, and now within the mayoralties there will be a case A or a case B, each of which may have in addition a commissioner or a deputy mayor.

This is crazy. For 40 types of authority there are—I have nearly run out of fingers—10 different constructs, I think. The Bill should be bringing order to that complexity. Instead, it is obfuscating and adding a further cat’s cradle of complication. I know that we are in Committee and that we will come back on Report, and I understand the complexity and the interaction with the police, because the police and fire and rescue work together in so many cases, but we have to bring some order to this chaos.

Although I do not necessarily support the entirety of the text of Amendment 170, it has probed the necessity of bringing some sensibility to what is a nonsense in the way in which our brave fire and rescue firefighters deal with not just fires. During my tenure as a trustee of the fire service’s pension scheme, I learned that the average fireman goes to a fire once every 12 days or so; this is about the other important work they do, in prevention and in attending road accidents and other national emergencies. They deserve better than the structures they have today.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 170 would require a mayor who holds fire and rescue authority functions to delegate those functions to a deputy mayor for fire and rescue, creating governance arrangements that mirror those already in place for policing.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, raises a number of interesting and important points, as we have heard from this short debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response, particularly on the issue of democratic accountability, as raised by my noble friend Lord Trenchard, and on my noble friend Lord Fuller’s point about making sure that public services all work from the same geographic area. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ensure that; it might take a little longer, but I am sure it is worth doing.

During our consideration of the Bill, it has become clear that fire and rescue services are not listed as statutory consultees in the devolution framework. For me, that raises a number of important questions for the Government. As we have heard, fire and rescue services play a central role in public safety, resilience, planning and emergency responses, yet when decisions affecting land use, building standards, transport corridors or climate adaptions are taken without any requirement for fire service input, there is a risk of the safety and resilience considerations being added only after decisions have been made, rather than being embedded right from the outset.

In that context, I would be grateful if the Minister could explain why fire and rescue services are not statutory consultees, whether the Government consider this omission appropriate, and whether steps are being considered to strengthen their formal role in devolution and governance arrangements.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for moving Amendment 170, which would require a mayor with fire and rescue authority functions to delegate those functions to a deputy mayor for fire and rescue.

Mayors are best placed to determine how to use the people and resources at their disposal to deliver for their communities. This amendment would prevent that by mandating the delegation of these functions specifically to a deputy mayor for fire and rescue. It would also, therefore, prevent mayors delegating these functions to a public safety commissioner. The effective delegation of fire and rescue functions to a commissioner can ease capacity constraints, ensuring that there is a dedicated individual with the time and expertise to focus on executing those functions. Fire and rescue functions are already held by deputy mayors for policing and crime in Greater Manchester and York—and in North Yorkshire, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. She seemed to say that she was not quite sure where it sat, so I will definitely write to her to explain how it works.

If they wish, mayors will be able to make an existing deputy mayor for policing and crime the public safety commissioner, meaning that that individual could lead on both policing and fire. However, certain functions should be the sole responsibility of the elected mayor as the head of the fire and rescue authority. Functions with the most significant bearing on the strategic direction of the fire service—such as the budget, the risk plan and the appointment or dismissal of the chief fire officer—are, therefore, retained by the mayor. On statutory requirements, fire and rescue services still have the right to respond to any planning application at the moment, for example, so they play a key role in that area. It is important that decisions in these areas are taken right at the top and that the person taking them is accountable at the ballot box.

To answer the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, every effort is made to make coterminous the public service boundaries when we lay out these plans. The position we have taken provides strong accountability and operational flexibility for the mayors, and I therefore ask the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Have the implications of the strategic defence review been taken into account in all this? Chapter 6 of the defence review talks about the need to mobilise a “whole-of-society approach” in response to the threats we now face, in which there will be more volunteer firemen and police, and civilian rescue will be expanded. That means that volunteers at the local level have to feel confident. If decisions will be taken a long way away at the top, I suspect we have not yet thought through how we will get the sort of volunteers and local resilience we need.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

The noble Lord’s point about whole-society resilience in the security review is quite right in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. There are resilience plans in all local authorities for such an incident, so these things are taken into consideration and reviewed constantly.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I have two comments on the noble Lord’s response. First, the fire and rescue service is no longer a statutory consultee. Anybody can respond to a planning application, but that is slightly different from being a statutory consultee. Secondly, commissioners are not accountable at the ballot box. Therefore, why would we allow the role to go down to not deputy mayors—I do not think there are such things—but the commissioners responsible, when they are not accountable at the ballot box?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I am not sure whether there were any questions there.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

Can I take this opportunity to put the question I asked in my intervention? For what reason are fire and rescue services not statutory consultees? The noble Lord indicated in his reply that they are, but they are not. It is driving people in North Yorkshire wild that all these highly flammable and highly combustible projects are being planted next to schools and people’s homes without the fire service being consulted.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

As I said, it may not be a statutory body, but being involved in a great deal of things on a statutory basis would be a bit of an onerous burden on the fire brigade. The noble Baroness mentioned the fires that could potentially happen. I have said that I will write to her about how the fire and rescue service in North Yorkshire functions and works but, from what I can see and what I understand, there are requirements for the fire and rescue service to be there when required. It has a resilience role in all this, and it does not necessarily need to be a statutory body to do all these things when it can do them anyway.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

The noble Lord said that the budget, the strategy and the planning were passing to the elected mayor, so is the elected mayor undertaking assessments? For example, if, hypothetically, two of these battery storage plants caught fire and at the same time there was a wildfire on the North York Moors, would the mayor assess whether there are sufficient resources—water, manpower and equipment—to deal with those fires? Who will be responsible for planning that?

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I repeat that the function of the mayor is for the budget and the risk plan, so he or she will take into consideration the potential problems that the noble Baroness mentioned. He or she is also responsible for the appointment or dismissal of the chief officer, and therefore that accountability stays with the mayor, who is the directly elected representative for the area.

16:45

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I thank everybody who has contributed to this debate on the future of the governance of fire and rescue services. It has exposed a fundamental flaw in the pattern of governance that the Government are pursuing with some haste: enabling a single elected person to become the sole democratically accountable authority for strategic planning, skills, strategic highways, policing, fire services and possibly health. This reflects what the Minister has said: a person, as a directly elected mayor, will hold all the accountability for those important public services.

That will not happen; no one person can hold all that accountability successfully. It will be dispersed, as it is now. In West Yorkshire, we have a directly elected mayor who has appointed a deputy mayor—it could be a commissioner, but in West Yorkshire the position is deputy mayor—who is a political appointee, not directly accountable to the residents of West Yorkshire, for policing.

We know from earlier parts of the Bill that the directly elected mayor can appoint up to seven commissioners, as we are now calling them, who will take responsibility for some of these functions but who are not directly accountable to the public whom they serve and for whom they are making decisions. That format of governance will crumble away when the first big incident of significance occurs, because who is responsible and who calls the shots? That fundamental problem is at the heart of this.

Apart from that, the second fundamental problem is the method of accountability through scrutiny. In earlier amendments, we on these Benches called for a scrutiny panel for each political appointee as a commissioner, which would go some way to alleviating the discrepancy in democratic accountability. But at the moment those scrutiny panels will scrutinise decisions post hoc, which is unacceptable. If they are to be effective, they need to look at pre-decision scrutiny as well.

I am sorry that the Minister has recited the mantra that all will be well and that creating a “Lord High Everything” will be fine. I fear that it will not, and I shall continue to point out the fault-lines in this model. I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 170 withdrawn.

Clause 45 agreed.

Clause 46 agreed.

Schedule 22: Functions of police and crime commissioners

Amendment 171 not moved.

Schedule 22 agreed.

Clause 47 agreed.

Schedule 23: Fire and rescue authorities

Amendment 172

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

172: Schedule 23, page 259, line 7, at end insert—
“Matters outside the scope of Inspections
4A In section 28 (inspectors), after subsection (A8) insert—“(A8A) When carrying out an inspection under subsection (A3) of a mayoral combined authority, or mayoral CCA, in its capacity as a fire and rescue authority by virtue of section 1(2)(f) or (g), an English inspector must not review or scrutinise decisions made, or other action taken, in connection with the discharge of an excluded mayoral FRA function.(A8B) For the purposes of subsection (A8A), the following are excluded mayoral FRA functions in relation to a mayoral combined authority, or mayoral CCA, in its capacity as a fire and rescue authority—(a) the issuing of a community risk management plan;(b) the variation of priorities and objectives set out in a community risk management plan;(c) the allocation of the draft or actual budget for fire and rescue functions in relation to any financial year;(d) the function of appointing, suspending or dismissing the chief fire officer;(e) the function of holding the chief fire officer to account for the exercise of—(i) the functions which are delegated to the chief fire officer; and(ii) the functions of persons under the direction and control of the chief fire officer;(f) the function of approving a pay policy statement prepared for the purposes of section 38 of the Localism Act 2011;(g) the function of approving arrangements to enter into a reinforcement scheme under section 13;(h) the function of approving arrangements with other employers of firefighters under section 15;(i) the function of approving arrangements under section 16;(j) the function of approving plans, modifications to plans and additions to plans for the purpose of ensuring that—(i) so far as is reasonably practicable, the mayoral combined authority, or mayoral CCA, is able to continue to perform its fire and rescue functions if an emergency occurs; and(ii) the mayoral combined authority, or mayoral CCA, is able to perform its functions so far as necessary or desirable for the purpose of preventing an emergency, or reducing, controlling or mitigating the effects of an emergency, or taking other action in connection with it;(k) the function of approving any arrangements for the co-operation of the mayoral combined authority, or mayoral CCA in relation to its fire and rescue functions with other general Category 1 responders and general Category 2 responders in respect of—(i) the performance of the mayoral combined authority’s, or mayoral CCA’s, duty as a fire and rescue authority under section 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004; and(ii) any duties under subordinate legislation made in exercise of powers under that Act. (A8C) In subsection (A8B)—“community risk management plan” has the same meaning as in Schedule ZA1;“emergency” has the meaning given in section 1 of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 for Part 1 of that Act;“general Category 1 responder” means a person who falls within Part 1 of Schedule 1 to the Civil Contingencies Act 2004;“general Category 2 responder” means a person who falls within Part 3 of Schedule 1 to the Civil Contingencies Act 2004;“priorities and objectives” has the same meaning as in Schedule ZA1.””Member’s explanatory statement
This would provide for matters which inspectors of fire and rescue authorities may not review or scrutinise when inspecting mayoral combined authorities or CCAs which are fire and rescue authorities.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, government Amendments 172 and 173 make essential amendments to Schedule 23, ensuring that the law operates as intended with evolving governance arrangements. Amendment 172 aligns the inspection framework for mayoral combined authorities and mayoral county combined authorities with existing exclusions for other fire and rescue authority governance models, ensuring fairness and consistency across England.

Amendment 173 makes technical alignments with existing legislation. It ensures that, where a mayoral combined authority or a mayoral combined county authority takes on fire and rescue functions, it is treated in the same way as existing fire and rescue authorities. The amendment will also bring mayoral fire and rescue authorities within Part V of the Local Government and Housing Act 1989, covering companies in which local authorities have interests. It will also bring it within Section 155 of the same Act for the purpose of emergency financial assistance.

It also clarifies the handling of Section 114 reports in the case of mayoral fire and rescue authorities, and the fire and rescue authority’s response under Section 115 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988. When a chief finance officer issues a report, the report must be sent to the relevant scrutiny committee, and the authority’s response must be sent to the chief finance officer, the external auditor and the relevant scrutiny committee. I commend these government amendments to the Committee.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, these two amendments are enabling amendments in response to the previous issue that was raised with Amendment 170 about absorbing fire and rescue services into a mayoral authority.

It has long been the objective of previous Governments to combine police services and fire and rescue services into one model by arguing that they were both emergency services and, therefore, would be better combined. That has always been resisted, with support from these Benches, because police and fire and rescue services have very different objectives. This Bill is seeking to absorb policing and fire and rescue into the ambit of the directly elected mayor, without having this discussion about whether it is appropriate.

I accept that four mayoral authorities have already combined policing and fire and rescue. Whether or not that has been a success is yet to be tested. The argument against these two amendments—I will reprise a bit of what I said on Amendment 170—is that it is an erosion of transparency and public accountability for what is, after all, a critical emergency service.

It is always interesting to me when we have government amendments—it points to pressure somewhere that new powers are needed to make this work. Amendment 172 removes the inspection of the fire service from the inspection regime and puts it into a mayoral regime. This means that, for instance—these are within the amendment—an inspector cannot challenge the budget of fire and rescue, challenge the appointment or dismissal of the chief fire officer, hold the chief fire officer to account or approve an emergency performance and reinforcement scheme.

All those are critical to ensure public accountability of the fire and rescue service, but suddenly they will not be available for its inspection regime. That will not do. The fire and rescue service plays a vital role as first responders to serious road traffic accidents. They are always the first there, not the police, and they are often at terrorist incidents. We need to have accountability for the public and the existing inspection regime, to ensure that it works well.

My argument with this amendment, as with Amendment 170, is that this is happening by stealth, by absorbing fire and rescue into the police service. Combining them ensures that the mayor has responsibility for those functions. The inspection regime does not apply to the mayor, therefore public accountability for the fire and rescue service lies in holding the mayor to account. As I have said, the mayor is now the sole Lord High Everything of a huge number of strategic functions, so holding them to account on any one of them will be a challenge. I hope that the Minister will think again on this proposal to change the way that fire and rescue services are democratically accountable and inspected, because I fear that failing to do so could have serious consequences.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, as I understand it from the Minister, the inspectors in question inspect only operational matters and not governance matters. Therefore, to not inspect the governance of mayoral combined authorities and combined county authorities is in keeping with the approach that the inspectors already take to existing fire services. Will the Minister please confirm that I have that right? If I do not, will she please explain why the Government’s arrangements for these new authorities will be subject to less scrutiny than already exists in the fire services? If my understanding is correct, I still have concerns about the need for effective scrutiny of new authorities taking new powers, in this instance over fire and rescue, so will the Minister please tell the Committee how the governance of fire and rescue services will be inspected and scrutinised, if not by this inspectorate? We have to ensure that there is an appropriate approach to scrutiny for all new mayoral combined authorities, which is exactly what the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, said. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Scott, for their comments. We have seen a lot of changes in governance in both policing and the fire service. I worked in policing for a long time and during my time policing went from police committees, which were local authority committees, to police authorities, which were more widely representative of communities, and then to police commissioners. Fire and rescue services have been with local authorities; in some areas they moved to police commissioners and responsibility for fire sat with police commissioners. But the mayor will be the only person elected by the whole of that combined authority area, so there is a democratic mandate there.

17:00

I will go into some of the details about these amendments. They do not create a new duty or expand powers; they ensure that existing provisions apply consistently when a mayoral combined authority is acting as the fire and rescue authority. Section 155 will provide the legal basis for the Bellwin scheme, which allows local authorities, including fire and rescue authorities, to receive emergency financial assistance when necessary. The proposed change will ensure that mayoral combined authorities that take on fire and rescue functions can also be eligible to receive that emergency financial assistance.

The amendment is necessary to ensure consistency, because other fire and rescue governance models already exclude the strategic functions from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services’ inspection. Without the amendment, mayoral combined authorities and mayoral combined county authorities would be treated differently and that would create an uneven playing field.

To answer the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, it does not weaken oversight of fire and rescue services. His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services will continue to inspect operational performance, efficiency and effectiveness. Strategic decisions such as budgets and appointments are matters for elected mayors and remain subject to that democratic accountability and the statutory checks. There are no new powers or changes in how inspections work. It is a technical amendment to align inspection frameworks across governance models and reflects existing practice for other fire and rescue authorities. It ensures clarity for His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services.

However, I recognise that the noble Baronesses have concerns about the operation of this, so I think it is probably best that I withdraw this amendment for now. We can have further discussions about both amendments and I will bring them back on Report.

Amendment 172 withdrawn.

Amendment 173 not moved.

Schedule 23 agreed.

Clauses 48 and 49 agreed.

Clause 50: Licensing functions of the Mayor of London

Amendment 174

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

174: Clause 50, page 55, line 31, after “the” insert “GLA and the”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is consequential on the amendment in my name inserting new provisions into the Licensing Act 2003 to confer powers on the GLA and the Mayor of London.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government are committed to supporting the high street economy, a key part of which is the hospitality sector and the night-time economy. Amendments introduced on Report in the other place established a new strategic licensing role for the Mayor of London. This included a duty on the mayor to publish and set out his licensing priorities in a new London-wide statement of licensing policies.

There was also an amendment that served as a placeholder for a new call-in power, which provided the Secretary of State with the power to make regulations to confer on the Mayor of London the function of determining relevant licence applications in certain circumstances. Government Amendments 174 to 181 replace this placeholder and provide more detail around the types of circumstances in which the mayor may call in or determine relevant licence applications.

The amendments also add the Greater London Authority as a responsible authority in certain circumstances under Part 3 of the Licensing Act 2003. They place a requirement on the GLA to notify interested parties, including the applicant and the relevant licensing authority, of applications that the GLA considers to meet the definition of potential strategic importance to Greater London. This will be set out in regulations by the Secretary of State. If a London licensing authority decides not to grant an application of potential strategic importance as applied for, including, for example, by rejecting the application or applying additional conditions to it, the mayor is required to decide whether or not to call in the decision.

If a decision is called in, the mayor must issue a direction to the relevant licensing authority, having given regard to his licensing policy and the importance of promoting the licensing objectives. New rights of appeal in relation to directions issued by the mayor will also be introduced to help ensure the call-in power is used judiciously. The new call-in power will initially be given effect in London to help unleash the full potential of our capital’s world-renowned cultural venues but could be deployed in mayoralties across the country in the future to help prevent decisions from being blocked by unnecessary red tape or short-term thinking.

Separately, at a national level, the Government launched a joint government and industry licensing taskforce last year and are considering more than 2,000 responses to a call for evidence that sought the public’s views on its proposals. We expect to consider those views before making any future reforms to the national licensing regime, including on aspects such as pavement licensing. For the avoidance of doubt, the amendments being discussed today concern the licensing regime in Greater London, not national licensing reforms. I beg to move.

[Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I have a real concern about this group of amendments, which appears to look to tinker around the edges to bring the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority into line with other strategic authorities. We already established in an earlier session that governance in London was the first established; it has never been repeated and, indeed, this Bill does not seek to repeat it either. Surely the sensible route is the one that we suggested in Amendment 75: to have a full review, consider the future governance of London and deal with issues such as this at that time.

I do not want to revisit the earlier argument, but I remind noble Lords that in London there is not the same relationship between the mayor and the boroughs as is suggested there might be in the new governance relationships, or indeed that exists elsewhere. In practice, that means that the mayor might not appreciate local circumstances—as I have said before, not all of London is the same. The mayor might not appreciate the local policing capacity, or lack of it, and the implications of that on licensing decisions. He might not understand the local economy and what licensing could mean for that. He might not appreciate the impact of the local demographics when decisions are being made to overturn local licensing decisions.

What is more, as we have heard before, the current scrutiny of the mayor is not considered to be effective. Devolution should mean respect for decision-making at its lowest common denominator—in this case, the borough level. If a more strategic decision is needed for a wider area, the decision should include the local decision-making processes or partners. For those reasons, I urge the Minister to consider the proposals put forward previously for a thorough review, at which time the implications of these amendments could be considered.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, I heard what the Minister said in her introduction to this group of amendments about it following a proposed change to the Bill in the Commons. Like the previous speaker, I understand the need, in a global city such as London, to reverse—for justifiable reasons—the direction of devolution and enable a power grab from the local boroughs in some circumstances. However, the circumstances are not defined, apart from saying that they have to be of “strategic importance” across Greater London. Yet the definition of “strategic importance” is left to regulations.

It is not at all clear how the mayor will make such decisions when they have been defined as being of strategic importance. Will they be based on the licensing priorities, which is a requirement for local borough licensing committees? How will local concerns be heard and considered? This appears to be a profound and unnecessary centralisation of power that threatens to strip local democratically elected committees of their voice in matters that affect their communities’ daily lives.

Under this proposal, which is set out in Amendment 179A—it contains a proposed new section headed “Licence applications of potential strategic importance”—local London licensing authorities, such as borough councils, would legally be required to notify the GLA of applications for the sale of alcohol, regulated entertainment or late-night refreshment. A further proposal grants the Mayor of London the power, in effect, to veto or override the decisions of these local authorities. So if a borough council decides to grant or reject a licence, that decision is suspended and has no effect until the mayor decides whether to intervene. This is allegedly the devolution Bill, but I am yet to be convinced that it has any relationship to devolution; this is the imposition of top-down command structure over local democracy.

The additional problem is that, if there is a veto and it is called in by the mayor, how quickly will the mayor decide? What is the democratic way in which that will be decided? Is it just the mayor in his or her office making a decision, or will it go to a scrutiny committee for discussion first? Will there be an open and transparent hearing where the local borough council—or several local borough councils, if it is something that affects several of them—can come and explain its decision? Will the mayor have to explain why it has been called in? A lot here is unsatisfactory, to say the least. I ask myself: who is best placed to make a judgment about licence applications, which can have significant effects on people’s daily lives? Is it those who live there and their elected representatives, or is it the mayor of 7 million or 8 million people who says, “Actually, I know best. This is important for business, so hard luck if it affects your daily life”? That is the risk in this.

In the end, this group of amendments is unsatisfactory until we know the definition of “strategic importance” and the methods that will be used for decision-making. For those reasons, I hope the Minister will think again and reconsider. I understand why, if it is a significant application that will affect large parts of London, you would want a mayoral authority to take that decision. But I would want to know how that is defined and how that decision will be taken in a public setting, with the ability for people to have their voices heard and an appeal process.

[Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)]

My Lords, I am a directly elected mayor of a London borough with a licensing authority and responsibility. I want to speak in favour of and welcome this amendment. The key word is “strategic”. It is important that we recognise that London’s nightlife and hospitality industries are essential to Britain’s economy. We need to support them; they bring more than 1.4 million jobs to the capital and generate £46 billion in economic activity.

Giving the mayor new powers over strategic licences, including the power to call in and decide strategically on those applications, could be important for the future. Different authorities will vary in how they approach their licensing. Of course, there needs to be that relationship between the local authorities and the Mayor of London—whoever that may be, now or in the future—to be able to listen and recognise, and to have that overarching strategic view of what the licensing is being applied for. We do not live within administrative boundaries, so if something is across different authorities and one side believes that a licence should be granted and another does not, there needs to be some sort of arbitrator to see the overall benefit of bringing that position forward and to say either, “Yes, it is strategically important for London” or, “No, it is not”.

17:15

For me, it would be good to have this, but it needs to be on important strategic matters—if the Olympics was coming back to London, or something of that ilk—so that we have that overarching view. So I support these amendments. I am new here, so I am waiting to see whether other things come in secondary legislation or something underneath, but we have the broad strokes here.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, this group of amendments in the Minister’s name would insert a new provision into the Licensing Act 2003 for additional powers for the Greater London Authority and the Mayor of London. We are not opposed to a greater strategic role for the GLA and the mayor, particularly where that role helps to identify key applications and promote consistency across London.

However, we harbour significant concerns about Amendment 179A, which would establish a London-wide strategic licensing oversight system. We are not persuaded that the mayor should be granted such extensive powers to intervene in and potentially overrule decisions taken by local licensing authorities. Although applicants will have the right of appeal, these provisions introduce a new layer of bureaucracy and uncertainty into what is already a complex licensing regime. We struggle to see why the mayor should be given such a decisive and potentially determinative role in local licensing decisions, particularly where those decisions are currently taken by local authorities with detailed knowledge of their communities, as my noble friend Lady O’Neill made clear. The mayor will not have that, and we are overriding local accountability. I am concerned by the provision that allows certain applications to be deemed “of potential strategic importance” when the definition of that term is to be set out not by the GLA or the mayor but through regulations by the Secretary of State.

I have similar scepticism to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, about whether this actually is a devolution Bill. It is supposed to be about local democracy and trusting local people to make the right decisions for their local area. It should not be about transferring powers upward to mayors and Whitehall. Why is London again being put on a pedestal and treated differently to the rest of the UK? I appreciate that the Minister said that this could be extended to the rest of the UK. Again, I very much defer to what my noble friend Lady O’Neill said: it would make a lot of sense for this to be part of a broader review of the governance of London.

Moreover, it is not clear why the Government have chosen to introduce these provisions at such a late stage, or how they interact with existing licensing frameworks. At the very least, the Committee needs more time to consider the implications of these amendments, alongside fuller guidance from the Minister about how these powers would operate in practice.

At present, I do not believe that the justification for these amendments has been made, so I look forward to the Minister’s response and to further explanation of the rationale behind the operation of these amendments. However, we cannot support any of these amendments being made at this stage.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their comments on these amendments. I will be very happy to meet noble Lords to discuss the proposals further and in more detail. I will give a little more information now and, I hope, answer some of the questions that noble Lords have asked.

On why we feel that the new call-in power is needed, there is evidence of unmet potential for London’s night-time economy. A YouGov survey found that 45% of Londoners stated that they had ended a night out before midnight in 2023-24, despite wanting to stay out later—I never do but, obviously, there are people who do. Night-time spending in the capital fell by 3% from 2022-25. London also has a lower premises licence approval rate than the rest of England and Wales. Of course, the reasons for that are multifaceted but, through the establishment of a new mayoral call-in power, intended to be used only in specific circumstances, as a measure of last resort, we would hope to encourage a more enabling and joined-up approach to premises licensing that unleashes the full potential of London’s cultural hospitality and night-time economy sectors. I know we have talked many times in your Lordships’ House about the restaurant and pubs business, and so on. We particularly want to encourage that sector in London—and everywhere else, but it is important to do that for the capital’s tourism and other trades.

In answer to the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, the Government support the principle of localism in licensing decisions, but we are committed to putting the right powers at the right levels to drive economic growth that we want to see. Local licensing authorities are often, or in fact nearly always, best placed to make licensing decisions based on their local knowledge and in consultation with other responsible authorities, including the police and enforcement authorities. But where the licensing system affects sectors with a strategic economic role—the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, mentioned that aspect—it is important that city-wide considerations can be taken into account. The new strategic licensing role of the Mayor of London would enable this and provide an opportunity to adopt a similar approach to those that have worked effectively in New York, Amsterdam and Sydney.

To pick up on some specific points about how this is going to work—the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, asked a couple of questions about this—the mayor will draw his strategic licensing policy by consultation on it before it is published. The mayor will be required to consult each London licensing authority, which will be able to make representations about its local circumstances. The Government intend to consider this and may seek to engage with key licensing stakeholders before setting out thresholds of what that

“potential strategic importance to Greater London”

actually means in regulations. That will provide further detail on the types of licence applications that will potentially fall within the scope of the mayor’s call-in power.

In answer to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, about why this issue has not come forward before, that is a fair point. Further time is required to develop the new mayoral call-in process, including how it would interact with existing licensing legislation. In thinking about bringing this forward, the Government have considered that sometimes the best way in which to deliver devolution across the country is to test out new powers or approaches in one or two places first. As a globally renowned centre for culture and nightlife, London represents an ideal location to test new strategic licensing powers and duties. Nevertheless, it is very much our intention to ensure that it will be possible to roll these out to other mayors across the country, subject to the provision of appropriate evidence via provisions in the Bill. Piloting things is a very good way in which to see how effective they are, and whether they get the balance right between the local decision-making to which the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, referred and what we might think of as a strategic call-in power—so it is very important to do that.

I thank my noble friend Lady Dacres for her comments about licensing. She and I had an informal meeting with some London leaders on Saturday. They were not all London leaders, so I will not use that as evidence because that would not be fair, but, broadly, their view was similar to that of my noble friend Lady Dacres: although you would not want this to be used all the time, it is an important power to have in a key city such as London. However, a call for evidence is out and is currently being reviewed.

[Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)]

Were all those whom the Minister consulted inner London authorities, or did they include outer London boroughs as well? My frustration is with the fact that everyone assumes that London is all the same, yet Westminster is certainly not like Bexley; and Lewisham, where the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, comes from, is not like Bexley. Bexley has a night-time economy, yet the Mayor of London is considering closing our police front counter but will not close Lewisham’s because it is that much closer. The police in Bexley are closing down and not working past 10 pm, yet obviously the nightclubs are open till 2 am. Those sorts of things have to be considered for the benefit of all local people, but the mayor will not be aware of them. I apologise, but I felt I needed to say that.

[Baroness Dacres of Lewisham (Lab)]

Just to correct some of what the noble Baroness alluded to, I see Lewisham as a mix of inner and outer London because we have the south circular and diverse aspects to our borough. She mentioned the police station. All our police station fronts, bar one, have been closed. Lewisham has the largest police station in London—in fact, in Europe—and I am sure that is the sole reason why it has not been closed. It includes horses, as well as other back-office support for the police. I wanted to correct that for the record, because the noble Baroness made it seem as though we are open because of our distance from central London, and that is not the case.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness and my noble friend for those helpful comments. I want to be absolutely clear that it was not a formal consultation I had on Saturday; it was an informal meeting, but a number of London leaders were there. It was not representative, so I will not pretend it was, but it is clear to me that there is more work to do before moving forward with this. Between now and Report I am happy to meet all those who have spoken in this debate but, for now, I will withdraw Amendment 174.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

It is perfectly reasonable that the Minister has suggested that there should be a more joined-up set of regulations, but I tabled an amendment that would have achieved this through the agent of change. Will she reconsider her views on how we can balance the late-opening nightclubs with the new residences next door to them?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We have had extensive discussions of the agent of change; it is a slightly different proposal. I know it could potentially be linked to this, so if the noble Baroness wants to get involved in the discussions on this, I am happy to include her.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I appreciate the Minister’s very positive response to our comments. She said that this is a pilot. You would normally have a review at the end of a pilot to work out whether it has worked and the consequences thereof. I appreciate that she intends to withdraw her amendment, but it would be helpful, if these amendments were to come back on Report, to be clear about what the pilot means and what the review process is.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

That is a very fair point. I was indicating that we will have some further discussions about it. If I bring further amendments back on Report, we will need to be clear about putting some flexible powers into the Bill so that we can extend it if we need to. If we look at the London project and it has not worked, clearly that does not mean that it will be extended. But we need the powers because, as all noble Lords will be aware, getting primary legislation on to the statute book is quite a process. We would rather have a permissive power that enables it, if it is needed, and then we are able to do that if necessary.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

Or it could be withdrawn.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Yes, it could be withdrawn.

17:30

Amendment 174 withdrawn.

Clause 50 agreed.

Schedule 24: Licensing functions of the Mayor of London

Amendments 175 to 178 not moved.

Amendment 179 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.

Amendments 179A and 180 not moved.

Amendment 180A

Moved by

[Lord Lansley]

180A: Schedule 24, page 263, line 14, leave out “(whenever passed or made)” and insert “passed before, or in the same Session as, this Act”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to limit the Secretary of State's power to amend future Acts of Parliament using secondary legislation, in line with the DPRRC's recommendation. The 'Henry VIII power' could only be used prospectively for Acts passed in this session, rather than any future Act of Parliament. It is connected to three other amendments in the name of Lord Lansley.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, we turn now to a group of amendments that all relate to the exercise of delegated powers to amend future legislation—Henry VIII powers. They are powers by way of statutory instrument to amend primary legislation in the future. The relevant document—if noble Lords are interested to read it in detail—is the 45th report of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, which reported on this Bill and drew the attention of the House to the Henry VIII powers.

Before I turn to precisely what it said, it did not note, but I have, that in Clause 88 there is a general power for making consequential and incidental provision relating to future legislation. Clause 88 says:

“Regulations … may amend or repeal provision made by an Act of Parliament passed before, or in the same Session as, this Act”.


My amendments do not affect that.

My Amendments 180A, 184A, 196F and 235DA in this group relate to Henry VIII powers to amend future legislation, which was the subject of the Delegated Powers Committee’s report. It said:

“It is reasonably common for Henry VIII powers to allow for consequential amendments to amend future Acts of Parliament passed in the same session as the Bill in which they appear … the Government and Parliament are capable of passing Bills in future sessions consistent with preceding legislation”.


It says in the next paragraph that in November last year the parliamentary counsel noted to the Constitution Committee that

“the power to amend consequentially Acts in future sessions is rare and normally specifically justified in the delegated powers [memorandum] … The Bill includes numerous instances of this type of power and the Memorandum”—

that is, the Government’s delegated powers memorandum—

“does not provide justification for any of them”.

It says, in the recommendations in paragraph 23 of the report:

“In the light of the Government’s failure to justify the ability of these Henry VIII powers to change the effect of Acts of Parliament to be passed in future sessions, we recommend to the House that the delegated powers in clauses 54 and 71 … Schedule 24 and … Schedule 26 are amended to remove that ability”.


I have tabled four amendments to do precisely that. In each case, they would take out the words “whenever passed”, meaning whenever passed in the future, and insert precisely the same words as those the Government themselves used in the drafting of Clause 88—that is, that they would amend or repeal provision made by an Act of Parliament

“passed before, or in the same Session as, this Act”.

I think there is a small, technical problem with my amendment in relation to Schedule 26. Since it relates to an insertion to the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, the reference to “this Act” might be inaccurate. However, we will not worry about that, because we can deal with it on Report as necessary.

The purpose of these four amendments relates to a number of places. It relates to Clause 54, which we are dealing with presently, which modifies the functions of mayors and strategic authorities; Clause 71, which concerns the licensing of taxis and private hire vehicles; Schedule 24, which we have just been discussing, which concerns licensing powers for the Mayor of London; and Schedule 26, which relates to local government reorganisation powers. The subject matter of those powers is almost unimportant; the point is that, in each case, the Government have used the same language to give themselves the power, by statutory instrument, to amend future Acts of Parliament beyond this Session. In the same way as Clause 88, each of my amendments would limit that power to amend Acts passed or made up to the end of this parliamentary Session.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, has tabled Amendment 184. As I say, I have tabled Amendment 184A, because it does the same thing as the others, whereas Amendment 184 would remove the regulation-making power entirely. I submit that that would go too far, since there is often a need to make consequential or incidental provision.

The essential point that I come back to is that there is no basis for justifying taking a power to amend future Acts of Parliament in future Sessions, because those Bills, when they are introduced to this place, can take account of, and make their own provision for, what the future shape of legislation should look like. It is not a question of saving parliamentary time; they can be dealt with in those Acts when the time comes. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise for not having spoken in the previous debates on this Bill due to the pressure of work. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has spoken eloquently to his amendments, and I agree with nearly everything he has said. I will speak to Amendment 184 in my name, as I am extremely concerned about the long-term implications of Clause 54(3).

Clause 54 begins with subsection (1):

“The Secretary of State may by regulations make incidental, consequential, transitional, transitory or supplementary provision for the purposes of”—


it then it goes into the detail. My concern is with subsection (3), which, for the benefit of the doubt, I will read:

“Regulations under this section may (in particular) amend any Act of Parliament (whenever passed), including by amending this Act”.


This is an amazing power to hand to the Secretary of State in the future, whoever he or she might be. The ability to amend any Act of Parliament, which may not even be a twinkle in the eye of any future government at this stage, is breathtaking.

Until the end of January, I had the privilege to sit on the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. The council that advises the DPRRC was extremely concerned about the number of delegated powers in the Bill that we are currently debating. There are 92 delegated powers, and a further 42 not covered in the memorandum, due to the fact that the Bill is likely to interact with existing enactments.

Similar powers were brought forward in 2015, at which point the committee felt that the powers were too broad. However, we now have a new Government and a new philosophy. I can understand that the Government want to be able to change past and current legislation in future, but they are asking for the power to change legislation that is yet to be drafted—a power that bypasses the role of Parliament completely.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, spoke at length on his amendments, which relate to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s concerns about the Bill. He set out his arguments extremely clearly and referred to the committee’s 45th report, which was published on 16 January. That report details the committee’s concerns; it is extensive and raises significant issues around the way in which the Henry VIII powers will be executed. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has already ready out the committee’s recommendation concerning this particular power, which is as follows:

“In the light of the Government’s failure to justify the ability of these Henry VIII powers to change the effect of Acts of Parliament to be passed in future sessions, we recommend to the House that the delegated powers in clauses 54 and 71, and those in paragraph 5(3) of Schedule 24 and paragraph 1(8) of Schedule 26 are amended to remove that ability”.


I apologise for repeating what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said word for word, but it is really important to stress this point.

Considering this strong recommendation from the Delegated Powers Committee, as well as the concerns raised by me and the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I hope that the Minister will be able to tell the Committee that the Government are prepared to accept this amendment and amend the Bill accordingly. This is an unjustifiable abuse of power, bypassing Parliament to seek to amend future Acts of Parliament and legislation that is not even in the initial stages of being drafted.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I will not seek to repeat what has been said so eloquently by my noble friend Lord Lansley and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville.

The issue is quite simple. This is supposed to be a devolution Bill about local empowerment; it is not supposed to be about giving the Secretary of State huge powers, in particular to amend things that have not even been thought of yet. On restricting things in the way that has been suggested, there are some flexibilities in this Bill, historical Bills and Bills for the current Session, but having the power to amend something that is not even a twinkle in the eye of a new Minister— whoever they may be—is just going too far. The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee has also said this.

This matter needs very deep thought on the part of the Government. We will come back to it if the Government do not seek to address this issue of a Secretary of State having the ability to amend something that has not been thought of yet. Frankly, I find it difficult to understand why you would want to amend a law you have not written yet, because you could always bring in powers that are relevant to that law as part of any legislation you then bring forward.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for their proposed amendments to the delegated powers in the Bill. I also thank the House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee for its report and its recommendations regarding the delegated powers in the Bill, to which these amendments relate. I will consider its report ahead of Report and will make sure that all noble Lords who have joined this debate on delegated powers have sight of that response.

I turn to Amendment 180A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, which seeks to limit the ability to make consequential, supplementary or incidental provisions that would follow a decision to repeal the strategic licensing regime. This amendment would prevent such provisions being made to future legislation. Our intention behind introducing the new strategic licensing pilot in London is clear: to trial a more strategic approach to licensing in London.

However, we recognise that any significant change to long-established arrangements may, in practice, give rise to operational or policy difficulties that could not have been fully foreseen at the point of legislating—I referred to that on an earlier group. It is for that reason that we have provided a power for the Secretary of State to amend the new strategic licensing measures within the first five years of them coming into effect. This will ensure that the Government can act swiftly and proportionately to protect the effectiveness of the wider licensing framework if necessary. The Secretary of State must be able to make consequential, supplementary or incidental provision that repeals or revokes legislation made at a later date, if necessary, in the event that the strategic licensing measures are repealed.

17:45

As currently drafted, the Bill preserves the Government’s ability to repeal the strategic licensing measures and make consequential, supplementary or incidental provision to all relevant legislation whenever it was passed. This will help to protect the wider licensing framework, ensuring that the licensing system for our capital remains balanced and effective. I also reassure the noble Lord that this delegated power will be subject to the affirmative procedure, which we judge gives it the appropriate level of parliamentary scrutiny.

I turn to Amendments 184 and 184A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. They seek to remove the ability to make incidental, consequential, transitional, transitory or supplementary amendments to primary legislation passed in the future that relates to the conferral or modification of functions for strategic authorities. This delegated power is critical to the Government’s ability to deepen the powers of strategic authorities over time and to ensure that they can effectively exercise their functions. This is because it enables the Government to remove legislative barriers that would otherwise prevent strategic authorities from taking on new powers.

I understand that the concern of the noble Lord and noble Baroness is with the ability to amend or modify future Acts of Parliament. However, it is right that the Government have that ability, so that the devolution framework can evolve over time. For instance, there may be cases where the Government use an Act of Parliament to confer a function on a public body but, at a later date, it is decided that that function is best exercised by a strategic authority, or they might originally decide to confer a function only on established mayoral strategic authorities and then, once it has proved to be successful, wish to roll it out to other levels of strategic authority so that other parts of the country can benefit. In such circumstances, it is vital that the Government have the powers to ensure that that function can be exercised effectively by strategic authorities.

In debates in Committee so far, noble Lords have made clear their support for devolution to local leaders. This power supports that aim. The power is appropriately constrained, given that it can only be used for the purpose of conferring or modifying functions for strategic authorities. It will be subject to the affirmative procedure, which means that it will be subject to appropriate parliamentary scrutiny. The ability to update the devolution framework over time is a fundamental objective of this Bill, which is why this power is essential to delivering on our new and ambitious approach to devolution across England.

Amendment 196F, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, seeks to remove the ability to make incidental, consequential, transitional or supplementary amendments to primary legislation passed in the future, to the conversion of combined county authorities to combined authorities following local government reorganisation. As your Lordships will know, the Government is currently undertaking an ambitious programme of local government reorganisation in areas with two-tier local government, with the aim of providing stronger unitary councils that are better equipped to drive economic growth, improve local public services and empower their communities.

The purpose of this delegated power is narrow. It facilitates the smooth and orderly conversion of a combined county authority to a combined authority, where necessary, so that the authority can continue to function properly following local government reorganisation. This is needed, as there are separate Acts of Parliament that provide for combined authorities and combined county authorities. To that end, the delegated power has been crafted to allow for any instances where primary legislation may need to be amended once a combined county authority has been converted to a combined authority, to ensure that there is no change in the functions conferred on a strategic authority before and after its conversion. Nevertheless, I welcome the spirit in which the noble Lord has brought forward his amendment. I reassure him that I will reflect on whether the Secretary of State requires this power to apply to future primary legislation ahead of Report in this House.

Finally, Amendment 235DA, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, seeks to remove the ability of the Secretary of State to amend or repeal legislation relating to the setting of national minimum standards for taxis and private hire vehicles in England. The current legislative framework for regulating the taxi and private hire vehicle trades across England is complex, fragmented and archaic, with some legislation dating back to Victorian times—I know that we will have a much fuller debate on that later and that the noble Lord, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, will be here to assist with questions that noble Lords have on that archaic legislation.

The delegated power in the Bill is essential to ensure that consequential amendments can be made to other legislation to make any necessary fixes that were not able to be fully foreseen at the point of legislating. This will ensure that the Government are able to effectively implement national minimum standards, which will mean that wherever passengers travel, the drivers and vehicles they use will be subject to rigorous safety standards. This is an important step towards delivering on our commitments following the recent national audit on group-based child sexual exploitation and abuse from the noble Baroness, Lady Casey.

Again, I welcome the spirit in which the noble Lord has brought forward his amendment and I will reflect on whether the Secretary of State requires this power to apply to future primary legislation ahead of Report. With these reassurances, I hope that the noble Lord will be able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, not only for her supportive comments on all these amendments but for her participation in the Committee’s scrutiny. We are grateful to the Delegated Powers Committee for the time and trouble that it takes in drawing these things carefully to our attention.

I will not dwell on this. I entirely understand many of the things that the Minister was saying. No part of these amendments is seeking to frustrate the Government’s intentions through these four separate parts of the Bill. The point is technical but simple. At any future stage, future primary legislation can take account in that primary legislation of whether it may be necessary for the powers in this Act to, for example, change the functions of mayors and strategic authorities or to revise the local government reorganisation arrangements in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act. It can take account of those and extend those powers to make statutory instruments to amend them in that primary legislation itself. However, we should not, before that legislation has even come here, give a power to amend it. That would significantly restrict our ability in future legislation to anticipate how that legislation can be used and to scrutinise it in the proper way at the time.

I will of course withdraw my amendment but I hope that the Government will come back, not only having responded to the Committee but in order to change this language on each of these occasions to the same as that in Clause 88. However, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 180A.

Amendment 180A withdrawn.

Amendment 181 not moved.

Schedule 24 agreed.

Clauses 51 and 52 agreed.

Schedule 25: Powers to make regulations in relation to functions of strategic authorities and mayors

Amendments 182 and 183 not moved.

Debate on whether Schedule 25 should be agreed.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, by opposing Schedule 25, we seek to probe and clarify what functions may be delegated to mayors under future regulations. Prior to the changes proposed by this Bill, the principal mechanisms for conferring local authority and public authority functions on combined authorities were set out in the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. More recently, equivalent provisions for combined county authorities were established through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023.

Under both frameworks, functions have generally been conferred on individual combined authorities or combined county authorities through bespoke statutory instruments, subject to the affirmative procedure. In other words, Parliament has been asked to scrutinise each discrete transfer of power on a case-by-case basis, authority by authority. However, in our reading, paragraph 2 of Schedule 25 marks a significant shift. It enables the Secretary of State to make regulations conferring functions not on individual authorities but on categories of mayors of combined authorities and combined county authorities, or to modify such functions once conferred. Clause 17 provides that those functions will then be exercisable by the mayor on behalf of the combined authority or combined county authority.

I would therefore be grateful if the Minister could explain in practical terms how this new approach differs from the position under the 2023 Act. In particular, how does conferring functions on a category of mayors differ, both operationally and constitutionally, from the authority-specific approach taken under the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act? What are the implications of this shift for democratic accountability, parliamentary scrutiny and local consent? Simply, will Parliament have more or less say and will decisions of this kind be subject to clearer democratic oversight than under the previous framework? My fear is that they will not. Additionally, is the Minister willing to illustrate this with a concrete example, perhaps in relation to transport, skills or planning, so that the Committee can better understand how Parliament’s role in scrutinising these transfers of power will change in practice?

The provision in paragraph 12 of Schedule 25 allows the Secretary of State to make regulations applying differing voting arrangements from those set out as the default in Clause 6 in relation to particular functions for one or more categories of combined authorities or combined county authorities. I have a number of questions for the Minister. First, in what circumstances do the Government envisage departing from the default voting arrangements and what criteria will guide those decisions? Secondly, how will local consent be secured where voting arrangements are altered by regulation, particularly if those changes materially affect the balance of power between constituent authorities and the mayor? Finally, what safeguards exist to ensure that such variations do not undermine transparency or local democratic accountability?

Part 6 of the schedule introduces yet another significant power: the ability of the Secretary of State to confer additional public authority or local authority functions on specific strategic authorities as part of a time-limited pilot programme. It also allows for the governance arrangements of existing functions to be modified on a similarly time-limited basis. Again, I seek assurances from the Minister. How will pilot authorities be selected and on what objective basis? What evaluation criteria will be applied before, during and after a pilot programme? Crucially, what guarantees are there that the time-limited pilots will not default and become permanent through inertia rather than explicit parliamentary approval?

18:00

Finally, paragraph 25 of the schedule provides that regulations made under this schedule are generally subject to the affirmative resolution procedure, with one notable exception: regulations establishing pilot programmes may be made using the negative procedure. Why is this distinction justified? Given that pilot programmes may involve the conferral of substantial new powers and alterations of governance arrangements, why do the Government consider the negative procedure sufficient in these cases? Does this not risk reducing parliamentary scrutiny at precisely a point when new and untested models of governance are being introduced?

These are probing questions, but they go to the heart of the balance between flexibility, localism and parliamentary accountability. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, briefly, I express my support for what the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, said. I suggest to the Minister that it might help, particularly as we approach the tabling of amendments on Report, if the Government were to produce a grid that shows what powers will reside where. There are mayoral powers, government powers, local authority powers and town and parish council powers, for all Whitehall departments. We could have a piece of paper that would tell us what the Government’s intention is for where they are headed. I assume that the Government have this already but, if they do not, I suggest that they consider creating one.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I, too, support what my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook was saying. I recall that she was responsible for Sections 18, 19 and 20 of LURA, on the conferral of functions on county combined authorities—as they were at that time—so she has been down this track.

I have three quick points. First, and I think my noble friend touched on this, the existing legislation, by which the Secretary of State can confer functions on combined authorities or combined county authorities, operates on the basis of a proposal from those authorities to the Secretary of State for the functions to be conferred. After consultation, the Secretary of State requires the consent of those authorities for the functions to be conferred. I cannot find that in Schedule 25, so the conclusion that one reaches is that, in this devolution Bill, the authorities do not even have the power to decide whether the functions are theirs or not. They will just be given to them or modified without anything beyond consultation; it does not require a proposal or consent. That is a very odd way of proceeding.

Secondly, we had a discussion in an earlier group about the structure of the voting arrangements in Clause 6, but we suddenly find in Schedule 25 that the Government want a power to change them on potentially quite important issues. I cannot for the life of me understand why that is necessary here, because the individual strategic authorities can change their constitutional arrangements anyway, if they really wanted to. I think that we established that in the earlier group. So why do the Government want to be able to change the voting arrangements?

Thirdly, on the pilots, there is a requirement in paragraph 21 for the pilot schemes to produce an impact report but, as far as I can see, it has to be given to the Secretary of State. It does not appear to have to be given to anybody else and it certainly does not have to be published. The Government should come back and make it clear that, when produced and given to the Secretary of State, the impact report should then be published.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for probing whether Schedule 25 should stand part of the Bill. Schedule 25 is central to the objectives of the Bill and the Government’s ambitions for devolution in England. We have been clear that the devolution framework delivered by this Bill is the floor not the ceiling of our ambitions for devolving powers to our communities. Schedule 25 provides the Secretary of State with the power to confer new functions on strategic authorities and to modify these functions. This will ensure that strategic authorities and mayors have the powers that they need to deliver for local people.

I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, wanted to question which functions could be conferred using these powers. As outlined in paragraph 4 of Schedule 25, a function can be conferred if it

“is a function of a public authority, and … relates to any aspect of any area of competence”.

It might help if I go into a little more detail on that. The current list reflects the areas under which the Government believe strategic authorities should hold powers and functions. Functions and powers held under these areas will best empower mayors to act strategically, to drive growth and to help shape public services for their local communities. The current list of thematic policy areas is deliberately broad and allows for a wide range of activities to fall within the areas of competence. The Government remain open to considering whether the list could be expanded in future.

Questions were asked about the conferring of functions on to a strategic authority and how that will work.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am sorry to interrupt but I have a question. When the Minister talks about extending the list in future, is that the list of functions within areas of competence, or is she talking about the ability to extend the list of areas of competence?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am talking about the functions within the competence.

The Secretary of State will be required to consult relevant parties, including the strategic authority, the constituent councils and any body that currently holds the function. The Secretary of State will then need to determine whether to confer the function, paying regard to the need for the effective exercise of the function concerned. Regulations made under Schedule 25 will be subject to the affirmative procedure, ensuring that appropriate parliamentary scrutiny takes place.

In some instances, it will make sense to pilot functions with a smaller number of strategic authorities for a time-limited period. I will try to answer the questions about piloting, but I will look at Hansard later and come back in writing if I have not answered them all. Where we are piloting, strategic authorities will be required to provide an impact report on the pilot, which the Secretary of State will take into consideration before deciding whether to confer the functions permanently; I will consider whether those reports should be public.

As an example—the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, asked for an example of this—development corporation functions are held by mayors. If we wanted to move those functions to foundation authorities, for example, we could use these powers. What will happen with a pilot is that an area will make a request for a function. Pilots will need to be consented to by both the Secretary of State and the relevant local authorities. When a pilot has been completed, there will be an impact assessment of that pilot.

I will come back to the noble Baroness in writing on her questions about default voting arrangements, balance of power and the safeguards.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, asked about a grid setting out the different powers between different layers of local authorities. We have already produced one; it is on GOV.UK. Perhaps the noble Lord might like to have a look at it and, if he has any further questions, to come back to me.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

In view of the points made in the debate on this group of amendments, is it going to change?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The competencies are there, so the powers will stay the same as in the grid that we have set out. I ask the noble Lord to have a look at it and, by all means, to come back to me if he has any questions on it.

The Government will be able to confer functions across all areas on which we expect strategic authorities to act. Also, if the Government wish to create a completely new function and confer it on a strategic authority, primary legislation would be required. This strikes the balance between delivering further devolution and ensuring that appropriate parliamentary scrutiny of more novel measures takes place.

I hope this answer is helpful to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and ask her not to oppose the schedule.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I thank the Minister for her response; however, I think we will need to go back to Hansard. My example, for instance, was not on the pilots. It was an example on the changes that have been made in this Bill to, in particular, the levelling-up Act. I will of course go through Hansard carefully and, if necessary, we will return to these matters.

The issue of oversight goes to the heart of how this House discharges its responsibilities, particularly in view of reorganisation and changes to how we are all governed. Processes in this place matter and, when we confer powers, particularly those that will shape local systems and local decision-making, we must do so with proper regard to localism and accountability, not just what the Secretary of State at the time would like.

Much of our consideration of this Bill has necessarily focused on the schedules. Schedules are rarely debated line by line in the same way as clauses. When powers are dispersed across multiple schedules, as they are in this Bill, it becomes more difficult for your Lordships to track precisely what authority is being granted, to whom and subject to what limits. That is not a criticism of this House, nor of the Government, but it does mean that we must consciously take the time to examine these provisions with care. Schedules also frequently rely on delegated powers, allowing Ministers to add, remove or modify functions through regulations with limited parliamentary oversight. Over time, this risks creating a ratchet effect, whereby more and more policy is shaped by executive action rather than by primary legislation. That is precisely why the questions raised in this debate deserve clear and substantive answers. When the Minister reads Hansard, maybe a letter would be sensible.

For those reasons, while I am grateful for the short debate that we have had today, I remain concerned that important issues of scrutiny and accountability have yet to be fully addressed. I hope the Government will reflect on these points as the Bill progresses. At this point, I will not press my opposition to the schedule standing part.

Schedule 25 agreed.

Clause 53: Health service functions: application of existing limitations on devolution

Debate on whether Clause 53 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, in proposing that Clause 53 should not stand part of the Bill, I should emphasise that I am not opposed to the clause—far from it. We have now had three debates about the role of local government in the health service, and I want to probe how far the Government are really prepared to devolve and delegate responsibilities for both health improvement and the NHS to strategic local authorities.

I will not repeat what has been said in our earlier debates, but this clause is very important. It makes consequential amendments to Section 18 of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016 to reflect changes introduced into this Bill. The importance of Section 16 is that it provides Ministers with the ability to confer public authority functions on local authorities, including health and social care.

The debate about the role for local authorities in relation to healthcare and health improvement is as old as the NHS itself. But since the 1974 reorganisation, it seems to me that the NHS and healthcare delivery has often stood remote and disconnected from the rest of public services such as social care, housing and education, which are under some kind of integration within local government and democratic control. I see devolution in health as a way to reconnect services, at least at a strategic level. I do not think this will happen without a stronger drive through powers devolved locally.

18:15

The motivation behind the 2016 Act was, in essence, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer’s support for devo Manchester as a way to kick-start the economy in the north-west and hopefully set a pattern for the rest of the country. However, the legislation was passed, Mr Osborne left office, and the Whitehall appetite for devolution evaporated alongside his departure. Only Manchester benefited, in essence.

Earlier, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, talked about the inability or unwillingness of the health sector to devolve money to local government. Last week, she talked about her own experience as a senior local government leader, about trying to go, as she described it, “to the full endgame”. She said:

“I tried to join the local director of children’s and adult care services with the local director of the NHS. I tried, but it did not work because health would not give up its power and its money”.—[Official Report, 4/2/26; col. GC 612.]

That is a great pity, because the evidence from Greater Manchester shows that, although it is not perfect, it has made some real advances.

Research by Manchester University shows that the devolution deal enabled Greater Manchester to make significant improvements in many parts of the health system. For example, there were 11.1% fewer alcohol-related hospital admissions and 14.4% fewer hospital admissions for violence, same-day GP appointments increased and unplanned A&E reattendances were lower. The researchers argue that the positive changes

“are likely to have been a result of different aspects of the Greater Manchester devolution deals”,

such as

“the transfer of control over transformation funding … to the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership”.

My question to the Government is: given that the apparent possibilities for improvement are there, will they increase the powers of other parts of the country and extend health and NHS responsibilities to them? I am convinced that the NHS cannot be run under essential command-and-control management from the centre. I have tried it myself. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, of course, had proposals; he tried through NHS England to move away from that but, as we have seen, that has proven to be very difficult indeed.

Clearly, there are concerns about how this works within the concept of a national service, where the public expect uniform provision throughout the country. But I have to say that I think Andy Burnham got it right. He has always talked about this, saying that you have to accept that the “what” has to be delivered with some basic standards that must be met and should be determined nationally, but how services are delivered and how a system becomes integrated to deliver the best overall package of services and set priorities is local, and it should be democratically local.

My noble friend Lady Taylor was encouraging in our debates last week, talking about local government having a bigger role in health. She reminded us that the mayoral competences set out in the Bill specifically include health, well-being and public service reform. She also spoke of her experiences in Stevenage, where she said they took a great interest in tackling some of the key health challenges in their area. I encourage her department to relook at the 2016 legislation, as it will be amended by the Bill, and give big encouragement both to its colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care and to local government to enthusiastically embrace the health agenda. I am convinced that this is one way we will lead to better health outcomes.

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to speak to my Amendment 185. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, with his rallying cry, and I hope that at least he supports what I am seeking to do with this amendment.

To me, a simple yet essential principle that I want to introduce is that devolution means real devolution—something that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, called for just then. I do not believe that you can say that you are meaningfully devolving a function while keeping the real authority and, crucially, the purse strings firmly in Whitehall. If you want to hand down power, you should not simultaneously hold on to it; you need to have a clean break and hand it over. With this amendment, I want to try to find a way to make real devolution happen.

As noble Lords know and as the Government were talking about only the other day, there has been a lot of coverage of and praise from the Government for their one-in, one-out approach to illegal migration. But I would like to propose a different one, one that perhaps works; it should be not just one in, one out, but one down, one out. When a function is devolved, it should be removed from central government entirely, except when the narrowest oversight is essential from central government or where there are international obligations. Without such a safeguard put into the Bill, we risk creating a system that is not devolved but duplicated with two bodies—or in some circumstances more than two—allegedly doing exactly the same thing, at the same time.

I say this because I come at it from the point of view that the public just want things to work. They want to know who is responsible and for them to just get on with it. I fear that, under the Bill as drafted, we risk a situation where powers are described as devolved, yet Ministers in departments in Whitehall still retain the same functions.

I was reading a brilliant book the other day, which I highly recommend, called the Unaccountability Machine by a chap called Dan Davies. He uses many examples from around the world when he talks about accountability sinks. I fear that the Bill is doing exactly the same, and the result is confusion, overlap and a lack of clarity about who is actually in charge. In some circumstances, it can be even worse: where accountability is not clear, decision-making becomes risk-averse or, at times, paralysed altogether. When no one is clearly responsible, no one feels empowered to act. Everyone waits for someone else to take the lead or people just assume, as perhaps is human nature, that it is someone else’s job.

It is easy for the Bill to lead people to think that the local authority will deliver a service now, only for the local authority then to say that they cannot deliver it, because the powers still lie in Whitehall. My real concern is that the result will be delay, drift and, ultimately, failure to deliver for the very people that the Bill is supposed to help.

I reassure noble Lords that I am not being melodramatic and I am certainly not game playing as, from looking at the Bill, there are three areas that could be used as examples of where this would happen. The Bill requires strategic authorities to produce local growth plans, to take responsibility for regeneration and to address health inequalities. We have talked about these objectives many times, including at Second Reading, and we support them all, but the broad powers and money to deliver them are not being handed down at the same time. They will remain in Whitehall.

Housing is something that we all talk about, which is covered a lot in the Bill. I know that the Minister is doing a huge amount on this in the department, not just on this Bill but in many other areas. But, if we want to build more homes, devolution means it should not be done just through the prism of national targets and central grants; we should be looking to empower and incentivise local authorities more by automatically giving them a fairer share of the revenue generated locally and the flexibility to deliver what they want. Let them feel the benefits of growth, and let them have ownership and buy-in. That will encourage them to do more.

On a related point, I know that the Committee has already talked about precepts and levies. The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is not here, but I agree with his Amendment 135. It is entirely possible that there is a doubling up, where powers are held simultaneously both locally and nationally and people will be taxed twice for the same service. To me, that seems a little mad. If you want local leaders to sort these things out, give them the tools to let them get on and do it, because, as I say, the public just want clarity. They want to know who is responsible for what, and they want these things to happen and be fixed. They want a system where the body tasked with delivering an outcome actually has the authority and resources to deliver it. They want it to get on and deliver the outcome unhindered: “If it does not work, we can chuck it out at an election”.

So my amendment seeks to protect the taxpayer and the integrity of devolution. It would ensure that Whitehall thinks carefully before announcing that a function has been devolved. In this scenario, we would not need an army of folks in Whitehall second-guessing what local leaders are doing. Whitehall seems to be growing in number, yet local authorities are having to reduce their numbers because they are feeling the pinch. If we are serious about empowering these local areas, we should be serious about letting go of our powers at the same time. I know that the Minister cares about this, and I hope that we can find a way forward together.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The noble Lord did not mention the questions of where the taxes are raised and who is responsible. For those of us on the Liberal Democrat Benches, the differences between decentralisation and devolution are tax and money. So long as the Treasury retains control of the spending, we will have only decentralisation. We will discuss some of the fiscal things in our next session, but, unless we address the question of fiscal devolution, we are not going anywhere much.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

I agree with my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire. I totally share his view, and we will come on to that matter in the next group. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, for what he said, which was important. I am sure that the Minister, through this grid that the Government are now producing, might clarify what is happening in terms of delivery as opposed to simply the powers.

On a previous day in Committee, I spoke about there being powers, responsibilities and resources in devolution. They are not the same thing. So I share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, that many more powers could well be devolved, alongside the responsibilities for delivering the powers, without the resources to do the job. The point was well made by the noble Lord; I thank him for that. A little more will be said on this in our debate on the next group.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, drew our attention to Greater Manchester and the improvements in the health system. Since the decision was made to devolve some responsibilities in health to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and its mayor, I have always regarded it as a pilot of what we should all be doing. It is now for the Government to double-check all of the figures produced on improvements in public health and to assess whether, having had devolution, the resources have been provided to match the responsibilities and powers devolved—and, at the same time, to assess whether the achievements and outcomes in Greater Manchester are better than what has been secured elsewhere where there is no devolution.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said something that was terribly important to me: the NHS cannot be run by a central command and control system. We learned that during the Covid epidemic, but it is more than that. You cannot run 56 million people in England out of Whitehall and Westminster. The noble Lord helped us a lot by saying that what is to be devolved is a national decision and how it is to be delivered is a local decision.

I therefore come back to the grid that the Government are producing. It should now have a “what?” and a “how?”. Some greater meaning to the word “devolution” can then be achieved. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said, in the end, without greater fiscal responsibilities and powers, you do not have devolution—you have decentralisation. I think I recall making that point at Second Reading and on the first day in Committee, because it is so very true.

18:30

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, before we complete this group, I just want to say that what the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said by way of moving his probing amendment asks not only important questions but questions to which we will have to come back, if not in this Bill then on the NHS reform Bill. As I know the noble Lord will completely understand, in so far as that forthcoming legislation will transfer responsibilities back into the Department of Health and Social Care and, potentially, give specific statutory responsibilities to integrated care boards, neither of those will allow this legislation and the 2016 legislation to operate in the way he intends. We will, therefore, have to come back to that and how it will happen at the time.

As things stand, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care does not devolve any of his functions to local government. In effect, he devolves the functions that would otherwise be exercised by NHS England in Manchester to the mayoral strategic authority. If we are going to do that in other mayoral strategic authorities when NHS England has disappeared, there will need to be a new structure to see how this works.

In some ways, it is entirely dependent on how the Government intend, in the NHS reform procedures, to re-establish the relationship between the NHS and local government. Nobody—I heard the noble Lord say this quite recently—has satisfactorily created that relationship. In the coalition Government, it was a very complicated process, and it did not work. There have been positive outcomes in relation to public health, but, for local government, there have not been satisfactory outcomes in relation to the management of health services—particularly in so far as they can be combined satisfactorily with social care services. This is something that we will have to return to in the NHS reform Bill.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, turning first to Clause 53, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, for his probing stand part notice. As we have said more than once, the devolution of health is a complex matter that raises many important questions—particularly, as we have heard, around the relationship between local authorities and the NHS. I listened to the passion of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, on this issue. I assure him that I felt as passionate as him 15 years ago; I hope that, at the end of all this, he is not as disappointed as I was.

When I was going through this in Wiltshire, the interesting thing was that the staff on the front line—those in the NHS and in local authorities—really understood this issue. They understood the importance of devolution and how they could deliver much more efficient, better services for the people whom they wanted to serve. That pushed me to do this more and more. However, as I have noted previously, many of the determinants of public health sit outside the health system. We must be clear on who is responsible for what. As we have said many times, where additional duties and responsibilities are placed on local authorities, they must be matched with sufficient resources to deliver them properly. In addition, the Government’s approach must be evidence-based and must demonstrate value for money for taxpayers.

On previous groups, the Minister mentioned the mayor’s involvement in integrated care boards, and we all welcome that. But it has to go further than that. In my opinion, being a member of an integrated care board will not deliver what we need to be delivered on the ground with health and local authorities.

This brings me to Amendment 185 in the name of my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. I thank him for making the case so compellingly. This amendment would prevent the duplication of powers between local authorities and central government. In the realm of health, for instance, we cannot risk the lines of accountability being blurred, whereby functions and responsibilities are devolved down to local authorities, yet Whitehall does not equip them to deliver effectively or continues to do the same jobs itself, leading to duplication.

This is precisely the difference between the Government’s current approach to devolution and what genuine community empowerment ought to look like. This amendment aims to correct that by ensuring that, when a function is devolved, it is also relinquished by central government, while still permitting the appropriate oversight where needed.

If the Government truly believe in local community empowerment, there can be no greater vote of confidence than supporting the principles set out here, trusting local authorities to do the jobs devolved to them fully, and giving local people clear, transparent lines of accountability. This is a matter not of meaningful devolution but of efficiencies and effective government. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on both these important amendments.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, for their amendments. I turn first to my noble friend Lord Hunt probing whether Clause 53 should stand part of the Bill.

Clause 53 places limits on the devolution of health functions to strategic authorities to ensure that the health service remains truly national. I know the noble Lord understands that. For instance, it prevents the transfer of the Secretary of State for Health’s core functions in relation to health. Where health functions are devolved to a strategic authority, it requires that provision is made to ensure that they adhere to national service standards.

Protections against devolving these functions are not new; as the noble Lord indicated, they have probably been going since the health service was first set up. They have certainly been in place since central government first began the process of devolving functions to combined authorities. The Bill merely retains those protections. I know my noble friend wishes to probe the Government’s intentions on devolving health functions in the future, and he is right to do so.

Health, well-being and public service reform is an area of competence for strategic authorities, as set out in Clause 2. The Bill also confers a new health improvement and inequalities duty on combined authorities and combined county authorities. As health is covered within the areas of competence, the Government could use the powers in this Bill to devolve health functions to strategic authorities in the future, if they believed it appropriate to do so. Mayors of established mayoral strategic authorities would also be able to request the devolution of health functions and get a response from government.

This demonstrates that the Government see a clear role for strategic authorities and mayors in health, both now and going forward. The example of Manchester is a very good one, and we will continue to look at what is happening there to make sure that lessons can be learned and that, if we get requests from other mayors to devolve health functions to them, we pick up on any lessons from Manchester. At the moment, the process is looking positive. But it will always be right, I fear, that limitations remain to make sure that the health service remains truly national. Whether that is in targeting or some of the processes, we will see.

I turn to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, which seeks to prevent the doubling up of powers and responsibilities in strategic authorities and Whitehall. I heard the Secretary of State speak over the weekend and his view is definitely that devolution by default is the way he wants to move this forward. He was very clear on that, and on the advocation of subsidiarity that sees powers and funding always held at the most appropriate level for delivering any service. The funding settlement will be announced this week; it may be out today. It is out—I thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. I had not kept up on that, although I have talked of nothing else all weekend.

Through the integrated settlement, we have instituted the principle that, where central government funding falls within the scope of an established mayoral strategic authorities’ functional responsibilities, that funding will be devolved. The Government are also committed to providing new strategic authorities with capacity funding to kick-start their organisations, so all areas on the devolution priority programme will receive mayoral capacity funding to help establish their new institutions once the legislation has been laid before Parliament. They will receive capacity funding in future years as well, so they are ready and prepared to deliver the benefits of devolution.

I agree with the noble Lord that, unless you have the funding to deliver these new functions, there is not much point in devolving them. We very much agree with the spirit of the noble Lord’s amendment. When responsibilities are devolved, they have to be devolved as thoroughly as possible to enable the true innovation and place-based approaches that we all want to see and that are the whole purpose of devolution in the first place. That is the position the Government have taken in the devolution framework in this Bill. The majority of powers will be exercised solely by the strategic authority or concurrently with the constituent authorities.

However, there are rare circumstances where the relevant Secretary of State and the strategic authority need to share powers. To give an example, the Secretary of State will retain the ability to provide funding in relation to adult education in addition to funding provided by the strategic authority. This will ensure that those areas in strategic authorities do not miss out on nationwide schemes. For example, I think there have been some announced today.

The amendment in itself is too restrictive and would prevent instances where it makes sense for powers to be held concurrently with government. I understand the noble Lord’s concern that, while functions may be devolved, funding may remain in Whitehall. However, the Government are committed to providing strategic authorities with the funding to deliver their functions.

We have committed to providing new strategic authorities with capacity funding, as I have said, and the integrated settlement institutes the principle that government funding will be devolved where the responsibilities fall within established mayoral authorities’ functional responsibilities. I hope that, with those explanations, noble Lords are able to support the clause standing part of the Bill.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend. It has been a really interesting and encouraging debate. I share the view, concern and thrust of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, and I thought my noble friend was pretty positive in response.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made a very pertinent point about the difference between delegation and devolvement. As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, pointed out, although we talk about devo Manchester in relation to health, it was actually delegation, with the Secretary of State retaining responsibility.

I do not think that in the short term we will be able to move off the Secretary of State’s responsibility. That goes back to 1948. However, I think a lot more could be delegated, and there are issues where we could start to look at real devolvement. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, reminded me that we have the joys of another NHS reform Bill coming to us in the next few months, and we will have an opportunity to discuss and debate this further. I will be looking particularly to see whether the Bill tries to nibble away at what is already contained in Clause 53.

One has to say that, at the time of the agreement over Greater Manchester, it is well known that NHS England was not in the loop in the original decision-making. I am afraid that, because of that, it has not been keen to see progress such as has occurred in Manchester. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said that Manchester was essentially a pilot and we should have a proper assessment; I agree with that.

My noble friend was very encouraging. I understand this whole question about the Secretary of State’s accountability to Parliament for the running of the National Health Service and how that squares with giving more authority to local authorities to have a role in it. We can find a way through. For instance, this always struck me: if we are going to have pilots, why on earth can we not have one mayoral authority taking on responsibility for an ICB—not having one place on it but actually doing it? Albeit it might be under delegated powers from the Secretary of State, at least let us dip in the water of freeing up the system. Looking at how the NHS is run at the moment, how many restructurings do we need to show that central command control simply does not work? Having said that, I withdraw my opposition to Clause 53.

Clause 53 agreed.

18:45

Clause 54: Incidental etc provision

Amendments 184 and 184A not moved.

Clause 54 agreed.

Clauses 55 and 56 agreed.

Amendment 185 not moved.

Amendment 186

Moved by

[Lord Gascoigne]

186: After Clause 56, insert the following new Clause—
“Powers of strategic authoritiesBefore new powers are conferred on a strategic authority, the Secretary of State must be satisfied that the strategic authority has a plan which will improve local services, drive efficiency and improve cost effectiveness.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that before changes are made, each strategic authority has a plan to ensure improved services and value for money for the tax payer.

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to kick off this group. I see the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, leaving at this crucial moment. I know that there are lots of other people with amendments here, so I will not dwell too long on what I want to say. On my amendment, I believe it is reasonable and genuinely important that, before new powers are conferred on a strategic authority, the Secretary of State must be satisfied that the authority has a credible plan to improve local services, drive efficiency and deliver better value for money.

I was going to welcome back the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, but she seems to have dashed off as well. I confess that I was a little saddened on the first day of Committee, when I thought I could perhaps work with the Lib Dems, but they were not able to support one of my amendments that follows this vein. Given the breakout of love on that last group, I hope I can get their support. That was on Amendment 12, which sought to ensure that people receive the best possible service on the ground as part of that intended reorganisation. As I say, this is my second attempt to win them over.

I genuinely believe that, if we do not build in something along the lines of what I suggest in this amendment, we are effectively just rubber-stamping the creation of swathes of new authorities without requiring them first to demonstrate that they will spend the public’s money well, and without any obligation to show that things will improve. To be clear, my amendment here simply states that, when we create these new authorities—which we are in this Bill—we should do so with the taxpayer front and centre. After all, surely one of the main tenets of devolution is that not only do people have a greater say but they have a better service in their local area based upon local desire and need.

As part of the process of reorganisation, I am saying here that new authorities must develop a plan as part of that reorganisation, because I genuinely do not believe that there is any point in going through all this reorganisation, with all the costs, energy, rebadging, delays of elections, hirings and firings—you name it—if there is no guarantee or even a requirement or plan for services to improve as a result. I say to my Lib Dem amigos that, although their argument against my past amendment was that it was not in the vein of the Bill, if they feel this is not the right Bill, let us try to work together to make it better. Let us try to put devolution in and put local people front and centre.

If we are choosing to impose this system on the people, which we are, we have a responsibility to make sure that it works for them. It is worth stressing that point: we are forcing devolution on to the people—rightly or wrongly, whatever noble Lords’ views—so we have a duty of care, in my view. There is no choice in this matter. In this Bill, we are ultimately giving a blank cheque, with respect, to the Government, so I do not think there can be a credible objection to saying that we owe it to the people that services should improve before we do so. If the power to create these entities lies in the hands of the Secretary of State, surely he or she has a duty of care to ensure that what will now appear across the land will deliver and look after the people in those communities.

As I said on day one, we cannot trust that this will all be fine. Some local authorities are already working well and, for those people in those authorities, perhaps things will continue to work well or even improve. However, when we are forcing authorities to combine with perhaps less well-performing authorities, we again have a duty to the people on the ground before these changes happen. It forces everyone involved to deliver and to work up a plan in advance.

Finally, and briefly, I will not name names but it was suggested in Committee that, because I have worked in Downing Street, I perhaps have very skewed views when it comes to devolution. I do not. I assure the Whip that I am not going to err into a Second Reading speech, but my real concern with this entire Bill is that it completely misjudges what I think people want. For context, I grew up in a working-class family in a terraced house in East Lancs. It was a long time ago, but there were some issues and those issues remain. In many northern towns, there are some deep and real issues. Twenty years ago, there was some scepticism of politics and how London dominated everything—this was in Lancashire by the way, the right side of the border—and things needed to be fixed, yet nothing changed.

That feeling has grown. However, that desire for change does not, in my view, equate to local government reorganisation, nor wanting mayors for mayors’ sake. Respectfully, the reason I say that is, if we look at the polls and at what focus groups say—I will not be the first to say this—if we go outside Westminster, there is a world between what we think people think and what they actually think. People are not clamouring right now for tinkering, nor are the masses out there with their pitchforks demanding local government reorganisation, but there is a building, growing unease. It has not happened overnight or certainly not solely under this Government, but people are struggling. They are feeling ignored and let down, and they want things fixed.

I give one quick example. The other day, I stumbled across the Electoral Commission’s 2025 public attitude report—I highly recommend it—which states that:

“More people now believe Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules”.


A little later, it goes on:

“Support among Labour supporters rose from 27% to 38% following Labour’s victory”.


It has other breakdowns for other parties as well, but I will not go into that. To me, what that shows is exasperation. People want things fixed; they want things to happen.

The noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, who is sadly not in her place, talked about my views on levelling up. I worked for the guy who coined that phrase. We can have a debate about whether he did any good or not on that specific issue, but levelling up does not always mean devolution—certainly not this version. One of the many things that used to drive me into an absolute rage when I worked in Downing Street was that, whenever many in Westminster talked of devolution, it always felt that it was more Westminster, not devolution. The answer to everything seemed to be more structure, more governance and more politicians. We seem always to overlook the crucial thing, which is the people themselves. It is they who want things fixed and to work and, in my view, that is what levelling up is. That is also why I think we need to put something into this Bill that helps to deliver it and puts the people front and centre. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 187. There is a fair amount of agreement between myself and the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne—on both sides of the Pennines—about the nature of the problems. This is not a devolution Bill; it is a decentralisation Bill. The Government believe that delivery is what matters but have not yet understood that, unless the people on the ground are helped to understand why delivery is difficult and that they have some part in seeing what is delivered and in helping with delivery, they will not feel that it is them.

My amendment therefore starts from the need to re-establish public trust in the delivery of government on the ground, at the local level and, therefore, to provide a degree of financial transparency. Unless we have a more transparent process of fiscal negotiation about the distribution of funds between central and local government, we cannot succeed in improving the governance of England or in gaining the acceptance of people outside London and the south-east that the governance of England is fair.

There is a deep sense of disillusionment across the north of England that people have been neglected, that London does not understand them and that the Civil Service in London, as the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, said, has grown in the last 15 years while local government has languished and, in many cases, faced bankruptcy. The city of Bradford is not yet bankrupt but is struggling on the brink of it. We have to explain to local people why the services they used to have are no longer being provided. I challenge the Minister to explain how devolution, which helps to resolve the enormous crisis we have with public trust in our democratic politics, can take place without a more visible process of fiscal devolution, without beginning to reform local taxation and without Ministers as well as local council leaders explaining to their public what is and is not possible in strict financial terms.

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 190 in my name would place an obligation on the Government to introduce devolved fiscal and revenue-raising powers within 12 months of the introduction of the Act. Fiscal devolution is the transfer of financial powers and responsibilities from central government to local authorities, enabling them to raise and manage their own revenue and tailor tax policies and spending to meet local needs and ambitions.

The UK is widely recognised as having the most centralised system in the world. The dead hand of the Treasury is firmly on the purse strings, holding back local potential, opportunities and energies. Overcentralisation has held back regional economic growth and increased regional inequalities. Vast numbers of reports have been written on this subject, urging central government to empower local government by devolving powers close to the people they affect. Charities and think tanks such as the Resolution Foundation, the LGA, the Centre for Cities, Core Cities and many more have produced well-evidenced reports as to how financial devolution could empower the UK’s communities to boost economic growth and greater public participation in governance, but progress has so far been extremely slow.

There are many ways in which fiscal devolution could be achieved in England. Evidence from other countries demonstrates effective and achievable systems in such countries as the Netherlands, Germany, France and Switzerland. Measures include raising direct tax revenues, expanding the tax base, taking a proportion of locally levied income tax, placing different conditions on business rates and making council tax a buoyant and progressive local tax, which it certainly is not at the moment. There is ample evidence available for the successful introduction of fiscal devolution in England. There are many advantages, such as democratic accountability and voter turnout at elections. Anybody who has ever campaigned in local elections will have experienced the challenge of persuading people to go out and vote when they understand that virtually all the funding comes directly from central government. “What is the point of it?”, they ask, when their hopes and aspirations are slapped down because of no funding coming from central government, only more cuts.

Economic dynamism benefits enormously from fiscal devolution in that the regions and cities of the UK are able to take actions that add to economic strength, such as attracting inward investment, job creation, skills training and development of specific infrastructure such as transport that enable more locally focused dynamic economic activities. There is also greater transparency and clarity. My colleague talked about the loss of trust among the public, part of which is because of the perception by many voters that money just goes into a great big hole: it comes from central government and they have no influence over how it is spent or raised. If they had more involvement there would be much greater trust and participation in local governance, which is a vital factor in the delivery of key projects.

The Government claim that the Bill will provide devolution and empowerment, but clearly it will keep firm central control over the finances. Funds are allocated from Whitehall, and mayors continue to be local outposts of central government who are responsible, in essence, for ensuring that central government policy is delivered at a local level. As my colleagues here have said, unless revenue-raising powers and financial powers are devolved, this is not devolution but decentralisation, and opportunities are likely to be lost: the opportunity to underpin local powers with real financial powers and responsibilities, and the opportunity to give people hope and optimism that they can achieve their local ambitions, with a realistic chance of them being financed, and improve their local area.

19:00

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 196C. For me, this is a really interesting group because it is quite wide: part of it is to do with wanting to enable local revenue raising and part of it says, “Hang on. Hold on a minute, we need a bit more accountability here. Should we not put up some guardrails?” I am somewhere in the middle of that argument, I guess.

My amendment would allow mayors to levy a business rates supplement to fund local priorities. The first question is: why do that? These mayoral authorities are going to be quite large—perhaps not on the scale of Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, the West Midlands and so on, but they will be large geographic entities. One would think that they will want primarily to drive projects that relate to bits of infrastructure kit and transport, such as buses, trains and trams, and to ensure that they have adequate local funding to do so. It is welcome that the Government are consulting on a tourism levy but, even following the Bill, established mayoral authorities will still require considerable central funding and approval for major projects.

I do not quite buy the argument that the Bill is about decentralisation, not devolution; I think it is a mixture of the two. It is good that we are looking to decentralise more because that will eventually underpin a greater level of devolution. My amendment would change who can levy the supplement and under what circumstances. It would allow established mayoral areas to levy a business rates supplement without a referendum, as was the case for Crossrail. I am sure that most colleagues will remember that the Crossrail funding was a mix of central funding and local funding. The Crossrail business levy was an important element of that; it also meant that businesses across the capital had to think about what they were going to get out of Crossrail and make their voices well known.

Currently, the relevant legislation says that only the Greater London Authority, county and district councils can do this in England, subject to a referendum of businesses in those areas. My amendment would change this so that only established mayoral areas would be able to do so, but without the requirement for a referendum. This would align the economic growth policies of the mayoral tier with the fiscal incentives from a business rates supplement, as is the case in London. It would mean that the referendum requirement, which was put into the Localism Act 2011, would be withdrawn or would not apply. Crossrail has been a major success—everybody can see that. It has major benefits. I am sure that mayoral authorities, combined mayoral authorities and so on will want to see the sorts of improvement that have been gained from Crossrail spread more widely across the country.

I argue that we should lift those restrictions so that mayors can get on with delivering for their areas. This cuts to the point on central funding that the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, talked about. Most local government services are, in the majority, centrally funded, but that was not always the case. I think back to my time as a borough councillor in the early 1980s, when much more of the revenue was raised locally through business rates and rates on properties. That gave us more autonomy and more freedom, and it meant that local people could see that their local authority was spending their money. That increased the level of interest in local elections, which I believe is a very positive thing. I therefore hope that this will get some favour from the Minister, and that colleagues will find this an interesting solution to local financial support for combined mayoral authorities.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad that I am following the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, because I could not disagree more with his Amendment 196C. When I was the leader of a district authority, we had control over the business rates, and we were able to get full reliefs to the last pub, shop or community sporting club in a village with a population of less than 3,000. That was the source of a huge community empowerment. The effect of the noble Lord’s amendment would be another nail in the coffin for rural pubs and small businesses, and I reject it on that basis. I will also speak to my own Amendment 256A, which is a rag bag. We are talking about Clause 56 at the moment, but this would go right at the end, beyond Clause 85; perhaps I should have asked for it to be de-grouped, but here we are.

My amendment is consistent with the Government’s Clause 11, which relates to constraining the council tax-raising ability of the larger, newly created mayoral combined authorities. But I am looking at the other end of the spectrum, because I am concerned that, following local government reorganisation, the former district councils, which are currently defined as “billing authorities” under the Local Government Finance Act 1992, will disappear. In Section 39(2), they will become local precepting authorities. In other words, the district council, once abolished, will be converted to a third-tier parish or town council. This will affect places like King’s Lynn, a historic county borough; cathedral cities like Norwich or Oxford; county towns like Ipswich and Chelmsford; and coastal communities like Hastings, Eastbourne and Great Yarmouth.

Some of these places have large populations—for example, Norwich City Council, when it is abolished, will have a population of more than 150,000—and there will be lots of new large locals formed. The problem is that the majors are constrained in their ability to put up council tax—5%—but the locals are not. This amendment would change the definition of “local precepting authority” to include authorities with a population below 49,999. Where a local precepting authority exceeds 50,000, it would become a major precepting authority for the purposes of raising council tax and be subject to the same rules as other larger councils.

Of course, it is not just the former billing authorities that will flip into parishes; the former boundaries that flowed from the hundreds, the poor law unions, the urban and rural district councils, and the predecessors of the county boroughs in the Reform Act 1832 will disappear. This is why my amendment proposes a size scale, rather than being limited solely to the former district councils. These places will be joining that benighted club: Salisbury, Shrewsbury and Scarborough, which have all fallen out of previous rounds of LGR and must now stand on their own two feet in the sense that, unlike their predecessor billing authority constructions, they will get no formula grant in the future; they will need to earn what they spend.

We already know already that over 100 councils, existing principal authorities, want exceptional financial support this year as the Government shamelessly tilt the formula away from being population based. That is a denial of the simple truth that people consume services that need to be paid for and that it is more expensive to deliver them in the countryside, but that is a debate for another time.

But, under LGR, there will be a powerful incentive for authorities to cost-shunt the most expensive things to these newly created third-level authorities to get the liabilities off their books and on to the small fry. I am thinking of leisure centres, municipal theatres, parks and open spaces, youth groups, civic activity, and community pride events such as carnivals and festivals.

My wife was a parish clerk for over 10 years in a small parish with 500 souls, spending about £3,000 a year, so I know the value of what these unsung volunteers—real community champions—in parish councils can achieve. But I am focusing on the new large class of parish, town or even small city authority, with plenty of staff, plant and equipment, miles away from that “Vicar of Dibley” stereotype.

These residents need protecting from unconstrained tax rises, cost shunts from principal authorities and the smaller populations being made to afford the costs of facilities that have been previously amortised over a much larger canvas—that hinterland of surrounding parishes where people are able to chip in. This is not an idle concern. The noble Baroness has certainly mentioned Salisbury before, which has let rip. Its precept is up 44% in just four years. Its own website tells long-suffering residents that their council tax is the highest in Wiltshire. At £383 for band D, it is over twice the level of my own district council. I have looked at Shrewsbury. Following LGR, its parishioners’ band D is up 218% in 10 years—although I will concede that, at £87, it appears to be offering slightly better value for money. To those against my amendment, I say: look to Shrewsbury, because limiting council tax in these third-tier authorities can be done.

I have also looked at Stevenage, which is likely to be consumed and subsumed into the larger construct—taking power further away from residents and damaging the distinct identity that came from it being the first post-war new town, alongside all the other accoutrements. It is funny how all my examples begin with an S. In Stevenage, the band D was raised by just 3% to £246.41. If it carries on like Salisbury, a band D in Stevenage would pay £354 by 2030—a raise of nearly 50% or over £100.

We must be clear that these are burdens in addition to the new mayoralties that will be created—the huge new bureaucracies with the ability to raise precepts for things they are not even responsible for. There will be new mayoral CIL on top of existing CIL and new authorities where the effects of council tax equalisation within the canvas have not even been ventilated yet, and the costs of LGR have not been determined. We know it is going be subject to at least a £1 billion black hole from the accelerated pension strain costs.

Do not let the Government tell you there will be fewer layers; there will be more and at more cost. The public will be rinsed by LGR. People will pay more for less—that much is certain—but my amendment would at least seek to constrain those billing authorities that are already principal authorities and are constrained in their ability to raise council tax. That will still apply to them when they are transmogrified into third-tier councils, to make sure they cannot do a Salisbury too. That is right not only by residents but by the authorities, because as they approach this forced reorganisation, which will see a transfer of assets, they will know by this amendment that there is not a blank cheque. It will sharpen the minds.

This is not a dig at parish councils or the third tier. They do a lot of valuable work at a level that is closest to the people, but I have got their back, because it will stop those councils with the broadest shoulders from imposing liabilities and cast-offs on to those with the most limited means. That is an essential safeguard if the community empowerment part of this Bill is not to be undermined. I would be creating equity between the cathedral cities, the market towns, the new towns and so forth, so that council tax after LGR does not become an intolerable burden for those who live within the cities and provide perverse incentives for those just outside to become free riders.

I know the Minister is concerned about this and we have spoken for some time about it. I have suggested a £50,000 threshold in Committee, but as we move to Report I would be open to saying that perhaps there should be a £1 million precept or some other measure. But we have to have a measure between the small and the major authorities to protect parishes from having their leg lifted and, in turn, protect their residents from being rinsed.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Before my noble friend sits down, I would like to clarify something. You cannot compare Salisbury as it is now to Salisbury as it was before as a district council. It was a far larger area; it was Sailsbury and south Wiltshire, not just Salisbury city.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I am staggered at the thought of a parish council with a population over 50,000; it does not make sense to me. I am also staggered at the thought that, if we are talking about getting back to place-based communities, we are denying to places the size of Scarborough or Harrogate, both of which I know well and which have or used to have important assets, in conference centres and major hotels, the sense of local community or parish, thus increasing the sense for most of our public of total alienation from the politics that we are providing them with.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Can I just explain to the noble Lord that a parish council is a name given to parishes, towns and cities? It all comes under the same legislation as parishes.

19:15

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, this is a most interesting group of amendments, and there is deep food for thought in what should come back to the House when we get to Report.

I am grateful for the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller. I must say that I had not understood the figure of 50,000, but at the very end he clarified that that could be a matter of discussion. My noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire has covered that issue as well. A difference between my party and that of the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Gascoigne, is that they are both trying to give excess power to the Secretary of State.

The noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, asked at the very beginning of this group why we had not supported his previous amendment a few weeks ago on the power of the Secretary of State to make a decision on whether an authority was fit to undertake additional powers. Our concern was that these matters should not lie with the Secretary of State, who would have power to make these decisions without necessarily having the right degree of accountability for it. It is better to give the power to local electorates.

In the end, I am not sure that local communities need to be protected by the Secretary of State from the level of tax to be paid. I think that the local ballot box is the protection at that stage—so I hope that, when the noble Lord thinks about bringing this amendment back on Report, he bears in mind that the major power lies with the local electorate.

My noble friends Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lady Janke both raised issues around fiscal power and the understandability and accessibility of financial matters for local people. This is of fundamental importance; it is about devolution. We need to have a transparent negotiation of fiscal powers of government. I accept totally that this is a process—it does not happen overnight—but I hope that the Government’s consultation on powers over tourism tax will be positive. Local areas are going to have to be more responsible for the level and nature of the taxes that they raise to pay for local services. We look forward to an outcome of the negotiation.

The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, raised a very interesting question about the business rate supplement. I want to think further about that, because it is a very interesting suggestion. We have to have the detail right. One thing I have noticed about raising taxes locally is that, if people know what it is that the extra money that they are paying is going to be spent on, there is a direct relationship, which you tend to get with parish and town councils and with some kinds of business rate supplements. I think there is potential here for further thought.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, that we will take this away and think further about the possibilities for driving ahead on a system of business rate supplements supported or underpinned by clear consultation with local areas and a clear attachment to a specific project. Then, the general public will be more amenable to what councils are trying to do and how the funding is going to be provided.

My name, alongside that of my noble friend Lady Janke is on Amendment 190. I hope that the Minister will be positive about thinking through bringing forward proposals for fiscal devolution because, for devolution to work, you have to give greater powers over fiscal policy to the constituent parts of England. I hope that the Minister will give us a positive response to this group of amendments.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has spoken on this group of amendments. We keep coming back to the same sorts of issues as in the previous group. We were talking about devolution in relation to health, and fiscal devolution and trying to extract money out of the NHS.

Now we come to a different level of fiscal devolution, and my noble friend Lord Gascoigne raised the point that a lot of people outside the London bubble are frustrated. I emphasise that it is not just in the north; I was on the south coast in Southampton this weekend, where there are lots of frustrated people. I can assure you that if you drove along the pothole-encrusted roads of Bedfordshire, there are lots of frustrated people there as well.

This is important because people care about their communities and they want their communities to be better. They care about place, and you cannot create great places by diktat from Whitehall. I recall saying that two or three times earlier in this Committee. That means you need real devolution and real powers. It also means real fiscal devolution; we have a number of suggestions on fiscal devolution here.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and my noble friend Lady Scott made the point that parish councils, particularly small parish councils, are very close to their communities. People can easily see what that extra £10 or £20 or £50 is being spent on—such as extra grass cutting or improvements to the village hall—and they are quite amenable to it. As you start moving away from that and you start breaking that relationship, it becomes much more difficult.

One of the great dangers with fiscal devolution, much as I believe in it, is that central government—I am not making a political point here, but I am blaming Whitehall and the Treasury—see that as an opportunity to raise tax by the back door. We have seen government regularly passing additional responsibilities to local government with a short-term grant and then expecting the council tax payer to fund that burden.

One of the big issues that we have in local government at the moment is that a lot of responsibilities have been passed down; responsibilities are then growing quicker than the tax base, which means many of these issues of place are facing a fiscal squeeze. We have this dichotomy or dilemma: we may want fiscal devolution, but how do we avoid central government cost shunting?

My noble friend Lord Fuller was implying the same thing. It is great to have fiscal freedoms for parish and town councils, but we do not want cost shunting from overpressed district, unitary and county authorities. How do we protect against that cost shunting, where people see higher tax bills but no benefits? Place is important. I am desperately keen for genuine fiscal devolution, but how do we protect our residents from, in effect, cost shunting from Whitehall down the line?

I will talk briefly about some of these amendments. My noble friend Lord Gascoigne’s amendment is really important, because it is not just about the Secretary of State making a judgment—that is what the Secretary of State would do anyway, if he were to devolve powers—but placing a burden on him to say that he genuinely believes that a council has the financial resources, financial capacity and management resources to do what is being entrusted upon it. It is not just a case of going, “Get on with it. Bye. It is not my fault; it is your fault”, then, a year later, not giving it the money that it needs to deliver those things.

Forgive me, because I cannot remember whether it was from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, or the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, but I accept his point. However, the contra argument is that it places a burden on the Secretary of State to make sure that it is feasible. We need to think about that very important distinction.

The other point to make is that we are going through reorganisation here and we need to ensure that this is not shuffling the deckchairs on the “Titanic”. It has to be about meaningfully improving services for our residents and about better value for money. We should not have reorganisation for reorganisation’s sake, which is why I think this amendment is the right approach.

We have had a number of amendments on fiscal devolution, but I will not go through them all. I have a concern about cost shunting and we have to protect against that. We need to give people real fiscal powers in order to deliver better services for their residents. What we do not need—some of the announcements that have been made today are like this and our Government were the same—is to have to appeal to the Government to get funding to do something. That means the Secretary of State is still in charge and that you are not determining your local priorities but, by the way, all the councils will do it because they want as much money as they can for their residents to deliver as best they can.

This must be underpinned by a real understanding that there are both costs and benefits from devolution, and that the funding arrangements are fair and transparent to local government. One of the biggest fears I have in local government is that the resident and local taxpayer does not see what their funding goes on, because far too much of it is dictated by the Government. These are responsibilities and duties with no funding and no powers, which is something that I might come back to on the next group of amendments. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Gascoigne, Lord Wallace and Lord Bassam, and the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, for their amendments in this group.

I will comment briefly on the general points that the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, made. It does not happen as rarely as one might expect, but I do agree with some of what he said. Nobody much cares about the architecture of local government; when I knock on people’s doors, they do not say, “Can you change the structure of local government, Sharon?” That does not happen. They do care, however, about their public services being delivered effectively. They want to see new homes built, their streets cleaned, their potholes fixed—as the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, pointed out—fly-tipping sorted and work being done to tackle the decline of our high streets. The current system was just not sustainable. It was not working in terms of either finance or efficiency, so we have to make some changes to tackle that issue. Both making the structures work better and devolving power to local authorities are needed to make sure that they can tackle the things that are important at the local level.

Amendment 186, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, seeks to place barriers on conferring new functions on strategic authorities. As per paragraph 1(4) of Schedule 25, the Secretary of State cannot confer a new function on a strategic authority unless they are

“satisfied that it is appropriate to do so having regard to the need to secure the effective exercise of the function concerned”.

That provides an adequate test to ensure that, when functions are conferred, it is with the effective delivery of that function in mind. It also enables the Government to pilot new functions with strategic authorities. We talked about some of that earlier. In these instances, strategic authorities will be required to provide an impact report on the pilot, which the Secretary of State will use to help decide whether to confer the function on a permanent basis.

The pilot process provides an adequate opportunity to test devolution before rolling it out more widely. We believe that requiring each strategic authority to have a specific plan for each function effectively signed off by the Secretary of State runs counter to the principles of devolution that underpin the Bill. It risks micromanagement of strategic authorities from Whitehall and slowing down the progress of devolution. I do not say “micromanagement” with any political side because, the last time that my party was in power, we ended up with about 160 performance indicators for local authorities. I am not in favour of that either.

19:30

The proposed new clause in Amendment 187, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, would put a duty on the mayor of a combined authority or a combined county authority to ensure that information around the authority’s financial affairs is publicised to local communities in an accessible way. It would also require the mayor to publish a plan for how they will engage with constituents on major spending decisions.

Although I recognise the aim of the amendment, this proposed new clause would duplicate existing arrangements and improvements brought forward by this Bill. Local authorities must already publish annual accounts along with annual governance statements on their websites. The accounts are then subject to a 30 working-day public inspection period and external audit. Once those processes are complete, audited accounts are published, along with the auditor’s opinion and value-for-money assessment. I know that that process has been flawed in recent years, and I hope it will improve under the clauses in this Bill—but the process is already there.

Further to that, the Local Government Transparency Code 2015 mandates that local authorities, including combined authorities, regularly publish information about their spending and assets on their websites. All mayoral strategic authorities are expected to adhere to the principles and processes set out in the English Devolution Accountability Framework, which outlines how mayors will be held to account by central government at the local level and by the public. This includes how their local assurance framework must set out arrangements for enabling effective engagement of local partners and the public, and they must review this annually. I confirm that the Government are reviewing the English Devolution Accountability Framework, and we will update on this in due course.

On Amendment 190, I reassure noble Baroness, Lady Janke, that the Government are already taking forward work to expand local revenue-raising tools and fiscal flexibility through the existing non-statutory processes. Noble Lords have mentioned the consultation on the visitor levy for mayors and other local leaders. The visitor levy consultation sets out detailed proposals on how locally raised revenues could be used to support economic growth, including through support for the visitor economy.

This Bill introduces new and more flexible fiscal powers for mayors by creating flexibility in where the mayor may spend the mayoral precept and the introduction of the mayoral community infrastructure levy for mayors outside London. Legislating for a statutory duty would constrain flexibility, impose a fixed timetable and prescribe a scope for work that has already been progressed through more agile and collaborative means

In addition, the Government have a long-standing commitment to provide certainty to local government on its finances. We have already published multiyear funding settlements as part of the provisional local government finance settlement for 2026-29, and the value of integrated settlements was also published for mayors who received them at the autumn Budget for the full spending review period. Although I have much sympathy with the noble Baroness’s wish to expand fiscal powers, and although we share the ambition of strengthening local economic leadership, we do not consider that a statutory duty in this regard is needed.

Amendment 196C, tabled by my noble friend Lord Bassam, proposes a change of tax policy and therefore is a matter for the Chancellor at fiscal events. Any future changes to tax policy will be announced at the relevant fiscal event, where they can be considered in the round. However, there are already powers for the majority of mayors to levy a business rates supplement. This amendment would restrict this power to established mayoral strategic authorities only, and that would remove the power to levy a supplement from the six mayors who currently have that power. A business rates supplement can create significant benefits for local communities. For example, in London, the business rates supplement introduced by the Greater London Authority was essential for the delivery of the Elizabeth line.

Amendment 256A was tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller. It was good to hear him recognise the good value that council tax payers in Stevenage get for their money—I was pleased to hear that. His point was well made, but that is 10% of the council tax that Stevenage council tax payers pay—in case they start writing in to me saying what they pay, because they have to pay the county council element as well.

This amendment is not necessary. The Secretary of State can already set referendum principles for any type of council if he chooses to do so. This would not change by reclassifying some parish councils as major preceptors. The Government’s ability to strike a balance between the generation of income for local services and the interests of taxpayers is an important part of the local government finance system, and the Government do not support attempts to change it. To date, no referendum principles have been set for parish councils. However, this is kept under review each year. The Government encourage councils to consider carefully the burden they place on taxpayers and to mitigate the need for increases. Parish councils, large or small, are closest to their residents and are already directly accountable for their spending decisions, for all the reasons set out by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley.

For all the reasons I have explained, I hope noble Lords will feel that they can withdraw or not press their amendments in this group.

[Lord Gascoigne (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, that this has been an interesting group—I think that was the phrase he used—covering not just finance in itself but money-raising powers, transparency and fiscal devolution.

I agree entirely with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, on the virtue of transparency, not just for holding people’s feet to the fire but for people to be able to see what on earth is going on; I totally support him in what he is doing there. As everyone probably knows, we are approaching Valentine’s Day. There were moments when I thought that there would be a breakout of a mass cross-party love-in but, sadly, it was dashed somewhere along the line.

With respect, I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, says. I apologise for coming back to this point—it is very boring on my part—but I wish to repeat it. We are imposing this on people. In my amendment, I am not seeking to block or stop strategic authorities, wherever they may be, being able to have these powers conferred on them; I am merely saying that, in the process, they should have some work put in to make sure that the service improves.

This has been a good discussion on a good group. Some good points have been made. I am conscious that the next group is also a very good one, so I will not bore on, but perhaps we could do something to bring this matter back on Report because, as my noble friend Lord Jamieson said, people do care about it. I know that the Minister shares that view; I am sorry if I damage her street cred in saying this but, as she knows, I am a deep fan of hers and am very grateful for all the personal support she has given to both me and the committee that I chair. I may want to come back to this on Report, despite the words from the Minister, but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 186 withdrawn.

Amendments 187 to 191 not moved.

Amendment 192

Moved by

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

192: After Clause 56, insert the following new Clause—
“Duty to contribute to delivery of nature, clean air and climate targets(1) When exercising their functions, a strategic authority, mayor, or local authority must contribute to—(a) meeting the targets and carbon budgets set under Part 1 of the Climate Change Act 2008;(b) meeting the targets and interim targets set under Part 1 of the Environment Act 2021;(c) meeting the limit values set under Schedule 2 of the Air Quality Standards Regulations 2010;(d) the delivery of the programme for adaptation to climate change under section 58 of the Climate Change Act 2008. (2) A strategic authority, mayor or local authority must not make any decision that is incompatible with the duty described in subsection (1).(3) Within one year beginning on the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must publish guidance describing the contribution that each strategic authority should make toward meeting the targets listed in subsection (1).(4) Guidance under subsection (3) must include clear metrics and measurable terms for strategic authorities, mayors and local authorities to meet.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new clause requires strategic authorities, mayors, and local authorities to act in accordance with the statutory Climate Change Act and Environmental Act targets, carbon budgets, Air Quality Standards Regulations, and climate adaptation programme across their functions. The Secretary of State must publish guidance for defining authorities’ contributions towards these objectives.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments 193 and 194 in the name of my noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

On potholes, in the past four days, I have been campaigning in Barnet, in Gorton and Denton—we are doing pretty well there—in Cardiff and in Cambridgeshire. Potholes came up quite a lot, which is interesting. They are dangerous and should be fixed but, at the same time, we often have potholes because of excess rainfall and a rise in water levels; of course, this is a result of climate change.

That segues neatly into Amendment 192, which would put a duty on strategic authorities, mayors and local authorities to contribute to the delivery of existing climate nature and clean air targets when exercising their functions. Air pollution, contaminated land, water pollution and climate-related risks do not fall evenly across society. They disproportionately affect those with the least power to avoid them—the poorest in our society. Strategic authorities making decisions on transport, housing, planning and economic development, therefore, have a direct influence on public health outcomes, whether or not that is explicitly acknowledged.

The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that decisions taken under the Bill are aligned with obligations that Parliament has already set in law. Climate targets, environmental targets and air quality limits are legal commitments. Strategic authorities will play a central role in determining whether those commitments are met. There is also a wider reason why this is important. Exposure to environmental harm is one of the most significant determinants of health and health inequality. The conditions in which people live—the air they breathe, the green space they can access and the pollution they are exposed to—shape health outcomes over a lifetime, yet environmental factors are often treated as secondary rather than being at the forefront.

The evidence here is overwhelming. The Chief Medical Officer’s annual report in 2022 highlighted the clear link between poor air quality and health inequalities, showing higher risks of hospital admission and mortality among those living in more deprived areas and, obviously, a reduction in the quality of life. Organisations such as Asthma + Lung UK have shown that people with lung conditions in the poorest neighbourhoods are far more likely to die prematurely than those in wealthier areas.

This amendment would bring clarity. It would require authorities to contribute to meeting carbon budgets under the Climate Change Act, environmental targets under the Environment Act, legally binding air quality limits and the national programme for climate adaptation. Subsection (2) of the proposed new clause would ensure that decisions incompatible with those duties could not be taken. That would provide legal certainty and embed prevention at the point decisions are made.

There is also a strong moral dimension. Recent legislative efforts such as Ella’s law and the work towards Zane’s law have helped shift how we understand environmental harm—not as an unfortunate by-product of development but as a threat to life, dignity and equality. Those cases remind us that environmental pollution can and does kill and that public bodies have a responsibility to act before harm occurs, not after. Many local authorities recognise this and are trying to align their policies accordingly. This amendment would support them by ensuring consistency across England, particularly as new devolved structures are created with significant powers.

If devolution is to succeed, it must strengthen our ability to meet national climate, nature and clean air commitments. I hope the Minister will engage constructively with the intent of the amendment and will be able to explain how the Government intend to ensure that strategic authorities actively contribute to the delivery of these vital environmental and public health concerns.

The purpose of Amendment 193 is to ensure that, in exercising their new powers, strategic authorities have a clear and transparent understanding of poverty within their areas. If these bodies are to promote economic development and growth, they must also be equipped to understand how that growth is experienced and who is being left behind. At present, the Bill places significant responsibilities on strategic authorities without requiring them to measure one of the most fundamental issues affecting their communities. Without published data on poverty it becomes difficult to assess whether policies are effective or whether they are unintentionally deepening existing inequalities.

The amendment would require strategic authorities to collect and publish annual data on poverty, broken down by factors such as age, gender, housing status, education and ethnicity. Poverty is not experienced evenly, and aggregate figures can obscure patterns of disadvantage that require targeted responses. This approach aligns closely with the intent of the socioeconomic duty in the Equality Act 2010, which requires public authorities to consider how their decisions affect inequalities of outcome resulting from socioeconomic disadvantage. That duty has yet to be commenced in England, but many public bodies are already preparing for it. This amendment would help to ensure that new strategic authorities are established with those principles embedded from the outset.

There is a strong case for this sort of systematic approach. Rising child poverty, increased reliance on food banks and the clear links between deprivation and poor health outcomes all point to the need for better data and stronger accountability. Publishing this information annually would allow progress to be tracked over time and enable communities and elected representatives to hold authorities to account.

The amendment would not impose targets or dictate policy choices; it would establish a baseline of information and transparency, while leaving strategic authorities with full discretion over how they respond. Many local authorities already collect similar data. This would simply ensure consistency and visibility across England. As new devolved structures are created, this Bill has an opportunity to set expectations of what good strategic leadership looks like; ensuring that poverty is measured, understood and addressed should be central to that. I hope that the Minister will engage with the purpose of the amendment and will be able to say how the Government intend to ensure that strategic authorities are prepared to tackle poverty and inequality from day one.

19:45

Amendment 194, on “community wealth building”, is a brilliant amendment—they all are. It would introduce a requirement for strategic authorities to prepare community wealth building action plans. This amendment has been developed with organisations that have been at the forefront of this work for many years, including the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. Its purpose is straightforward: to give strategic authorities a clear framework to bring together partners across their areas to build stronger and fairer local economies.

The amendment would require authorities to set out plans for community wealth building and would explicitly support partnership working with anchor institutions such as hospitals, colleges, universities and major employers. These institutions already shape local economies through their spending, employment practices and land ownership. Bringing them together would create the opportunity for co-ordinated action on procurement, fair work and the better use of assets in a place. In essence, community wealth building is about creating an economy that is inclusive and locally rooted. It shifts the focus away from extraction and towards long-term value for communities. It recognises that growth is about not only large-scale industrial strategy but the everyday economy—the sectors where most people work and which keep communities functioning.

There is growing evidence that this approach works. Preston’s experience is well known, but it continues to be backed up by research. Analysis published in the Lancet Public Health found that the community wealth building programme there was associated with improved economic outcomes and life satisfaction, as well as fewer mental health problems than would normally have been expected. That is a powerful indication of what locally grounded economic policy can achieve.

This approach is also being embedded in local economic strategies elsewhere. In cities and boroughs such as Brighton and Hove and Islington, community wealth building has been adopted across political parties as a way of ensuring that public spending supports local businesses, local jobs and local supply chains. As one local authority leader put it recently, the aim is simply to make prosperity local to ensure that money spent in an area benefits the people who actually live there. The amendment also includes a provision allowing strategic authorities to request powers to apply local levies to private equity involvement in public services. It is about giving local leaders a mechanism to limit excessive extraction where it undermines local value and resilience.

Scotland is now taking this agenda forward through its own community wealth building legislation. If we are serious about meaningful devolution in England, this Bill should provide similar support for local economic empowerment. I hope that the Minister will receive this amendment in the constructive spirit in which it is intended and will consider how community wealth building can strengthen the Bill’s ambitions. I beg to move.

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 241B is in my name, and I strongly support Amendment 192 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

The devolution Bill creates these large, powerful strategic authorities whose decisions on planning, housing, transport and infrastructure will shape England’s carbon emissions, climate resilience and natural environment for decades to come. Once they are in place, these six new mayoral districts and combined authorities will be responsible for the strategic oversight of 75% of England’s landscape, so huge swathes of the landscape will be under these authorities. Despite this, as it currently stands, the Bill contains no clear mechanism to ensure that these authorities will contribute to the UK’s legally binding climate and nature targets under the Climate Change Act 2008 and the Environment Act 2021. Both have clear, unambiguous delivery targets to which we have agreed—they are in our law.

These targets are spatially constrained and require both strategic oversight and the consideration of competing land uses. Currently, however, they sit under the Secretary of State only. Without even a mention of a duty to deliver on these targets in the devolution Bill, I believe that there is a high degree of risk that they will be undeployed, or at least deployed unevenly. This is a real risk; it is particularly important given the shifting political priorities and how they can deprioritise action. As the system stands, the Secretary of State-level duty for our Climate Change Act and Environment Act targets does not automatically filter down, be it to a local government, a regulator or a non-departmental public body.

I am sure that the Minister will say that local authorities have a “duty to conserve biodiversity”, under Section 40 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, which was strengthened by the Environment Act 2021 and requires an authority to consider what it can do to conserve and enhance biodiversity. This is of course correct, but it is rooted in guidance—that lovely word to which I keep coming back—that can, and I am sure will, be changed. That then leaves it up to the individual authority as to whether it will or will not further the objective. What happens if we have an elected mayor who does not agree with net-zero policies or is someone who sees nature as a luxury that we can no longer afford? What will be their guidance on these strategic decisions to their commissioners, if we even have commissioners appointed for climate and nature, since this is far from guaranteed under the Bill as it is currently constructed?

My Amendment 241B would require strategic, mayoral or local authorities to take all reasonable steps to contribute to our net-zero target and the targets under Sections 1 to 3 of the Environment Act, and to adapt to the risks set out in the climate change risk assessment report. It is hardly as if we are starting from a good place. We have only to look at the papers or the reports coming through from the Office for Environmental Protection and the Climate Change Committee, which are loudly ringing the alarm bells to say that we are nowhere near delivering on our targets in the Climate Change Act or the Environment Act. Without any firm duty on mayoral authorities to deliver, I fear that we will move further and further away from these targets.

I put it to the Committee and the Minister that we cannot rely on whatever provisions we currently have or the fact that we have national targets. We need to embed the targets in everyday decision-making—in local decision-making on the ground by council officials and elected members, as much as anyone. We can say that councils already do this. That may be the case, but it is too little and not quickly enough. If we look at the climate scorecards produced by Climate Emergency UK, which has assessed councils’ progress on a variety of climate and nature issues, they demonstrate this clearly: we are not moving quickly enough and we are seeing the consequences of this day in, day out. Species numbers are going down, landscapes are being lost and we are seeing flooding as a result of a lack of joined-up thinking on nature-based solutions.

At worst, without a duty such as this one, we could have authorities pulling in a completely direction from what Ministers or the Secretary of State expect or desire. I would hope that, from a legal standpoint, Ministers would want to be seen to be doing everything within their power to meet those targets by empowering the new strategic authorities with a responsibility to contribute. Just because an individual council decides that it does not want to progress further towards these targets—or, worse, that it actively wants to make them harder, if particular mayors come in with that role—it does not mean that we should just roll over and accept it. These issues absolutely transcend borders and affect us all. They are not within these mayoral authorities; they are much broader than that.

We have been happy to give local authorities other statutory duties; social care is the obvious big one but there are many others. It is welcome to see the new health improvement and health inequalities duties coming through. My amendment asks that the same statutory duties be given on the environment and climate change. On this critical matter, we must align local government with national government. This point was made succinctly in Dan Corry’s review for the Government last year, which covered Defra’s regulatory landscape for driving both economic growth and nature recovery. In it he said:

“A stronger and clearer link is needed between targets and plans set nationally and the activity being carried out to protect the environment and support development locally”.


That is exactly what this amendment tries to do.

With the biggest shake-up of local government in generations, if we fail to give a duty to do what we can to address two of our most critical threats—nature loss and climate change—what are we doing, really? I see this as very important.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I too support Amendment 241B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, to which I have added my name. I also support Amendment 192 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, which was moved so ably by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. In fact, I think she probably has the slightly better amendment, if truth be told; I may go into that later.

I am sure that the Minister is detecting a pattern here. A number of public authorities have already had similar duties for the achievement of various legally binding environmental targets laid on them either in legislation or by agreement with Ministers in subsequent guidance. Recent examples include Great British Energy, Skills England, the Crown Estate, Ofwat and the GLA. This is particularly important for these strategic authorities because they have key functions in housing, strategic spatial planning, economic development, regeneration and health improvement. If you think about it, the achievement of these environmental targets is part of the fundamental underpinning of the delivery of growth, economic development, regeneration and health improvement. Conversely, the achievement of the national environmental targets will be possible only if there is effective local and regional action. Without explicit provisions in the Bill, there will be a structural gap between national environmental commitments and these important, new, local decision-making bodies.

Having this duty would ensure clarity, consistency and legal certainty, which would certainly benefit not only authorities themselves but business and investors. So it is not surprising that the proposed duty is supported by businesses across relevant sectors, the LGA, the District Councils’ Network, London Councils, ADEPT, the majority of UK100’s members and a number of council leaders and Cabinet members. There is widespread support for this duty being applied.

Another point is that, as has been said already, the national environment and climate change targets are pretty stretching; the Office for Environmental Protection and the Climate Change Committee are already expressing concern that the Government are not on track to meet them. If the Government are to have any chance at all of achieving the statutory targets, all relevant public bodies need to do their bit—especially strategic authorities. Simply listing the areas of competence for the strategic authorities is not enough. These bodies need a duty; it has to be something that they must do, not a competence that they may carry out in a variety of ways.

Amendment 192, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, is particularly elegant. It would apply a sort of triple lock, if I can use that expression. Apart from the duty, it would introduce a requirement that the authority must not only exercise the duty in carrying out its functions but think about how all the decisions it makes fit in with the duty; that is the genuine spirit of the integration of environment and climate change requirements into all decision-making, which has long been talked about as a principle but, alas, is not really happening as yet.

The most cunning thing about Amendment 192 is that it goes on to say that each authority will have guidance from the Secretary of State, and that the guidance will be “clear” and “measurable”. That is a pretty neat combination; it is better than our amendment, I think, and therefore I would endorse it beyond ours.

In both amendments, the duties would apply not only to strategic authorities but to mayors and local authorities. It is important that all these local decision-making bodies are singing from the same hymn sheet. Since the GLA was set up with climate and biodiversity duties from the very beginning, I ask the Minister whether the Government will agree to do the same for strategic authorities, mayors and the reformed local authorities.

20:00

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee that my noble friends Lady Bakewell and Lord Shipley have had to leave for another engagement, leaving me, a non-expert on climate change, to comment from this side. It is particularly important to put this in the Bill when we stop to think that, after next May, there will be rather more local councils that are run by members of a party that does not really believe in climate change. Indeed, within the next year or two we may have a number of mayors who also hold to climate-sceptic views.

We recognise—particularly after last month, when Aberdeen, for example, had 31 days in which it rained for part or all of the day; and when flood warnings are now out across substantial parts of England, Scotland and Wales—that we have some real problems and that they have to be faced at the local as well as the national level. I come back to the point I made earlier about the strategic defence review’s reference to a whole-society approach, galvanising local volunteers and people who need training as part-timers and volunteers in dealing with civilian rescues. We see that already and we need more. If we are to have that, it has to be local councils and not just combined authorities that help to respond.

My noble friend Lady Bakewell left me with a note that says how valuable it is to collect the sort of biodiversity record that is required, but that the climate emergency UK scorecard, with its 93 questions across seven sections, threatens to overwhelm the ability of local councils to record what is required. So yet again, one needs volunteers. One needs to engage people.

My deep scepticism about the Bill is that it seems to me to be taking government further away from local people, which would make it more difficult to engage volunteers and others in local democracy, and thus make the whole problem of the governance of England much more difficult. Having said that, I very much support these amendments and hope that the Minister will take them into account before we come to Report.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses and the noble Lord for their comments on this group. It places me in a bit of a dilemma, because I have a lot of sympathy for the objects of these amendments: we agree that the environment is important, and we like community wealth building and so forth.

I refer back to my comments on the previous group. I have a big issue with placing duties on a local or strategic authority without the means and resources for them. This is very much a half-amendment, because it would place the duty without the means to deliver it. I think the noble Baroness commented that the LGA backs this, but the LGA actually said

“local authorities need statutory duties and powers, sufficient funding, and robust support to lead on climate action”,

which is a lot more than just having the duty. So, to progress on these, we need to recognise that you cannot just place a duty. I say that quite seriously because, when I was running my council, around 85% of our expenditure was on statutory duties and we had very little room for manoeuvre on any choice-based things. Given the pressures on adult social care, SEND and so forth, I am sure that if I redid the numbers now, that figure would be way over 90%, and we end up compromising on statutory duties. So I am very wary of placing lots of statutory duties without providing the means to deliver them.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, talked about support. I am 100% behind providing support to do something, but that is not quite the same as saying, “You must have a duty as well as support”.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

Quite a lot of local authorities are doing well on this. Many of the things that they are delivering do not require additional funding but are about making the right decisions on their day-to-day routine responsibilities for planning, regeneration, growth, urban development and all sorts of things. They are making these decisions in a way that is good for the environment, climate change, biodiversity, air quality, people and sustainability, rather than making them without thinking about these things. So a duty is not a huge imposition; it is about a mindset, not a set of expenses.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I beg to disagree. Once you place a duty on an authority, all its decision-making needs to have that in mind. The authority can be challenged for not doing X, and X could involve significant expenditure, or it could be something that it has very little power over. To take a local example, my local council has a statutory duty on pollution in certain areas, such as Ampthill, which is just down the road from me, but it does not have the ability to stop cars going into Ampthill, and they are the cause of the pollution. So you end up with these dilemmas, and that needs thinking through. That is why I am wary. I do not disagree with the thrust of what the noble Baroness is trying to do, but we need to do it in a practical and deliverable way. All good councils will try to seek to do the right thing wherever they can.

As certain Peers have alluded to, in the future there may be somebody who might not be as keen as some of us are on the environment, well-being or anything else. That brings me to my second point: I am a huge believer in democracy. We have a very serious question to ask ourselves: do we believe in democracy? That means local decision-making and devolution, and, at times, it may mean that people do not do what we would choose to be our priority. That is a dilemma that we face and have to accept. If you believe in democracy and devolution, you cannot always seek to bind the hand of people to do what you want, because that is not devolution and democracy but centralisation and state control, which may be the right thing—

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

Can I ask a question of clarification? I agree on democracy and the point that the noble Lord is making, but these are legally binding targets that we have agreed in the law through these Acts, so do we ignore the law through devolution?

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

As the noble Baroness rightly says, they are legally binding targets that people need to take into account. We do not necessarily need to do it again. But I come back to my central point: do not place a duty on somebody if you do not provide the capacity for them to deliver it.

My second point is on devolution. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, made some interesting points about local wealth building and it probably is a very good model, but it may not be the only model. There may be other models and there may be other models that work locally, so why are we doing a one size fits all? We should trust people to deliver for their residents; that is why they get elected and re-elected. Sometimes we will make mistakes, and we do it differently the next time because we made a mistake the first time.

Those are my two key concerns that we need to focus on. First, if you provide a duty to somebody, you need to provide the means and capacity to do it. Secondly, on the issue of democracy, if we are genuine about devolution, we should be very careful about providing a centralised diktat about what we should do. That has nothing to do with the proposed areas of concern, which I have a huge amount of sympathy with.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Willis, for Amendments 192, 193, 194 and 241B. I will respond to Amendments 192 and 241B together, as their aims are somewhat shared.

During the Bill’s passage, the Government have consistently made the point that many local authorities have a high level of ambition to tackle climate change, restore nature and address wider environmental issues, including air quality. It is not clear what additional benefits, if any, a new statutory duty would bring.

The Government offer net-zero support for local government. That includes through Great British Energy, which will work with local government to help to increase the rollout of renewable energy projects. Furthermore, the Government will also partner with strategic authorities and local authorities to roll out the ambitious warm homes plan, which will upgrade 5 million homes over this Parliament to help them to save money on their bills and benefit from cleaner, cheaper heating. To strengthen our engagement with local government on net-zero strategy, policy and delivery, and to support local government to drive forward net-zero action at the local level, the Government also run the Local Net Zero Delivery Group, which last met on 9 December last year.

Local authorities already have statutory duties to improve air quality in their areas. Thanks to the combined efforts of local and central government, air quality in the UK has improved. The Government will continue to work with local authorities to reduce air pollution and its harmful effects. It is worth noting that in London, as the noble Baroness will know, the air quality target, which it was estimated would take 193 years to achieve, was accomplished in nine years. Concerted effort and clear decision-making can make a real difference.

Existing tools and duties also support efforts to contribute to targets for nature, such as local nature recovery strategies and the biodiversity duty under the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, strengthened under the Environment Act 2021. The latter requires all public authorities to consider and take action to conserve and enhance biodiversity, which must have regard to any relevant local nature recovery strategy and to any relevant species conservation strategy or protected site strategy prepared by Natural England.

On climate adaptation, the Government already work closely with local authorities, strategic authorities and mayors, a number of whom are developing dedicated climate risk assessments. In October last year, the Government launched a local authority climate service, which provides tailored data on climate change impacts. The Government also ran the first adaptation reporting power trial for local authorities last year, providing guidance and support on how to assess climate risks to their functions and services.   

I will respond to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, about the mayor not abiding the climate change duty. There is a specific competency on environmental climate change in the Bill. A mayor of a strategic authority, as well as having the overview and scrutiny powers that the body has, could be subject to a challenge by way of a judicial review for failure to meet an existing duty. There is significant power there already. The issues around local democracy and the prioritisation given to an issue is and must be subject to democratic accountability. It is difficult; we have to get that balance right. But as there is an existing legal duty, there is enough power for local citizens to be able to push their locally elected representatives. Given such existing support, and the fact that many local authorities are already taking great strides in tackling environmental decline and climate change, we do not think that this particular duty is needed.

Amendment 193 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, seeks to require strategic authorities to collect and publish annual poverty data for their authority. We recognise that the policies and interventions that strategic authorities deliver have an impact on reducing poverty and alleviating its impacts. As set out in the Government’s strategy, Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty, a broad and dedicated range of partners play a role in reducing poverty, and we will continue to do this work in partnership with local, regional, national, private and third sector partners.

20:15

We also continue to work closely with strategic authorities to ensure that their outcomes align with national and local priorities, including the design and delivery of effective and equitable local services. Additionally, we are committed to working with senior local data leaders through the newly formed Mayoral Data Council on data issues that affect them to turn insight into impact for communities. Adding an additional duty on strategic authorities to collect and publish information on poverty at this time risks creating an additional administrative burden that distracts from delivery.

Amendment 194, also tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, would duplicate strategic authorities’ existing functions and duties. While I welcome the intent of the amendment, the Bill already confers on strategic authorities a range of functions to help them to deliver against their areas of competence, including that of economic development and regeneration. Authorities are very able to introduce economic strategies that pick up community wealth-building principles, and they can do that under the existing framework.

There may be, for example, barriers in procurement legislation, but a great deal of work is being undertaken to identify some of the legislative obstacles to community wealth-building, both in Preston and elsewhere. I have done quite a lot of work on this myself with the University of Hertfordshire. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies—CLES—does a great deal of work in this space, convening networks, conducting research on practice and policy, and providing tailored support to organisations. There is therefore a huge amount going on already.

The existing framework includes a duty to produce a local growth plan to hardwire local economic priorities into local and national decision-making, so strategic authorities can choose to set out how their local growth plan to make sure that it secures economic value and supports social value. There is plenty of scope there to undertake the kind of community wealth-building to the extent that a local area wishes to. Additionally, under Clause 21, the mayors of strategic authorities will be able to convene local partners to discuss relevant local matters, and local partners will also have a duty to respond to a mayor’s request. So, the element of community wealth-building that requires that convening power of saying what is the overall power of procurement of the public sector in the local area is perfectly possible under that duty.

Although mayors of strategic authorities will have a formal power, this does not prevent an authority forming partnerships and bringing local partners together through discussion and collaboration. We encourage strategic authorities to work collaboratively with a broad range of partners in furthering their regional objectives. At a local level, we are also giving communities stronger powers to come together to secure some of their beloved local assets through the new community right to buy.

For these reasons, I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. I am sorry that I did not mention Amendment 241B but, yes, I would support it if my amendment were not accepted.

On the duty to think about climate change and so on, the Minister asked what extra the duty would add to current systems. However, there will of course be councils that will not want to do it, as somebody else said—I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Willis—so putting a duty on them is absolutely crucial for taking forward this whole agenda.

I did not really hear a good answer about collecting data on poverty. Surely, that would be fundamental to any Labour Government—that they should know exactly how large the problem is. We get all sorts of data, reports and figures, but on a local level this would be a fantastic resource to direct, support and help.

On community wealth, the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, said that there were other systems. The point about this proposal is that it is tested and it works. I live in a local village where we do not have this—but we have a chalk figure on a hill overlooking the village that is so astonishing that we get hordes of tourists, which keeps open three pubs in a village of 800 people, and a shop that opens every day of the year apart from Christmas Day. All those people coming in can keep the local economy booming for local people. I go to all three pubs, obviously.

On the issue of air pollution, it is an interesting topic. London’s air pollution is not very bad anymore; it is one of the cleanest cities, if not the cleanest, in Britain. The reason for that is down to two very bold moves. First, Ken Livingstone introduced the congestion charge, and at the point when it was introduced he said that only two groups supported it—big business and the Greens. Big business understood about keeping things moving in a small area. The City of London made big steps, before even the Mayor of London did, to clean up its air quality. Again, it understood that you had to keep business moving and keep people moving.

Both the Mayor of London and the City of London also understood that air quality impacted very deeply on the people living here. It is obvious, when you look at the statistics in London, that people who live near the M25 live in poorer properties with less access to green space and suffer much worse from air pollution than people living in the inner city. Of course, children who grow up there are damaged for life: their lungs are stunted and they have problems all through their lives, putting pressure on the NHS. These things are all related. It is important not to see those things in isolation; we should see them as a flow that helps life generally.

I am going to withdraw the amendment, although I think it is great. I am sure that something like these amendments will be back on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 192 withdrawn.

Amendments 193 and 194 not moved.

Amendment 195

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

195: After Clause 56, insert the following new Clause—
“English Local Government Council(1) Within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must establish a national body called the English Local Government Council.(2) The general functions of the Council are to—(a) to represent English local government in matters relating to devolution,(b) to work with central government to create a framework for the further devolution of power to English local government (“the Devolution Framework”),(c) to work with central government to agree the fair funding of local and strategic authorities, and(d) to identify a representative or representatives of the English Local Government Council to participate in the Council of Nations and Regions.(3) The members of the Council are—(a) a person appointed by constituent members of each strategic authority to represent the combined local authority in the proceedings of the Council, and(b) the Mayor of London.(4) The Secretary of State must, by regulations, make provision about the operation of the Council.(5) The Regulations must, in particular, make provision about—(a) staffing of the Council,(b) proceedings of the Council,(c) accounting and other record-keeping by the Council,(d) publication of proceedings of the Council, and(e) publication of guidance and advice by the Council.(6) In making regulations the Secretary of State must, in particular—(a) provide for transitional arrangements to ensure that upper-tier authorities that are not part of a combined local authority are represented in the Council,(b) allow for weighting of the voting power of strategic authorities to account for combined local authorities having different population sizes, and(c) require the Mayor of London to consult with representatives of London authorities in performing functions as a member of the Council.(7) Members of the Council must pay annual fees to the Council, which must be set by the Secretary of State in regulations.(8) The Secretary of State must pay the costs of the establishment and maintenance of the Council, except in so far as those costs are met from annual fees.(9) Regulations made under this section—(a) are to be made by statutory instrument subject to affirmative resolution procedure, and(b) may include incidental, consequential or transitional provision.”

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is a Bill about local government reform, but it is also a constitutional Bill. It is about the structure of governance within the UK and in particular in England. Perhaps I should say by way of introduction that I have had some very helpful advice in preparing this amendment from John Denham and Sir David Lidington, so in some ways, this is a cross-party amendment, and it is a matter of much concern to those who are thinking about the structure of the UK and how it holds together. I have also looked at the report from the Labour Party’s commission on the UK’s future, from December 2022, three and a half years ago, which strongly recommended a statutory council of England. I have also looked at various reports from the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which has reported on the governance of England on a number of occasions in the past five years.

There is now a Mayoral Council for England, which I gather has met five or six times since the last election. It does not have statutory powers. Currently, it has the 14 elected mayors on it, and when we have gone all mayoral it will have some 30 to 35 when complete. I heard Andy Burnham talking 10 days ago about how well it has operated since the last election.

That takes us back to early intergovernmental relations, when, in 1998, the devolved Administrations in Scotland and Wales were set up and relations between central government and the devolved authorities began to operate in a relatively informal way. The intergovernmental framework worked very well when you had Labour Governments in Scotland and Wales and a Labour Government in London, and began to work very badly when you had different parties in power in those countries. I say that by way of emphasis, because we are facing a situation in which, after May this year, we may well have different Governments in power in Scotland and Wales, and we will certainly have some different parties in power in parts of England. The question of how we manage that and how, if we really believe in devolution, we set up some means of bargaining negotiation between those who represent devolved authorities and central government, matters a great deal. If we want to make it work, we have to talk about the place of the Mayoral Council for England and give it proper authority to operate.

I remind noble Lords that we had these various intergovernmental councils under the previous three Governments. I note that under Conservative authority, we even set up joint executive committees to negotiate on the Barnett formula. The Joint Exchequer Committee for Scotland last met in June 2022; the Joint Exchequer Committee for Wales was created shortly before the Wales Act 2014 received Royal Assent and last met in October 2016. That is what happens if you have only informal and non-statutory arrangements.

The complexities of intergovernmental relations across the UK also include the British-Irish Council, which now has not only a north-south body but an east-west body on relations between Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. From what I have heard from talking to Scots involved with this, it is clear to me that the Scots will not accept 35 mayors from England as representing England alongside the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish on the Council of the Nations and Regions—which, I am afraid, is simply a rebadging of the old intergovernmental conference. Gordon Brown’s image of what the Council of the Nations and Regions should be was a great deal more ambitious than what we now have, and it was absolutely a statutory body. It is a sad reflection of how timid this Government are on all matters of political and constitutional reform that so much that was valuable in Gordon Brown’s report has so far not even been discussed further, let alone put into action.

We want the Mayoral Council for England and the Council of the Nations and Regions to be able to negotiate, bargain and hold the Government to account. We also want government departments in London to have to negotiate with and take into account the views of these sub-regional authorities that we will be creating. I was talking to another noble Peer who is actively engaged in this today who said that they regretted the regional centres of government, because it meant that those in the regions could get together with central civil servants and talk through some of the relations and regional areas of policy with them.

We have many more civil servants in London than we had 15 years ago, and we have fewer local government civil servants. That is the sort of thing that we clearly need to have. The purpose of my amendment is to say that we need some degree of clarity within the Government on the role of the Mayoral Council for England and how that governance arrangement for England fits in with the governance arrangements for the UK as a whole. This will become a much more difficult matter once we no longer have Labour Governments and Labour mayors as the majority, and we will therefore need statutory functions and statutory status to make sure that they continue to meet, argue and, one hopes, co-operate.

20:30

Gordon Brown’s report on the constitutional future made it clear that a statutory body was needed. A report from the PACAC said:

“For a reform of the governance systems to successfully be implemented and invested in, a vision of where England will end up needs to be clearly articulated, on a cross-party basis and at all levels, to get sufficient political acceptance from the people necessary for its implementation to guarantee long-term delivery”.

I say to the Minister that it is easy to manage intergovernmental relations when one party is in charge in most of the areas concerned. But if this legislation is going to work, it must be proof against different parties being in power in different parts of this country.

Therefore, we need something, and I hope that the Government will take this back and come up with something on Report that will tell us what the Mayoral Council for England is intended to take over, how it will relate to central government and—this the reason why the amendment says something different for a local council in England—how the 35 mayors that we may well end up with will interact with Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Governments. They will not want to be swamped by 35 English mayors when they are trying to negotiate the governance of the United Kingdom, the fiscal arrangements for the United Kingdom and a whole set of other issues that will involve—particularly if we have a reset with the European Union—a set of arguments about the interaction between domestic legislation and international obligations. I beg to move.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for his amendment. I was initially a little confused, having read the amendment and then listened to his speech, but after his final comment I understand that this is a probing amendment to get the Minister and the Government to be clear about how they see the structure of the Mayoral Council, the regional devolved Governments and, potentially, councils. It is about how to create some kind of structure or how it will be structured. In that sense, I am a lot clearer and happier.

I had more concerns about an English local government council, because that would be largely duplicating the role of the LGA. As an ex-chairman of the LGA, I would be deeply unhappy and my colleague the noble Baroness would also be deeply unhappy as a fellow ex-chair. We would both agree that enhancing the LGA would be a good idea, but I am not sure that we would want an English local government council. As a probing amendment, I understand the purpose of it. The noble Lord raises some valid points about what the role of the Mayoral Council is, how it will all fit in and where the pieces of the jigsaw are. That is a good question, and I look forward to the Minister’s answer.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for Amendment 195, and hope that he will take my regards back to John Denham, for whom I have the greatest respect. I have often worked with John on English devolution, so I respect what he says.

This amendment seeks to create an obligation to establish a national body called the English local government council. Membership of the council would comprise a person appointed by constituent members of each strategic authority and the Mayor of London. Members of the council would also be required to pay a membership fee, placing a new financial burden on authorities. Functions of the council would include working with the Government to agree a framework for the further devolution of powers; to agree funding for local and strategic authorities; and to identify a representative to participate in the Council of the Nations and Regions.

I appreciate the spirit of the amendment, as I believe that proper representation of local government into central government is incredibly important. We have worked very hard on that as a Government since we came into power in July 2024. When local leaders work together with the Government, it benefits our whole country. That is why the English devolution White Paper sets out three forums for engagement: the Council of the Nations and Regions, the Mayoral Council and the Leaders Council. Across these councils, all levels of devolved government are represented, from First Ministers to mayors to the leaders of local authorities. These forums have all met a number of times—I have been to the Leaders Council three times, I think. I can assure noble Lords that funding and furthering devolution is rarely not on the agenda for discussion, but they also discuss thematic issues as well.

It is therefore not necessary for a new council to create a framework for further devolution. The Bill is already establishing a process to extend devolution in a more streamlined way and to deepen devolution through the mayoral right to request process. While funding is discussed at all these councils, it is right and proper that local government funding is provided through the finance settlement process, which carefully allocates needs-based funding across the country. The current council structures we have in place are working well, and the flexibility afforded to them as non-statutory bodies allows us to work with the sector to adapt the forums as the needs of local leaders change. The current structures place no new burdens on authorities, with no membership fees required, as this amendment would create. For these reasons, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I am of course entirely willing to withdraw my amendment, but I wish to stress that this is a very important point. We are about to enter another difficult period in which we have no idea how this year’s elections will come out and which parties will be in control in different parts of the United Kingdom, and in which the relationship between the devolved authorities and what is intended to be the stronger combined authorities within England will come under some strain.

What happened between 2015 and 2024 is that these things did not work well and, in many cases, they ceased to meet. We do not want that to happen again. If this proposal for stronger mayoral authorities is to work, we need to make sure that it fits into the governance of the United Kingdom. If it is to work, the institutions, not just the Council of the Nations and Regions but also the Mayoral Council for England, need to have a good deal more power than the LGA has in standing up to central government—and, as in most other democracies, they need to have some sense of how one bargains over fiscal redistribution. One of the central aspects of the German federal system is the bargaining over how money is distributed between the centre and the richer and poorer regions. That is something that we need to do in England as well—it is done a certain amount between the devolved authorities and the United Kingdom. I speak as someone from northern England, and we are always deeply conscious of the fact that we do not manage to bargain with central government about that.

I would be very grateful if the Minister would have further conversations off the floor before Report, because otherwise we will want to push the issue that the Mayoral Council in some shape or other must be given statutory authority. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 195 withdrawn.

Amendments 196 to 196EB not moved.

Committee adjourned at 8.40 pm.