Live Debate: Lords Chamber

Legislation: English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill – second reading Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Housing, Communities and Local Government) (Labour)

16:03

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Housing, Communities and Local Government) (Labour)

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16:16

Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Conservative)

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Commissioners, this bill be now >> Commissioners, this bill be now read a second time. My Lords, I read a second time. My Lords, I declare my interest as Vice President of the Local Government Association and the National Association of Local Councils. My Lords, I hope the House will forgive me if I begin by noting a certain irony in the title of this bill. Contained within it are words community empowerment. Yet the measures before us would appear to do precisely the opposite empowering the centre rather than the community.

And as we reflect on that, we cannot ignore the democratic chill cast by the government's decision to cancel the forthcoming local mayoral elections, when democratic participation itself is suspended for administrative, administrative convenience, it becomes difficult to sustain the claim that community consent lies at the heart of these reforms. My Lords, what emerges instead is a model of compulsion over consent. These proposals risk leaving communities without a meaningful voice, enabling the Secretary of State to withdraw to redraw local government boundaries, restructure authorities and compel mergers against local wishes.

The introduction of sweeping powers under the new section 109 B and others marks a striking departure from the voluntary negotiated deal by deal approach that has defined English devolution to date. That approach was rooted in respect for local identity, local geography and local choice. The bill before us seems to move away from that principle with unsettling ease. My Lords, our discussions with colleagues and with stakeholders underline something fundamental local consent is not an optional extra.

It is the democratic foundation of any credible programme of localism. Yet this bill weakens that foundation at the very moment when it should be reinforced. The government claims that reforms empower localities, but too often we see the power devolved in name only, while genuine authority remains firmly centralised without clarity on what powers are truly being passed down, how responsibilities differ from those already held, and how local leaders will be held to account. There is a real risk of creating an accountability gap at the very centre of the system.

My Lords, these concerns are sharpened still further by the bill's uncertain financial implications. Community empowerment is impossible without financial empowerment. Local authorities cannot reasonably ask to be asked to shoulder the burdens or the liabilities of their neighbours, nor can local taxpayers be expected to underwrite centrally imposed restructuring. Yet the bill provides no assurance that council tax will not rise. No clarity on whether solvent councils may be required to absorb the debts of failing ones, and no explanation whatsoever of how these reforms will deliver value for money.

Additionally, we are still in the dark as to how these new mayoralties will be paid for. We hear much about synergies and efficiencies, but nothing about what they are, how they will be realised or what modelling, if any, underpins them. My Lords, rhetoric is not a substitute for a costed plan. The government must commit to publishing a detailed cost benefit assessment. My Lords information available shows that the creation of more top tier councils in place of the county councils may increase costs year on year, not reduce them.

It reverses the economy of scale and offers no prospect of long term savings. Recent freedom of Information disclosures reported by ITV Meridian indicates that the councils in Essex, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight have already set aside 11.22 million for years 25 to 26 to support this transition, with more than 1 million being spent in the current year alone. In Hampshire, over half a million has already been allocated to consultants for local government reorganisation.

How, then, can local taxpayers be assured that this represents value for money? Will there be a transparent framework, underpinned by evidence, to demonstrate whether these substantial outlays can genuinely be recovered through future efficiency gains? This reorganisation, my Lords, will impose real costs on our constituents at a time when many of them are already paying more in income tax, more in national Insurance, whether through their earnings or their pension contributions. Because of this government's choice to value welfare over work, we cannot, my Lords, in good conscience, simply accept that reform must be expensive without being provided with a credible vision for future savings and for long term fiscal stability.

My Lords, nowhere is is at risk more acutely than in social care. Adults and children's social care are among the most vital, the most sensitive and the most fragile of all our local services. But the bill is silent on how these functions will operate across new combined structures, how responsibilities will be shared, and how accountability will be maintained at a time when care systems are already stretched to their limit. Reorganisation without clarity. My Lords, I believe, is merely not merely unwise, but also it's dangerous.

Vulnerable people cannot be left to navigate the fog created by institutional reform. Nor is this the only area where ambiguity prevails. My Lords, the Bill creates a new regulatory alliance, including a local audit office whose relationship with existing bodies is left largely undefined in the bill. We all agree on the importance of rigorous oversight, but the creation of new regulators must be justified by purpose rather than just by preference. Likewise, spatial development strategies, critical tools for planning and housing are referenced in a manner that leaves scope, governance and oversight uncertain.

Without clarity, there is a real risk of slowing down the very growth and the House building. The government claims the bill will accelerate. I also wish, wish to just touch on this significant alterations proposed to some of the Local Government Pension Scheme arrangements when local government reorganisation occurs and assets and liabilities are carved up, it is essential that independent assessments are undertaken. So there is a proper oversight of what funds and actuaries in each region are doing. My Lords, we must also explore the workability of the new duty required, requiring combined authorities to assist in identifying or developing LG investment opportunities.

My Lords, these are legitimate concerns that that such a requirement would place authorities in direct conflict with the scheme managers fiduciary responsibilities, which must remain independent and solely focus on the interests of the scheme members. Taken together, my Lords. These examples illustrate a broad problem. This lack of clarity speaks to a wider issue in the bill's design. This is a substantial piece of legislation, constitutionally significant in both scale and ambition. Yet the government has offered no clear explanation of what it is ultimately for.

Is the goal efficiency? Is it local empowerment? Is it public service reform? Fiscal consolidation, house building, economic growth? A bill of this breadth and consequence should be founded on a coherent purpose. My Lords. Yet the rationale before us is diffused, diffused, it's undefined and at times it is contradictory. And while the Bill professes to empower communities, many of its consequences appear likely to impose costs on them. Instead, new mayoral precepts, expanding borrowing powers, increased parking charges, and the creation of further layers of local bureaucracy, including mayoral commissioners, will all place additional burdens on our residents.

If this empowerment. If this is empowerment, it is empowerment of a kind, my Lords, that we believe comes with a higher council tax bill attached to it. My Lords, the House will recall that we have made this point before. Uncertainty, particularly in planning, is the enemy of delivery. If responsibilities for housing, infrastructure and spatial strategy are to shift, then the transition must be clear, orderly and transparent. Developers, councils, communities need certainty, uncertainty, not disruption.

Local authorities understand their housing needs, their land, their constraints and their potential. Better. Better than anyone in Whitehall ever could be to so. Therefore reform should strengthen that local knowledge. Not as this bill does sideline it, consistent with that theme, I wish to address another important issue, and that is of local identity. Imposing reorganisation. Reorganisation from above, drawing maps in Whitehall and instructing local people to accept new boundaries poses a genuine threat to the character.

The cohesion of the communities we represent. Local identity is the foundation on which trust, participation and civic pride are built, and we must also reflect the right of the role played by our town and parish councils. They should and they should could be custodians of our children's parks, our green spaces and the amenities that give neighbourhoods their distinct character. If their powers are to be subsumed into larger unitaries dominated by broader macro level concerns, how can we ensure that the priorities of those towns and those parishes across our country will still be recognised and respected? These councils, I would suggest my Lord, are not peripheral.

They are central to the everyday life and wellbeing of our communities. In fact, my Lords, we believe we should be encouraging more towns and parish councils when representation is subsumed by a larger geographic area. My Lords, if this Bill is truly to live up to its title, it must move from the rhetoric of empowerment to the practice of it. It must restore local democracy, not delight. Dilute it. It must clarify responsibilities, not not obscure them. And it must build trust, not central control.

Communities do not require permission to have a voice. They require the power to use it. True devolution rests on partnership, on consent and on clarity, not on imposition or ambiguity. My Lords, at Committee stage I will challenge the government on whether this Bill meets that aim, not only in those areas where reorganisation is already underway, but also in areas such as London and Greater Manchester where devolution exists. But we believe it could deliver better if the government wishes to empower communities, then let this bill begin by listening to them.

Only then can it claim with any confidence to speak in their name. But as drafted, this bill takes power away, increases costs for working people, and most of all, it leaves communities, my Lords, without a voice.

16:30

Lord Wallace of Saltaire (Liberal Democrat)

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My Lord have much sympathy with what Baroness Scott of Bybrook has just said. But I'm puzzled because just said. But I'm puzzled because it seems to me that this bill is very much in line with the directions in which the last conservative government was taking us. I had thought that she was a Minister. I have not forgiven the last conservative government for the artificial institutions it imposed on Yorkshire in the face of resistance from all the councils in Yorkshire. And I have not forgiven the Conservatives either, for starving local government of funds, without which it's impossible for local democracy to work here.

The White Paper and the explanatory memorandum for this bill set out the problem it was trying to address. I quote, England is one of the most centralised countries in the world. There is a serious and long term decline in public trust in politics. Three quarters of our citizens feel powerless to influence decisions affecting their local area. Westminster politics, again, I quote, face a wider power feeling of disempowerment and distrust. At a local level, Liberal Democrats fear that this alienation from Democratic engagement feeds into a broad disillusionment with Democratic politics and democratic parties as a whole.

The changes this bill proposes won't meet these challenges. Strategic authorities are not local government, nor are many unitary authorities of half a million people or more local communities. Communities is a word thrown around a great deal in this bill. Local communities are found in our towns, villages and urban neighbourhoods. The White Paper promises that this bill will empower communities to take control back from Westminster. Instead, it takes power and representation further away from local communities, giving it to mayors responsible for several million people.

It also promises that the new authorities will cover, quote, areas that people recognise and work in that may fit England's metropolitan areas, but it creates unrecognisable and artificial authorities elsewhere. This is decentralisation. It's not devolution. The Secretary of State retains extensive powers to direct, intervene and alter the new arrangements. Executive powers, without continuing scrutiny from Parliament. Executive dictatorship the charge that the late Lord Hailsham made about an earlier Labour government, the 1997 Labour government, in cooperation with Liberal Democrats, devolved powers to Scotland and Wales.

Labour's half hearted plan to devolve some powers to regional authorities collapsed with the defeat at the North East referendum, in which Dominic Cummings played as negative a role, as he later did in Wexford. A Tory Labour consensus has since emerged that fewer, larger local authorities are cheaper and easier for central government to work with, and elected mayors are far more to be trusted than elected councillors. It also became the conventional wisdom that these bodies should be as uniform as possible in size and functions.

A minimum of half a million for unitary authorities, significantly larger than London boroughs, I point out to Lord Gascoigne for some unexplained reason, with subregional strategic authorities significantly smaller in population than London. This does not reflect the complexity and distinctiveness of England's different regions. What suits London? Manchester will not easily fit Devon and Cornwall. The last conservative government, I remind Baroness Boycott again disregarded the overwhelming consensus of Yorkshire's local leaders that we would prefer a regional framework to take powers back from London and impose combined authorities and mayors on the moors and dales of North Yorkshire, as well as on the reluctant combination of urban hull and rural East Yorkshire.

This bill will complete the imposition of the new strategic model across the country. It will also ban the further introduction of mayors in unitary authorities, on the grounds that uninformed voters might be confused by the duplication of titles. French and American citizens manage all right with elected mayors at multiple levels, but English voters are clearly not able to understand this bill is constitutionally incoherent and democratically deficient. Labour's 2024 manifesto said almost nothing about English local democracy, except that I quote, as recommended in the report of the Commission on the UK's future, we will establish a new Council of the Nations and Regions, and that in the long term, Labour is committed to replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations.

We already know that serious reform, the Lords, has been kicked into the long grass. The new Council of the Nations and Regions is a shadowy body, with the Mayoral Council for England tagged on as almost an afterthought. We all agree that too much of our civil service is based in London, there in London, because that's where too many decisions about local policy and spending are made. This bill does little to shift policy decisions out of London, and nothing to ease the financial crisis of local government, nor to strengthen the ability of mayors or unitary authority leaders to negotiate fiscal priorities with the Treasury and with central government.

An alternative second chamber might well begin to rebalance UK politics away from overdependence on London, but that is far too radical idea an idea for Labour to pursue. For all that Gordon Brown recommended it, the bill's answer to the problem of public mistrust and alienation is to offer them an elected mayor for a distant strategic authority, accompanied by up to seven commissioners who will be, I quote, independent appointees made by and accountable to the mayor, who will act as extensions of the mayor.

So authority mayors will be almost as much elected dictators once in office as prime Ministers. This places excessive trust in mayors and excessive distrust in councillors. Many of the most effective and useful members of your Lordships' House are former councillors. When I first joined the Lords, I rapidly learned to respect their experience and their understanding of how policies are implemented on the ground. Councillors are the elected representatives closest to our alienated and disillusioned citizens. The council, as I know in West Yorkshire, representing wards with 10 to 15,000 voters, struggle to get to know the different communities and issues within their enormous wards.

This bill will leave them with even less chance of representing the interests of their voters, as it transfers powers upwards from local government to strategic authority. Mayors. Clause 60 imposes a duty on local authorities to make, I quote, appropriate arrangements to secure the effective governance of any area of a specified description, which it calls a neighbourhood area. There is no mention of any direct elections here for neighbourhood representation. Presumably it envisages area committees of councillors for several wards roughly the size of a parliamentary constituency.

Under that, the vast majority of our citizens will not personally know or recognise any elected representative. Repeated reductions in local authority budgets and programmes have left swathes of our cities without any significant contact with democratic institutions or public services. No wonder so many of them are distrustful and suspicious, and inclined to vote for those who tell them that democracy is a conspiracy. Labour believes that its delivery that matters, not participation in public life. Liberal Democrats believe in active citizenship as a fundamental part of democracy.

We will press for local councils to be an essential part of this new structure. It should be a matter of concern for Labour that town councils exist, most often in prosperous communities, and least often in inner city communities, where discontent with democratic politics is at its strongest. There's a glaring contradiction here between this assumption of passive citizens and the weight. The Strategic Defence Review places on mobilising all of our citizens in their local communities to strengthen national resilience and respond to threats to national security.

We discussed the call for a whole society approach in this afternoon's questions. The concept follows Swedish and Finnish models, two countries with strong local government and much higher levels of public trust in government. We will never manage to build a whole society approach to national resilience and to respond to threats. If most of our population feel left outside democratic life. The proposal to reintroduce the supplementary vote is a classic example of the half hearted Labour approach to democratic change.

This was Jack Straw's reluctant compromise for London mayoral elections. He intended it to help Labour by capturing Liberal Democrat votes, thus maintaining the two party competition between the Tories and Labour. Well now, as I am sure we all know, we have a five party system in England, as the polls have consistently shown since last year's election, and we need to move to a system which reflects the diversity of electoral opinion rather than the conservatism of the current Labour government.

There are, of course, proposals in these bills, in this bill, that we welcome the restoration of an effective system of local audit. Much needed the powers to take buses into firmer control locally. For example, my noble friends who speak further on these and other clauses. I welcome the government's willingness in the Commons to accept some reasoned criticisms and incorporate them in government amendments, and I hope that we will see a similarly constructive dialogue here. We on these benches will do our best to improve this ill thought through Bill, while maintaining our commitment to a structure for English governance, which would be more democratic and more attuned to diversity.

16:41

Lord Best (Crossbench)

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16:47

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Labour)

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My Lords. >> Firstly, can I declare an interest as a recipient of a local interest as a recipient of a local government pension but also congratulate my noble friend? Having been a local government Having been a local government Minister for four years, I know how difficult any local government legislation is. Anything talking about devolution of any sort, and I thought it very interesting that the Liberal benches concentrated on very local. That is important. But there is also a need for bigger and wider authorities to do the really strategic stuff.

And I am reminded of the the reason we were able to attract inward investment in the North East at one time was precisely because of the amassing of land. By the Tyne and Wear Metropolitan Authority, which was then demolished and disbanded by the then Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher. And actually we lost that strategic organisation in the region. And it is really those more strategic things that I wanted to dwell on. Firstly, though, very quickly, I really support the attention to the transfer of community assets.

I am, as many members will know, doing a an independent commission, chairing an independent commission on neighbourhoods and those neighbourhoods I've sort of used most Fridays in the past year to go and have another look at difficult neighbourhoods and those neighbourhoods who've been working on neighbourhood development have really been made to able to make a difference when they've been able to use community assets and when they've been able to have more control and actually use them as income generators, too, so that they're not waiting all the time for the public sector to have enough money to fund their youth work, their activity with the elderly, with the the lonely and so on.

And so I really am in support of the government pushing this both around sporting facilities and community assets. But I mainly want to talk about something that is also in the bill that, again, I have spoken on in this House before and that is the need for better accountability and audit of the regional bodies and the combined authorities. Now, I know that there are members opposite who really celebrate the end of the Audit Commission. But actually the reality is that that has lost significant groups in our society areas, in our society, without any effective audit and accountability.

And in the North East, we have particularly suffered from this. I know that when the first Combined Authority's elected their mayors, the then chair of the Public

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Accounts Committee brought in the. I note carefully what.

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The noble Baroness is saying. I presume on that basis, she deprecates the decision by this current government to abolish the current government to abolish the office for Local Government, which government.

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government. The. I think that the noble Lord needs to hear my arguments first and then when he comes to speak and in Committee stage, he can challenge them. The the reality is that in the North East, we have really suffered. And I as I say, I know that the then chair of the pack called the newly elected mayors to advise them of the challenges that they faced because there wasn't the normal auditing process available to them, and that they have to therefore make sure that they got they brought in people who understood the challenge of auditing books for public and private cooperation events and of projects, and some of them took notice.

Unfortunately, the Tees Valley mayor did not. And had there been robust arrangements then, then we wouldn't have had the difficult circumstances that people in the Tees Valley have faced since we now have the totally unjustified position of an arrangement having been made behind closed doors, with nobody being aware of it, of two individuals and their families, and they also now live in Dubai. So even the money going to them is not being spent in the region anymore. That and the and the agreement of 50% local, 50%, 50% public, 50% private benefit from any investment that was made was changed to 90% private and 10% public.

And this means that any investment and any return on that investment does now not go to local people. It goes to two developers who, as I say now, live in Dubai and who don't even spend the money they get locally anymore. And we have the other position that the land in the Tees Valley is particularly relevant to major investment of a data centre, and the government is faced with a data centre they need and the public not being able to get the advantage of that investment.

I think the mayor should rethink and renegotiate, and I hope that the government, by introducing these measures in this bill, is really able to make sure that the public of the North-East actually gets some benefit from investment that the government is making in that area.

16:54

Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Conservative)

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Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Lord. >> We on this side oppose many

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We on this side oppose many aspects of this bill, but it is not because we oppose the principles of because we oppose the principles of devolution and greater local accountability. We strongly support both principles. In 2010, the only area of England with a devolution settlement was Greater London. Since then, conservative governments have introduced a number of devolution deals with local authorities, and that now covers 64% of England. We have always on this side, believed that local people should be able to hold to account those who deliver local services.

My Lord, this Bill seeks to standardise and restructure English devolution by creating strategic authorities with mayors across the country. But rather than putting more power into the hands of local people, as my noble friend Baroness Rebuck has said, it gives the Secretary of State significant new powers at the centre, for example, creating new strategic authorities, adding councils to them or providing a mayor without the consent of local councils. The government will have part of force two tier council areas to become unitary authorities.

Five new powers will allow legislation to be amended by Statutory Instrument without the agreement of local councils. And so, my Lords, there will have to be close parliamentary scrutiny of this Bill in this House and in the other place, we need to examine the principles and procedures contained in the Bill. Because of the great importance to the whole population of the services for which the new strategic authorities and mayors will be responsible. This has been briefly mentioned, and they include transport and infrastructure, skills and employment support, housing and economic development and regeneration, environment and climate change, health and wellbeing.

Where social care is, I do not know and I hope, like me, can maybe cast on that public safety. The functions of police and crime commissioners. Now all of these are extremely important policy areas close to local people obviously, and despite disagreements and misgivings, it has been equally important at local level in the areas with mayoral elections announced for 2026 Norfolk and Suffolk, Essex, Hampshire and Suffolk. To prepare for the changes to come. Much work has been done.

Mayoral candidates have been chosen. They are already campaigning in some places. Staff have been interviewed by the new authorities for the new authorities. Imagine, therefore, my Lord, the disbelief with which local council leaders received phone calls from the Minister in the other place a few days ago to inform them that the local mayoral elections had been cancelled and would take place in 2028. No one was more shocked than the former Minister for Local Government. In the other place, Jim McMahon MP, he said local leaders across the political spectrum had worked in good faith.

They put aside self-interest and difference and they did everything expected of them for a better, better settlement for the people they represented. And they had reason to expect the government to do the same. The government had a moral and legal obligation to honour its side of the bargain. I agree with those words. 5.4 registered voters live in the areas affected by the changes, and Norfolk, where I live, is one of them. In Norfolk, there are fears that the uncertainty caused by the delay will affect investment in large infrastructure projects and strike a stifled growth in the local economy, and there is also the question of uncertainty in all of the policy areas, which will be covered by the new strategic authorities.

I mean, what have they meant to do? They can't plan because they don't know what's going to happen. It is extraordinary. My Lords, why has the government taken this shock decision to delay the mayoral elections? After all, it has said about the importance of devolved powers, they claim that the necessary local government reorganisation is not yet in place. That is an argument rejected in all the affected areas in Norfolk. We are certainly 90% there. There have been critics who say that the government have calculated that they might have more success in the mayoral elections under the new supplementary vote system they intend to introduce for mayors not yet in place.

Others claim I am not claiming this, but there have been headlines that the government is running scared given the current opinion polls. Whatever the reason, many of us in this House value and respect local government. I believe that the noble Baroness, the Minister, does too, and I look forward to her reply to this debate.

16:59

Lord Goddard of Stockport (Liberal Democrat)

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Yeah, yeah. >> Hello. >> The right to speak. I am reminded of 15 years ago when the then four leaders from Greater then four leaders from Greater Manchester stood outside the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, awaiting for an invitation in. And awaiting for an invitation in. And I was one of those leaders. Greater Manchester had ten local authorities in 2010 five Labour, three Liberal Democrats and two conservatives. We'd already signed off to the first combined authority in the country, a legally binding agreement to serve the people of Greater Manchester, and that was running quite well.

We therefore asked the government for full devolution and full powers and more importantly, the funding to go with that, and we presented to the full Cabinet of the government, Nick Clegg, the Chancellor Exchequer, and four of us sat there with two jugs of water and four glasses and facing the. We didn't expect that. We thought it'd be a small number of people. My role was to explain the Mac model, which was simply we would provide the combined authority at no cost to government, and they quite like that.

We would provide no cost to government. The infrastructure for major development schemes, motorway links, transport hubs and many other measures that would then enable development to take place and when successful, and the government would collect the subsequent gross value added tax, the GVA from the businesses, we would earn a proportion of that tax back to reinvest again to create more jobs and opportunities. We were successful, but took four years to hammer out the financial details of that deal with the Treasury and was eventually signed off in Manchester by the Chancellor, George Osborne, in 2014.

And the obvious difference between that devolution deal and the devolution bill we have today are elected mayors. We then have election mayors. In those days, we, the ten leaders responsible for our portfolios, directly accountable, directly elected, and that's the problem. But we have an elected mayor in Manchester now, Andy Burnham, and he has been outstanding working collaboratively with combined authorities but in place before politics with the first Mayoral Development Corporation not in a Labour room town but in Liberal Democrat Stockport.

And it has attracted over £300 million of private investment so far, including thousands of new homes, a fully integrated transport hub and now expanding further across the whole town centre and bringing the bus network back under public control was a masterstroke. And it's also driving the Greater Manchester to being the fastest growing economy in the UK at present. Having said that, all is not well in Greater Manchester. The private high cost boundary issues are of great concern to us and Baroness Pidgeon.

Our transport person will go into more detail later, but my Lords, there are more private hire drivers from Wolverhampton working in Greater Manchester than working Wolverhampton itself. Yes, and that cannot be right. Simon Mayor Burnham might one day in the future leave us to do greater things in another place and reach higher office. We don't know that, but we know that the new bill gives elected mayors sweeping new powers, but is almost silent on the

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Democratic accountability. Yeah. Removing planning powers from directly elected members do not sit directly elected members do not sit well with this group, and future governance arrangements for fire and police will be high on my and police will be high on my agenda as this bill receives the scrutiny it deserves. As I've said, Greater Manchester has a combined Greater Manchester has a combined authority. However, there will be strategic authorities and there must be help for stronger roles for must be help for stronger roles for their council leaders to ensure potential mayors can't override the views of 3 or 4 constituted local authority leaders.

And is it right that the mayor can use the casting vote where decisions to make are tied? Where's the accountability? Where's the honesty in that? My Lords, the Liberal Democrat Party are the party of devolution and talk of empowerment. The bill, quite frankly, are laughable. It goes in hand in glove with robust scrutiny, accountability and the confidence that gives the citizens that vote matters. Their voices matter and their voice will be heard. That way you get benefits for all of society, not only a few.

If this government listens and accepts reasonable amendments, this could begin to do what we all want growth, investment, better transport, better quality for all. But if it doesn't, there will be opportunities lost. We delivered in Greater Manchester and continue to do so because we increased scrutiny and joint accountability and build confidence in the private and public sector. And I do hope the government take heed of that because this bill is too important to fail. Thank you sir.

17:04

Lord Lansley (Conservative)

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Yeah. >> Is. >> A doorstop of a bill. >> I. >> Before I.

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Say anything, I ought to draw attention to my registered interests as chair of Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire Development Forums, and I support Development Forums, and I support development forums in Norfolk and Suffolk and Cheshire as well. But of course, anything I say is entirely my own view. I just want to, as a former Leader of the House of Commons with responsibility for Parliamentary counsel, I just want to draw the House's attention to the fact that more than two thirds of this bill is to be found in the schedules, when parliamentary counsel published their most recent document on drafting of bills, they said that, of course, technical detail should not interrupt the narrative, the story that one is trying to tell in the bill, but that special attention should be paid to the question of whether material should be relegated to the back of the bill.

Well, virtually everything has been delegated to the back of the bill. We have something like two dozen clauses that actually don't tell you what their intention is, simply tells you that there is a schedule to go and look at. And I noted as just one rather effective example reference the I thought very interesting speech from the noble Lord Lord Best Homes England and the Powers of Homes England in relation to the acquisition of land is to be found in schedule 16, introduced by clause 35.

That makes no reference to Homes England. It only references strategic authorities so the the uninitiated reader of the bill would not find anything about housing Homes England in the contents of the bill at all. But yet there are powers provided for it. I'd only a couple of minutes. There will be many opportunities in this bill to, I think, to take up many of the issues that I know. The noble Lady, the Minister understands very well. As we finish the Planning and Infrastructure Bill on Wednesday, we start this bill with some of the same issues in our minds neighbourhood planning, how to how to relate local growth plans to spatial development strategies, what, for that matter, the spatial development strategies of strategic authorities should do in relation to the national land use framework when it is published? But I do think from the point of view of the principle of the Bill, I think I share the view of many expressed that we want to see devolution, we want to see it achieved.

I'm not sure if the noble Lord Lord Wallace of Saltaire referenced the Localism Act 2011, but the then coalition government, of which I was very proud to be a member, I think, set us down this path and I think it's an important path and one that we wanted to see completed. I think our expectation is that 15 years on, we probably would see devolution across the whole of England and Wales, but it is tough to do. My own experience, of course, is in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, which is the which is very interesting and instructive because it is not one of the metro mayors.

It's not one of the city mayoralties. And I think it illustrated from the outset the difficulty, because we had parish and town council, not in my own constituency, of course, we had nothing in those days that as large as a town, but we had parish councils, we had a district council, we had a county council and we had a combined authority. This is too many. And in principle, the government is right that we should arrive at a simpler structure. And if we are going to have a strategic authority, we should have beneath it unitary authorities with whom to whom people can relate, who are responsible for the delivery of the great majority of those council functions, local government functions.

But at the same time as these authorities get bigger, we must have effective governance. And I was quite interested because there is doesn't appear to be a schedule that tells us the detail of what neighbourhood effective neighbourhood governance looks like. We just have a clause 60 that tells us that appropriate arrangements should be made for this, but that is something which Minister in the other place told us would be set out by way of principles in statutory guidance. Well, I think noble Lords might well find that it would be instructive for us to set out what the principles for effective neighbourhood governance might look like, rather than to leave it to civil servants in the ministry to do so at a later stage.

I think the only other thing I really want to draw attention to is the importance of pace. When we had a Devolution Priority Programme, I thought it was a priority programme because we would really get on with it. I live in Suffolk, we have had contributions already from Norfolk and we'll have at least one more. We thought we'd get on with it and people in local government thought we would get on with it and have responded on that basis. So it does feel a little bit like that memorable occasion when we all, we all remember being sent in to the crease, having had one one's bat broken.

And I'm afraid after the end of the passage of this bill in another place, it feels like the noble Lady, the Minister for whom I know we all have the very greatest respect, feel like her bat has been broken by that decision before. She came here to to sit stand at the crease, as it were, to look after this bill. I have to say I am a cynic noble. My noble friend talked about this decision and why it might have been motivated.

Well, it may be to do with this bill because this bill will, of course, will allow that those mayoral elections to be conducted under the supplementary vote system in future, rather than the first past the post system next year. I'm afraid cynical politics is not what we were looking for in the Devolution Priority Programme. We were looking for the the the positive politics of devolving decisions to local government and seeing local government take that up that mantle. And I hope we can see that principle through in this bill.

17:11

Lord Shipley (Liberal Democrat)

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My Lords, I should remind the House that I'm the vice president of the Local Government Association and a recipient of a small local and a recipient of a small local government pension. And I want to thank the Minister for introducing the bill, which I welcome insofar the bill, which I welcome insofar as it sets us off on what will be a long road towards true devolution in England. The aim of the Bill is to transfer power out of Whitehall, which I strongly welcome.

No government can run England with its population of 56 million out of London. Yet that is what Westminster and Whitehall try to do. The devolved nations get their block grant and Whitehall, with Ministers, then manage and indeed micromanage England. Yet this bill is not about devolution, despite its title. It's actually about decentralisation. And even then, this bill creates a centralised structure through mayors who will in practice be managed by Whitehall and in particular by the Treasury. And that is because mayors will be forced to compete against each other for resources.

And there is also a huge centralising power in mayors having rights to higher commissioners, as opposed to elected councillors to drive policy and delivery. And the terms of these appointments will need challenge. I submit at Committee stage. Having said that, I want to work with the grain of the bill because it represents a start on which we can build. I see it as a staging post to direct elections to combined authorities in the course of time, and time will be needed anyway to build capacity at combined authority level, to take on all the extra powers and responsibilities proposed.

When I am content with the need for there to be a strategic planning tier, I welcome local growth plans. But would the Minister confirm that all Whitehall departments are signed up to this bill? Paragraph 15 of the explanatory Notes confirms that a long list of changes that will be delivered by the Bill, but they can only be delivered if all parts of Whitehall are committed to delivery of the government's ambition. And I ask the Minister whether they are, and will this bill fix the foundations of local government, as Ministers suggest? For I fear it will not for the reason that resources to do so are insufficient.

We are told that mayors will be able to raise revenue, and that is welcome. But at Committee stage we will need to explore what this really means. Fiscal policy is sadly lacking in the bill. It is not just about community infrastructure levy and in terms of local growth, I hope we can examine at Committee stage community banking. I want to see simplification of the regulatory requirements involved in establishing new banks to respond to local communities needs, for access to banking in the face of branch closures.

Such banks could be supported by local authorities in their duty to promote growth. And there are, my Lords, many useful examples of success in this field. In Germany and the USA, we could draw on. I am pleased by the proposal to end the first past the post election system for mayors. But my Lords, why stop there? Do we not need proportional representation across all local government in England to have effective governance? I want to welcome the end to upward-only rent review clauses for commercial leases to help regenerate our high streets.

Although I accept that we may need to review the detail of that Committee stage carefully. I like the principle of micro mobility schemes. I like the new health duty to be imposed on all strategic authorities, and I am strongly in favour of proposals for local government pension schemes to help drive the funds to help drive growth, and the proposals on local audit. I want to compliment the Minister and the government for what they are proposing. They are hugely important.

They matter because we cannot devolve power successfully if there isn't an audit system. Examining proposals and spending commitments alongside decision making, laws. Finally, to negatives first, I haven't understood why culture, creativity and heritage are missing from this bill. I also think it is wrong to enforce an end to the local government committee system. The government claims a committee system is a less effective form of governance for local authorities. I would like to ask or invite the Minister to publish the evidence for that assertion, because I have never seen evidence that would actually meet it.

And finally, might the Minister say more about effective neighbourhood governance structures? It is very easy to say that, as previous speakers have said, I fear this ambition cannot be delivered given the current state of local authority budgets. So I ask the Minister, does the Minister really think it can?

17:16

Lord Bassam of Brighton (Labour)

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My Lords. >> My Lords. >> I firstly declare an interest. I chair, on behalf of Brighton and Hove City Council, a seafront Hove City Council, a seafront development and regeneration Board. My Lords, I'm delighted to speak in this debate for a number of reasons. Firstly, I enjoy discussion about local government almost as much as I do watching Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club. Secondly, because it's a genuine pleasure to speak in a bill being fronted by the noble Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, who I think we all admire and respect and enjoy her passion for all things local government.

The third reason I'm having very happy to speak is that I'm a big supporter in principle of both devolution and of unitary councils. Indeed, I think I've been arguing for these probably for the better part of the last 40 years. And like other others in your Lordships' House, I've served on district and unitary councils and was privileged to be successful in arguing for Brighton and Hove to become a unitary back in the 1990s. And it's my experience from back then which informs my comments and words of advice to the government.

Today. Brighton and Hove has carved out of East Sussex with the Brighton element, previously an old county borough and Hove district, and my task with leader was to merge two organisations with different cultures and approaches and blend in county services of highways, education, social services, transport etc. no easy task. We've got most of the reorganisation right, largely because we were well led in our officer corps. We settled the big decisions early and because we established a Cabinet style authority with clear lines of accountability, we also developed a vision for the city and a radical programme of change and service modernisation.

Behind the mantra of M&S quality and first direct banking service enthusiasm. Getting it right meant setting effective working structures early in the process. This gave us two and a half years before the authority was set up, the first in a sort of pre shadow year, and the second is a shadow authority. So on the 1st of April 1997 we hit the ground running. The lesson I took from this was to give authorities time. Don't try and do everything at once to make unitary successful roll them out.

Just don't just impose them. And if I'm to be critical of the government's approach to the combined authorities in Unitaries, it's on this point for understandable reasons, the government wants to crack on with change. Don't just pause and think about it. Do as your predecessors did. Do it gradually. Do it sensitively. Why? So that much of government's programme relies on getting councils to deliver, whether it's social care, new housing, stronger environmental programs, the growth mission, nursery schools, getting people into work, retraining and meeting the challenges of the digital age.

You cannot expect councils to do that and more while they're being set up from scratch and councils unfamiliar with each other, having different systems and offering different organisational structures will need time. Also, make sure they're well resourced to do it and don't expect savings. In my experience, local government reviews rarely ever achieve a net saving so far for me. The government made a wise decision last week in delaying the creation of the combined mayoral authorities for Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, Hampshire and Sussex.

The reason why the mayoral model has worked in the Met in Greater Manchester, Merseyside, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and so on, is that they were built on a sound unitary council base. What the councils needed need is a strategic body for the bigger issues to be resolved. Sadly, that went in the 80s and had to be reinvented in the last decade or so, and in London back in 1999. Additionally, the issues in Manchester, Merseyside and so on are very different from the South and East Anglia.

So I ask, is the same structure going to work for Sussex and Hampshire as for South Yorkshire or for Greater Manchester? A one size fits all approach may not be best, so use the time that's been provided to pause and think through some of the issues and some of the structures. Finally, the bill is strong on empowerment and I approve of this. I think we probably all do. The UK is far too centralised, with some of the biggest regional disparities and inequalities in Europe.

We need to do more to help communities, so use and develop parish and town councils, let strong neighbourhoods emerge and ensure that they have the resource to run things close to people and places. And on placemaking, which I know a bit about, don't create local government structures that people can't identify with. Don't make the unitary so big and disparate, with big divides between rural and urban place making harder because it will get lost. And I think that will be a great shame.

This bill provides us with an opportunity if we want bottom up governance with citizens in control, use the neighbourhood funding as a way of empowering people in their communities to finish. I applaud the commitment of the government, but don't rush this or the objectives will get lost. I mean, structures that are dysfunctional don't expect big savings, but do place an emphasis on creating renewed local government that is about responsive services based on quality and excellence. That's what the public want.

They don't want more cuts and austerity. They want the improvement of the public realm and the higher quality of local service. And I think if this reorganisation and the development of strategic combined authorities does one thing

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that that they should focus on delivering. Said Steve. Steve.

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Can I. Baroness Nye Baroness Taylor of Stevenage for her opening speech? Stevenage for her opening speech? This is a significant bill. It has the potential to reshape the the potential to reshape the governance landscape of England in a very profound and lasting way. a very profound and lasting way. The intention of the Bill to bring decisions closer to communities, to

17:23

Baroness Prashar (Crossbench)

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strengthen local leadership and to enable greater public voice is one that I support. But if we are to deliver those ambitions, we must ensure that the structures set out ensure that the structures set out here are sufficiently whole, coherent, socially attuned to the coherent, socially attuned to the challenges that local areas face. We also need to be mindful that the process of devolution can lead to process of devolution can lead to complex effects on national unity. While it can nurture a sense of identity, it can cultivate a sense of competition rather than cooperation and undermine social cohesion, balancing local devolution with national cohesion is a critical challenge, particularly now when we are grappling with the sense of our identity as a country, when identity politics are rife and we are witnessing fraying of social cohesion.

But this bill provides an opportunity for deliberative engagement to foster social cohesion and inclusion. And to me, the bill prompts an important question what enables people to participate fully in the life of communities that they are part? Administrative efficiency alone cannot be the answer. Economic development alone will not will not do it either. True participation rests on something deeper the capacity of communities to come together, to build trust, to form relationships across difference, and to have shared spaces in which dialogue and collective problem solving can take place.

We need to look beyond narrow service provision and towards the underlying social and cultural conditions that sustain inclusion, culture, creativity and heritage are among the principal ways in which people make sense of the world around them. And throughout my work in public life for over five decades, I have I've seen how vital this can be in terms of intercultural dialogue, which is not just a slogan, but an ongoing practice of listening, understanding and negotiating difference. And again, it has proved essential for sustaining social cohesion.

And it is much more than cultural expression or appreciation. It is a strategic means of enabling people to meet, to meet across boundaries, to build trust and to shape a shared sense of purpose. As we begin to develop a robust regional tier of governance through the provisions in this bill, we must ensure that these principles the ability to communicate, communicate across diverse communities to foster understanding and strengthen social bonds are woven into the strategic functions of the new authorities it will create.

Without that devolution risk becoming an administrative exercise rather than a genuinely community building endeavour. My Lords, this is where I believe the Bill as drafted is deficient. This area of profound significance for social cohesion and civic participation, culture, creativity and heritage is entirely absent from the list and does not have a place within the statutory architecture. Organisations such as Culture Common and the RSA, which have consistently shown how cultural ecosystem underpin community wellbeing and local agency, and there are a lot of local examples and the one I'm familiar with is in Southampton.

The Southampton model is a culture led, place based impact initiative led by Southend forward and Southampton City Council. It is a successful model which has focussed on unlocking prosperity and delivering impact for people and place. It is very akin to the government's agenda of the Office of Impact Economy, which interestingly sits within the Cabinet Office and not the noble Lady's department. My Lords, I'm aware that culture, creativity and heritage are often characterised as cut across issues, but many of the functions already named here are by very nature cross-cutting.

So creative industries seen as important pillar of the industrial strategy, are sufficiently central to the life and cohesion of a place to merit explicit recognition within the governance structure before us. This precisely because they sit across so many parts of people's lives. They should be included purposefully in the strategic remit of the new authorities and not, by implication, implicit powers are very rarely sufficient when multiple departments, funding streams and accountability regimes are involved. Previous devolution arrangements show that culture or civic functions are often left orphaned, dependent on discretionary grants or short term programmes, rather than treated as part of the strategic fabric of our governance.

For that reason, I believe culture, creativity and heritage should be included as a defined area of competence competence consistent with other functions named in the Bill. My Lords, culture is not an adornment to government, but its foundation it to many parts of the country. People do not feel heard, do not feel connected, do not feel part of the shared civic story. If devolution is to succeed, it must help rebuild the sense of belonging, sense of inclusion which sustains social inclusion.

This bill is an opportunity to design a system which supports not only economic coordination but the deeper, more often fragile threads of social life, trust, dialogue, identity and belonging. If we neglect those, we risk building institutions which are technically capable but socially brittle. I hope the noble Baroness Baroness Taylor of Stevenage will reflect carefully on these issues, and consider whether some measured adjustments can be made to strengthen the long term sustainability, fairness and cohesion of England's devolved governance landscape here.

17:29

Baroness Janke (Liberal Democrat)

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My Lords, when I saw the title of this bill, I thought that all the long years of deliberation and the many reports produced on the subject of local devolution were about to come to fruition. Experts such as Sir Michael Lyons, Tony Travers, the late Lord Kerslake are among the many luminaries and organisations who have advocated for the fundamental need to bring government closer to the government. As a long convinced supporter myself, I had hoped that this bill would empower local people, enabling their participation in matters that directly affect their lives, that they would be able to influence and see how their money was spent, and hold accountable those who were responsible for governing their local area.

An opportunity, my Lords, to address the present democratic deficit. As the Bill says, we in England are one of the most centralised systems of government in the world, with citizens increasingly disaffected and scornful of those who govern badly. As people are fond of telling us on their doorsteps. But the overall feeling is that it does not much matter how you vote or what you do, as nothing changes. This powerlessness is expressed by many as a reason for not even going out to vote.

Anyone who has ever canvassed as a prospective councillor must surely have struggled trying to explain why people should vote in a local council election, whilst at the same time explaining that local aspirations cannot be met because the government in Westminster controls all the money. Local councillors are bound by the stultifying financial constraints imposed by central government over popular local projects. This tramples on local ambition, demotivating communities and generating widespread cynicism. The bill's title raised our hopes only to confound them as we read its woeful contents.

Devolution is not the purpose of this bill. Empowering Ministers, not local people, is what we find here. If this bill passes, the Secretary of State will have unfettered powers to bring about radical changes, such as merging or restructuring councils without local input or consent and without proper parliamentary scrutiny. That, my Lords, is the opposite of devolution. The Bill seeks to create a distant elite of so-called strategic councils covering large geographical areas, delegating government policy implementation implementation to mayors.

They will control these authorities on behalf of central government, supported by unelected members, some might say cronies, but who have real decision making powers but no accountability. District councils being abolished. There will not even be the means of holding mayors or authorities to account by the people they will purport to govern. Mayors will answer upward to Whitehall, not to their communities, and in many areas, a regional mayor may cover vast, diverse counties and communities with very different priorities. Experience shows that top down solutions rarely meet local needs.

My noble friend Lord Wallace talked about the regional assemblies, and this is another attempt to shoehorn locally diverse areas into larger, amorphous bodies. I was a member of the South West Regional Assembly, and that August body sought to combine the counties not just of Devon and Cornwall, which I think is a would be a challenge on its own. But Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Bristol into one body and this was basically a huge conflict in that people who were members saw real dissonance between their local interests and priorities and those chosen by the RDAs, who, incidentally, were given most of the powers and the resources.

As we've heard from Lord Wallace, the referendum in the North-East gave a firm thumbs down to these bodies with 77.9% against the idea and the entire policy was abandoned. So I do hope the current government will look back on what went wrong with those attempts to impose top down solutions on an unwilling population. They will eventually take their revenge in the ballot box. As we all know and have found out in the past, I'm sure. Furthermore, the bill ignores the councils that are actually closest to residents our towns and parishes.

These bodies are often the first port of call for communities, parish and town councils understand the local identity, the civic history, the practical day to day realities of where people live. Yet in this bill they are barely mentioned. There is no statutory role for them in the new structures, and no guarantee that larger authorities will have to work with them. I think it also should be said here that mayors are not universally popular. In my own city of Bristol, the city mayor was removed as a result of a referendum in 2022, and the West of England combined authority and mayor are a matter of complete apathy to the local population.

30% turnout for the mayoral vote and a complete lack of understanding of what this body is actually intended to do and how it affects local people. So if this model were to be replicated in our area, it would be considered absolutely derisory by the local people. My Lords, I believe this is a damaging bill and I believe it will be deeply unpopular. It smacks of desperation and despotism. The government is saying in the interests of delivering change, we will remove the rights of those who disagree with us.

We will create distant bastions of government policy, remove means of dissent, and discount the views of local people where they do not coincide with our own participation, influence, scrutiny and accountability of government by those who are governed are hard fought basic rights in any democracy. This government will ride roughshod over them at its peril, I believe.

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Hear, hear! Well done. My Lords. I'm slightly reluctant. To follow.

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To follow. Such a position on the basis that I believe that the government, if it sticks to what it says in the if it sticks to what it says in the title of this bill, is doing the right thing. Unfortunately, like right thing. Unfortunately, like some episodes of yes, Minister, I think this could be a case of get the hard bit out of the way and the the hard bit out of the way and the title before you get to the detail.

But seriously, if if the noble Lady who I think most of us have expressed great joy in her leading this bill because of her belief in this subject matter, if she truly is into that space, and most members know that if you cut me through the middle, I would have locally written through the core, which is why I stand very awkwardly in your house to speak, because it's not my natural space. I will put my signature to any amendment

17:36

Lord Porter of Spalding (Conservative)

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that anybody would put up onto this bill to make it better. I obviously don't have the brains big enough to write any of the amendments that write any of the amendments that are going to be necessary to make it work, but I am quite prepared now that I've mastered my new now that I've mastered my new signature. To put that to the piece of paper I would also like, while I'm standing, to draw members attention to the excellent briefing notes from the County Councils network who have got a position, the District Councils Network who the District Councils Network who have got a position.

Strangely enough, they do agree on some things, but not the detail or the positions they agree on. They agree on constituent members having better scrutiny powers. They're just not sure who the scrutiny, who the constituent members should be. They both take on the hard challenge of accepting the fact that they're both going to disappear in the new world. They're just not agreed on what should replace themselves. One of the questions I would like to ask the Minister is when we were first introduced to this bill, we were told that London was going to be in scope and the number of councillors and councils would have been seen to be fair, across the whole country, given the present Secretary of State's last council that he ran was a 300,000 unit, it would be interesting to find where his position sits compared with the previous Secretaries of State on the numbers that we should be aiming for, and not that I'm advocating one number over another.

As you would understand, the smallest council I have interest in is 30 odd thousand and the largest was a million. So anywhere in between, I'm quite comfortable that somebody will come up with the somebody will come up with the right number. But for pardon? But. There is one technical question I would like to ask the Minister, and that's where there's a proposition to take some power and not much from central government and give it to a mayor. Does that mean that central government will lose that power? And particularly thinking about the ability to call in a planning decision from council, if the mayor can call that decision in, does that include the Secretary of State of also having that power? And if that is the case, is there anywhere where we can find it? And if there isn't, if that isn't the case, is there anywhere where we can amend it in this bill to make sure that it is the case? Because that's what devolution should really be about.

It should be stripping powers out of Westminster and Whitehall and putting them into the local communities where we all live. We know that over the last probably 14 years, Whitehall has grown by about a million employees and the town was shrunk by about a million employees. So devolution, even in the go, in the sorry, the the plan, the plan that my noble friend Michael Gove saw through, which was the Osborne plan originally, even in that the state centrally has managed to grow and not shrink.

And if devolution is going to be anything, it should be about a smaller centre and a bigger local. And that's what I think most see.

**** Possible New Speaker ****

Yeah. My Lords, as with my. Colleagues on these benches, I'm

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Colleagues on these benches, I'm a strong supporter of devolution. I was therefore sadly disappointed to see in this bill the number of places where power is still to be with Whitehall and not with local with Whitehall and not with local government, where opportunities for genuine devolution amidst and where it risks adding to, rather than it risks adding to, rather than reducing the legal complexity faced by local government. Let me briefly give examples of each. And in doing so, I hope my Lord suggests some areas where amendments may, in due course, help improve this bill.

I start with the most fundamental provisions the rights of people to elect those who govern themselves. We all recognise that in some exceptional circumstances, it can be necessary to delay democracy. I doubt few, if any, in this House would think, for example, it was a mistake to delay the general election during the Second World War. But my Lord, such delays should be the rare exceptions. Moments of major crisis where safety is at risk. Yet the bill, as it stands, would continue.

The power of a central government, including any future government of who knows what level of commitment to democracy, to cancel elections that have been previously scheduled. Simply by order of the Minister. My Lords, that is far too low a bar. The postponing of democracy should require the full permission of Parliament through primary legislation. So I hope the noble Lady, the Minister, will say more in due course about why the government views local democracy as not being worthy of the protection that would come from requiring primary legislation to interfere with it.

Turning to examples of where powers could and should be devolved but are being kept within Whitehall's grip. Let me give two. Here in this House we let members participate remotely. So carefully limited, right. But it's one that's used and that works. Whether or not we happen to agree with those remotely contributed views. Personally, I would make the rules more permissive. But even as they stand, the rules are more permissive than what Parliament allows local councils in England to do.

If we think it's okay for us to decide these matters for ourselves, even though there isn't the safeguard of elections for people to kick us out if we get it wrong, why should we withhold that right from democratic councils? Indeed, we've seen remote participation used successfully in local government around the UK, both

17:42

Lord Pack (Liberal Democrat)

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during Covid and since then outside of England, and to give credit of England, and to give credit where it's due. Earlier this year, the government made positive noises about introducing new rights for about introducing new rights for remote participation in English local government, with the proviso of needing to find parliamentary of needing to find parliamentary time in due course. Well, my Lords, here we are in Parliament, we have local government legislation in front of us and a good chunk of time allocated.

So I hope the noble Baroness Vere Minister can tell us more about why this opportunity to get on and act and get this sorted is not being taken to turn to another example of how the bill still holds so much power tightly at the centre. Let me pick the example of cattle grids. For those of us who are collectors of examples of unusual centralisation, the grip of Whitehall over permission to install a new cattle grid is, in its own way, a famous example.

So my hopes arose when I saw cattle grids mentioned in the white paper. But looking through the bill, the decentralisation of those powers does not seem to have made it into the bill. Indeed, the whole bundle of decentralisation mentioned alongside cattle grids in the White Paper seems to have been watered down significantly. I hope this is not due to any change of mind by the government. I hope it's not due to a sudden fear that if the controlling, centralised hand of the Secretary of State is relaxed, we'll have a sudden outbreak of mad cow disease sweeping the country.

So I look forward to hearing more from the Minister in due course. As to what's happened to those final two sentences in the local government taking back control section of the White Paper. But turning to the third area, I mentioned the risks of adding to rather than reducing the legal burden on local government and the complexity in this bill, as also touched on earlier by the noble Lord Lord Lansley. My point here is simply so much of the legislation which Parliament passes ends up never being commenced.

We do all the work to legislate that the law then sits there with different pieces buried in different places within it, never getting commenced. Now I appreciate for understandable, practical reasons, the commencement provisions in this bill are not simple, stretching over three full pages, but the way the commencement of different parts is left open, particularly in clause 92. Paragraph seven runs the risk of repeating so many previous pieces of local government legislation that it never does all get commenced.

So I hope, too, that the noble Lady the Minister, will share where where the government's thinking is on having a clear cut off date. So do the parts of this legislation are not otherwise commenced sooner. There is a backstop that catches the remaining items and ensures that this bill doesn't become just another addition to that huge sludge of bits and pieces of previous local government legislation that get passed but then never enacted, hanging around in limbo to conclude, then, I hope that as this bill progresses, we will see from the government more willingness to enact genuine devolution and in particular, look forward to hearing from the Minister the government's thinking on the right threshold for cancelling elections, why elected councillors should not have the same rights that we hold for ourselves, for allowing remote participation in their proceedings, whether the government is still committed to devolving power over cattle grids, and what the government will do to ensure that whatever Parliament passes, it really does at some point come into force.

If we can get those issues right, the bill will be very much the better for it.

17:46

Lord Fuller (Conservative)

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Lords, this is just the latest legislation in a long line of legislation in a long line of tinkering that has made our subnational government structures more fragmented, complicated, opaque and financially unsustainable that the opening clauses enumerate 13 types of so-called strategic authority proves that point unambiguously, and some such complexity has sown confusion amongst councils, voters and government, preferring the wants of the administrative state over the people taking power further and further away from residents and business to the dead hand of Marsham Street.

Over 20 years as a councillor, I have seen a mania from officials who live outside, who live in the London Borough bubble to tidy things up outside the M25 for their own bureaucratic convenience, and this is just another attempt to lard on half baked new structures in a half done settlement that is already unwinding and unravelling before the legislation has even passed. Because, as an example, the budget announced that mayors could raise a new tourism tax. In her opening remarks, the noble Lady lauded that Surrey was promised a mayor to do it.

Now it's been taken away in the same breath as the mayoral elections have been cancelled. The bill asks mayors to write growth plans in pursuance of the urgency of driving economic growth. I thought this government was all about growth and the mayors were the key to unlocking it. Clearly not that urgent after they've been delayed for two years now. I've heard it all before. Let's get rid of the districts and all the 8086 things that the residents value the most that they do, and it'll all be lost in a system where 70% of the money is spent on adults and children's services.

But nevertheless, somehow it'll all be all right. And it's all nonsense. If we were really interested in community empowerment, the government would sort out the system where three quarters of local government expenditure is spent on the 5% of the residents who need social care and special educational needs and disabilities. But on this the bill is silent. In another, can kicked down the road. Nowhere in this bill does the government set out what local government is for. There are lots of administrative functions listed, but none viewed through the lens that if it's not foreign policy or defence, it's capable of being done locally.

And it's not hard to articulate a purpose because local government exists to raise a family, to grow a business, to invest in local infrastructure and protect the local environment. But on on this, the bill is silent. Instead, we get 380 pages of schedules and impenetrable processes so complex and convoluted they come round to meet themselves in the opposite direction without working out whether it benefits either the resident or the firm. And as if to prove that point, whole parts of this bill contain duplicative provisions for mayoral or non mayoral authorities, with extra discriminations between London and everywhere else.

In a metropolitan apartheid. That's all about shoring up Labour's electoral heartland at the expense of everyone else. Because, my Lords, there are more councillors within the M25 than in all of the county councils of England. 3108 electors get to choose a councillor in London, but in the shire counties it's typically more than 10,000. Now that is a cynical dilution of democracy. Schedule 26 of the bill is all about reorganisation everywhere apart from London and the Mets.

Birmingham, Manchester. Funny that it's nothing less than a gerrymander to save Labour's councillors in the city while pursuing Labour's war on the countryside by other means. The title of this bill is a confidence trick that promises more structures, not fewer mayors able to raise unlimited taxes for things they have no control over. New combined authorities with dodgy decision making provisions, confusion between tiers and even the smallest scale powers like taxi licensing transferred up to strategic authorities without the systems, staff or experience to execute them.

Proud city councils disbanded and relegated to parish council status, with unconstrained council tax raising powers. A vandalisation of our historic county, boroughs and cathedral cities losing their identity, civic pride including their Lord mayors, sheriffs and lieutenants and county councils with their pension funds, which which the Chancellor wants to control, split up, destroying the districts which do the things that people value the most. With net budgets only of around 10 to £12 million, but scoop up the most vulnerable people.

Labour tells us they're most concerned about. And worse, we now get a new war on the motorist with new civil enforcement powers for traffic conventions. This is not a bill about empowerment, it's disempowerment and centralisation, a disembowelment of local accountability because part of community empowerment is all about helping people stand for election. But the bill actually makes it harder for single mums, community minded businessmen, to stand with larger councils further away from anybody else. So it relies more and more on the rich and retired motorist.

That's the effect of Labour's vision for devolution and empowerment. More layers taking powers further away from people whilst creating a new, professionalised councillor class. Now I've heard it, said, I've heard it all, I've heard it said it'll save money, but the people that called for this in 2020 now say it won't save a bean. Look at Somerset bankrupted by an LGR process that is now to be visited elsewhere, and pension strain costs of at least £1 billion, which we know will have to be factored in but have not been calculated so far to be borne by the local ratepayer.

And when we look at the parishes, Salisbury District Council, for example, control converted from a city to a district council tax is up 44% in four years to a £383 band d a a stealth tax if ever there was. And then right at the end, fly tipped some provisions on investment staffing commercial rent reviews as if that improves devolution or community empowerment. Well-meaning but counter-productive. Let's pin the tail on the donkey. Everyone affected will pay more for less. It's all about top down or bottom up, and we should send the bill back under the Trade Descriptions Act because it's neither devolution nor community empowerment.

17:52

Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe (Labour)

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Madam. >> Madam. >> My Lords, I think I've. >> Just entered. >> A parallel universe. The English

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A parallel universe. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. The real clue to this legislation lies in its title. this legislation lies in its title. While I will touch on structures, my real interest in this bill centres upon community empowerment. I wholeheartedly welcome the government's commitment to devolution, and the act will be the most significant step forward for a decade. The statement that powers and funding are the floor and not the ceiling, of where we want to get to, is most welcome here.

The newly announced ability for metro mayors to implement the overnight visitor levy is another significant step forward, and will help English cities like Liverpool compete on a more equal footing for international events and visitors. In my view, there is no one better place to lead on this bill than my noble friend, the Minister serving as the leader of Stevenage Council from 2006 to 2022. She fully understands the complexities of different tiers of local government and is demonstrably committed to effective, devolved local governance and its truly important role in delivering quality public services as close as possible to the needs of local citizens, especially in deprived communities.

Having had the privilege of representing the North West of England with a population of 6.8 million and over 40 local authorities, including Stockport I, came from a region of largely unitaries combined local authorities and city regions. When my mum got ill, I moved back to the West Midlands, where we currently have town districts and county local government. While we have excellent local councillors, many of whom I am proud to call my friends, it has taken me two years with some experience.

Having been a local councillor in Liverpool myself, to truly decipher which layer of government is responsible for what I truly believe in the role of local government to expand the possibilities of local regeneration and strategic planning, effective landlord licensing schemes, unlocking resources in, for instance, pension schemes to regenerate local communities and town and city centres joined up affordable, accessible public transport and most importantly, understanding the physical regeneration alone does not work. It has to be accompanied by innovative training, apprenticeships and lifelong learning to ensure that local people are equipped to maximise local job opportunities.

It also has to embrace a just transition to ensure that workers are equipped with the skills to move from declining industries to the high GDP jobs in the emerging industries of the future. Every three year old girl should be enabled to have the creative education to set her on the path to shape her own future. We know where growth is coming from, the creative industries, clean and green energy, for example. Who better to plan for growth than locally accountable strategic authorities here? I firmly believe that, for instance, Manchester is better placed to seize the opportunities for Manchester than Whitehall, that just national standards for taxis and private hire cannot work.

Bury needs that knows the needs of bury rather than out of area licensing, which in my view should be stopped. There are more taxis licensed in Wolverhampton operating in Manchester than in Wolverhampton. This is potentially dangerous. I strongly welcome the proposed creation of a local audit Office to ensure effective delivery of local plans in the clean energy pill in the. We propose local energy communities to enable local people to plan and benefit from the creation and delivery of local energy.

However, we argue that this in order to be effective, they had to be resourced and financed. My noble friend, the Minister knows a key challenge is how devolving funding and powers to neighbourhoods can really and effectively get local people involved. In my view, this requires resources. Accountability of resourcing is key. We must also seize this opportunity to achieve the joined up delivery of public services. Politics being done with communities, not to communities. We also have to embrace the fact that different areas are at different starting points, and may need additional help.

We must enable the exchange of good practice and support between regions. Before the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, we have the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities agma. So there was a history of the ten local authorities working together and indeed co-financing innovative initiatives in e.g. culture Greater Manchester CA therefore have a head start. No such model existed in Merseyside. I am, however, very proud of how Gmca and Liverpool City Region have worked together to support one another in resourcing.

We have to take cognisance of differing starting points and regional differences and needs, especially in rural communities. Having represented Liverpool European Capital of Culture in 2008, I would ask my noble friend to consider adding culture, creative and heritage as defined areas of competence in strengthening our ties with partners in Europe. The role of elected mayors is key. Carlos Serrano and you were elected mayor in Portugal with a proven track record of delivering judicial skills. Working with mayors in the UK, I work closely with the EU Covenant of Mayors, but was acutely aware that while Manchester and Liverpool were prominent, Carlisle was not.

Had we achieved more level playing field using the Covenant of Mayors as a convenient consultation tool, excluded swathes of my region? How do we achieve consultation that is profound and reaches all area? I'm delighted to welcome the objectives of this Bill, having a lifelong commitment to local governance. The question to my noble friend the Minister is how we work to achieve it here, here, here.

17:59

The Earl of Devon (Crossbench)

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My Lord, it's. >> My Lord, it's. >> A pleasure to follow the noble Baroness Griffin. I note my interest as the Earl of Devon, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I'll speak perhaps unsurprisingly, I'll speak to the impact of this bill on that county where I co-chair Exeter's place partnership, promoting the interface between the city and its rural hinterland. I'm a programme board member for the Great South West, and I liaise with both Devon and Exeter city councils on their respective and regrettably conflicting local government review proposals.

I sat on the noble Lord Best Devon Housing Commission and I'm a partner in a law firm operating originally from Devon, that practices in many areas impacted by this bill and my Lords. I also operate a Devon based heritage land and farming business which interacts with various tiers of local government, not least in licensing, economic development and planning. Despite so many touch points, I am not a politician and I remain, like Baroness Griffin, somewhat mystified by the workings of local government and its many levels, and therefore benefiting immensely from the wisdom of this informed and erudite debate.

But I am concerned that if I remain ignorant of local governance after a decade of involvement, how do we educate and inform those who might be less engaged? The typical local resident, the consumers of local public services who are due to elect their local leadership? After the passage of this bill, the new strategic mayors and the new unitary local councillors, they must be bemused by the complexities of local governance with its various and changing boundaries and tiers. Perhaps this explains the lack of participation in local authority elections, about which we have heard voters simply do not know what they are asked to vote for.

To the extent that this bill simplifies matters and creates a consistent and level playing field across England, it therefore has my tentative support. But I would ask that the noble Baroness, the Minister, what plans are in place to provide an education for the nation on the reforms that are taking place so we can decrease the disenfranchisement that arises from our collective ignorance? My Lords, as a feudalist who owes his presence here to the regional autonomy of the South West during the 13th and 14th centuries, I can only applaud the government's efforts to return us to the status quo ante.

It is ironic that as we're banished from Westminster due to our antiquated nature, the government seeks to return to the regionalism that typified the Plantagenet era that time, before the trauma of the Wars of the roses caused the Tudors to centralise authority, thereby creating one of the most centralised countries in the world, which now has some of the highest levels of geographic inequality in Europe. Historical context aside, given the poverty suffered by once prosperous rural and coastal communities in the south west, I believe the peninsula's best bet for economic and social development stems from greater regional autonomy, so it can look to its strengths the traditions of trade, innovation and exploration to chart a path to a sustainable and a better future.

I therefore support the broad ambitions of this Bill, but I reserve judgement until I understand how it will specifically impact the South-West. Specifically, what form of strategic authority does His Majesty's Government foresee for the region? Was Luke Pollard correct? When he told the Great Southwest Conference that Cornwall cannot go it alone and must combine to form a strategic mayoralty, with its neighbours necessarily mixing the cream with the jam. Perhaps Lord Stevenson equally, what does local government reorganisation look like for Devon? I understand the closing date for submissions saw a smorgasbord of proposals from Plymouth, Torbay, Exeter, Devon county councils and maybe more indicative, perhaps, of the county's long standing tradition of political diversity.

How will those different proposals be resolved, and was it really wise to invite existing local governments to propose their own reorganisation, when their response will necessarily be informed by their own political interests? Turkeys rarely vote for Christmas. Perhaps a more pressing concern is what will happen in the interim while local government is reshaped, focusing specifically on housing and the target of 1.5 million new homes. Planning departments surely need to be focussed on nothing but delivery. But with recent amendments to the nppf upheavals as a result of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, the landscape for local planning is in great flux.

Add to this the promise of wholesale local government reorganisation. Some ten planning authorities in Devon are due to be rationalised to two, three or maybe four unitary authorities and you can only pity local planning departments who are generally understaffed, overworked and may not even have a job in a few years time. The Devon Housing Commission found that one of the major challenges to delivery of affordable housing was uncertainty in the planning process. And this is only going to get worse. Also of concern is the status of rural communities.

The government must be aware of the productivity gap between rural and urban, as well as the terrible poverty that exists, often unnoticed in urban and rural, sorry, in rural and coastal communities. As an advocate for the interdependence between rural and urban society, I believe we should seek, wherever possible, the better integration of the two for the benefit of both. But there is a danger that the specific challenges of rural communities will be ignored and even exacerbated, where they're governed by leadership that has a predominantly urban interest.

The expansion of strategic authority coverage will include large swathes of rural England for the first time, and steps must be taken to ensure rural residents are protected and able to thrive. There's not a single mention of rural in the 360 pages of this bill, and I invite the government to consider amendments to establish a rural commissioner, as well as duties to consider rural needs. My Lords, there are multiple further aspects of this bill that are of interest, including the environmental and climate change competencies.

With my tech lawyer hat on the future proofing of local private hire vehicles is of some interest, particularly having spent time in California, where Waymo autonomous vehicles are predominant. With my property barrister hat on, I'll be interested to understand the policy behind the abolition of upwards only rent reviews and obviously as to assets of community value, I recommend to the House the tireless work of the Plunkett Foundation, and I look forward to sharing with you. They're really insightful work in this space.

18:06

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (Green Party)

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My Lords, it's a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, the Earl of Devon. I'm not sure I entirely concur with his view of Plantagenet concur with his view of Plantagenet governance, although I will note, of course, that the Angevin Empire was distinctly a European structure. I declare my positions as vice president of the LGA and the Nalc, and I begin by agreeing with much of what the noble Lord Lord Wallace of Saltaire said. Democracy is at the foundation of green political philosophy, and democracy means decisions being made by the people affected locally and only referred upwards when absolutely necessary.

And despite the thoroughly misleading title of this bill, it involves not devolution of power but Westminster directing what should happen in local areas, areas and communities, being disempowered by the loss of local representatives and the imposition of the single strong leader model of a mayor without any deep responsibilities for local engagement and, more than that, a mayor subject to little local scrutiny and oversight. We heard from the noble Lady Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top just how wrong that can go.

In the work project, there's been much hand-wringing about the apparent loss of trust, particularly among young people in democracy. But democracy should be about much more than an election of a single person every four years. At, as we've seen in the postponement of four of next year's scheduled local mayoral elections, the whim of the government in far off Westminster. Before we give up on democracy, we should try it. To take one specific example, I'm going to go to clause 59 and schedule 25 of the bill, which saw a win by the Greens and others in the other place hard fought, which will allow Sheffield and other communities.

And Sheffield is particularly close to my heart, having been part of the campaign to allow councils currently operating a committee system to keep it to varying renewable periods. Great. A concession from Westminster to local power. But why was it necessary to fight so hard to keep local decisions in place, particularly in Sheffield, where a local referendum secured huge communities support for this far more democratic model of local governance? Why is this? As with the previous governments so opposed to democracy, do they not understand what damage centralised control and direction is doing? Do they not understand that with 29 councils already in financial crisis, with a fresh warning today that more will fall into this position after the new funding settlement is announced this month? As the LGA is explaining today, cost and demand pressures are unrelenting, particularly in children's and adult social care, homelessness and send all areas where councils are effectively forced to be the agents of central government determines the statutory responsibilities.

That's not local empowerment, but local desperation and rightful anger at the failure of local government to deliver local priorities because they simply don't have the cash. But there is one area of positivity in local government in town and parish councils, which under a decade and a half of austerity have been forced to often, sometimes gladly, to pick up many of the responsibilities previously carried out by larger authorities. And many of them have done it extremely well, efficiently and democratically. But there's a problem.

It tends to be the more privileged communities with longer histories, a market town say, that have these structures, while perhaps a large, relatively new council or other estate where the need for representation is most urgently needed is now further away than ever, there's little time and so much in this bill. So I'm going to tick off some further issues that I'm going to be picking up at report community wealth building, rather than allowing a few to profit while the rest of us pay for privatised and outside sources, seeing community facilities sold into developers hands for luxury departments, so often it appears and lost as community spaces forever.

Why does this bill not take steps to allow an inclusive and democratically owned economy? A question to the noble Lady, the Minister. Also, I turn to the environment. Such a crucial issue for community health and wellbeing on these islands that are some of the most nature depleted on this planet. I note the briefings, extensive briefings received from peers for the planet and the Wildlife Trust, which stress how out of date, how very mid 2000. The bill and the government approach is the 2025 council climate action scorecards finds progress only improved 5% between 2023 and 2025.

And we can all see in the floods, the droughts and heat waves, how much faster we have to go. As the Olga consultation concluded, local authorities need statutory duties and powers, sufficient funding and robust support to lead on climate action. And I note that more than 500 councillors, including Andy Burnham, I just note that have signed an open letter calling for more statutory responsibilities. I'll be bringing forward amendments, I suspect, with others Committee stage, to seek to address these issues.

Finally picking up the point by made by the noble Earl of Devon and and also by the Better Planning Coalition. This bill is urban focussed, as is this government adding rural affairs as an area of competence and providing provision for rural affairs. Commissioner. If we have to have the undemocratic structure of commissioner at all, where relevant, would certainly aid local democracy and ensure some catering to desperately under considered communities. Finally, briefly, on resilience, a crucial issue in this age of hybrid warfare and the age of shocks in terms of climate and nature and health, dreadfully, and also, I will add, dreadfully fragile for profit infrastructure on which oligo oligo ballistic multinational companies have forced us all to rely.

We need to see democracy to build local resilience. This bill is not delivering that.

18:13

Baroness Pidgeon (Liberal Democrat)

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My Lords, I'd like to also declare that I'm a vice president of the Local Government Association. of the Local Government Association. Lords, as a passionate localist, someone who strongly believes in devolving power to the lowest possible level, I was really rather excited to hear there was a devolution white paper and subsequent bill, but sadly, like many of my noble friends, excitement evaporated pretty quickly. This bill is not about subsidiarity, it is Whitehall giving out a few goodies, but with strings and budgets very much attached and controlled from the centre.

This is not devolution in my book and compared to other OECD countries, the UK remains one of the most fiscally centralised countries. Data from the OECD's Revenue Statistics shows that in recent years, no more than 6% of the UK's total tax revenue has been raised locally, about half of the OECD average. Whitehall needs to let go and devolve far more funding and services to local and regional government. Fiscal, fiscal devolution, as we see in cities and localities around the world alongside a fairer voting system, would allow local innovation, creativity and to help reset politics.

Sadly, these are all absent from this bill, but let me focus my concerns on a few specific areas. The bill provides insufficient scrutiny of strategic mayors and authorities. The mayoral model is being rolled out across the country, but without the strong check and balance that is needed. And in the Commons, the Minister said she could, and, I quote, assure the committee we will consider how to strengthen the scrutiny of strategic authorities, because I completely agree that as they acquire more powers, it is right.

We have accountability and scrutiny frameworks that are robust and fit for purpose to ensure that they are held to account for how they use the powers we confer on them. So perhaps the noble Baroness and Minister could update us on work to strengthen scrutiny of these new mayors. And there is also an assumption that London has had devolution, the 1999 Act and Amendment Act tick, job done. But that is not the case. The reality is that the mayor has been given increasing areas to oversee over many years, and now has a budget well over £21 billion.

And yet the London Assembly, the other half of the Greater London Authority, has not seen an appropriate increase in its powers. And this bill proposes even more powers to the mayor. Now, having been an Assembly member for 16 years, I know firsthand that some additional powers are needed to strengthen the scrutiny of the Mayor of London and partner agencies, and ensure services are being delivered effectively and efficiently. I therefore ask the noble Baroness May as to what engagement did the government have with the London Assembly ahead of this bill.

It's clear to me that the Assembly needs stronger powers, such as a wider power of summons, and change the threshold for the budget, and I will be bringing forward amendments at Committee stage to address these concerns. But the other areas I wish to draw attention to at this stage are related to transport. Over recent years, we have seen the explosion in micromobility e-bikes and scooters covering our pavements and streets, a lifeline for many who use them to get about our cities at pace and convenience, but a nightmare for those with mobility issues, visual impairment or young families having to negotiate routes around these obstacles dumped all over the pavements, and local authorities unable to license or manage these bikes or set safety standards for them.

So whilst it's welcome, the bill covers this area. Neither the bill nor the accompanying guidance include explicit, explicit requirements on mayors or strategic authorities to engage with constituent authorities on the development of micromobility schemes. An upfront duty would ensure engagement at all stages, is robust and covers all instances, so I'd be interested to hear from the noble Baroness, the Minister on this matter. And my final issue that has been raised a number of times relates to private hire and taxi licensing and regulation.

The amendment introducing national minimum standards. Whilst it's welcome, it does not go far enough and it feels like this issue is being kicked into the long grass. I have been talking to transport authorities across the country who are all concerned about out of area licensing. This is a safeguarding issue. It was raised by Baroness Casey in her July 25th report on group based child sexual exploitation. As the Minister mentioned, Baroness Casey recommended that government should take immediate action to put a stop to out of area taxis.

But why is this an issue? You might be thinking different authorities have different standards in their licensing regimes, and if you want to operate in an area, you should be licensed for that area. And as as we've heard several times, Manchester currently 49% of drivers are licensed in Wolverhampton. Now, this means that Manchester local authorities have no say over the standards of drivers and vehicles in the city, nor do they have the resource and right to carry out inspections.

This is a huge safeguarding issue, a loophole that really needs closing. Will the noble Baroness, the work with myself and members across the House to close this dangerous safeguarding gap. I look forward to working to improve this bill to ensure local empowerment, genuine devolution and safer transport for

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all. I'm delighted to. Have the opportunity to to speak at. This stage of the Bill and

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This stage of the Bill and welcome the Minister to her place, just when she thought she was going to have a quiet life, another bill to have a quiet life, another bill comes along. We heard earlier that the purpose of the bill is to transfer power out of Whitehall by giving local leaders the tools to deliver growth, fix the foundations of local government and empower of local government and empower communities. My question is how precisely this will work in rural communities.

I spoke against the orders for the combined authority and the mayor for York and North Yorkshire, and I think my concerns have been proven right, as indeed the noble Baroness Baroness Pinnock and I shared similar views. At that time, the population of North Yorkshire and York together, given a combined population of 768,000. And I don't believe that it's it's

18:19

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Conservative)

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too big geographically, but it's not big enough numerically to make not big enough numerically to make it worthwhile having for the last five years, I was in the most rural part of the constituency that I represented. If I drove 200 miles in one day, I was barely touching in one day, I was barely touching the sides of the constituency. How a mayor is expected to get round and meet people and actually and meet people and actually represent that area is a challenge for anybody, and I wish him well.

Democracy is for him. Democracy is, I believe, certainly in rural areas. It's grassroots. And the building blocks, in my view, are parish councils, the districts, the boroughs and the county. And I believe that that it's very confusing. I was twice subject to Boundary Commission reviews in my parliamentary career, or three times once as a European MP, once, twice as an MP. And I think the difficulty when we keep meddling and making more mysteries to local government, as we are doing in this bill, it actually discourages people to go out and vote because they don't know which area of of government or which authority the living in.

We were promised that if we got rid of the districts and boroughs in North Yorkshire, we would save money. We then had a metro mayor imposed on us, and most of the rural dwellers stayed at home. Politically, it was not a right or success for us in North Yorkshire, and we lost our overall majority. So I think it's going to be a challenge as successive elections take place. I think the lowest turnout was for police commissioners. This was something that was imported from the states.

It might work well in the States, but it didn't certainly work well in rural parts of North Yorkshire. So what I do hope, and I share a common cause with those who've spoken in favour of rural commissioners. I think there is a great case in those areas which are deeply rural, that we must have a rural commissioner in place. Better still, could we go back to having rural proofing of all policy across the piece? I think that that would help very much indeed.

So I look forward to working with the Minister and others in the House when we move to committee in making the bill work in this regard, when it comes to funding, if I've understood correctly that there's going to be a levy for transport, but how is the government going to square the extra responsibilities on combined authorities, particularly when it comes to solar farms and battery storage plants, both of which are highly flammable? And if you actually have to have the fire service attending to these, that is going to put an extra call and an extra resource implications on them.

So I'd be very interested how the government expects to fund these, if it cannot be met out of the the general funding at this time. Areas which I do support, I support the provisions on out of area services. I think Baroness Casey did the House and the country a great responsibility. We realised that that that was part of the responsibility, how grooming gangs were able to target their victims. And it's not just in Wolverhampton and Manchester, right across York, North Yorkshire, the North East.

These are problems. I think there are still problems with Uber and I think it's right and proper that they should be brought under this bill. There is still I'm grateful to the Guide Dogs for their briefing on this. There is still an issue. About 58% of guide dog owners reportedly being turned away by taxi or private hire vehicles, despite this being a criminal offence, can the government address this as part of the bill to make sure that the there is a better understanding? I'm very proud of the fact it was a conservative government under my right hon.

Under my noble friend Lord Hague, who introduced the Disability Discrimination Act, which which did enormous, made enormous strides in this field. So I hope that can be addressed as part of this bill. This bill, I think, sounds excellent in theory, but how it will particularly be delivered in practice in rural areas, I think is going to be a real challenge, not least because we already have. I'm a vice president of the drainage authority's drainage authorities, and I think we have a key issue that has to be addressed of funding drainage boards where they do exist, to make sure that they have the means to do the excellent work they do in keeping us all safe from floods.

So I welcome the Bill as it stands, but hope to improve it and reintroduce the agent of change

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principle this time successfully. I declare my interest as a Chief

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I declare my interest as a Chief engineer working for Atkins and as a Director of Peers for the planet. I welcome this bill, but I do feel I welcome this bill, but I do feel for the Minister. She's just about finished the Herculean task of taking the Planning and Infrastructure bill, the Renters Infrastructure bill, the Renters Rights Act, through this House. And now here's another doorstop of a

18:25

Lord Ravensdale (Crossbench)

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bill for for her to take through, to use the words of the noble Lord Lord Lansley. But a very important bill, I think, something that has been grappled with for many years by by many governments so far tackled in quite a piecemeal way. But there's a real need for that strategic level approach to complete that process and seize all of the benefits for comprehensive devolution across the UK. I've worked for many years on regional issues in the Midlands.

Noble Lords have mentioned many areas of the UK in the debate this evening, but not not yet the Midlands, but the Midlands. Actually a great testbed or case study for the issues that we're talking about. When I came into Parliament, we had a single combined authority in the Midlands, which was the West Midlands Combined Authority, but nothing across the rest of the region. So were I, I'm in Derby in the East Midlands. We did look, look on the on the West with a little bit of envy because Andy Street at the time had huge levels of success in being that voice in, in bringing in levels of large levels of public and private investment into the West Midlands.

And we were lagging far behind that in the East But now we do have things have moved on. We now have the East Midlands Combined Authority, the Lincolnshire Combined Council Authority as well, but there are there are issues with the way that this devolution is, is being approached. And actually I go back to something that the noble Lord Lord Blunkett brought out a very perceptive comment in a bill earlier in the session, the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education Bill, which was looking at Skills England, and he said that devolution is something we can all get behind.

We can all get behind that as a concept. But in doing, in doing so, we do create joins. We do create barriers that were that were not present before. And we have to we have to learn how to how to get through those, get through those barriers that we've created. Because what I've observed a lot of the the legislation going through the House in this session, there are many areas where that's a problem. For example, I've talked about skills. Now, the government's approach to skills in Skills England has been driven through combined authorities now in the Midlands.

Even though we now have three combined authorities, around half the population of the Midlands lives in areas outside of the combined authority. So they don't they can't take the benefits of of some of these initiatives. And we've seen the same in the Social Mobility Committee, which has just reported in the approach to social mobility, the youth trailblazers, again being driven through combined authorities. Now, of course, that will be resolved in time in the government's plans. But even when we move to a model of strategic authorities that cover the whole country, we will need to break down those barriers.

And I would suggest that a pan regional level is is the best place to do that, to look at investment into regions, to look at skills, energy, social mobility. There are areas that require that broader pan regional approach. So I, I do look forward to to working with noble Lords and Committee to think about how we can put in place more of a broader, perhaps a pan regional structure into this which which is something that's brought out strongly in the government's White Paper as well.

Now, the bill my second point, the bill is surprisingly silent on energy. And if we look at the areas of competence in clause two, we have a number of areas points out transport, skills, housing, etcetera, etcetera. But energy is quite conspicuous by its absence. And I think there is there is a need for clarity here on how, how, how these strategic authorities are going to, for example, work with great British energy, the role of regional energy, strategic plans, local area energy plans.

So I think that does need to be well, we do need to have some discussion in committee on that, on how energy is going to be factored into the role of these new strategic authorities and environment, as well as we are retreading some of the discussion that we had in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. But the planning role of of these strategic authorities does need to align with the strategic priorities of the country. So environments and net zero, it is carrying on from that earlier discussion we had.

But I, I, I do want to bring bring that back in committee. How the planning system can better align with these strategic priorities to ensure that what gets built by, by strategic authorities aligns with those goals, and really to empower those strategic authorities to deliver on those goals. So to finish the vision is there, my Lords. I mean, many of the issues that the country has faced in recent decades can be traced back to that centralisation of power and actually opportunity.

And the the regions have been left behind, that geographic inequality that the noble Earl of Devon mentioned. And the way to resolve that is to devolve power, to devolve resources and use all of that local knowledge to revive the regions and not least deliver the economic growth agenda of the government.

18:31

Lord Teverson (Liberal Democrat)

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My Lords, I'm not going to disappoint the noble Lord, the Earl of Devon. And by I will speak about Cornwall, and I will mention our brothers and sisters in Devon as well, at at certain point. But, my Lords, a serious point. Cornwall is then the, as members will know, is in the far southwest of the United Kingdom, only further southwest of the Isles of Scilly. And it is a nation that is surrounded, a Celtic nation that is surrounded by the ocean primarily, and a little bit of the the River tamer as well, and it is an area of the country, together with parts of Devon, in the same valley that were part of the first Industrial revolution, not just in this country, but globally in terms of its extraction of minerals, of tin, of copper, international trade with the Phoenicians way back in classical history, and a nation that is now looking at providing the nation with the with the minerals of lithium, so that in Somerset, one and first Gigafactory can actually produce its output with the British raw materials.

It's also a nation at the moment that is surely one of the first sources of quality food and drink and all of that area. But perhaps in culturally and culture has been mentioned a great deal in this debate. It is the only part of the realm outside of Ireland, Wales and Scotland that has its own language, that of Cornish, which is recognised by the Council of Europe through the charter for Minority Languages and recognised by the government as well.

So this is an important part of the United Kingdom. And although most of my colleagues here have been very critical, the government and its proposals at the moment, the one thing I will definitely congratulate the government on is Steve Reid's announcement that last week, I think, or two weeks ago, that Cornwall should have a single let me get the it exactly right. So I've got this right. The single foundation strategic authority. And that has been very much welcomed through the work of Cornwall.

Six members of Parliament for Labour, two Liberal Democrat and indeed the leadership of Cornwall Council under its Liberal Democrat and Independent leadership. So I want to thank the Minister for that move forward and the clarity that there is and the importance that people in Cornwall. I should explain. I'm not Cornish myself. I, my family were migrants from Denmark in the 10th century into Suffolk, but my but residents in Cornwall feel that personality of the land they live in, that culture is an importance to them, not just those that were born and have long traditions there.

But my question to the Minister are this with those congratulations. Firstly, will all strategic authorities be able to become members of the Council of Nations and Regions? At the moment, that is quite an exclusive club in terms of of authorities. And in the past Cornwall has been excluded from that, even though its terms of reference are, it is or it makes it sound like it's all authorities with devolved responsibilities, and clearly all strategic authorities would have that.

Secondly, clause 51 of the bill allows the established strategic authorities to come back to the Secretary of State and ask for extra powers. Now, I think that is something where we don't want to see a caste system in terms of strategic authorities. I think that's very dangerous for the future. And so could that ability to ask for further devolution be something that could be moved out to all strategic authorities? My Lords, I do welcome the the Secretary of State's announcement.

I'm sure my colleagues would hope that a similar thing could be extended elsewhere, but I do welcome it for Cornwall. We I those stress that we are not anti the rest of the South West at all. We work very closely with other local authorities in the South West, and although the noble Lord, the Earl of Devon, may put his clotted cream on his scones before the jam, we don't hold that against our brothers in Devon, even though we have a different culture ourselves.

18:36

Lord Bradley (Labour)

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My Lords, I rise very briefly to raise one particular issue. At the Second Reading debate on a bill which I am very pleased to support. which I am very pleased to support. This issue is the need for legislative change to address Out-of-area taxi licensing, which has been raised several times in the debate today. This is a part of a campaign led by the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, who, by the way, is quite popular, and council leaders in the devolved Greater Manchester Authority entitled Backing Our Taxes Local, licensed, trusted, which calls for more local accountability to drive higher taxi standards, stronger public safety and safeguard the livelihoods of drivers.

As a former chair of the Licensing Committee on Manchester City Council, I welcome this initiative at Report stage. In the other place, as we have heard already today from the Minister, the government introduced an amendment to the bill which would provide the Secretary of State for transport with the power to introduce national minimum standards for the licensing arrangements for drivers, operators and vehicles. This should present a valuable opportunity for greater consistency, improved public confidence and improve support across the sector.

However, its success will depend on the reasonableness and appropriateness of the standards and most importantly, on their implementation and ensuring compliance with them. The bill does not yet yet set out what these national standards would be, but this can be further debated as this bill progresses in this House. But while it is very positive that the government are willing to add taxi and private hire services into the scope of the bill, a key concern remains have we, as we've heard on several occasions tonight, that out of area operations remain unaddressed, and this was particularly highlighted by Baroness Pidgeon in her contribution, as the Minister referenced Baroness Casey's national audit on group based child sex, child sexual exploitation highlighted the challenges that Out-of-area taxis have presented to local authorities trying to enforce standards to protect children at the risk of child sexual exploitation.

The report has, Baroness Pidgeon noted, recommended the government should take immediate action to put a stop to out-of-area taxis and bring in more rigorous statutory standards for local authority licensing and regulation of taxi drivers. The government accepted the report's recommendation, including for the Department of Transport, to take immediate action to stop out of area practices. As we've already heard, and also that we've noted that many licensees operate predominantly outside the district in which they have been licensed.

And as a resident of Manchester, I see the numerous license plates from Wolverhampton. Every time I walk into my local village. The mayor, Andy Burnham and Greater Manchester leaders have supported Elsie Blundell MP, who has been championing the out of area issue in the other place, and and tabled a new clause for an optional licence where you operate model that will give mayoral strategic authorities power to require that journeys wholly within their strategic area are fulfilled by locally licensed operators.

There may be other options to this proposed amendment, which I'm sure we can debate at a local at a later stage as the bill progresses. But what is most important today is that there is no clear government stance on advancing the Casey recommendation. So I hope that my noble friend, the Minister, will clarify the position of the government on this as she responds to the debate, so that we can be clear whether to determine that further legislative change will be

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required during the passage of this bill. My Lords. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady

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I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, for introducing this 371 page bill introducing this 371 page bill today, and I declare an interest as a Deputy Lieutenant of a Deputy Lieutenant of Hertfordshire. I am well aware of the high regard across the political spectrum in which the Minister is rightly held in our county. Noble Lords may wonder why

18:42

Viscount Trenchard (Conservative)

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the government is pushing for more elected mayors, while at the same time forcing areas that still time forcing areas that still operate under a two tier system to switch to a single tier system. This move involves dismantling traditional counties and creating new unitary councils. On the one new unitary councils. On the one hand, the government claims two tier local governments are bad because people feel remote from because people feel remote from decision making. Hence the push for unitary councils. On the other, it seeks to impose new second tier authorities in the form of strategic mayoral authorities through a top down approach.

The closest level of local government to communities are town and parish councils, which deserve more attention, especially after the abolition of district councils. If the aim of replacing county councils with smaller unitary councils is to bring decision making closer to communities, why is the government transferring powers to larger strategic authorities? Moreover, the bill grants the Secretary of State sweeping powers, including the authority to create new strategic authorities and mayors without local councils consent. I know the Minister loves Hertfordshire, but I am concerned that the implications of Unitisation and the break up of counties are not fully understood.

The word unitary is horrible. I regret the destruction of our historic counties, the poet Thomas Larkin wrote in his 1972 poem going, going. And that will be England gone. The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guildhalls, the carved choirs, the guildhalls are going, including the magnificent County Hall in Hertford, where I recently attended a mayor making ceremony. I wonder what Larkin would say about the ongoing local government reorganisation. The Minister argues that the identity of traditional counties will not be affected by the move to Unitaries.

I am far from convinced. As a child I remember Sussex was thought of as one county, but after the Local Government Reform Act of 1972, even the Lord Lieutenant and High Sheriffs offices were replaced by appointments for East and West Sussex. The historic counties of England were established for administrative purposes by the Normans. They have also helped define local culture and identity, stripped of any relevance to local government. The so-called ceremonial counties will gradually be confined to history books, losing their practical relevance if counties like Wiltshire, Dorset and Buckinghamshire can remain basically as single counties, why can't Hertfordshire and Essex? My Lords, even aside from the significant extra costs involved in setting up a new tier of local government, I am sceptical that there will be any savings from this reorganisation.

Many councillors who support it do so for political reasons, not administrative ones. Hertfordshire has been well managed as a county and in this case the old adage if it ain't broke, don't fix it should apply. The government seems to lack understanding of the importance of community identity, or of the function of history and political geography. I believe that we proceed with this compulsory reorganisation at our peril. The argument that people don't understand where decisions are made between county and district councils is not a good reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The new strategic authorities created by this bill will control most of the funding and services such as police, fire, social care and NHS. This means that decisions affecting residents will be taken further away from communities, not closer, as the government claims. Does the Minister believe people will understand the complex web of new authorities? CA, CCA. SAFs, MSAs, Fsas, MSAs, etc. most people could actually understand the difference between district and county councils, but the confusion began when districts stopped calling themselves district councils.

I suspect that in the future, people will have much less understanding of where crucial decisions are made. Councillor Tim Oliver, chair of the County Councils Network, has stated that mayors should not undermine the role of councils but work with them to drive growth, build infrastructure and deliver better local services. However, it is clear that the creation of mayors will significantly diminish the role of councils, which are undergoing expensive and unwanted restructuring. At the same time, this has the makings of a disaster, particularly in the absence of strong leadership, to manage such a large scale reorganisation.

The recent headline from the Bishop's Stortford Independent Dog's Dinner Plans for new authorities plans sums up the situation well. The conservative group at Hertfordshire County Council staged a walkout on November 19th because they were given no option to vote against all three proposed options for unitary councils. I agree with councillor Nick Cox of the Green Party, who said Labour's plans are a coup against local democracy, delivered with a smile and a flowchart. We're being asked to choose between two, 3 or 4 unitaries, which is like asking the passengers to vote on the band's encore when the Titanic is already sinking.

There is a credible alternative a single county wide unitary authority with as much power devolved to local town and parish councils as possible, even in districts where the majority of councillors support one of the three proposed options, there is widespread doubt about any savings and concern about the disruption this will cause to vital services like social care. Some councillors fear years of chaos as new structures bed in. Anyone who believes that breaking up the county's £1.7 billion highways deal into smaller contracts will lead to savings is mistaken.

In conclusion, My Lords, the government's plans for local government reorganisation are fraught with risks. They undermine both local identity and efficient governance, and they add unnecessary complexity and costs without delivering any clear benefits. I look forward to working with others to persuade the

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government to reconsider its approach before it is too late. Well, sir.

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Well, sir. My Lords, I stand with a little bit of fear in my soul today because they're, unusually for a liberal Democrat. I have very little groundings in local government. And indeed, as one of my colleagues said to me, not yet. my colleagues said to me, not yet. So, my Lords, fearing that the candidate selection with the arm up behind the back is following me, I would say 1 or 2 things about this bill in front of us.

The one thing which I believe the local Lord Viscount Trenchard most people don't understand local government, but I would disagree with one. I did a little service for the RFU about explaining local government about planning issues a few years ago, and it was quite clear that most of the people involved didn't know the difference between a district and a county council. They had no knowledge of it, and this was because you had a group of people who were incredibly committed to a bit of the public service this way sport.

They went training, they played, they manned their committees. They even went to work and had love lives. They didn't have time to understand the structure of local government, and they didn't realise that until they bumped into it when something was going wrong. Oh, you, we have to do that. We then took it on and this was done in the local government. Local Government Association helped me with this. We then went and spoke to other sports. And you know what? It was the same there.

These local structures designed often on historical county lines, things

18:50

Lord Addington (Liberal Democrat)

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that have been there for a long time, which have, whenever they could, ignored the changes in local could, ignored the changes in local government, haven't spoken to each other because they're doing their other because they're doing their own thing in their own time. Local government run, often local, political structures run by volunteers have exactly the same problems, so they don't meet very often. They don't meet until something goes wrong. Would the Minister undertake to make sure that when local these local government changes come through, there was an active programme of integrating with these large voluntary groups that go across the country? Sports would be one of the first ones, but it goes through you've got because how does it interact? Well, local transport don't have a bus stop.

You don't have a junior team because they don't have cars. Explaining to somebody when they want to move their club outside. When wonderful new site, that's a problem you'll have. And the developer who has offered you the sun probably can't offer you a bus service. All these things have to be explained in, integrated in. And so if we're going to take these changes, please can you do it, please. Can you go in and talk to them, other cultural groups, which probably should be mentioned in this also catch in also the case of what is the relationship between these bodies and public health.

My Lords, establishing an exercise habit for something other than the fact you're told to by your doctor is a very good way of keeping it going, getting going. You're also involved in a cultural interactions of that group, which is very good for mental health as well. It also is an informal job market and something that allows you to meet people outside your normal group, which helps understanding why don't we help them more? Now? These are self-sustaining groups who probably are struggling to get by, but government and particularly local government really should be reaching out.

Please can we do that? This bill is an opportunity to start doing this. Try and reach out and find out what's going on. We also have we can also go in. We can expand upon this, my Lords, to minute detail. But I think I'm at the edge of absurdity here, so I will stop very soon. What is the government going to do to reach voluntary groups, sporting ones with a good place to start? They're not the end of it. How is the changes going to happen? How are you going to reach out and change their lives for the better? Because if you don't, this wall of ignorance which exists, it's not even a wall.

It's a pit that you fall into. It is there. And these bodies do not interact. They have their own politics, their own agendas. They don't have time to get in touch with yours on a casual basis. You need to form bridges, original structure or even unitary authorities might be a good way of starting.

18:54

Lord Borwick (Conservative)

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My Lords. why governments of all flavours make their legislation so heavy and long. In the case of this bill, 371 pages and 93 clauses and 34 pages and 93 clauses and 34 schedules, it's to enable any peer to speak about the one subject they know about Second Reading. That's that's very generous, because several clauses are to solve long term problems in the taxi industry. And that is what I want to talk about. I must first declare my interests, my Lords, I have been connected with the taxi trade for about 45 years, and I own my own wheelchair accessible licensed taxi.

Historically, I was the group CEO of Manganese Bronze Holdings plc, who voluntarily introduced the first production wheelchair accessible London taxi in 1997. My Lords, I want to mention the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 30 years ago may seem to the young people in the Transport Department department to be legislative archaeology, but the wonderful library here has dug out the history of this legislation in section 32 of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, it says that the Department may make regulations for the purpose of securing that it is possible for disabled persons to get in and out of taxis and be carried in them safely and in reasonable comfort.

The government did not actually make the regulations, and the DDA act was repealed and replaced by the Equality Act 2010. The same clauses were carried through in section 160 of that act, but the same inactivity was carried through to the House of Lords. Did Post-legislative scrutiny on the Equality Act and Disability, and the Liaison Committee did so again in 2021. Both said I think that this clause should be commenced without further delay. The government leaped into action, agreed with the committees and did nothing.

So I believe that the clause 32 words are still relevant 30 years later. The department may make regulations but hasn't bothered to do so, and still, disabled people with flat batteries are pushing their wheelchairs uphill. My Lords, these words pose an obvious question why have they not been actioned? Is it because there hasn't been the time in 30 years to action them? The Conservative Party has been in power for 16 years. The Labour Party for 14 years and the Liberal Democrats in coalition for five years.

All of them have had the power to do something, but nobody has actually done anything. The blame should not be shared among the parties represented here. There is ample obloquy for anyone other than the crossbenchers to take their fair share. This is a shameful history and I think it should stop. Essentially, Parliament decided to do something and the department decided not to do it, but didn't have the courage to repeal the legislation. 30 years, my Lord, he's enough.

In those 30 years, the number of people who use wheelchairs has grown enormously as longevity has increased. Indeed, I can point out that all of us have used a wheelchair. It's called a baby buggy, and we're very fortunate that if very fortunate, if it's only at the beginning of our lives when we use a wheelchair, the noble Baroness Baroness Brinton made a speech on the 4th of March 2022, which impressed me. She mentioned that she had arrived at her local station, Watford, after 11 p.m.

in sleet and snow and only a very few of the taxis were wheelchair accessible. She had a flat battery, so she had to push her wheelchair because there wasn't an accessible taxi available. So why didn't any party in power actually do the small work required to get the Statutory Instrument in place? I have enormous respect for the noble Lord Lord Hendy, the Minister, who I know is an enthusiastic, is enthusiastic to solve this wheelchair accessibility problem. I asked the government two questions has the department drafted the Statutory Instrument needed by clause 32 already? I presume that was 30 years ago.

When can we see it proposed, my Lords, on the bill itself, whether where there are new to clauses on the licensing of taxis and private hire vehicles, I ask why not set a timetable for these excellent clauses, which I thoroughly support? Why does it say may and not must? Are we actually debating a 30 year timetable to get these changes done? My Lords, the largest problem in the taxi industry is cross-border hiring, which has been mentioned earlier. It was a problem mentioned in the Casey report.

If a taxi driver can be caught in a crime and lose his licence, but carry on working the same place with a new licence from somewhere else, then this charge changed to enlarge. Licensing areas should be made and there's clearly something suboptimal suboptimal about the knowledge in London. Butter Boys, the London trades name for newly qualified drivers, has spent 3 to 5 years memorising knowledge which is inherently computable. It can be done better on an iPhone than in a brain, because the answer to the question how do I get from the House of Lords to Kerry Street changes from day to day, depending on who is digging up which road and then staring at the whole my Lords, there may well be a significant problems with the rest of the legislation, but I support these taxi clauses, and I will be proposing amendments to compel the government to bring forward the inclusion of wheelchair accessibility to taxis.

About matter agreed. No less than 30 years ago.

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My Lords, I want to reflect on the journey that has led to this the journey that has led to this bill before us today. English devolution has not arrived all at devolution has not arrived all at once. It's been shaped over time by successive governments of different political parties, each building on political parties, each building on what came before from Lord Heseltine's championing local Heseltine's championing local leadership in economic regeneration to my late noble friend Lord Prescott, whose Northern Way set out the economic opportunity of stronger regions, and the noble Lord Lord O'Neill, who worked with George Osborne to translate that economic logic into the modern mayoral model.

While their contributions were informed by different political traditions, they were bound by a shared belief that this country succeeds when power is closer to the people it serves and reflects their needs and aspirations. Because of that shared endeavour, the landscape has changed dramatically. Eight years ago, there were no metro mayors in the north. Today we have nine, representing several difficult different political parties, I'm sure sometimes difficult as well. Building on that cross-party progress, I welcome this Bill's ambition to standardise and strengthen the powers available to mayors and combined authorities that are made up of council leaders.

It offers a clearer framework for how devolution should operate and moves us beyond the top deal making of the past, and it sets a strong direction for the future. That devolution is not a patchwork experiment, but a permanent and essential part of how we govern the powers in this bill over skills, transport, housing, regeneration, health and wellbeing are exactly the areas where local leadership can make the biggest difference. Because out there in the real world, the challenges challenges people face are not neatly divided into departments, but are intrinsically connected and overlap into varying government departments.

That is why

19:03

Baroness Elliott of Whitburn Bay (Labour)

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decisions taken locally and regionally better reflect need. A regionally better reflect need. A lack of affordable housing affects employment, poor transportation, employment, poor transportation, access to training and health outcomes are shaped by all of the outcomes are shaped by all of the above. As the mayor in my region, Kim McGuinness tries to address Kim McGuinness tries to address child poverty. She is using her formal powers and wider convening role to help her do this, and she strongly supports the ending of the two child limit to benefits announced by the Chancellor recently in the budget.

If we don't give our mayors the powers to address all of those challenges, we shouldn't be surprised when the same problems persist. This bill gives them a more complete toolkit, and I hope we continue to build on this as devolution evolves. But tools alone won't get the job done if they don't come with the resources to deliver that change. Too often, mayors with clear mandates have to return to Whitehall to bid or make the case for funding when they want to act.

That is neither a good use of their time, nor is it consistent with the spirit of devolution. So I also welcome the move towards longer term, more flexible funding settlements, and I hope this becomes the standard across all devolved areas. But fundamentally, if we want accountable mayors who are actually responsible for the destiny of their localities, we must go further than that by allowing them to raise and retain revenue. That is why I was also pleased to hear the Chancellor announce a discretionary visitor levy in last month's budget, which I hope will be a first step towards a new era of fiscal devolution.

Ultimately, politics is about achieving outcomes, not changing governmental structures. But should we really be surprised that when the decisions are made at a distance from the people they affect, they often lead to worse outcomes? Devolution gives local leaders the ability to act on the priorities that matter to their communities to create jobs, improve public services, and ensure that growth is felt more widely. I support this bill because it moves us further along that path, and I

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hope we continue to build on it. My Lords, I should probably

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My Lords, I should probably start by declaring an interest in that. I am a contributor to the that. I am a contributor to the Local Government Pension Scheme, sadly not able to take any money out of it as yet, but I know that out of it as yet, but I know that it is. It is going to be in good hands. I'm particularly pleased to hands. I'm particularly pleased to follow the contribution by my noble friend Lord Borwick, whose wife, Victoria I served on the London Assembly with for two terms.

She was a wonderful deputy mayor of London, and set a very high standard for the rest of us to follow. I particularly agreed with Lord Borwick comments on disabled access to taxis. And Jamie, I have to say, if you bring forward that amendment, I would be delighted to support it and to help it as well because it is about time I agreed with much of what the noble Lord Bradley and the noble Baroness Pidgeon had to say about Out-of-area licensing. Whilst I was in London, I visited cab drivers and would go out with them to see some of the challenges they faced around London, and I was quite often dismayed to see the number of out-of-area plates from towns around London that were applying in the centre of town, seemingly with with no enforcement, even though we knew that the standard they had to pass to do that was far lower than a London cab standard would be.

And that was in the days before Baroness Casey made her report on the grooming gangs, which only makes that type of licensing even more urgent. So I'm pleased to see the government bring that forward. It's 25 years since the noble Lord Harris of Haringey and I arrived at Romney House, just down the road from here, to take up our role as founder members, I suppose, of the London Assembly, which celebrates its 25th year anniversary. Well, last year, as it as it happens now.

So I'm going to confine most of my other comments to London issues, because that's the area which I, I know a bit about. I was pleased to to hear the Minister talking about the London wide licensing strategy that's been added at a fairly late stage to the bill. I note that in the other place, Dame Meg Hillier, another former colleague of ours now representing Shoreditch and Hackney South, had some very technical questions to raise about the licensing strategy and I will be interested to see how it develops as the legislation moves forward.

I have some questions myself about London wide entertainment and alcohol licensing, largely around the basis of why it's being done, why it was asked for and what the objectives are, and how we will be able to judge whether this trial is successful before it's rolled out into the rest of the country. Because local communities guard their their local decisions on licensing very fiercely. And I think to take those away or to affect them a higher level, there needs to be a very a very obvious benefit for making that decision further up the ladder.

I'd also like to to join Baroness Pidgeon's comments on the Assembly's powers and perhaps improving them, something that I suspect many people here won't know is that in the 25 years that the Assembly has existed, there has been no occasion at any time when the Assembly or its committees have been able to amend or overturn the mayor's budgets or the mayor's strategic strategic powers, despite the fact that that power was put into the legislation. And that's because those committees and the Assembly require a two thirds majority to do it.

And mathematically linked with proportional representation, it is almost impossible. There's actually only ever been one term in which that might have happened, which was the second term of Ken Livingstone and his office when the Labour Party were reduced to seven Assembly members, which was not enough to provide a one third blocking number on that occasion, there were a number of deals done with colleagues in the Green Party, and I think the mayor's conversion to green policies was dragged along partly by the political necessity of having to get his budget through.

I think it might also be so. Perhaps the solution to that is to allow the Assembly and the Assembly's committees to amend the budget by simple majority, rather than by a two thirds majority, and an amendment to that effect was introduced by Peter Fortune, the hon. Member in the other place, who represents Bromley and Biggin Hill, another former Assembly member. I think it was defeated, but we might see it again here. I also believe that another look at the way the Assembly is described in legislation may be overdue.

We've been in existence now the Assembly, for 25 years. In that period of time, the population of London has increased by over a million people. That's over a 10% increase in the size of the population of London. Easily. Yet the Assembly still made up of 25 members. It hasn't grown to reflect that. The reason for that is that the legislation says, or certainly used to say, that the Assembly should be made up of 25 members. So some legislative changes required to actually enable a boundary review to take place.

And perhaps that is something that the Minister would like to consider while we're going over London matters as well. It hasn't been or it has been an asymmetric growth in numbers as well. So there are two particular constituencies in London, London North East, that covers the Lea Valley and City and East that covers the Barking Riverside development, both of which have grown much faster than others, and therefore the people in those constituencies are possibly underrepresented. I'm indebted to my noble friend Councillor Porter, who mentioned, yes, Minister.

There's been a lot of discussion about the the title of this legislation. I dug the quote out. I should just give it to the House. Exactly. It's the first episode of Yes, Minister, sir Humphrey Appleby's advice to Ministers on drafting legislation. Dispose of the difficult bit in the title. It does much less harm there than on the statute books. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure Lords.

19:12

Lord Storey (Liberal Democrat)

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I declare an interest as a vice president of the Local Government president of the Local Government Association. Like my friend Baroness Pidgeon, when I looked at Baroness Pidgeon, when I looked at this bill, I was excited about the possibilities and I thought, here is a real opportunity. And sadly, I don't think we've seized all the opportunities that we could have done. But maybe, as somebody said, it's a first foot in the door. I was a local councillor. In fact, I'm still a local councillor in Liverpool for 38 years and leader of the council for eight years.

And I was reflecting as various people talked and scribbling and changing things on my notes. What have been the real changes that I've seen during that period of time, and was there such a thing as civic pride? Well, yes, I think there was. At the beginning I felt truly that people were proud of the city. Perhaps they still are. Hopefully they are. But it's very difficult to be proud when finances are constantly being cut. I don't know how Liverpool survived when it lost a third of its budget.

Imagine your own family income, your own family budget, losing a third of that budget. I don't know how. Still, councils with the huge costs of adult social care and special educational needs and school transport, what's left is, is just about just about managing to keep per statutory services going. There is little left for those things that might actually help to regenerate civic pride. During that time. I have to say that it took a riot, the Toxteth riot, to get the then Prime Minister to come to Liverpool.

It took a Liberal Democrat overall controlled council to get the Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to come to Liverpool. He came willingly. He came in my first year as leader of the council. He came to a breakfast, he arrived late and Alastair Campbell told me I couldn't speak because the Prime Minister had to speak and go on to his next engagement. I wasn't allowing that to happen and we created a good relationship. And I have to say, one of the hallmarks, I think, of a successful government in terms of working with local authorities, and this is not, of course, in the bill, is the relationships that are created.

And I'm sorry that Baroness Armstrong isn't in her place because she helped us enormously with our Cabinet model. Tessa Jowell, of course, helped us with culture, although she remained impartial. And I think that sort of relationships that you have with Ministers is hugely important. And of course, Michael Heseltine almost became a Scouser. He he changed his views completely. So we have a in Merseyside now. We have a combined authority and the combined authority I have to say is remote from the people.

You cannot access that the, the Cabinet or the, the, the group that advises the mayor are all the leaders of the local authorities in Merseyside. And guess what? They're all Labour. Can you as a citizen find out what's happening when it's decided? Yes. Can you ask to see an agenda of what's being discussed? No. Can you go to a meeting and petition the meeting? No you can't. So when we talk about devolution, when we talk about opening up local government, it's not just about structures.

It's actually about people themselves. The former deputy Prime Minister of Angela Rayner at Second Reading of the English Devolution Empowerment Bill in the other place, said the following I know we will not achieve our goals unless we fundamentally change the way the country is run. That means handing power back to where it belongs to local people. Hallelujah! We all agreed that, don't we? So that we can make decisions on what really matters to their communities so we can make decisions that really matter to their communities.

However, this bill sees power remain at the centre. The Secretary of State will retain sweeping powers to merge authorities and extend functions without local consent or parliamentary oversight. Place is important to people, whether it be a village or a town or a city. Regional identity is hugely important to people and whether it's strategic elected mayors who have a real vision for their communities and have the energy to drive forward that vision for their communities. And two names come to mind, both with the same first name Andy Street in Birmingham and Andy, sorry, Andy Street in Birmingham and Andy Burnham in in Manchester.

Real visionary champions for their combined authorities, while others have quite frankly been rather dull and not had the vision, not had the determination, and that is to the detriment of of local government. The Bill needs to ensure that all mayors, elected mayors, are on equal footing and given the same responsibilities. As Baroness Scott said, equal financial security, not the drip, drip, drip of responsibilities and finance favoured, I have to say, by the previous government, we on these benches have always believed that decision making should start at the lowest level at the grassroots and not become remote and remove from the citizen.

Elected mayors must always be accountable and local government and all levels should be

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electorate. Yes. Thank you, My Lords. A lot of good points have already been made good points have already been made in this debate, and it's clear that the principle of devolution is supported across all of our benches. I've personally seen really good results from devolution in the Midlands, where I've lived for most Midlands, where I've lived for most of my life. There we've had serious and meaningful devolution that's already delivered real progress. Under the leadership of former Under the leadership of former conservative mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street.

I think it's quite telling that people from all across this House have mentioned him, in particular. The noble Lord Storey has just talked about pride, and Andy made us feel proud of our region and my home city of Birmingham for the first time in a very long time. That was actually something truly precious. After a lifetime of being laughed at for for being from Birmingham. But nothing in this bill, I'm afraid, resembles that successful model. Instead, what we're presented with is a measure that centralises power and concentrates authority in the hands of a few individuals.

It sidelines councillors and it weakens scrutiny. And I'm afraid, against the backdrop of cancelling mayor elections, it really does make a mockery of the of the government claim that they want to

19:20

Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Conservative)

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strengthen democracy. And if I may, bring in some concerns that have been raised directly with me by been raised directly with me by councillors in my former constituency in Redditch and also in the county of Worcestershire, these are people who actually deliver services and understand their communities. I do really pay tribute to them and to everybody tribute to them and to everybody else who steps up to serve their local area, similar to the comments that were made by my noble friend that were made by my noble friend Baroness McIntosh, it's far from clear how an area like Worcestershire would be affected.

It's too small a county to be enlarged strategic authority, but lumping it in with Birmingham or combining it with Herefordshire or Gloucestershire just wouldn't work. Be a million miles from the wishes of local communities. So I would be grateful to hear from the Minister when she comes to sum up how specifically Worcestershire and Redditch would be affected when she plans to combine those two tiers of government into one authority, and picking up the point made by my noble friend Viscount Trenchard.

He's right to highlight those deep roots of counties. I'm actually old enough to remember when my hometown of Solihull was kicked out of Warwickshire, and it put the West Midlands, it was put into the West Midlands and it caused everybody to go into a frightful tizzy and to vote against all the local councillors who've done that. I've heard concerns also expressed about the concentration of power into the hands of a small number of individuals, and I really do think that's a danger.

To have good governance, you need a robust group on a committee challenging each other and making sure that alternative points of view are presented. I can see that we are creating a situation where influence can be captured by targeting a handful of individuals, and you could find a small number of mayors who could create a cabal distant from the people that they serve, rather than the current model that we have of ward councillors deeply embedded in their local areas, living and breathing those day to day problems affecting people every day.

And without proper checks, a mayor can simply ignore scrutiny panels. There is no equivalent to parliamentary votes. If a mayor just says, well, it's my way or the highway, what can those local representatives do? Absolutely nothing. As I'm speaking after the noble Lord Ravensdale, I follow him in talking about the Midlands, and I was fortunate enough to work very closely with Sir Andy Street as he started out in as the first mayor of that combined authority. And the reason he was successful was because he was able to navigate relationships with other local authorities under different political colours.

He was able to deliver significant benefits for that region and put that authority on a pathway of being an outstanding authority, and he did that through just relationship building, through developing trust despite their different political colours. And I genuinely don't think it would have worked if the then conservative government had just said, you have to do it this way. We're dictating from MHCLG. At that time, it wouldn't have worked. They would have all dug in and refused to work with the conservative mayor from the point of view of being Labour authorities.

But Andy Street was able to bring them together and deliver something, and I think that the government would do really well to reflect on successful models of devolution that have worked well and have delivered benefits for those areas, potentially reorganisation, if done properly, could save millions of pounds. And I think that the government is planning to do that. But my worry is that any cost saving potentially could get swallowed up into more bureaucracy. I do, I do fear, and I think many of us share this concern, that it looks as though the government is potentially using this to do their favourite thing, which is put up taxes.

When I listen to the government frontbencher, at no time did they say that they had the aspiration for lowering council taxes on hard pressed council tax payers. They talked instead about more taxes for tourism, which will cost money to administer and collect, and might well have the opposite effect to the one that they imagined. My Lords, real devolution does mean trusting local people and not bypassing them, and this bill does none of that. Local government, I think, in the words of one of our noble peers, I was just having a cup of tea with is one of those things that's boring but really, really important because it touches the lives of so many people.

I think it's vital that we get it right, and I do hope the Minister will take on board, on board the suggestions of noble Lords to improve it throughout its passage. And my Lords, as a councillor on Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire, which is a large

19:24

Baroness Pinnock (Liberal Democrat)

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unitary authority with both a metro and a combined authority, I both have an interest to declare and experience to share. Now. This has experience to share. Now. This has been a great debate to, to be part of and to listen to because the passion for local governments and local democratic government has local democratic government has been apparent throughout the afternoon. Many issues have been raised that are important locally. Categories. Who knew taxi and private hire licensing vital for safeguarding.

And we've we've heard about different parts of the country, be it Cornwall or even Devon and parts of the Lincolnshire, Norfolk and West Midlands and now Yorkshire. So this has been a important debate to to have. It has, however, had rather a mixed response from various members across the House. We on these benches of Liberal Democrats are completely in favour of the principle of devolution. It's fundamental to our values, as is community empowerment, which should naturally flow from devolution.

Unfortunately, the bill being debated encompassing encompasses neither real devolution nor does it unfortunately empower communities. On these benches we will strongly support proposals that enable either or both at the heart of the chasm that exists between a Liberal Democrat and a government. Approach to devolution is an understanding of the essential purpose of local government. Successive governments have viewed local government as simply a necessary local service delivery function. Now, perhaps that notion has its beginnings.

In the statement made by Sir Keith Joseph when he was a Cabinet Minister in the early Thatcher government, that local government should outsource all its service delivery and the Council therefore would only need to meet once a year to agree the contracts. Since then, there has been a persistent trend of central government viewing the purpose of local government. Through that lens. Nearly 20 years ago, the Lyons report into local government expressed a more positive purpose for local government as being one of place shaping in order to use powers and influence to promote the well being of a community.

Lyons said. That approach, that approach was crucial to improving satisfaction through that Liberal Democrats challenge the basis of the Bill. We support a strategic authority. It should have great, but it should have greater democratic accountability and not be at the expense of local decisions made locally where they belong. During this debate, there have been many contributions to part one and part two of the bill, which established strategic authorities and the role of mayors. Now, strategic authorities do have an important role to play in play shaping.

As we've heard in both Manchester and in the West Midlands. Have been trailblazers really in in doing that. But what is not acceptable to those those of us who cherish local democratic decision making are the powers given to a single person over a large area with minimal accountability, minimal community engagement and little involvement of elected local councillors. The Mayor of West Yorkshire, for example, serves 2.5 million people and the combined authority consists essentially of the five council leaders.

So the mayor will have very wide powers under this bill to determine a strategy, for example, of land use that will have a significant impact on local communities who will have been denied a genuine opportunity to have their voice heard. So where is the community empowerment in that? Where indeed is the local accountability and local democratic decision making? Now, my noble friend Lord Pack has rightly criticised the change to the mayoral electoral system. A supplementary vote fails the test of enabling the candidate with the widest support to be elected.

So why has this system been chosen when others are more effective in doing? Having a candidate elected with wider support have been rejected? A further undermining of transparency is the power this bill provides for a mayor to appoint up to seven unelected commissioners. As it stands, this enables a mayor to appoint their mates to these roles, as has apparently already happened in some mayoral authorities. One not far from where I live, and at the very least, there need to be requirements in the bill for an open process of of appointment selection, selection panel and appointment.

The extension of mayoral powers is far remote from the notion of community empowerment. For example, the potential for civil enforcement powers to be taken undertaken by the mayor removes it from the local involvement. Further, the power of a mayor to take a planning decision away from the local planning authority is that complete odds with local democracy, and there is nothing in the bill that I have read which explains what a strategic planning decision will be, how it will be defined, perhaps the noble Baroness, the Minister, will be able to explain that part three of the Bill is a further attack on local democracy and accountability, as it provides powers to the Secretary of State to merge councils into unitary ones.

What is not sufficient, sufficiently discussed, is that the key criteria for a unitary council is to be its population. The numbers of people is going to determine the geography of the new unitary councils, not whether places co-exist well with each other, work well with the other, or indeed is the will of the people. Forced amalgamations fail. The council on which I serve is a prime example when, after 50 years, there are regular, heartfelt calls for its abolition because it's forced together the the great towns of Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Batley have been forced together when they really have not much in, not that much in common and that is the danger of creating the unit, forcing unitary councils to come together in in this way.

There are elements of the bill that are welcome. You'll be pleased to hear, such as the Local Audit Office. That is a very important move. Once the Audit Commission was abolished, there has been a lack of oversight and guidance for local audit. So that clause I welcome and clause 58 is important because it gives a nod towards neighbourhood governance. So there's no clarity about what that might mean. And in any case, the clause 58 provides a power for the Secretary of State, for crying out loud, to make the decision on what is a neighbourhood unit.

Now, if we really believe in devolution, neighbourhood governments should be decided by the by the local council area, not the Secretary of State. And and if there's one thing we're going to, I hope the noble Baroness Morrissey will help us to change. It's that because that is at the heart of what devolution should be, that local people determine what neighbourhood governance should look like and what the area should be, and not. The Secretary of State surely has got better things to to decide on.

And that is just one example of a ministerial power to override local decisions that are peppered, unfortunately, throughout the bill. So this isn't real devolution and there is no fiscal devolution throughout in the bill either, which, as many members have said in their contributions is makes it rather empty. If the the devolution rather an empty promise when mayor mayors are going to probably have to compete for resources from the Treasury. At its best, local government is greater than the sum of its parts.

It is what matters most to the daily lives of people, and a plea from these benches is for government to start appreciating the power of vibrant, well-funded local government that enhances the lives of both the people who live there and the place in which they live. We on these benches will challenge the government during the next stages of the bill to look through a local lens and provide real

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devolution and real community empowerment. Yeah.

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Yeah. My Lords, I declare my interest as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire and also a local Bedfordshire and also a local government pensioner. I'd like to extend my thanks also to the Minister for the time that she has Minister for the time that she has given noble Lords today, and as well as the many constructive meetings that she has kindly hosted outside your Lordships' House. I'm likewise grateful to the many organisations and individuals that have written to us all, and provided many submissions and analysis on the Bill.

My Lords, one question troubles me. What is the true purpose of this bill? Because I remain far from certain. My Lords, we have seen a consistent trend

19:37

Lord Jamieson (Conservative)

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over many, many years of centralisation in the UK. As a

19:37

Baroness Pinnock (Liberal Democrat)

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centralisation in the UK. As a councillor, an ex-chair of the LGA, I am personally a huge advocate of devolution and I was looking

19:37

Lord Jamieson (Conservative)

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devolution and I was looking forward to this bill to deliver real devolution. We have heard real devolution. We have heard support across this House for genuine devolution, but and there genuine devolution, but and there is a but the title of the bill is devolution. But hard as I try, I find very little in the Bill of devolution. Yes, the bill devolves licensing of micro electric vehicles. It removes outdated Secretary of State consent for things like special event notices, conversion of footpaths to cycle paths, construction of cattle grids and I'm pleased to see, given our previous discussion on the Planning and Infrastructure bill, partially the removal of the need for Secretary of State approval for lane rental schemes.

Now, while these are all very helpful, they can hardly be described as real devolution and would certainly not justify a bill of this size well over 300 pages. In fact, the reality is the reverse. With the bill seeking to centralise powers in Whitehall. Reading the bill, there are 43 mentions of must have regard to, including regard to guidance from the Secretary of State. 76 mentions of duty in relation to local government, and 105 mentions of the Secretary of State.

May, with all these new duties and guidance that has to be followed. There is no mention of funding transferring for fiscal devolution, for instance, in relation to new duties for health, housing and education. What there is is an ability for mayors to increase taxes on hard working residents who have already suffering from a 68 billion increase in taxes over the last two budgets. This bill clearly risks substantial increases in local taxation from uncapped mayoral precepts, which can be used for almost any purpose, no doubt to fulfil new duties and guidance as dictated by Whitehall.

Had the title of the bill been Local Government Reorganisation. It would have been more understandable. The bill's focus is on the establishment of mayors and strategic authorities, and the transfer to them of powers currently held by existing county, district and borough councils. Can I ask the Minister what is the purpose of the reorganisation as on the face of the bill, it is clearly not devolving powers from Whitehall. Now, I just want to reflect on some comments that we've made across the House.

The noble Lord Best raised the issue of development corporations, and I have a lot of sympathy with that. But do we really need mayors to create development corporations? The existing structures could do that. The issues of taxes has been raised by many noble Lords, and the issue of safeguarding has been raised. And the alarming statistic that was raised on the number of Manchester taxi drivers from Wolverhampton, and these do need to be addressed. Why is there a delay to the mayoral elections? Why these couldn't have carried on the noble Baroness? The Minister did say that these strategic authorities would carry their formation, so why not have a mayor to help that? Also, the issue of town and parish councils is critical, and this bill is rather reticent on that.

And in terms of devolution, I thought there was some quite interesting quotes. The noble Lord Wallace of Saltire, constitutionally incoherent noble Baroness, my noble friend Baroness Shephard and my noble friend Viscount Trenchard, spoke eloquently on the issues of local democracy and local identity, the noble Lord Bassam pause and think, roll out the noble Baroness Janke. Apologies if I've got that wrong. What a woeful bill, my noble friend Lord Porter made the very interesting comment. Should we be judging this on how small Whitehall gets? Because our suspicion it will not and Lord Pack raising the very important comments on commencement.

And I would raise the question, why are we having a bill when many powers have not been commenced that already exist on the statute paper? This should be about local identity, local democracy and real devolution. We should be trusting local people. As my noble friend Baroness McLean said, and as Baroness Pinnock the noble Baroness Pinnock raised, it should be about place shaping, which is best done at the local level. I'd also like to reiterate the important questions posed by my noble friend, Lady Scott, regarding cost and economies of scale.

Both my noble friend and myself had led councils through reorganisation, and they we know the difficulties and the upfront costs involved, the need for scale in certain services like social care. How will the government ensure that any projected savings, potentially in the tens of millions, are actually realised and not frittered away by consequent changes? And if such savings do materialise, will they be used to ease the burden on local taxpayers who are already under considerable pressure at committee? My Lords, we will wish to probe in detail the areas of competence that the government seeks to shift and, crucially, the rationale for doing so.

My Lords, I must also raise what I consider to be a fundamental issue what powers are actually coming down from government to local government, to local councils to mayors? The noble Baroness, the Minister, suggested that future powers will depend on what mayors demand. But how are these demands going to be made? Who decides what powers are devolved and which remain tightly controlled from the centre? As drafted? There is no clear pathway by which a mayor may secure the genuine authority needed to effect meaningful change and, as importantly, funding for those services involved.

Annual bidding for funds is not the same as having a guaranteed revenue stream against which you can plan. In this regard, the government has already got form, removing the incentive for growth provided by business rates. Sorry, retained business rates, which are set to be removed by business rates. Reset. This bill does not devolve power. It simply rearranges administrative functions through Whitehall diktat. Now devolution has huge potential. Whitehall does not know and cannot implement holistically at the local level.

If we as a nation are going to address the issues of social care, health, economic growth and inactivity, it can't be done centrally but needs to be done by local partners working together at the local level to get the best outcomes for their communities. And we've heard across the house, whether it's Cornwall or Devon, a bit of a dispute about cream and scones, but hey, or in Kirklees or in Yorkshire or elsewhere in the country, they're all different and they all need to be looked at separately.

My Lords, I hope that in committee the government will provide the clarity that is presently lacking and explain how they intend to bridge the gap between nominal competence and real power. Only then can we properly assess whether this legislation truly serves the interests of local communities, or simply strengthens the hand of central government. My Lords, for these reasons, I fear the Bill does nothing to empower local communities. Instead, it reduces local democracy through government imposed restructuring, irrespective of local opinion, local geography or local identity.

Bureaucratic reorganisation that will cost money, distract from housing delivery and offers no evidential basis for improved services. It risks higher costs for residents through the new mayoral precept precepts, increasing borrowing powers, higher parking charges, and the creation of further layers of mayoral appointed officials. Can the Minister assure the House that this will not lead to higher bills for hard pressed residents, whilst services are disrupted through reorganisation? My Lords, these are serious concerns and I look forward to returning to them in more detail at the next stage of the bill.

19:46

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Labour)

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Can I thank noble Lords from all sides of the House for their excellent contributions? It's been a very engaging and constructive debate, and for someone as passionate about devolution and local government as I am, it's heartening to hear that passion echoed around the chamber. We may have different views on how we do things, but I think that passion for moving some of the powers and funding that are currently held in this little bit of London to local areas has been echoed today, and I, I do want to comment on the fact that we all know the pressure the current system is under.

It's not working in many places now, and it certainly is not sustainable for the future. We can see the signs of the system cracking all around us and we need to move forward with this. I do want to answer a couple of points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brooke and the noble Lord Jamieson. Before I start picking up particular detail points in the bill, I would say that the noble Baroness Bybrook spoke about respect for local identity. Well, these proposals that we're looking at have come from local government.

We haven't devised them in the office. There is no map drawing going on in Marsham Street that's been done by local people in their own areas. And and I'm not going to take any lessons from the Tories, who dithered and delayed on local government review and devolution. They did some devolution, but they left huge areas of the country stranded from the increased powers and funding that some areas have benefited from. That's that can't be right and we need to address that and we need to address it now in terms of the accountability gap that the noble Baroness Coffey mentioned, we the accountability gap is there.

Now, what we're doing is introducing locally elected mayors to provide that local accountability for local decision making. And with the powers that will be devolved from Whitehall to those local mayors, they will have a powerful democratic mandate to take decisions on behalf of their residents and with the strong local authorities that will sit alongside them, and the neighbourhood governance that will take that accountability to the very local level. I think this is an empowering bill in terms of accountability, not the other way round.

The noble Baroness asked about funding. There is £200 million of funding being devoted to this. So billion. Sorry. I beg your pardon? It's £200 billion of funding being devoted to this mayoral project. And I think that gives areas a real chance to make decisions on their own behalf. And there are other powers as well, which I'll come to. The noble Baroness mentioned fiscal stability. Well, fiscal stability comes from having growth and investment in every part of our country, not just in the bits of it where it's decided that it will be, and we will only get that fiscal stability where we're making decisions on growth and investment at local level.

So it's very important that we take these steps now. And just briefly, on her point about adult social care, which is well made. We know there are huge problems with adult social care, but each of the proposals for local government reorganisation contain the areas ideas of how to do the transformation to adult care services. With that local input and the work that Baroness Casey is doing, I think we've got a chance to make a real step forward on adult social care.

After a long time of waiting for that to happen. So I will endeavour to respond to different points in turn, but I will be happy to discuss topics of more interest in detail in advance of Committee stage. I did want to mention that Lord Shipley asked for a very important question about other government departments and how they are reacting to this bill, and I would simply point to the huge amount of cooperation we've had from other other government departments, for example, on skills, on transport, on public health and prevention, on policing and the fire service.

There's been a great cross-governmental project to work on this, and I've got some of my fellow Ministers sitting on the front bench who I know will be in their own departments, working on how we devolve these powers out to local levels. He also asked whether this devolution can really be delivered with local government finances in the state they're in. Well, I very much regret there in the state they're in and we need to move that on. But the answer to that question is we simply cannot deliver the public services people deserve, and the growth people need to see without making these changes.

And to Baroness Bennett, we absolutely do understand the pressures. Many of us have been very close to those pressures over the years, but we need to move this on now. I would say to Baroness Janke that mayors will have powers devolved from Whitehall, not upwards from local government, and that's very important. We will have stronger, more sustainable unitary local authorities delivering services to local people. And as my noble friend Baroness Griffin very articulately pointed out, that will instead create the opportunities and growth that we need to see across our country.

Of course, people are worried about change, but I would point to the success we've seen in rural areas already, right across those areas that already have mayors making great strides forward with economic growth, with housebuilding, with skills, with transport, with infrastructure. And can I be clear, particularly to the noble Viscount Trenchard who I have spoken to on many occasions at Hertfordshire events, as well as in this house, the historic institutions such as Lord Lieutenants and High Sheriffs, remain a fundamental part of local life and will continue to do so.

Turning to issues, a number of noble Lords raised issues about the functions of local government. As I said, no one's drawing maps in Whitehall. There have been devised and owned by local people. This place shaping goes right to the heart of the local government reform that Baroness Pinnock referred to. This devolution by default, is the principle right at the heart of this bill. As mayoral authorities grow and get more established, they can request more powers. And we've already seen our colleagues in Manchester and other mayoral authorities doing so.

The bill sees our system of devolution move away from an ad hoc and inconsistent model being replaced with a model where it is clear what places can access and when they can access it, and under what conditions. Our new system of conferring functions on levels of strategic authority is that devolution by default and it will streamline the devolution of functions. All areas can be confident about the functions they will receive, and as the framework deepens over time, they will know they will have access to the new powers as they're introduced.

I am very grateful for examples of great local action we've heard. And my noble friend Baroness Elliott is right that accountable, responsible mayors must have the funding they need to deliver local outcomes and the right framework to demand further powers when they're ready to take them. The noble Baroness Bybrook Baroness Shephard, Baroness Bennett, Viscount Trenchard and Baroness Maclean all spoke about issues relating to the establishment and the expansion of functions and the government's been clear devolution can deliver growth, unlock investment and deliver the change the public wants to see.

And that's why we want to see more parts of England benefit from devolution. Our engagement with councils to date has demonstrated there is a real appetite for this devolution across England, and the Bill will streamline the process for establishing new strategic authorities. It is our strong preference for devolution to be locally led, however, and I hope this addresses some of the points about the powers that we've put into the bill to deal with issues through ministerial led routes. There are powers providing those routes to establish or expand strategic authorities, or provide a strategic authority with a mayor.

However, can I reassure the noble Lord Storey and others that have raised this issue? These powers will only be used where no local agreement can be reached, where there is no no. Moving this forward at local level, we much prefer this to be done from local level. It will definitely be a last resort. They will be subject to conditions and statutory tests and will not be commenced automatically. Instead, they will be commenced by regulations only when Ministers consider it necessary and ensuring that Parliament does have the opportunity to engage further on this matter.

My noble friend Lord Bassam points on pace are noted. I'd like to thank him for all the work he did in Brighton, and I agree we do need to establish stable unitary authorities as the foundation for devolution, and I'm grateful for his comments. I am going to briefly refer to the, as it's been mentioned in the debate many times to the Devolution Priority Programme mayoral elections, because although we had a question on it earlier, I think it's important to reiterate those comments as they were questioned by Baroness Scott, Lord Wallace, Baroness Shephard Lord Lansley spoke about the importance of pace in in the Devolution Priority Programme associated to this, and Lord Pack mentioned this as well.

Of course, we're committed to this extension of devolution and for Cumbria, Cheshire and Warrington, the first mayoral elections for the new strategic authorities will take place in 27, as those local authorities had already requested that that be the date for them. For Norfolk, Suffolk, Greater Essex, Suffolk and Brighton and the and Hampshire and the Solent, which are all areas which currently have two tiers of local government. We have a announced that we are minded to hold the first mayoral elections for those areas in May 2028, because we know mayoral devolution is most successful when mayoral strategic authorities are underpinned by strong unitary councils and therefore holding elections for new mayors in 2028 will allow enough time for the reorganisation process to conclude and unitary councils to be well established on the issues around why culture and heritage aren't included in the competence list, and a number of noble Lords mentioned this Lord Shipley, Baroness Prashar and Baroness Griffin.

The current list of thematic policy areas is deliberately broad, and is intended to allow a wide range of activities to fall within the scope of the areas of competence. Many initiatives relating to culture, heritage and tourism would naturally be encompassed within the economic development and regeneration area of competence, and strategic authorities will remain key players in supporting culture and heritage initiatives locally. Many are already using their existing powers to support culture, heritage and tourism. Baroness Prashar raised important points about the ability of local government and confidence in its institutions, how that can drive community cohesion.

And she's absolutely right to say that. And that's why it's important that these institutions are stable and people have confidence in them. And Lord Ravensdale mentioned environment, which is a specific competence of mayors, and energy, which is the subject of new powers over local growth plans and strategic planning on the issue around the appointment of commissioners mentioned by Baroness Boycott, Lord Shipley and Baroness McIntosh. I think Lord Shipley actually asked why they're not local government leaders. Well, they can be local government leaders if that's the way the mayor decides to take this.

Local authorities will have critical new functions to undertake. They require representation on national bodies and joint working. It's not realistic to expect a mayor to do all of this on their own, and that's why they will be able to appoint and remunerate commissioners to lead on one of seven areas of competence, helping to increase the capacity in mayoral strategic authorities. And Baroness McIntosh asked a question about rural communities. In this respect, mayors can set an expectation that one or all of their commissioners should focus on rural issues.

This is rightly a local decision. The noble Lord Fuller and many other noble peers have raised issues around local government funding. We're making good now on long overdue promises to fundamentally update the outdated funding system and its decades old data. We're targeting money where it's needed most by properly accounting for local need and equalising local income, we're giving local authorities greater flexibility and certainty as we simplify the more than 30 funding streams that were there when we came into office, worth almost £47 billion through the first multi-year settlement in a decade.

And given local authorities that certainty over funding over multiyear settlements is really critical here we will publish the local authority allocations later in December, and they will be subject to consultation and the usual parliamentary process on the issue around mayoral combined authority precepts to empower mayors to deliver change in their communities. They need to be able to spend their money effectively. Previously, mayors could only use their precept to raise money for mayoral functions. This didn't cover some areas vital to growth, like skills like adult skills provision.

But the bill will allow mayors to spend money raised through their precept across all of an authority's function, the introduction of a precept will need to be approved through the budget voting process within each strategic authority and on council tax. We're committed to empowering local leaders to drive growth and deliver for their communities without placing excessive tax burdens on people. So we are delivering the long awaited local government funding reforms and the multiyear settlements, and we're consulting on modernising and improving the administration of council tax to make the system fairer, more efficient and more transparent.

That package builds a more sustainable, accountable and locally empowered system, focusing on the needs of communities and on the local audit reforms. I think there's been a broad agreement that local audit reform was needed, and I agree with my noble friend Baroness Armstrong that audit is essential for public confidence. And when when the whole of government accounts can't be cleared because of the issues with local government funding, something has to change. Local audit is vital for trust and confidence that taxpayers money is being used wisely.

We have acted decisively to clear the backlog, but significant further reform is needed. And last December we published a strategy and consultation on measures to outline a road to recovery and set the system up for long term sustainable success. And the bill delivers core elements of this strategy, creating a clear statutory remit for the local Audit Office to oversee and streamline the system. I hope that picks up the points that noble Lords mentioned and on the scrutiny of combined authorities and local Public Accounts committees, the noble Baroness Bennett, Baroness Pidgeon, Baroness Armstrong Lord Burns all mentioned this issue.

All combined, authorities will be required to establish both overview and scrutiny committees and audit committees. And beyond these structures, the current system of accountability and scrutiny is guided by the English Devolution Accountability Framework and Scrutiny Protocol. We are reviewing both documents to reflect the changes brought forward by the Integrated Settlement and this Bill. We recognise the scope to further strengthen the system of accountability and scrutiny for mayoral strategic authorities, and that is why we committed in the White Paper to exploring models for Local public accounts committees and local accounting accounting officers.

So we're committed to strengthening accountability alongside the devolution offer, and we will confirm our policy approach in due course. There were many noble Lords mentioned the very important issue of our parish and town councils. Baroness Boycott the noble Lord Wallace, Baroness Jenkin, Baroness Bennett and Baroness McIntosh. The government values the role town and parish councils play. They're an important part of local democracy. There are no plans to abolish town and parish councils or change their powers. Our plans on neighbourhood governance in the bill are about hardwiring community engagement into local authorities themselves, and parish councils will be an important partner in creating stronger, more responsive neighbourhood governance, as will the whole range of grassroots groups that support community empowerment.

I hope that answers the point. Also raised by the noble Lord Addington about community groups and their engagement in this. It's for local authorities to determine whether new parish and town councils are needed, and this is done through the community governance process. The noble Lord Wallace Baroness Boycott and Baroness Griffin raised issues around community empowerment and of course, communities need power returned to them. We want to empower local leaders so they can better affect the decisions impacting on their areas, and that is why we're giving communities stronger tools to shape the future of their local areas, such as the community right to buy to help protect the loss of cherished local assets, and 350 of the most deprived communities are receiving funding from the government, including the 75 plan for Neighbourhood Areas and 25 new trailblazer areas, which will receive 20 million in funding over the next decade, including the Pride in Place funding.

So there's a clear ambition to hardwire that community engagement into this new system. In terms of the neighbourhood governance plans, the noble Lord Wallace talked about removing powers from local areas. It's the opposite of that creating this clear neighbourhood governance system for local authorities to hardwire community engagement and neighbourhood working into their governance. And the goal of that neighbourhood governance is to move decision making closer to residents. Decisions about local communities should be made by people who understand local needs, and that's why we're introducing a new requirement for all local authorities to make appropriate arrangements for the effective governance of local neighbourhood areas.

The noble Lord Fuller and the Earl of Devon raised issues about rural versus urban. And like the noble Lord Jamieson, I'm not going to get involved in the cream and jam debate. I'm afraid the planning Bill and the English devolution bill are quite controversial enough for me. I'm not going to get involved in the debate about scones. The government recognises neighbourhoods across England are diverse, and that rural and urban communities have different needs and characteristics. And through the review of existing council led neighbourhood governance models, we're working closely with local authorities and the community to sector to understand what works best in different contexts.

The noble Lord Best and the noble Lord Lansley raised important issues around Mayoral Development Corporations. I agree with the noble Lord Best about the value of the new Towns Task Force report and Sir Oliver Letwin's report relating to master planning and development corporations. And that's why the Bill extends the power to create Mayoral Development Corporations to all mayors to drive economic growth and regeneration, and Mayoral Development Corporations will benefit residents by delivering new homes, better transport and economic opportunities, revitalising areas for future generations.

I see I've run out of time, so I'm going to. I'm sorry I won't get through all of this, but I will respond to any noble Lords whose questions I didn't get to in writing. If I can just conclude my remarks now, I'd like to reiterate my thanks to your lordships for your engagement with the Bill to to this point, and can I thank the noble Lord Porter for raising the issue of the district Councils network and the County Councils Network who have contributed hugely to the work going forward and to, I know, to briefing noble Lords as the Bill progresses? I'm happy to accommodate any requests from noble Lords for meetings or additional briefings wherever helpful.

As I've set out earlier today, this ambitious piece of legislation will deliver top to bottom redistribution of power, putting decision making in the hands of local areas and delivering real change for working people. With this bill, the government will deliver on our manifesto commitment to empower local leaders and mayors to unlock growth opportunities right across our country by making the right decisions for the communities they serve. I look forward to working with your lordships during the passage of this legislation.

I commend this bill to the House and I beg to move the commitment motion standing in

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my name on the Order Paper. The question is that this bill be now read a second time. As many as that opinion will say content. as that opinion will say content. Contrary, not content. The contents have it. The motion needs to be

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moved separately. Speaker I beg to move the commitment motion standing in my

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commitment motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I understand. That there's. Been no agreement.

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Been no agreement. In usual channels for this bill to be committed to a grand committee, so I just want to put on record that it is very disappointing that the government has tabled this motion without

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agreement of usual channels. My Lords, my noble friend, the

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My Lords, my noble friend, the Chief Whip consulted the usual channels in the usual manner. I'm also aware that he spoke to some

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also aware that he spoke to some key peers with an interest in the bill. The question is that this motion be agreed to, as many of that be agreed to, as many of that opinion will say. Content the contrary, not content or contents have it. Would you have a few have it. Would you have a few For For questions? For questions? On For questions? On a For questions? On a statement For questions? On a statement made in the House of Commons on Tuesday, the 2nd of December, on the Angiolini inquiry? Angiolini inquiry?

20:10

Statement: Angiolini Inquiry – Part 2 Paragraph 3 Report

Some work.

20:10

Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative)

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My Lords. I'm sure I join the whole House in welcoming the publication of the first report of publication of the first report of part two of the Angiolini Inquiry. It is a report that no one wished would ever be necessary, but one which now stands as a bleak and urgent testament to the failures that have left too many women feeling unsafe to go about their daily lives. We must start by remembering why this inquiry exists. The abhorrent murder of Sarah Everard, a young woman walking home by serving police officer with shattered faith, trust and public confidence.

And it particularly hurts me to have to say that her death was not just a tragedy for her family and friends. It exposed deep and systematic rot. We must never forget the human cost a beloved daughter, sister, friend lost because protections failed. But this report is not solely about one individual. Its purpose is far wider. Part two was commissioned to examine not just the crime of one man, but the broader issues across policing and society recruitment, vetting, police culture and standards, and the safety of women in public places.

What this report reveals is disturbing and unacceptable to many. Women remain fearful, changing their routes, avoiding dark streets, altering their behaviour not because of what they do, but because of what predatory men might do. The report puts it plainly, stating that somehow we have simply come to accept that many women do not feel safe walking in their streets. That must shock and unsettle every noble Lord, because it should not be normal to adjust one's life out of fear of violence when walking home.

And I welcome the government's recent commitments, notably the creation of a National Centre for Violence against Women and Girls, and for putting and the putting of police vetting standards on a statutory footing so that those with a record of violence against women and girls offences cannot serve in our police service. These are important steps. But as this report makes clear, and as the statement rightly acknowledged, there is no quick fix. We need consistent nationwide standards across all forces.

We need resourcing, training, cultural change. We need data which is comprehensive and transparent so that progress or the lack of it cannot be hidden. On that note, I hope the noble Lords Minister can finally, perhaps give us a date on which the government will publish their violence against women and girls strategy. In the other place, in response to the question, the safeguarding Minister simply said very soon the phrase I know the noble Lord, the Minister is well acquainted with. Unfortunately very soon has been the answer for quite some time.

If the noble Lord, the Minister, cannot give a date, perhaps he could explain to the House what is taking so long. Can he also set out whether it will include a clear published timetable for implementation of all of Lady Angiolini recommendations? Will it commit to robust data recording not only of reported crimes but of patterns, follow up investigations, outcomes and resource allocation across every police force? In honour of Sarah Everard and all of all victims and survivors of violence against women and girls, this House must act.

Not tomorrow, not next year, but now.

20:14

Baroness Brinton (Liberal Democrat)

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My Lords, the three moving statements from the families of Sarah Everard, Zara Aleena, Biba Sarah Everard, Zara Aleena, Biba Henry and Nicole Smallman must act as a reminder that too little has changed since their murders and and worse since the inquiry was set up. And these four women represent the safety of women in our country. The minister's statement is sparse and whilst it is good that the statement says the government will act, it's just not yet. And I say very gently to the opposition spokesperson, actually not much happened before either under the previous government.

This is a difficult issue and I realise that detail needs to be sorted, but many of the recommendations in the part two report are very clear to most of us who are involved in home affairs issues, because we debate them time and time again in questions, in debates and in legislation. So for me, the key issue is that because the violence against women and Girls document is not yet published, there appear to be zero commitments from government. In 2021, the UN survey of over 1000 women reported that 71% in the UK had experienced some form of sexual harassment in a public space at some point in their lives.

One of the key recommendations is number 20 empowering and engaging citizens to take action. And I'm going to focus on on this and some of the softer issues, because they may be harder for a government to deliver. And with great respect to both this government and the previous government, changing a culture is difficult and the Home Office cannot change culture on its own. So can the Minister say what ideas there are to create a strong campaign? That sexual harassment is not acceptable, should never be normalised, and that women should not have to live their lives on high alert the whole time, and that they should not feel guilty because of how they look.

These are all key points made in the inquiry report. But whatever this campaign is, it also needs to cover social media, the digital world. Given all the work that's happening in your Lordships' House, in order to try and make sure that bad influences are moderated by sensible, sensible behaviour. It covers education. It involves campaigns with young people and children and their parents and families. Lady Angelini rightly says that this is a society wide problem. It is, and it is urgent to.

Recommendation 22 on information and early intervention for men and boys to create a culture of positive masculinity is also essential and equally urgent in the Crime and Policing Bill, as well as many other pieces of legislation, were trying to combat the appalling culture that is becoming normalising sexual sexualisation of young girls and women, pushing boys and men to accept stereotypical roles as dominant partners in a relationship. And violence is often not far away. The Tate brothers have made a fortune so far in creating an obscene and abnormal online society, in which young boys and men are fed without any counter-narrative.

So what does the government propose to do to begin to remedy this? The report also recommends designing out crime officers. I have to say, I remember in the late 90s, when I was bursar of a Cambridge college, that the Blair government did make clear recommendations to councils about designing out crime. And if the government is going to act on recommendation 18 to increase the use of police, designing out crime officers in the prevention of sexually motivated crimes against women in public spaces, will the government ensure that local government planning committees must also consider this, and that there will be training for officers and planning committees as to why it is so important? Turning to data, it is appalling that after the murders and violence against women received so much attention that data collection remains inconsistent and forces still use different systems.

The report notes that the NHS has fared much better, but my Lords, the NHS has learned the hard way that common systems are critical if problems throughout the country are to be dealt with. Pilots are a typical way that governments try out new ideas. Report. The report notes institutionally poor sharing of good practice or funding rollout, so money for pilots dies with the pilots and therefore nothing else will happen because when it's rolled out, there is no money for it.

Police and other professionals. I know this from stalking and other VAW issues that other professionals and partners are often left out of data collection. There is often group thinking over issues that needs to be addressed. Lady Angiolini rightly pointed out that prevention is the first peelian principle, but it must not just remain within the police. So what will the government do to remedy this problem? The report also recommends that. Sorry, I do beg your pardon. Lady Angelini also says that this must happen immediately.

Now, this is a tough ask, but an essential one. And she sets out who needs to be involved in seeing the data, including the Inspectorate of Constabulary. This is right, and it is urgent. Will the government act on the first part of this recommendation straight away, as she proposes? But above all, I echo the question that was asked earlier from Lord Davis when will the government launch its own vawg strategy, and will it and the police not start on any of the recommendations until after that launch, or worse, after the usual consultation? Will all the recommendations be fully and properly funded? Because if not, as Lady Angelini said so powerfully last week, women are still at risk this Christmas.

20:20

Lord Hanson of Flint (Labour)

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I'm grateful to. Gower and the noble Lady Baroness Brinton for their comments on the report, and I want to start where they have started with remembrance of Sarah Everard and her horrific murder, which instigated this murder, which instigated this inquiry in the first place. She and all the other women who have been murdered deserve an effective response from government because she is a daughter, a sister and a friend and the family demand and want answers and we are in a position to be able to help prevent future murders.

Colleagues in the House will know that this is a second part. Recommendation by Lady Angelini, and I want to thank her and her team for the work that they have done on this. Noble Lords will know that part one recommendations included 13 recommendations, three for government and ten for police, directed at the Home Office to improve the response to non-contact sexual offences. And to date, we are delivering against those 13 recommendations, including measures in the Police and Crime Bill that noble Lords are aware of.

A number of questions have been asked, but I just reemphasize again that it's simply not acceptable that women should live in fear in their streets, in their own town of attack by random men, and for domestic violence to continue, and for the attacks that have led to the murder of Sarah Everard, to be not resolved by government colleagues, Ministers, the shadow Ministers and the Liberal Democrat frontbench have both asked similar questions and I'll try and give some response to those issues.

If I may, let me be again clear to both the noble Lord Davis and to Baroness Brinton the violence against women and Girls strategy is being finalised. We will publish as soon as possible. Last week, for example, number ten, the Prime Minister and the safeguarding Minister held an event with stakeholders, including victims and their families, to discuss the progress on the violence against women and girls strategy. The strategy will deliver a whole system response. There is a need for us to consult with colleagues in the Department of Transport, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the Ministry for housing, Communities and Local Government to ensure that our public spaces are safe for everyone.

But I'll just give an assurance to both noble Lords who have spoken today that the strategy is shortly to be published. I can't give a date today because I can't, but it will be published in very short order. But that doesn't mean that this goes again to a point that the noble Baroness Brinton mentioned that we don't have to wait for the strategy to act. The government has invested £13.1 million to launch, as the noble Lord Davies of Gower acknowledged, the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and for Public Protection to provide co-ordinated national leadership to improve the public response.

Thanks to initiatives and the strong push of my hon. Friend Jess Phillips, we have introduced domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms and we are rolling that out at the moment. We have got the rolling out of domestic abuse protection orders. We have got strengthening management of registered sex offenders in place, and we are improving the response to stalking. And again, in the Police and Crime Bill, there are measures on that before the House at the moment. We do intend to take forward reforms to the vetting and misconduct systems so that those who commit crimes, like violence against women and girls have no place in policing.

And it's extremely important that and I know the noble Lord Davis feels very strongly as well, that in the forthcoming White Paper again, which will be set out very shortly, we will set out a package of reforms to policing to ensure that policing can focus on the crimes that matter to the public and drive out waste and efficiency, but also look at how we can build on some of the big operations that we're doing now, such as Operation Soteria and Project Vigilant, which have been funded through the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and in which we've invested over £13.1 million now.

The noble Baroness Brinton rightly pointed to the issues of how we can tackle what I will call negative masculinity, which is prevalent at the moment and which is very much encouraged by what I would regard as some poisonous online activity. Now we have to ensure that we tackle that at root cause. And that's why, again, already in advance of the response to the part two of the inquiry, the Department of Education in England has updated the statutory guidance on.

With a focus on helping pupils understand the markers of a healthy relationship and how to navigate online safety. Now, again, I'm being pressed rightly on what response we will give to the recommendations in part two. I simply say to both noble Lords that we've what we've published part two, part one of part two last week, and that we intend to take our time to study the recommendations clearly, to make sure that we can respond to that and to respond to that as part of the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy, which, as I've said, will come very soon.

It is simply not acceptable, as the inquiry found, that 1 in 20 adults are recorded as perpetrators of violence against women and girls per year. It is a clear scale that violence against women and girls is a national emergency, which is why this government has committed to bring forward the strategy very shortly to ensure that we set out a roadmap to halve violence against women and girls over the course of the next ten years. It's important that we have an effective strategy.

The Angiolini report recommendations will be part of how we respond to that strategy, and I very much hope that we'll be able to do that shortly. But we wanted to publish. And Dame Angiolini has published her recommendations accordingly. We want to publish our Violence Against Women and Girls strategy. We are working hand in hand with the recommendations that we've got, and if the House looks back at what we've responded to in part one and the response we've given in accepting those 13 recommendations and continuing to press the police now to improve their performance in meeting those regulations, I hope that very shortly we'll be able to bring forward that violence against women and girls strategy and just do justice to the memory of Sarah and others who've been murdered.

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My Lords, can I ask for the Minister to reflect on Wayne Minister to reflect on Wayne Cousins's application to become an authorised firearms officer? Because those assessing and Because those assessing and processing his application were not able to assess the information about the alleged 2015 indecent exposure allegation. Now, if they'd been able to do this, obviously his been able to do this, obviously his application would have been rejected. So all in all, the suitability that was made of Wayne Cousins was a lot more lax than had he been a member of the public applying for either a shotgun licence or a firearms licence.

So so can the Minister reflect on this and and see whether lessons can be learned from this particular part of what was a very, very long running investigation and a saga, which was, I think, caused all enormous amount of stress and distress. I think he was quite right to to underline that. And I'd like to also compliment him and way that he's handled this himself, and also the way his department has expedited this inquiry. In fact, it's a, I think, an object lesson to other departments who have put in place non-statutory investigations and enquiries that this was done in a way that was very thorough, but also at speed,

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and commanded a great deal of public confidence. I'm grateful to the noble Lord for his comments on how the department handled the inquiry. The inquiry initially was commissioned by the previous government, but by the previous government, but I've been clear as the sponsoring Minister in the Home Office for enquiries that we need to ensure enquiries that we need to ensure that we have recommendations and that the inquiry is kept to a budget, but also those recommendations come as speedily as possible so they can be, as the noble Baroness has indicated, implemented as a matter of urgency once government has had a chance to to assess them.

I've met with Dame Angiolini a number of occasions for the progress of the inquiry, not in relation to what she's going to say, but in terms of the way in which the inquiry has reached its conclusions. And I'm pleased to say that it's proving an effective way of managing that inquiry. Clearly, in the case of Wayne Cousins, vetting has failed, and it's clear that there are lessons to learn about how police officers are vetted and the government has brought forward already and will continue to work with the police chiefs Council and with the College of Policing to look at how we can improve vetting to ensure that those police officers who serve the public have the confidence of the public by ensuring there's a proper vetting system to weed out individuals who may have either committed offences or potentially committed offences, and self-evidently, in the case of the police officer that was mentioned, Wayne Cousins, that self-evidently happened.

There are lessons to be learned. We will look at those lessons we're already working on vetting, and it's important that we put the strongest mechanism in place to maintain the integrity of the police force because, quite simply, it is unacceptable what happened in the case of the murder of Sarah Everard. And I do not wish to have a situation whereby other police officers in the force or joining the force are open to that

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type of activity. My Lords, I beg to move that the

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My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now adjourn.

This debate has concluded

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