English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Baroness Taylor of Stevenage and Baroness Pidgeon

Committee stage
Thursday 29th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak initially to my Amendments 70 and 71 in this group. It is a pleasure being here with noble Lords; it feels like a reunion of assembly or London Councils meetings. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, who I know is not able to be here today, for adding his name to Amendment 70, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, for adding his name to Amendment 71. Both noble Lords have direct experience of the GLA and London government as a whole. Like other noble Lords, in drafting these amendments I bring 26 years’ experience as an assembly member and a London borough councillor.

Amendment 70 is about the power of summons. The law as it stands means that the assembly has relatively limited powers of summons over individuals and documents. It can summon the Mayor of London only in his or her role as chair of one of the functional bodies. For example, you could summon the mayor to a meeting as chair of Transport for London, but you could not summon them to come to a meeting if there was a huge failure or difficulties in their housing or solar programme and you wanted a detailed discussion. That makes no sense.

Furthermore, the assembly is prevented from summoning those delivering services in London. Noble Lords might well think that that does not matter because people will go and give evidence, so we do not need this power, but I will give the Committee a concrete example. Many years ago, I led an investigation into High Speed 2—then an initial programme that was going to have a huge impact in west London. High Speed 2, admittedly at that time under different management, refused to come before the assembly to give evidence to our inquiry. Despite huge amounts of correspondence, including the Department for Transport trying to put direct pressure on this body that was accountable to it, High Speed 2 refused to give any evidence at all. Yet it was delivering a project affecting London with huge amounts of public money.

Similar bodies, including the Environment Agency, the Port of London Authority and even London Councils, may attend if requested, but they, too, have at times decided not to. That cannot be right when we are trying to look at services delivering for London. This power would strengthen the assembly, allowing it to fully carry out its scrutiny role. It sits well with Amendment 72, which proposes a London local authorities joint committee, because there would need to be scrutiny of that body and this new power would allow the assembly to carry that out.

As I said, the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, is unable to be here today, but in correspondence last night he said that he was happy for me to explain his support for this. He comes at it from a different point of view. He used to work for the former Mayor of London and he said that, although we come at this from different angles—he would brief the mayor ahead of scrutiny and I would be there as a scrutineer—he feels that these scrutiny sessions are serious, healthy, important and substantive and he does not see any potential for these powers to be abused because you would use them only in exceptional circumstances. He feels that, ultimately, if the mayor turns up, they may not answer the questions put to them, but at least you would have that opportunity—so he was keen to support this amendment. This issue has had cross-party support on the assembly for years, so I hope that the Minister will seriously consider this amendment.

Of course, if more powers are given to the mayor, as was discussed at the start of this group, the assembly should be strengthened alongside this. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, mentioned London being up on a pedestal but, actually, Manchester has more power than London in certain areas, such as health, and it feels as though London potentially needs to catch up.

Amendment 71 would remove the anomaly that, to amend the Mayor of London’s budget, a two-thirds majority is needed at the final stage. For many years, this has meant us, as assembly members, sitting there and rejecting the mayor’s budget and then it still going through at the final meeting because the threshold has not been reached. Such a threshold does not exist in any other part of local government, and I do not understand why it is needed here for London. I ask the Government to remove this requirement so that any mayor has to work with the assembly to ensure that a budget has majority support.

The other amendments in this group cover the establishment of a London local authorities joint committee and the power to pay grants to it. This would, as we have heard, put in place formally what is already taking place through other means. I am happy with these amendments. They have cross-party support and support from the London Assembly. As I said, they complement my amendment on the power of summons for the London Assembly, because I think that this joint committee should be subject to scrutiny as well.

Amendment 75, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley, makes a reasonable point—the noble Baroness and I exchanged some correspondence at the weekend about it. As many of us have said, reviewing how the London system works and what lessons there are for other areas does not necessarily need to be in the Bill. I come at this from a different point of view. I am really keen to increase the powers of the London Assembly and to look at stronger scrutiny arrangements across the country with the rollout of mayoral and combined authorities. For me, that is the gap in the model that is being rolled out.

At the moment, there is little to no real scrutiny of billions of pounds-worth of expenditure across the country. This is a huge deficit in these new mayoral models. This scrutiny must be carried out by members who are not conflicted through other roles, such as being leaders of authorities. This is probably where I differ from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord John, because I think that council leaders can be conflicted. They want to secure funding for their borough, and that can cause tension—they may not want to get into the bad books of a mayor. That is where the benefits of the GLA model, with scrutineers who are directly elected, comes in. They can look at things more independently, ask the tough questions and, sometimes, produce very tough reports.

I disagree with the suggestions we have heard in the debate on the amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Harris, about reducing the number of London boroughs. I do not think that that would be right. The amount of work, including casework, that borough councillors have to do in London is unbelievable compared to their colleagues elsewhere. That would not be a realistic option.

I look forward to the Minister’s response with interest. I hope we can start to see some movement to strengthen the powers of the assembly and to support London Councils on this matter.

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

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey and the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott of Bybrook, Lady Pidgeon and Lady O’Neill of Bexley, for their amendments relating to London devolution. As a mere veteran of what the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, described as provincial local government, I feel a little hesitant about sticking my head into the lion’s den of London local government—but it is my job, so I will do it anyway.

I start with the stand part notice in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, which would remove Clause 15 from the Bill. It is vital that the devolution framework works for the unique circumstances of London’s governance. Clause 15 must stand part of the Bill in order to signpost to Schedule 25 to the Bill and the GLA Act 1999. This enables the Government, among other things, to confer functions on the Mayor of London, the Greater London Authority and its functional bodies. Contrary to the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, about putting London on a pedestal, the provision enables us to confer powers on the mayor and the GLA. If the GLA was excluded from Schedule 25, it would then be the only strategic authority that would require primary legislation for the conferral of functions, and there is no rationale for creating a divergent approach just for London. Schedule 25 will ensure that the Greater London Authority benefits from the devolution framework and can deepen its powers over time.

The noble Baroness asked a question about consultation. Ahead of the Bill being introduced, the Government engaged the mayor, the GLA and London Councils on proposals in the devolution White Paper.

I thank my noble friend Lord Harris for bringing his wealth of experience and knowledge of London to our debates on this Bill. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady O’Neill, Lady Pidgeon and Lady Hayter, and the noble Lords, Lord Tope, Lord Moylan and Lord John. I have not yet been able to add up their joint years of London experience, but it is of significant breadth and depth, and it is welcome to have that informing our discussions on the Bill. For the record, my local council was formed in 1971 and has been a Labour council to this day. It does not quite meet the 60 years mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, but we are not far away, and we are a new town.

We are currently engaging positively with London Councils and the Greater London Authority on this matter. In the context of that ongoing work and the need to continue to work jointly towards a constructive resolution, I do not feel that it would be appropriate to rush in a legislative change for the unique arrangements for London governance through this amendment. I am very happy to meet my noble friend Lord Harris and other London partners, if he feels that that would be helpful before Report, because I understand the points he has made.

On Amendment 70, in the English devolution White Paper the Government committed to strengthening scrutiny in strategic authorities. As the noble Baroness knows, London is unique among strategic authorities, in that the mayor’s work is scrutinised by the directly elected London Assembly. It is my understanding that the mayor is committed to appear before 10 sessions each year for scrutiny. If he does not do so, or misses more than a number of those sessions, he can be sanctioned by the GLA.

As the Government consider the best way to strengthen scrutiny in strategic authorities, it is right that we tailor our approach to the arrangements in London. We will engage the GLA and the London Assembly on any potential changes. I have much sympathy with the frustration about key partners and providers that spend public money and then refuse to come before scrutiny bodies. I will not go into my particular pain over bus companies, but I understand the point that the noble Baroness was making there. This amendment would significantly alter the powers of the London Assembly and preclude the Government’s ongoing work on this issue, which is being taken forward in close discussion with combined authorities and the GLA.

Similarly, on Amendment 75, London’s model is unique among strategic authorities and has successfully served the people of London for the last 25 years—I think the noble Lord, Lord John, referred to the successful part of London governance. The Government are regularly in contact with the GLA to understand how its governance, scrutiny arrangements and partnership working arrangements are delivering for Londoners. As London’s devolution settlement evolves, the Government want to continue to see positive working between the GLA and its partners, including London borough councils, to deliver on shared priorities. We hope to build on these where possible. Therefore, we do not believe that a formal review is necessary.

I listened to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, about issues around boroughs neighbouring London, Lee Valley park, the London grants scheme and so on. I will reflect on those. A meeting might be helpful, because I did not quite understand the balance between “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix” and there being things that need to be fixed that we should have a look at to see what changes would be necessary. It would absolutely not be right to interject a legislative knee-jerk into this space without the work that is needed between all parties to determine a way forward. I hope that we can move that forward before Report.

Amendment 71 seeks to introduce simple majority voting for the London Assembly to amend the Mayor of London’s final draft budget. This Bill includes measures to unblock mayoral decision-making. Primarily, this is by stipulating that most decisions in combined authorities and combined county authorities require a simple majority including the mayor, but also by making some functions, such as those concerning police and fire, exercisable by the mayor only.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

We talked about a review of the scrutiny arrangements of other metro mayors, if you like—mayoral and strategic authorities. Is the Minister able to give us a timescale for that? We also talked about discussions with the GLA; the GLA is made up of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. Is the department talking to officers and members of the London Assembly, because the Civil Service often uses the term “GLA” when it means just the mayor’s office.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My understanding is that discussions are with the GLA, but I will double-check on that and respond to the noble Baroness in writing.

We are putting in place a robust system of overview and scrutiny for the combined authorities. We are also considering, as we discussed with the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, the other day, whether a system of local public accounts committees might also be relevant.

Business Improvement Districts: Town Centre Renewal

Debate between Baroness Taylor of Stevenage and Baroness Pidgeon

Thursday 11th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

BID reform is not included in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. However, the Pride in Place Strategy included a commitment to give property owners a formal role in shaping local priorities by expanding property owner BIDs outside London as soon as parliamentary time allows. Landlords will be able to work with councils, tenants and communities to create thriving high streets and support growth across the country. We are aware of calls for property owner BIDs to operate separately from occupier BIDs and the policy is currently being refined, working with the sector. Further details will be published in due course.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, the hospitality sector is the backbone of town centres. A 5% cut in VAT for hospitality businesses would give such a boost to our high streets. Does the Minister agree?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We have provided a great deal of support for small businesses, including those on our high streets. The Chancellor announced some steps in relation to business rates in the Budget recently. There are a number of steps in our small business plan to support those small businesses which operate on our high streets, including helping them to address their costs and constraints, creating a licensing regime that supports the growth of hospitality and night-time economies, and enabling them with local collaboration and capacity building, as well as addressing crime and anti-social behaviour on our high streets, which we know is a blight on those small businesses.

Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019

Debate between Baroness Taylor of Stevenage and Baroness Pidgeon

Wednesday 4th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, the RAC has said that private parking operators are on track to hand out a record 14.5 million fines this year. In addition to the long-awaited code of practice, will the Government go further and introduce a regulator with appropriate powers to protect motorists and ensure transparency across the system?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

We want to make sure that we do as much as possible to protect motorists, but this is an industry that helps to regulate parking. Having been a councillor for many years, I know the distress that wrong and illegal parking can cause people, so we have to get the balance right. We will look at all these issues, including the regulator, as we go through the process of drawing up the new code. The important thing is that we get something in place as quickly as possible to put everyone out of the parking misery they have been suffering.

Car Parking Companies

Debate between Baroness Taylor of Stevenage and Baroness Pidgeon

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I have not been in this ministerial post since 2022. I will now take action on this as quickly as I can. I thank the noble Lord for his work on this and agree that it is very important that we get it resolved as quickly as possible. The industry did step up and produce its own code of practice, covering the whole private parking industry. That was a step forward, but we need to do what it says in the Act and introduce a government code of practice. We will get on with that as quickly as possible.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, the code of conduct has been discussed today. It was withdrawn after only four months. In the policy document and consultation that the Government plan, will they be looking at the issue of motorists who have been charged nearly £2,000 for taking more than five minutes to pay for their parking?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

That was some of the worst practice that we have seen, and there has been a lot of media interest in this. I see, as probably we all do, people wrestling to download apps when there is no wifi, so that they can pay their parking charges. Both private parking trade associations have recognised this as an issue. They have worked collaboratively to take immediate steps to ensure that motorists no longer receive parking charges in that kind of scenario. This came into effect at the start of February. We welcome those steps taken by the industry, but there is still more to do.

Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement

Debate between Baroness Taylor of Stevenage and Baroness Pidgeon

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

I thank the Minister for the opportunity to discuss the provisional local government finance settlement. It is always an early Christmas present for finance departments in councils up and down the country.

Local government was brought to its knees under the last Government, with funding cuts happening at the same time as further responsibilities were given to our hard-working local government workforce. From the Liberal Democrat Benches, we welcome the move set out in the Statement for multiyear settlements—something my party has long called for.

The Statement suggests that funding previously allocated to rural local authorities under the rural services delivery grant will be repurposed under a need and demand basis. This is despite the grant providing rural local authorities with £100 million for the rollout of essential public services, including emergency services and the provision of social care in the last year.

From these Benches, we are concerned that this new system of allocation will not recognise—as has just been discussed—that the sparse and isolated nature of rural areas drives higher costs for the delivery of essential services, creates challenges in the recruitment of staff for key services, and of course requires local authorities to provide a greater public subsidy for the provision of services such as public transport.

Deprivation in rural areas would also likely be hidden through the use of this measure because it occurs over a wider geographical area. Using deprivation as an indicator of demand for services also does not consider local authorities with a higher number of elderly or vulnerable residents and the additional demands these residents place on services, as the noble Lord just outlined in his response.

I urge the Government to provide rural councils with a funding settlement which reflects the impact of the rurality and sparsity of the areas they serve, through the application of the fair funding formula. With additional pressure on councils to deliver further scrutiny in planning decisions, deliver further housebuilding and accept additional NICs changes, it is essential that they are funded robustly to achieve these aims. Can the Minister say what plans the Government have to ensure that local authorities in rural areas have the support that they need? These authorities face unique challenges and their funding settlement needs to reflect this.

We are also concerned about the funding of certain services such as special educational needs and indeed special educational needs transport. What assurances can the Minister give that the new funding settlement will allow local authorities to deliver special educational needs services at the level needed, as well as child and adult social care?

From these Benches we welcome the consultation on wider local authority funding reform, but we urge the Government to move as fast as possible with this, as 2026-27 feels a long time away and, the more time passes, the more the contents of this Statement will feel rather like a sticking plaster. Can the Minister say anything more today about the timescale of the consultation and whether genuine fiscal devolution will be considered, so we are not looking just at how the government funding is divided up but at powers to enable local authorities to raise funding to invest in services and infrastructure for their local communities, rather than always being reliant on the Government of the day?

Finally, given that we are on the final sitting day before the Christmas break, I take this opportunity to wish the entire local government workforce a very happy Christmas, and of course I extend that to all noble Lords as well.

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

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for their questions and comments, and I really welcome this opportunity to update the House on our plans to get local government finances on to a surer footing, both next year and beyond.

Our Labour Government were elected to deliver real change, and this must include change for local government. Local government delivers over 800 services to local people every day. Councils are the front line of public services, from waste collection to adult care provision, economic growth and housing. Yet we know that they are facing challenges as demand increases for critical services such as homelessness, social care and SEND, as mentioned by the noble Baroness. The Government cannot deliver our priorities alone. We have to reset and rebuild the relationship with an empowered local government—we spoke about that earlier today.

Yesterday, Minister McMahon set out the Government’s plans to get local Government back on track, both in 2025-26 and longer term, as the noble Baroness mentioned, to lay the foundations for long-overdue funding reform. We must move away from expensive acute crisis response and invest in the key longer-term preventive services, and the Government are committed to ensuring that taxpayers’ money goes where it is needed most.

Taken together, the additional funding made available at the settlement and the Budget delivers over £5 billion of new funding for local services over and above the local council tax, and in the provisional local government finance settlement we have an additional £2 billion in grant funding—a £700-million increase from the £1.3 billion announced at the policy statement.

This £700 million increase includes over £200 million extra funding for social care. It also includes £515 million which will be made available at the final settlement to support councils with the increase in employer national insurance contributions. I will come back to that in a moment.

Financial year 2025-26 will also see a new one-off and highly targeted recovery grant, already mentioned by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. That is for those authorities with high deprivation but a low council tax base. This will be funded in part through repurposing the rural services delivery grant and the services grant and laying the groundwork for broader reform in the future. I will come back to rural authorities. We will provide funding certainty. No authority will see a reduction in core spending power after accounting for council tax flexibilities.

The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, spoke about funding not keeping pace with the demands in local government. We are very well aware of the difficulties in funding that local government has experienced. This Government have done more to help with that than any of the work that the party opposite did in the last few years; I know that from personal experience. If he wants to criticise the 5% increase in council tax, I point out that it is exactly in line with what his Government had in place before us. We know council tax is a burden for people—we properly understand that—but we have to help local government with funding, and not allowing it to increase council tax would not help at all.

In terms of national insurance charges and the Government’s funding to help with them, we have chosen to make that £515 million of additional funding not ring-fenced, so the Government are enabling councils to choose how to distribute it, including how to meet the increased cost of externally commissioned services. We hope that the additional £3.7 billion funding available in the settlement for social care authorities will help with that. It will be clear to local authorities that specific funding for national insurance contributions being provided will not meet the overall cost to local government of the change to employer NICs, particularly given the expected increase in the cost of commissioned services, but that is why we have left that money un-ring-fenced: to try and help with the issue of funding. The overall increase in funding should help local authorities to meet the cost as they go forward.

The decision around national insurance contributions is a Treasury decision; it is not made in MHCLG, so I am afraid I cannot help the noble Lord on the responsibility for that. The national minimum wage increase is all part of the picture of making sure that no local authority has a reduction in cost funding, but it is really important that people who work in local government, as everywhere else, and particularly the brilliant teams that work in social care and across social care employment, have the right wages for the very valuable and important work that they do. The national minimum wage is the basic element of that. We welcome the opportunity to give them that increase, which they so much deserve.

The noble Lord mentioned kicking the can down the road on SEND. We have been in government for five months, so it is probably not us who have been doing that; it might have been somebody else. As part of the 30 October Budget, the Government announced an additional £2.3 billion for mainstream schools and young people with high needs for 2025-26, compared to 2024-25. That means that overall core school funding will total almost £63.9 billion next year, after accounting for technical adjustments.

The children with special educational needs and disabilities have been failed, with poor outcomes and parents struggling to get their children the support they need and deserve. I mentioned this morning the absolute outrage of parents having to take their own councils to court to get services that those children were legally entitled to. That happened in my own county of Hertfordshire, which is why it had such a disastrous Ofsted report on SEND. This Government’s ambition is that all children and young people with SEND or in alternative provision receive the right support to succeed in their education as they move into adult life. Any gap in SEND provision for children leaves a lasting effect on their life opportunities. The Government will strengthen accountability on mainstream settings to be inclusive, including through Ofsted, support the mainstream workforce to increase their SEND expertise and encourage schools to set up resourced provision or SEND units to increase capacity in mainstream schools. We are getting a grip on this, but it had been left—kicked as a can down the road—for a very long time, and it is going to take a while to get it back.

The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, and the noble Baroness mentioned the issue of rural services. The Government really recognise the importance of our rural communities, and we want to support them. The funding reforms that we have announced are very much part of a comprehensive reform, and the Government are absolutely committed to tackling the issues that matter so much to those rural communities. Places with a significant rural population will, on average, receive around a 5% increase in their core spending power next year, which is a real-terms increase, and we are proposing to continue to apply area cost adjustment to account for relative cost differences between local authorities, including differences between rural and urban areas. The Government propose continuing to assess the same factors as the 2024 area cost adjustment, which seeks, for example, to account for increased costs as a result of travel times, and we will ensure the approach is informed by the latest data and evidence. We are inviting views from local government and the public on this approach and whether we should account for any other factors which could affect cost, as well as any evidence for including those. There will be an extensive consultation for this as we go into the spending review in in the new year.

Part of the doctrine of new burdens is that they are funded. On the new homes bonus, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, there will be a new round of payments in 2025-26. In line with recent years, these will not attract legacy payments. New homes bonus allocations will continue to be made in the usual way, applying the same calculation process.

I hope I covered all the noble Baroness’s issues on rural and sparse populations. On the funding reform timescale that she mentioned, we have to do some consultation on this, but it is the intention to do that work in advance of the spending review in spring. Having waited several years now for fairer funding reform in local government, I am very pleased that we are able to bring that forward as quickly as we have. We must reform the way that councils are funded to ensure that local government can deliver for all people in the long term, including the most vulnerable. Fixing local government is a long-term challenge, and I hope that I have set out as clearly as possible the steps we have already taken to get local government back on its feet through this year’s settlement and in the future.

On the announcement issue, it used to drive me mad when I was a council leader that this announcement comes out on 18 or 19 December, and your poor officers are struggling to get the work ready. We could not do much about it this year, but I hope we will do better next year. I thank noble Lords very much.