English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Lord Bassam of Brighton and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall not speak for long. I was looking around the Room, trying to add up how many former local leaders there are, and I got to five or maybe six. We probably all had one thing in common: our generation of politicians was extraordinarily reliant on our local paper to broadcast our successes and failures and, more importantly, to hold local institutions to account.

When I first became a councillor in Brighton, in 1983, my local paper had three editions a day. It had a circulation of 120,000. It had arts, health, local government and crime sections, with a general list of reporters, all different specialists, who worked from the city centre. The paper was also given different opt-outs for Worthing, Hastings and Crawley. There was an extensive newspaper network, and it was complemented by three radio stations, two of which were commercial, and two TV stations. Brighton and Hove had a degree of news saturation.

That meant that the spotlight was placed on us as local politicians in a way that was sometimes aggressive, but more often than not benign, because they believed in reporting the facts. As a local politician sitting on a committee—including as leader of the council, which I was towards the middle end of the 1980s—if I could see the journalist’s pen twitch in the corner of the room, taking a note, I thought I had scored a good hit politically, and invariably I had. I am sure many politicians were reliant on people such as Adam Trimingham, our local reporter, for broadcasting their political views and making sure that people knew what the local authority was about.

This amendment is a practical one. It would be a shame if local authorities were not obliged to publish notices in the way they have historically. The decline and death of local news is a great sadness, because people are less well informed about what has been going on in their name. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, talked about investigative journalism; that is as important at a local level as it is at a national one. Our society is poorer without it, so anything we can do through local government to help strengthen local news is very important. I am sure local authorities themselves are worried about that, because it is part of their population’s decline in knowledge and understanding of the democratic process. I hope the Minister can offer us some comfort and encouragement, and perhaps say that we should do more to stimulate local news services. This is one practical measure that the Government should actively consider.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister will not be surprised to know that I very much support what other noble Lords have said, given that I promoted amendments to her previous Bill on this subject. It seems to me immensely important that notices should come to the notice of people. I know what my local council would do, if faced with this clause: it would publish either nothing or as little and as obscurely as it could. Its practice is to try to ensure that people do not know what it is up to.

It is entirely undesirable that local councils should have this direction in paragraph 6(3) of Schedule 27, without any rules as to how they should apply it. If we are to keep this clause, at the very least councils should be given an objective; for example, that they should publish it in a way that will lead to the widest readership over the widest spread of the community. In other words, they should know what they are trying to achieve, and they should have something through which to justify their actual performance against what they are supposed to do. I also ask that the publication be, at least in part, in IPSO-regulated spaces, to make sure that what is getting out is of quality.

As noble Lords will remember from the previous Bill, we need to get rid of the 19th-century definition of “newspaper”. There is a much broader section of local news enterprises. As the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, knows, because we are very close neighbours, the level of local news that we get now is very degenerated; the level of investigation, rather than just reprinting material they are given, is really very low. However, in that gap, little local enterprises are springing up. They are often not yet of a sufficient size to afford a print run, but they are getting out there and doing the investigative work. They ought, in the right circumstances, to be supported. I urge the Government to change the definition —if we keep newspapers, that is. If we do not, as the schedule proposes, and we broaden the discretion of local government, we must make it clear what it has to achieve rather than allowing it to achieve nothing.