English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 26th March 2026 Lords Chamber

As Gordon Brown’s commission report and many others have declared, the UK is a flawed and weak democracy. Among other things, it suffers from overcentralisation compared with any other liberal democracy. This has led to a widening gap between London and the English regions, as well as often tense relations between the devolved nations and our English-dominated Government. We are now condemned to move to a model of local government led by elected mayors, who will become the main interlocutors with Whitehall and Whitehall Ministers on English regional and local matters. So we need to entrench their collective position in the mayoral council and future-proof it for their negotiations with Secretaries of State and their advisers. That is why I regard this amendment as crucial.

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, my Amendment 309 in this group seeks to impose a duty to co-operate on local public service partners. I again thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for adding his name in support.

I will not repeat at length the arguments I rehearsed in Committee in support of the amendment, many of which are equally relevant to my Amendment 182, which we debated on Tuesday. Suffice it to say that the recent fragmentation of our public services has resulted in disjointed services that do not align with the perceived needs of ordinary citizens, in wasted resources and in a damaging culture of competition rather than collaboration between providers. Ordinary folk just want to see collaboration and partnership working to improve the quality of the services they receive.

Many attempts have been made to address this problem. Noble Lords will recall initiatives such as the joining up central government initiative—a work in progress—health and well-being boards, integrated care boards and the troubled families programme. In all honesty, none of these has resolved the problem. Perhaps only Total Place, in which I played a part, was enthusiastically embraced by all sectors.

The Bill takes a different approach and includes a provision for strategic authorities to convene meetings that partners will be required to attend, but I am really not convinced that the power to convene meetings will resolve the deep-seated problems that have beset multi-agency working.

To succeed, we need to be more radical. Rather than setting up yet more working groups, liaison committees and joint boards, we should attack the problem at its root and place on public sector agencies a duty to co-operate with the strategic authority, principal councils and each other when they are formulating policies and plans or delivering services. If such a duty were imposed, the responsibility for ensuring that it was met would rest with the agencies themselves, which is exactly where it should be.

There is nothing new in this proposal. After all, the public sector equality duty places a duty on public authorities to consider how their policies or decisions affect people who are protected under the Equality Act. Under the Children Act 2004, a local authority must co-operate with relevant partners, bodies and individuals to improve the well-being of children in the local authority’s care. In doing so, it must consider the role of parents and others who play a part in caring for children.

So there is no reason why an overarching duty to collaborate should be difficult, and the advantages of it are immense—I think it would be a complete game-changer. For a start, it would send a very clear and necessary message that this Government expect to see collaboration between agencies, not competition. It would change the culture of our public sector entirely. It would show that the primary driver of public services must be to meet the needs of clients, citizens, customers or whatever you want to call them, not to serve for their own convenience or to enhance their own profile.

This amendment is supported by the Local Government Association, and I am given to understand that the Minister and the Secretary of State want to explore it further. I entirely understand that: there is probably more policy development to do, and there is a need to consult all the players in this sector. That is why I will not push this to a vote, although there is probably a majority in this House in support of the proposal. At the end of the day, this is a decision not for the providers themselves, some of which may find this inconvenient, but for the Government, to decide what kind of local public service they need. I think they need this duty.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak on this group of amendments on collaboration. I will not comment on the government amendments, other than to say that we consider them to be technical and will not stand in the way of the Government. I must declare my interest as an ex-chairman of the Local Government Association.

Amendment 181 from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, raises a number of serious points that the Government need to respond to. However, we have some concerns that a mayoral council risks duplication of work that is already happening in other forums, such as with the Local Government Association, and therefore risks increased bureaucracy.

On Amendment 309 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, we share his ambition for joined-up public services that co-operate effectively. That will be important to deliver the high-quality services we would all like to see locally. The Government need to consider how best this can be achieved. However, we have some concerns about how this amendment would work in practice as regards the legal duty to attend meetings and the interpretation of “reasonable”. We are therefore not convinced that the amendment as set out is the right way forward, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, that the Government need to think about how this can be made to work in practice.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 24th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, in this group I have Amendments 49, 95 and 96, and I have signed Amendment 182 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard.

In speaking to Amendment 49, I want to thank the Minister for having written to us last week—she proposed a whole raft of new amendments on the scrutiny functions. My amendment, which would require the mayor of a combined county authority to establish a scrutiny committee of elected members with powers of summons to examine and report on the mayor’s exercise of functions, is therefore rather out of date now, so I will not be pressing that.

However, I want to raise a broader question, because at times the rest of England seems to be following London, and at other times it is not. On this occasion—this relates to Amendment 95—in London, the mayor of London is required to hold a public meeting known as a People’s Question Time twice per financial year to answer questions from the public; that is in Section 48 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999. I would like that to be replicated across all mayors in England so that something similar happens. I think that mayors are going to need—and I hope that they will want—to be held accountable for policy decisions they make. But the Minister might look at that issue of a people’s question time. We shall not reach it tonight for voting purposes, so I can consider what to do as a consequence of the Minister’s reply.

I feel very strongly about Amendment 96. I was a member of a regional development agency a number of years ago, and the RDA was required to turn up to every local council in its area once a year to answer questions from elected members, so that seems an entirely appropriate thing to do. I am suggesting only that a combined authority mayor should

“appear annually before each constituent local authority to answer questions from elected councillors”,

which would strengthen

“democratic accountability within devolved areas”.

I find it difficult to know what would be wrong with that, so I hope very much that the Minister will indicate her approval.

I will not speak about the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, as that would steal his thunder, but he has hit on a very important issue around local public accounts committees. I have similar concerns to those that I think he has, but I will leave it to him. I beg to move.

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak on cue to my Amendment 182, declare an interest as an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association and thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for supporting my amendment.

I welcome the Government’s amendment to establish overview and scrutiny committees. Why then have I persisted in my amendment for what I have called local public accounts committees? It is because the overview and scrutiny committees will focus only on scrutinising strategic authorities. I believe that we need to extend the focus of scrutiny from a single institution—the strategic authority—to the wider scrutiny of the place. The crucial difference between my amendment and the Government’s proposal is that my scrutiny committee would have the power to report not just on strategic authorities but on how effectively all local public service partners were collaborating in a place for the benefit of the public and the wider community.

Why is this so important? I will not go through the points that I made at length in Committee, but over the last four decades our public services have become increasingly fragmented, with the establishment of a myriad of disconnected, sometimes single-purpose agencies whose objectives and targets have on occasions overlapped and even conflicted. As we all know, those agencies have worked too often in silos. As a result, the public have struggled to access or even make sense of the disjointed services that are on offer. Money has been wasted because the silos do not work together to deliver the best value for money. At worst, people, sometimes children, have died because data and intelligence were not shared quickly enough to protect them.

In many places public service partners have worked very hard to break down these silos, but that is not uniformly the case. The prevailing culture in our public services has too often been one of competition rather than collaboration. I am convinced that for that to change we need in every local area a body with the power to scrutinise and report on how all public sector partners co-operate or do not co-operate for the good of citizens. If instead we establish overview and scrutiny and scrutiny committees which address only the performance of a single institution, we will reinforce the silo-based mentality that we have created for another generation—all for the want of adding a simple power for the overview and scrutiny committees to report on how the wider system is working.

If we do give those committees that additional power, we will also demonstrate that in a devolved system, accountability does not always have to be to the centre. Accountability can be local, should be local and can be done more effectively if it is. Extended scrutiny committees and local Public Accounts Committees of this sort would be very visible. They could involve local business communities and the voluntary sector, perhaps with an independent chair. They would become a very visible local body.

I promoted this idea when I was chief executive of Gloucestershire County Council. Your Lordships must suspend your disbelief—that was in the 1980s. Therefore, I was delighted when the English devolution White Paper committed government to explore the local public accounts committee model. The problem is that this Bill and the Government’s amendment do not follow that through. However, my conversations with the Minister since Committee—which I am grateful that she was prepared to be involved in—suggest that she remains supportive of the concept but wants to see more policy development and more stakeholder consultation before progressing further. I understand that.

If the Minister can confirm this from the Dispatch Box tonight, that will take us quite a long way further forward and I will not press this to a vote. If, for example, we could set up a working party to produce a fully formed proposal for local public accounts committees, we would have taken a big, decisive step in changing the very culture of our local public services—from competition to collaboration.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 29th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 98 and 99, tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook, concern the treatment of local partners in the Bill. While the Bill places a duty on strategic authorities to convene local partners and an obligation for those partners to respond, this falls short of meaningful consultation or genuine co-production. Without an additional requirement to engage substantively, Clause 21 risks becoming little more than a tick-box exercise, as the Local Government Association has warned.

Clause 21 will give the mayor of a strategic authority the power to convene, but what matters is that they can get something done. If a body is competent in an area but does not hold the power to make decisions, allocate resources or change delivery, what is the point of convening a discussion? Is the expectation that those with competence will be able to influence those with power, or that power will in time follow competence? Or is the purpose simply information sharing and having a nice cup of tea?

More practically, how do the Government envisage that these convened meetings will lead to tangible outcomes if those around the table lack the authority to act on what is discussed? I raise this not as a criticism of the clause but as a genuine question of intent. This is a very real issue. As chairman of the Local Government Association, councils continually raised with me the difficulties of getting local partners to genuinely work together to deliver for the local area. I am a huge believer in devolution and think that the local area, whether it is a strategic area or a council, will better deliver for its residents than something directed down from Whitehall.

The propensity of partners is to focus on the short term rather than the fundamental long term. I raise a case in point. On health, we all recognise that prevention, early intervention, health hubs, supporting the vulnerable in suitable homes and a co-ordinated approach to hospital discharge are all the right things to do. However, I recall sitting down at a meeting with my local NHS trust chiefs and they said, “We absolutely agree with you, but on Monday morning the chief executive”—the now noble Lord, Lord Stevens—“will ring me and ask: what is my A&E waiting time? How many discharges do I have today? That is why I have to focus on that”. It is therefore important that the priorities for the area are reflected in those partners.

This is also the case, particularly given their role in economic growth and strategic planning, for things such as drainage boards, utility companies, the DWP and the Highways Agency. Their focus is too often on what matters nationally and what their masters in Whitehall are saying. While they are sympathetic, they will focus on those issues, when there is an important duty to focus on the local.

Fundamentally, if meetings and responses do not amount to meaningful action and outcomes, there is not much point. Genuine devolution is about consent and local leadership. It is not about Whitehall and Ministers sitting behind desks mandating how partners should collaborate. These amendments seek to ensure that partnership under this Bill is real, accountable and rooted in local decision-making rather than some centrally imposed obligation. I beg to move.

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 237 in my name. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott and Lady Eaton, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, for adding their names to it. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, wanted to be here this afternoon; she has not been well this week so, on the Committee’s behalf, I wish her well.

My simple amendment seeks to place a duty on local public service partners to co-operate. Many people believe that the governance system in England has two major flaws. The first is that it is excessively centralised—probably the most centralised in the developed world—which this Bill seeks to address. In my judgment, the second major flaw is that statutory agencies have too often failed to work effectively together, a problem which has been exacerbated by the way in which the state has fragmented over many years. Put simply, we have established ever more agencies—some of them single purpose—in the belief that this would bring sharper focus and greater efficiency. In reality, this fragmentation and lack of collaboration has produced more negative than positive consequences.

For example, it has produced disjointed services which do not align with the needs of ordinary people. They just do not recognise them. It has produced policies and services which overlap and, at worst, conflict. As I shall go on to say, that costs a lot of money. The same lack of collaboration has produced waste, additional cost and a failure to share data and information. That has been most tragically evident in the never-ending cases of child abuse. A lack of sharing data and information is at the core of those tragedies. Fundamentally, it has produced a damaging culture of competition between providers when ordinary folk just want to see collaboration, partnership and co-operation to address their needs.

Down the years, various attempts have been made to tackle this silo working. Central government departments have tried to work in a more joined-up way. Noble Lords must form their own opinions as to whether that has been successful; I think it is a work in progress.

After the local government reorganisation in 1974—and I know that it is difficult for noble Lords to believe that I was there at the time—one or two county authorities appointed liaison officers to encourage closer working between districts and county councils. I was one of those. In 2012, health and well-being boards were established to improve working relationships between health authorities and local authorities, particularly on the subject of social care. More recently, health authorities have set up their own integrated care boards—again, with variable success to date. The last Labour Government championed an initiative, in which again I was pleased to be involved, called Total Place, which was enthusiastically embraced by many local agencies. More than 100 places quickly endorsed the concept of Total Place but, when the Government changed, they decided not to continue with Total Place. Now we have this Bill which, as we have heard, includes provisions for strategic authorities to convene meetings that partners will attend, again to ensure better co-operation.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 27th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 53 on behalf of my noble friend Lady Pinnock. This amendment is about how you scrutinise mayoral commissioners. I noted what the Minister said in responding to the previous group about the mayor or combined authority members being responsible for scrutinising commissioners, yet that removes any responsibility on the constituent authorities to undertake scrutiny. It is doubly important that elected members of the constituent local authorities have some powers in scrutinising the work of a commissioner. They will need powers to do that—to require the mayor and relevant commissioner or indeed any member of their staff to attend and give evidence—so it can be a requirement to attend rather than a request to attend, and there should be an ability to require the production of any documents relevant to the exercise of a commissioner’s function.

There should then be a right to publish reports on the committee’s findings and recommendations, with an absolute power to do so; it would not be for the combined authority or the mayor to say that this matter cannot be published. It is really a fundamental matter about who is in a position to scrutinise what mayors do.

Can I make just two points about scrutiny, which will come up later in our deliberations? The best form of scrutiny is one that happens before the decision is made, not one that comments on a decision after it has been made. The best way in which to deliver that objective is through a committee system, because a committee system actually authorises decisions to be made and has the major advantage that the scrutiny is happening at the same time as a decision is made.

I have found it very disappointing in the Bill that quite so much is being said about the committee system and its perceived failures, most of which I do not recognise. It may be that when we get to further discussions in Committee and then on Report, further consideration can be given to those matters. I hope the Minister will be able to say that the Government do not downplay the importance of scrutiny, particularly when so many issues and so much public money is involved in the proposals to devolve power to mayors and commissioners. I beg to move.

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 191, and, in doing so, declare an interest as an honorary vice-president of the Local Government Association.

The amendment would provide for the establishment in every local area of a local public accounts committee to ensure the effective scrutiny and accountability across the whole range of public service spending and activity in that area, not just the actions of the strategic authority or the mayor. So why is an amendment like this necessary?

During the past 40 years we have seen in this country a radical fragmentation of our public services with the establishment of a myriad disconnected, sometimes single-purpose agencies. Sadly, these have too often worked in isolation, seeking to achieve their own specific targets energetically, but on occasions their efforts have conflicted or overlapped with their partners. They have too often worked in silos and, sadly, regulators have been very slow to recognise and challenge that. As a result, the public often struggle to access or even make sense of the disjointed services which this system has produced. In addition, resources are wasted because of the overlap and duplication, bureaucracy thrives, and there is inevitably a culture of competition rather than collaboration. This needs to change, but I do not believe that, as drafted, the Bill alone will achieve that level of change. If we are adequately to integrate public services in a locality, all public service providers and partners have to build co-operation into everything they do.

A later amendment in my name seeks to impose a duty on all local public partners to do just that. But alongside that kind of duty we also need to put in place local accountability—and not always accountability to the centre, which has been the model we have followed for so long. We need more local accountability to ensure that genuine co-operation does take place, so that services are delivered which are actually recognisable to ordinary local people and which meet their needs effectively.

King’s Speech

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, when you are the 61st and last Back-Bench speaker, you can at least hope that some people will be pleased to see you—and I hope that noble Lords are. Building on that positive start, I add my welcome and congratulations to the Attorney-General and the noble Lord, Lord Khan, on the Front Bench. The noble and learned Lord gave a remarkable maiden speech, and it is wonderful to see a local mayor taking up a national office. It should happen more often.

I will pick up a theme that, surprisingly in some respects, has been focused on by a large number of Peers: the loss of trust in government and the state. I agree with them. It has become so severe a problem that it is beginning to threaten our democratic foundations. After all, why would you vote for, campaign for, lobby or influence a state that you do not trust or think can deliver?

I will touch on two reasons why this crisis has occurred. First, people feel increasingly distant from the decisions that affect their everyday lives due to the stifling centralism that has engulfed this country over the last 40 years.

Of course, that is why I welcome the proposal in the gracious Speech to introduce a devolution Bill. However, devolution should not just be seen in terms of the selective transfer of some statutory powers to more local levels of governance, or structural change. To help restore trust, devolution must be about creating stronger, more effective communities—that is what it is about—where people feel a sense of belonging; communities able to define their own needs and make choices about their own priorities; communities that can fully realise the potential which we all know they possess and which we already see in the contributions made by individuals, charities and voluntary sector groups; communities that can quickly respond to changing demands, innovate and build trust in ways that we saw so well during the pandemic.

To create those sorts of communities, we need a long-term vision for the future relationship between central and local governance, based upon greater financial stability and with localities given access to whole-place budgets. We need some credible form of local accountability which, frankly, we do not have at the moment, and we need to confront—yes, confront—the inevitable resistance of central government silos to ceding power. What about a mission-based approach, Minister? For me, the success of devolution a decade from now is not going to be measured by the number of powers transferred or bodies set up, but by whether we have created stronger communities, providing better services, improved growth, reduced waste and that critical sense of belonging.

The second reason why we have this crisis of trust is a profound disenchantment with the behaviour and standards of some who hold public office. I know more than most that we have vast numbers of dedicated public servants who have tried so hard to maintain services in the face of almost impossible challenges, but we cannot ignore any longer the failings exposed by the infected blood inquiry, the Post Office scandal, Windrush, Hillsborough, Grenfell and now the Covid report, and nor can we excuse them as isolated historic incidents. If we are going to regain trust, we need to show that we want to change that and address those failings. We need to show that we are determined to give the public what they have the right to expect, which is not least to be treated with respect and consideration.

Clearly, our current attempts to codify these expectations are not working. The Nolan principles, the Ministerial Code and the Civil Service Code proved insufficient, and their words will ring hollow with, for example, the victims of the infected blood scandal—many of whom I have met—for whom integrity, accountability, openness and honesty were sadly absent. We need a thorough review not just of the content of those codes but, even more importantly, of how they are enforced and how breaches are sanctioned, whether those breaches are by officials or by Ministers.

Surely the Ministerial Code must be made statutory, but what about giving Permanent Secretaries the power to seek a direction, not just on the grounds of value for money but, equally, on potential breaches of the codes of behaviour? If local government is required to appoint statutory monitoring officers—which it has had to do since 1989—then perhaps central government departments need something similar.

We have long boasted that our standards of governance in this country were beyond reproach, but recent inquiries tell a different story. They speak sometimes of a system which is excessively defensive and reluctant to learn the lessons of failure. That has to change.