English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Lord Jamieson and Baroness Young of Old Scone

Committee stage
Monday 9th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

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

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

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

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

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

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

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

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

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

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