English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Viscount Colville of Culross and Lord Freyberg

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to support Amendment 6, to which I have added my name, and to express my full agreement with the case made by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. I also support Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar. Both amendments address a clear omission in the Bill by placing the arts, culture and creative industries, cultural services and heritage explicitly within the areas of competence of strategic authorities, precisely where local government, the Local Government Association and the sector itself understand them to sit. Amendment 51, also in the noble Earl’s name, provides the necessary consequential provision to ensure that this competence can operate coherently in practice. Together, these amendments bring clarity, not complication, and I strongly support them.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendments 6 in the name of my noble friend Lord Clancarty and Amendment 10 in the name of my noble friend Lady Prashar. I have spoken to a number of people in local government and become convinced that the new strategic authorities could benefit their regions if they had competence over the heritage and cultural sector.

Noble Lords have only to look at the catastrophic situation in the arts and cultural sector in the West Midlands to understand their importance. Birmingham has reduced the funding of arts in the city from £10 million in 2010 to a mere £1.1 million in 2024-26. In 2015, when the first big cuts were announced, they were in part because the political dysfunction of the city council persuaded the Arts Council to redirect funds, with a terrible effect on the city’s cultural and heritage life. Since then, the crisis has continued. The result of this long decline in funding was that in 2024 the city council signed off 100% reductions to funding for some of the most internationally recognised city institutions—the CBSO, Birmingham Rep, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Ikon Gallery, Fabric dance and dozens of community cultural organisations; the list goes on.

Some of these cuts have led to entrepreneurial responses by the city’s cultural sector. For instance, John Crabtree at the Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre has put on a more commercial and popular offer that has helped to stabilise the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which is also housed there. The Mayor of the West Midlands, who has strategic authority over the region but does not have legal competence for the cultural sector, has been able to direct some financial support through the regional authority’s cultural leadership board. It has managed to use money left over from the underspend on the Commonwealth Games and wider devolution funding to channel money to at least some of the most important cultural bodies in the city.

However, all these payments are one-off and do not replace longer-term core funding. They are not able to reach many smaller community cultural bodies, which have subsequently closed. In a city where there is huge concern about youth crime, that seems to be a retrograde and regrettable step. Imagine how much more effective the authority could have been if it had a statutory board to oversee and direct more extensive funds to the cultural sector across the region. I would hope that the establishment of a statutory heritage board in the West Midlands Combined Authority, with constituent authorities as members, would bring stability and greater funding to the sector across the region. In the process, that would allow local and national funding bodies to release money to the region and attract private philanthropy.

The acceptance of Amendment 6 would allow this competence and support for the cultural sector and the creative industries. As many other noble Lords have said, the heritage sector is so important for bringing together communities in a region, for giving them a sense of identity and for attracting tourism into the area. I ask the Minister, with her impressive career in local government, to appreciate how important such an additional competency could be in boosting regional development and cohesion.