English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Baroness Thornhill Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I rather suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and I are fishing in a similar pool here. My Amendment 196B is all about local accounting officers and is designed to help to improve the level of scrutiny and accountability for each mayoral strategic authority.

The system of departmental accounting officers and their requirement to appear before the Public Accounts Committee is often used to justify value for money—an issue that could prevent proper devolution—but this is because accounting officers are technically meant to be able to justify all spending even if, in reality, the decision to devolve to a different authority has been made. With the development of the new combined mayoral authority model, we need to learn from those models being used by the devolved Administrations where accounting officers’ responsibilities have been given to the relevant bodies.

This amendment would look to devolve AO responsibilities to new local accounting officers, who would be local and accountable to the relevant authority’s scrutiny bodies for any spending by an established mayoral strategic authority. This is loosely based on the relevant legislation for Welsh accounting officers. The relevant body here might include a local public accounts committee; the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, made the case for that.

This amendment is designed to be helpful. The Minister may say that it is unnecessary but, in my view, it would be a genuine move towards devolved accountability—in terms of models of funding and allowing places to innovate while retaining an appropriate level of scrutiny. With the development of devolved mayoral combined authorities, we need an extra layer of accountability that looks at the way in which public money is spent. For too long, local government has been burdened with more responsibility, less funding and fewer opportunities to innovate and develop; at the same time, to my way of looking at things, local authority accounting practices have not really moved on from where they were in the 1990s. This amendment is an attempt to be helpful, very much in the spirit in which the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, spoke to his amendment.

[Baroness Thornhill (LD)]

My Lords, I will make a brief comment on Amendment 196B, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, which is worth discussing further, especially given how it fits with Amendment 191 from the Lord, Lord Bichard, which I strongly support.

The question I asked myself, perhaps trying to anticipate the Minister’s response, was: would it duplicate existing audit and scrutiny arrangements? I came to the conclusion that I do not believe that it would. Audit answers the questions of whether the accounts were properly kept and whether the acceptable processes and procedures were legally carried out. But this amendment addresses a different and much more important question: is public money being spent effectively across the whole system? Audit is retrospective, siloed and looks at individual organisations after the event. Local public accounts committees, as proposed in this amendment, would look across organisations in real time. They would look at how councils, mayors and public service partners are actually working together—they are not the same things.

The Bill deliberately—and correctly, in my view—will push power and spending into shared collaborative arrangements, but our scrutiny remains fragmented, organisation by organisation. This mismatch is the gap that Amendment 191 would fill. Without it, no one body would be clearly responsible for asking very basic questions such as: is it the case that joint working is working? Is it delivering value? Are overlapping budgets aligned with agreed priorities? Are partnerships working as intended? Audit does not do that—and scrutiny committees, as currently structured, will struggle to do that.

In contrast, this amendment would enable that. It is not more bureaucracy; it is better oversight. It is not another unnecessary new layer. The amendment is enabling, not prescriptive, and it allows Ministers to integrate these committees within existing audit and scrutiny frameworks. It provides coherence and not clutter, and in fact good system-level scrutiny actually reduces duplication by exposing it.

My main reason for supporting the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, is that devolution without strong, visible accountability risks undermining public confidence. If power and money are exercised at a mayoral strategic level, scrutiny must exist at that same level. Otherwise, we are asking people to trust structures they cannot see being properly examined.

In conclusion, Amendment 191 strengthens the Bill by aligning power, spending and accountability. It complements audit and scrutiny; it does not replace them. In fact, the financial cost of not having effective system-wide scrutiny could lead to duplicated programmes, misaligned budgets and failed collaboration, which will almost certainly cost a lot more than the modest investment required to make this work well. For these reasons, I hope that the Minister will give both ideas serious consideration.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I support the principle of Amendment 191 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill. I observe that, for the first time, we are bringing local, parish and community councils substantially into scope, for I believe that the definitions provided in Amendment 191 will do so. What has not been fully understood is that one of the second-order effects of the Bill is that it will create a significant number of larger community councils as a result.

As a result of local government reorganisation, large numbers of cities, such as Oxford, Exeter and Norwich, and former county boroughs, such as Ipswich, Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, which have been billing authorities hitherto, will now fall into the lower tier of local authorities. Those authorities have no constraint or cap on the amount of council tax that they can raise. In Salisbury, they have jacked up council tax by 44% in the past four years—they have let rip, and it is not good enough. There has been no scrutiny, there has been cost shunting, and the council tax payers have paid more.

I have laid amendments, which we will discuss later, that will make provision for those larger smaller authorities to fall under the constraints that all the other authorities will have. I do not seek to fetter the smallest parish council, but if you have a population that hitherto has been part of a billing authority, it is right that they should be constrained going forward, as they have in the past.

I am not sure that I entirely welcome all the provisions in Amendment 191 on local public accounts committees, but the amendment shines a light for the first time on where we will go with these smaller community parish councils. There is merit in the thrust of what has been proposed here. I wait to hear how the Minister reacts to what constraints will be placed on this new class of large parish or town council as a result of the changes proposed in the Bill.