English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Second sitting)

Kevin McKenna Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

We will now hear evidence from Andrew Goodacre, chief executive officer of the British Independent Retailers Association, and Allen Simpson, deputy chief executive of UKHospitality. For this panel we have until 3.10 pm.

[Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)]

Q Thank you for coming. I am very interested in the provisions around local growth plans and particularly how they affect your sectors. In the area I represent, Sittingbourne and Sheppey, there has been a feeling that we have been lacking, from the existing local authorities at both tiers, a real focus on growth locally. For instance, on the Isle of Sheppey, they are pulling together a local growth group and a local growth board. That is really important for the sense of place for areas that feel that they have already been overlooked. I am concerned that, in a big devolved settlement, that may still be a problem. I am also curious how that affects areas like the retail and hospitality sectors. Again, they may not be seen as major strategic-level elements of a growth plan, but actually they are fundamental, particularly for local communities. What are your takes on that?

Andrew Goodacre: Looking at it from a wider view, we are largely supportive of devolution and what is in the White Paper. If I put the retail lens on it, though, especially independent retail, which are the businesses that we represent, they will always ask, “What is in it for us?” There is a fear among those businesses that if you look at the national growth strategy, neither retail nor hospitality really feature in there as one of the eight key areas for investment and growth. I have not seen all the local growth plans. I have looked at the north-east and the west midlands one—that is where we are based—and largely those growth plans are aligned to the national growth areas. I understand that: the mayors, the areas and the regions want to create jobs that are skilled and well paid, and that grow the local economy by focusing on industries of growth.

You could argue that retail, and high street retail especially, has seen itself decline over the years as customer behaviour has changed, so I understand where the direction is, but there has to be a fear. If I was a shop owner now looking out, I would be saying, “Okay, I hear where you’re going to spend money. How does that work for me? How does that make a difference for me in my high street in Coleshill in the west midlands, near where I live?”—or in Solihull, or anywhere else in the UK that they might be?

If you look at the north-east plan, I do not see high streets mentioned once—I have only scan read it; someone may be able to point me in the right direction—and in the west midlands plan, I see priority high streets mentioned. Priority high streets are where they are planning to invest and create jobs, so they recognise the need to invest in high streets in the areas where they are creating jobs. I am not sure where that leaves the others. If you look at it purely from a retail point of view, there has to be a fear that the focus on high-tech, highly skilled jobs and on creating in the local economy will create pockets of success, but it will also create pockets of neglect as well, if we are not careful.

Allen Simpson: I agree with that. The element of a local growth plan that I think is really positive is the word “growth”. Quite often, when we ask local communities what they want, we are talking to them about whether they do or do not want housing, but encouraging local communities to think about what sort of growth they want is really valuable.

I think you are right about the tendency that exists. Often, if you ask local political leaders what sort of growth they want, they will start talking about wanting to be a fintech hub. In an old life, when I was at a devolved organisation that used London mayoral money to drive economic development, I quite often used to get asked by people around the country how they could create a fintech hub in Devon, Dorset or wherever. I used to say, “You’re probably not going to. You’re likely not going to succeed, but there are industries that you can develop.” That might have been agritech, agricultural tourism or food supply chains, depending on where they were in the country.

Your point about encouraging local communities to think about the role of hospitality and retail in driving quite visible growth is really powerful. There is something about the distribution of the value of growth that we would encourage local communities to consider. I happen to know your patch quite well—I am from Maidstone, so it is a world I know. If you look at the areas around the Kent coast, for example, which have done well over the last few years, the characteristic of the growth strategy has been to use hospitality, leisure and experience as a way of driving other forms of growth. Take Folkestone, for example, and the work around the Harbour Arm there, or Margate, or 20 years ago, Whitstable. With growth strategies that, first, ask how you make a place liveable and attractive, you find that you crowd in other forms of growth, which may be within the eight industrial sectors.

I am very in favour of local growth plans, because they help to encourage local communities to ask what sort of growth they want and to be pro it. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and if you ask people what sort of growth they want, you get an answer about what growth they want. If you ask people what other sorts of development they want, often you get an anti-development answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)]

Q Meur ras—thank you—Ms Vaz. Dohajydh da—good afternoon. I will declare straightaway that I am Cornish and my question is about Cornwall.

In order for Cornwall to access the highest level of devolution, as the Bill is drafted, it requires the Government to breach article 16 of the framework convention for the protection of national minorities. The Cornish are the only people in the UK that have national minority status but do not have access to the highest level of devolution. How flexible should the Government be when determining what powers different types of strategic authorities can exercise? Is there a case for exceptions in places such as Cornwall? I ask that you try to avoid the temptation to talk about identity—we can identify with lots of parts of the country and with football teams and pop bands—and talk more about national minority status.

Professor Denham: I confess that I am not an expert on the framework convention, so I am not sure I will address that from a satisfactory legal point of view. In terms of the devolution policy, it was always my view that whether to have a mayor should have been a local choice and not a national prescription. That boat may have sailed, but that was my view. Clearly, there are cases where mayoral leadership is seen by everybody as an advantage, but I think there was a case for having some flexibility over that.

The other thing that I think is worth exploring is that one size fits all is not always going to be the right arrangement. I would imagine that, in the case of Cornwall, there are some functions on which it is in Cornwall’s interest to collaborate very closely with Devon, and maybe the new Wessex strategic authority around strategic transport, and other areas on which you would not want to. There should be a way in the Bill—we have talked about the pooling of regional powers—to enable strategic authorities to build larger bodies with neighbouring strategic authorities when it is in their interest to do so, without requiring the agreement of central Government.

I suppose my in-principle answer to your question, which is very unhelpful to the Minister, is that maybe the choice whether to have a mayor should have been given more local discretion. As we are where we are, certainly I would like to see a system where Cornwall can build the sort of strategic authority it wants but also have the benefits of collaboration across the south-west peninsula, or whatever, on areas of common interest and where everybody might benefit from having a regional rather than a county-based approach.

Zoë Billingham: I speak only from the experience of pan-northern collaboration, which has changed and been flexible, and has taken the form of transport co-ordination. Its latest guise is the Great North, which is a great innovation and a great step forward for northern leadership. I think that is an example of how flexibility should be offered to all parts of the country where they see benefits beyond devolution just in their patch, so to speak.

I think you speak to a larger point about inconsistency in devolution. As many have said, it is very much building the plane while it is flying, and I think we need to be comfortable with that. We are far behind many of our OECD counterparts in terms of decentralising power. We are yet to settle on a model, and we should not settle on a very rigid model at this stage; we should be open to it being flexible in the future. I am sure that the Bill will be a very important first step in this Parliament, but it should by no means be the last word; the question of how devolution is taken forward in this country will need to be revisited on an ongoing basis.

Professor Denham: It might be worth exploring in Committee whether the right to request powers is sufficiently broad. For somewhere like Cornwall, even if you are currently on the lowest tier, you could none the less have the right to request powers specific to Cornwall, for the reasons that you want. There may be scope in the Bill to create something that does not necessarily guarantee you what you want, but gives you a route towards it.

[Kevin McKenna]

Q My question is in a similar vein, building on a lot of the conversation so far. My constituency is an outlier in the south-east of England and in the county of Kent, which is likely to become a devolved authority. Sittingbourne and Sheerness are two properly industrial towns. They really stand out for the amount of manufacturing and manual jobs in the area, compared with the service industries that predominate in the rest of the county and the south-east, and that has a lot of effects. Over the years, a misunderstanding, or ignoring, within the county of Kent of the industrial nature of my towns has strengthened the inequality and the depth of deprivation in certain parts of my constituency.

One of the concerns that has been raised locally is that, by replicating the electoral and political structure of Kent and having Tunbridge Wells and Maidstone, which are very different types of towns, predominate the political nature of the mayoralty, we will just replicate the same problem and our needs in terms of economic development, and therefore social support and social economics, will be overridden. Effectively, we can be categorised as a little bit of the red wall in the south-east of England. One of the dangers to me is that we—

[The Chair]

Order. Is there a question?

[Kevin McKenna]

Sorry, Ms Vaz—there is. What do you think we can do when setting up mayoral authorities to prevent aberrant areas—I say that in a very positive way—within a broader, more homogenous mayoral district from being neglected?

Zoë Billingham: We have some similar dynamics in the north, where certain combined authorities comprise some areas of low and modest incomes and some areas of great wealth, so some parallels can be drawn. Setting and influencing early mayoral priorities is really key. While in the north-east there are some areas of great wealth, Kim McGuinness’s priority is child poverty, and she has made that very clear. Obviously, that speaks directly to the areas of the north-east that suffer most from high levels of deprivation and child poverty. The initial setting of the mayoral agenda is absolutely essential in that.

Professor Denham: I recognise a lot of what you say, because I live in Hampshire. We have Southampton, Portsmouth and the island, which was mentioned earlier and is completely different.

There are two things that are crucially important. First, the unitarisation approach must be sensitive to those local geographies. Simply forcing people into a 500,000 unit because, mathematically, that is what came out of a PwC report two years ago would be counterproductive if that meant you lost the focus on those areas. That is a part of it: we need sufficient flexibility in the unitarisation approach.

The second thing is to try to build in from the beginning the idea that not every combined authority needs to replicate the structures that evolved initially in Manchester and the west midlands around a centralised authority. There are different ways of structuring a combined authority, its functions and its leadership that recognise the different constituent elements in an area. If I have one concern at the moment, it is that because we are asking people to reorganise their district councils and create a combined authority at the same time, it is very hard to find the headroom for that creative thinking about, “How are the internal dynamics of this going to work in the future?”

That is two things. First, we need flexibility on unitarisation, so that you do not disappear into an area that does not understand your needs. That is replicated in cathedral cities and all sorts of places right across the country. Secondly, we need to look at structuring a combined authority that builds in an understanding of those different geographies from the outset, and does not necessarily create a superior tier of authority.

Zoë Billingham: May I add one more point? It is about interventions at the neighbourhood level. A welcome focus of the Bill is that, as you raised, there can be as much inequality within combined authorities as between combined authorities. Sometimes the intervention needs to be at the neighbourhood level, so that should also be introduced as a focus of the combined authority. The basis on which they intervene and where is also a useful way to address disparities within regions.

[Lewis Cocking (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Q I want talk about district councils. Lots of councils have gone through unitarisation, and when they come out the other side, lots of them set up area planning committees and delivery teams based on the old district boundaries. What is your view on the savings that might come through that process? I think there are hardly any.

On the democratic deficit, we are talking about getting rid of elected authorities. The response from you, Zoë, was, “Well, we can do some more consultation. We can have online meetings and votes at 16,” but how can any of that replicate a free and fair democratic election to a local council?

Professor Denham: I made my position clear: I think you might have needed to reorganise in future; I did not think it was the priority. But we are where we are. Personally, I am sceptical about savings materialising at the scale that has been said, because costs are always higher. If you followed what I suggested about having some flexibility in the size of the new unitaries, that undermines what was in the original proposal, but I think it is necessary for democratic reasons.

I would say, though, that we have never really taken a strategic approach to what happens below unitary and strategic authorities, even in areas that have only unitaries and strategic authorities. Everything I said about community empowerment plans, I would apply to met boroughs and to Greater Manchester and all the rest of it. It probably sounds particularly relevant because we have this process of local government reorganisation, but it should apply equally strongly to the duties that exist on current unitary authorities and strategic authorities. It is a national policy, rather than purely a local one.

Zoë Billingham: I would only add that, as John said, I am not sure there were many external voices calling for the abolition of district councils. It was seen as a quid pro quo, as I understand it, for the mayoral tier. As I stated previously, I am sceptical about the backroom savings that are considered to come with reducing headcount, office space and so on, but I will leave others to speak to that. As John said, unitarisation is not new, so there are examples of places that have tackled it well. We should look to those before thinking it is a foregone conclusion that it is not the right thing to do.

On democratic innovations, although the Bill challenges the current model, I think we should use this moment to consider what they are. Looking at voting levels at the last election, we just about got 50% of the country voting for MPs. At some of the local and regional elections, we mostly have less than the majority of the population coming out to vote. We can improve on the current system, and I hope this is a real opportunity to do that. That is why thinking about how people engage with democracy, why they come out to vote, and who comes out to vote is really important at this stage—especially with such a difficult political atmosphere in this country.