English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to oppose Clause 57 and Schedule 26 and express my deep concern about the way in which the Government are pushing through local government reorganisation under the banner of devolution. Local government reorganisation is not new. It can and does happen but, where it does, it should happen by consent. Councils already have routes to propose mergers and restructuring where they believe it is right for their area.

What is different here is the scale and direction of travel. This feels rushed, top-down and imposed. It runs directly counter to the notion of devolution and the stated purpose of this Bill. I do not accept that the creation of new strategic authorities requires, as some kind of quid pro quo, the rapid abolition or forced merger of existing authorities. One size does not fit all. I have some experience of unitary authorities and recognise that they can work well, but that does not justify imposing them everywhere regardless of local circumstances, identity or consent.

Crucially, there is no strong evidence to support the argument that these changes will save money or improve service delivery. Larger councils are not automatically cheaper or more efficient to run. At a time when local government is already under extreme financial pressure, it is extraordinary that Ministers are pursuing structural upheaval rather than addressing the underlying problem of chronic underfunding. Local authorities are still grappling with the consequences of austerity. Councils across the country face serious and growing funding gaps and services are already stretched to breaking point. Before imposing disruptive reorganisations, the Government should fix that.

There are also serious risks to community identity and representation. Evidence from councillors on the ground suggests that these proposals could result in arbitrarily drawn, very large authorities with little sense of place or shared identity. Many towns with long histories and strong civic cultures—places that people care deeply about—are at risk of being effectively wiped off the local government map. It is important because democracy is about not just administrative efficiency but connection, accountability and trust. There is clear evidence that size matters for democratic engagement. Increasing population size and geographic scale risks reducing electoral turnout and lowering participation in local decision-making. We already have far too few elected representatives compared with many comparable countries. These proposals will significantly reduce the number of councillors overall, further thinning out representation at precisely the moment when communities are facing increasing pressures and greater complexity.

I am particularly concerned about the impact on casework and local advice. Councillors play a vital role as accessible, familiar faces in their communities, helping people navigate failing systems, resolve problems and get support in times of crisis. Many already work far beyond what their allowances reflect, often with limited support. When I was a councillor in Southwark, I could not do any gardening in my front garden because people would come up to me and tell me about their awful problems with black mould—clearly more important than my daffodils—so going into my garden was sometimes a challenge.

Schedule 26 risks abolishing whole tiers of representation almost overnight. That will inevitably lead to spikes in casework and confusion about where people turn for help. Local advice centres are already under immense strain, having lost staff and volunteers, while demand continues to rise. I see no evidence that the Government have seriously considered how this reorganisation will affect advice provision or where that additional pressure will land.

I do not agree that having services under one roof will make things simpler for residents. It might sound true in principle, but transitions of this scale are not frictionless. Removing thousands of local representatives at once is a disruption, and disruption without consent carries real democratic costs. Schedule 26 concentrates power in the hands of the Secretary of State, allowing directions to be issued, boundaries to be changed and authorities to be abolished with little or no local say. For all these reasons, I believe that Clause 57 and Schedule 26 represent a huge step in the wrong direction.

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, my Amendment 196EC to Schedule 26 fairly sets out some of my concerns, which, having listened to the noble Baroness, I am sure are shared by others in the Room. I tabled it in part to probe how Ministers will determine the new pattern of unitary councils. I appreciate that, by and large, they will be shaped by the submissions being made by current local authorities to the department, but my concern is that there is little thought or discussion about the size, shape or culture of the new councils.

The Government’s White Paper, published in December 2024, was clear that unitary councils should have

“a population of 500,000 or more”.

It argued that this would be

“the right size to achieve efficiencies, improve capacity and withstand financial shocks”.

The White Paper also said that

“reorganisation should not delay devolution and plans for both should be complementary”.

The Government have sensibly delayed the election of a number of the combined mayoral authorities and slowed the process down. Until the last general election, the pace of devolution was rather more measured, which was wise. Understandably, the new Government want to get a move on with their major reforms. At the same time, we will be asking the combined mayoral authorities and the new unitary councils to deliver much of the Government’s growth agenda and their political priorities in education, housing, childcare, nursery provision and so on. Quite right, too: they are the vehicles for a lot of those things, in particular transport. But the idea that these new and very powerful institutions will be capable of delivering new policies and plans while simultaneously creating themselves is something of a stretch. When Brighton and Hove City Council was set up back in 1997, we wisely gave ourselves two and a half years of preparation, including one year as a shadow authority. None of these structures will have that luxury.

It is well known that I favour unitary councils and have long argued for them, but they have to be well grounded to work and, to be well grounded, they have to be based on recognisable boundaries that have a clear relationship with local geography and a sense of community. My authority, Brighton and Hove, is constrained by the downs and, for that matter, it makes sense. It is a place, and place-making, as the Government say clearly in the White Paper, is of great importance not just to government but, more importantly, to communities. Make the unitaries too big and start tying urban and rural districts together and you lose that. You also lose the sense of community identity.

In the past, when unitary authorities were established, many place names were lost. I go back to 1974: who knew that Sefton was Southport and Bootle, or that Kirklees subsumed places such as Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Batley? Kirklees is the name of a hall on an estate, some of which is, I think, in the neighbouring borough of Calderdale. My point here is that place-making and community building, which are surely part of the stuff of local government, rely on the ability to be readily identified so that people can understand who is responsible for what and in whose name. Abolishing a lot of the place names, as the last local government review did in 1974, risks depriving people of that ready point of identity, which would be unfortunate and wrong.

Currently, looking at the size of authorities, we have few that fit the 500,000-plus margin—just nine: Birmingham, Cornwall, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Manchester, County Durham, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire. It is an open question as to whether their size makes them more efficient; it is possible that it makes them more remote. The more remote they are, the more citizens feel left behind and left out, and less engaged and able to influence local decision-making.

For that reason, my amendment seeks to ensure that, in making a direction on the future pattern of local councils in a given area, the Secretary of State must have regard to local geography, because of its influence on travel and community relations; the sense of identity that the new authorities will take on in terms of places and communities; and whether it is wise simply to glue together urban and rural areas for administrative convenience. Additionally, the environmental and financial sustainability of a council area, and its proposed size, have to be considered.

The White Paper seemed to assume the bigger the better and that savings would flow. I am less convinced. If I look back to the unitarisation of Berkshire in 1998, for example, when the council was broken up into six unitaries, all then had to find directors of social services, education, environment and highways. A similar impact will be felt with the unitarisation that takes place under combined mayoral authorities.

I suspect most councils have stripped out excessive costs over the past 15 years and most will have come from back-office mergers. There may be savings in the administration of council tax as larger council tax areas come into view, but the integration of many district council systems into new unitary council tax collections will certainly come at a cost.

To conclude, I have a number of questions for the Minister. Can she confirm that a fixed size for unitaries—the 500,000 figure—has been dropped? Do the Government have a number in mind? Will the Secretary of State be mindful of ensuring that mergers respect the need to have identifiable boundaries that respect urban and rural differences and the historical bases of councils, to enable place-making and help with community resilience? Can we be assured that resources will be in place to ensure a seamless transition from the current pattern of districts into larger unitaries?

What steps will the Government take to guarantee a level of democracy that makes councils accessible to local electors and residents? The noble Baroness, Lady Jones, made the point that councillors already work hard. The White Paper confirmed that the number of councillors would reduce—that is pretty obvious, really—but can we be assured that councillors will be sufficient in number, and well enough resourced and supported, to represent the inevitably larger communities that they will be part of?

I do not oppose unitaries; in fact, I am rather keen on them. I do not oppose devolution, but it has to be done at a pace, and in a style and manner, that works for local communities to ensure that democracy, demography and community identity are preserved, because place-making should be at the heart of the changes. We all need to be assured that that will be the case.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I add my voice in support of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam. Everything he said makes a great deal of sense. It is hugely important to consider the identity of the authorities being created in terms of their communities and place-making. I am also tempted to support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, in her opposition to Clause 57 standing part, because it makes no sense to introduce this additional tier of local government at the same time as supposedly simplifying it by reducing two tiers to a single tier. To do this at the same time is likely to result in more costs, endless local government arguments and unhappiness.

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Tabled by

[Lord Bassam of Brighton]

196EC: Schedule 26, page 275, line 31, at end insert—
“(3A) Before issuing an invitation or direction the Secretary of State must consider—(a) the natural geography of the proposed local areas being merged,(b) the identity of the authorities in terms of communities and place making,(c) the balance between the rural, urban and suburban mass of the proposed authorities,(d) the financial and environmental sustainability of the proposed authorities, and(e) the size of proposed authorities in relation to the creation of local democratic structures.”

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[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for her response to my amendment. It is worth the Government thinking a bit more about whether it would be appropriate to put in the Bill something that reflects the guidance. I am grateful to all noble Lords who supported what I said. If we are to get reorganisation right, this is an opportunity to put some guarantees in place to do exactly that.

Amendment 196EC not moved.

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[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall not speak for long. I was looking around the Room, trying to add up how many former local leaders there are, and I got to five or maybe six. We probably all had one thing in common: our generation of politicians was extraordinarily reliant on our local paper to broadcast our successes and failures and, more importantly, to hold local institutions to account.

When I first became a councillor in Brighton, in 1983, my local paper had three editions a day. It had a circulation of 120,000. It had arts, health, local government and crime sections, with a general list of reporters, all different specialists, who worked from the city centre. The paper was also given different opt-outs for Worthing, Hastings and Crawley. There was an extensive newspaper network, and it was complemented by three radio stations, two of which were commercial, and two TV stations. Brighton and Hove had a degree of news saturation.

That meant that the spotlight was placed on us as local politicians in a way that was sometimes aggressive, but more often than not benign, because they believed in reporting the facts. As a local politician sitting on a committee—including as leader of the council, which I was towards the middle end of the 1980s—if I could see the journalist’s pen twitch in the corner of the room, taking a note, I thought I had scored a good hit politically, and invariably I had. I am sure many politicians were reliant on people such as Adam Trimingham, our local reporter, for broadcasting their political views and making sure that people knew what the local authority was about.

This amendment is a practical one. It would be a shame if local authorities were not obliged to publish notices in the way they have historically. The decline and death of local news is a great sadness, because people are less well informed about what has been going on in their name. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, talked about investigative journalism; that is as important at a local level as it is at a national one. Our society is poorer without it, so anything we can do through local government to help strengthen local news is very important. I am sure local authorities themselves are worried about that, because it is part of their population’s decline in knowledge and understanding of the democratic process. I hope the Minister can offer us some comfort and encouragement, and perhaps say that we should do more to stimulate local news services. This is one practical measure that the Government should actively consider.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister will not be surprised to know that I very much support what other noble Lords have said, given that I promoted amendments to her previous Bill on this subject. It seems to me immensely important that notices should come to the notice of people. I know what my local council would do, if faced with this clause: it would publish either nothing or as little and as obscurely as it could. Its practice is to try to ensure that people do not know what it is up to.

It is entirely undesirable that local councils should have this direction in paragraph 6(3) of Schedule 27, without any rules as to how they should apply it. If we are to keep this clause, at the very least councils should be given an objective; for example, that they should publish it in a way that will lead to the widest readership over the widest spread of the community. In other words, they should know what they are trying to achieve, and they should have something through which to justify their actual performance against what they are supposed to do. I also ask that the publication be, at least in part, in IPSO-regulated spaces, to make sure that what is getting out is of quality.

As noble Lords will remember from the previous Bill, we need to get rid of the 19th-century definition of “newspaper”. There is a much broader section of local news enterprises. As the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, knows, because we are very close neighbours, the level of local news that we get now is very degenerated; the level of investigation, rather than just reprinting material they are given, is really very low. However, in that gap, little local enterprises are springing up. They are often not yet of a sufficient size to afford a print run, but they are getting out there and doing the investigative work. They ought, in the right circumstances, to be supported. I urge the Government to change the definition —if we keep newspapers, that is. If we do not, as the schedule proposes, and we broaden the discretion of local government, we must make it clear what it has to achieve rather than allowing it to achieve nothing.

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[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 206 in this group. I guess it is fishing in a similar pool to that of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, but with a more explicit purpose.

With the increased size of local authorities that we are going to get, we will have cities becoming parishes. At the moment, I think the largest parish form of council is Northampton, which has a population of about 130,000. I do not know what the outcome of the local government reorganisation will be, but quite a large number of towns and cities that have a substantial population will have their powers reduced to that of parish and town councils. My guess is that there will be an expansion in parishing in those areas because people will want to make up the democratic deficit.

However, my point in this amendment is to try to ensure that, where neighbourhood areas are identified as being important—as, for instance, with the Pride in Place programme—the parishes, whether town or city-style parishes, are at least represented. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, correctly argued, they are a form of elected democracy and are there to represent their local community. While we all celebrate and work with people who are from neighbourhood organisations, they do not have the same standing in their community because they have not been directly elected by local residents. What I am therefore trying to achieve with this amendment is that, at least where neighbourhood areas are identified and a governance body is established for a neighbourhood area, parish and town councils should have a stake in that organisation. That is what my amendment seeks.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group and will speak to them in turn, but I just begin by saying that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bassam. His Amendment 206 and my Amendment 207 are complementary, and in a sense, ask the same question: if one is creating effective neighbourhood governance, does one do it by incorporating town and parish councils into some structure or by investing town and parish councils, as far as possible, with functions and responsibilities themselves? That is where I think our amendments are complementary and could in practice be adopted in one direction in some places and in another direction in others. I accept that this is not our job in this clause, which seems to be the only clause that does not get its own schedule. I would want to have a schedule attached to this clause that set out in intense detail how this would be done because it would vary from place to place.

I was listening to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, earlier; I did not interrupt, but the Long Title has no interpreted legal force. It is called the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, and that is a means of citation, but the Long Title does not mention community empowerment. In effect, you can look at what the Bill is called but then you look at the Long Title and it just makes provision about various forms of authorities. It does not actually say that the purpose of the Bill is to devolve power or to empower communities. It is our job to ensure that the Bill really does that. Clause 60 ought to be about community empowerment, which is where my Amendment 208 comes from. In so far as there should be guidance to local authorities on how they go about creating effective neighbourhood governance, it should be geared towards empowering and engaging local communities. It is not necessarily the case that that would happen.

I live in Suffolk. My noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook and I were both at the same meeting where the intention—it may be intention in many places—is to create neighbourhood governance. This is, in essence, the elected members of the unitary authorities forming a committee for an area. I do not say that that is irrelevant to this purpose, but it is not the same thing as town and parish councils, which have their own identity, their own powers, their own connections and relationships with all the people who live in that precise area. I come back to the word “identity” because, as all noble Lords understand, political identity is very important in how one creates political and organisational governance structures. The starting point for government structures should be: what is one’s political identity? As it happens, in Suffolk, most people probably identify with their town or parish. That is where they start from. My proposition is terribly simple, which is that towns and parish councils should be, wherever possible, strengthened and their functions maintained or enhanced by this process of local authorities creating effective neighbourhood governance.