English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Janke (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 196D, which would place a duty on strategic authorities to work with local and community-based bodies when exercising their functions. Devolving powers to the level of the people whom they affect means that effective devolution depends not only on transferring powers from Whitehall but on ensuring that those powers are exercised in partnership with the communities they affect. Without an explicit duty to work with community-based bodies, there is a risk that decision-making becomes remote, technocratic and insufficiently grounded in local reality. This amendment would ensure that parish and town councils are treated not as an afterthought but as partners in governance, helping strategic authorities to understand local conditions, priorities and constraints before they are implemented.

Voluntary and community sector organisations also play a critical role in the delivery of local support and preventive services. They are often hubs of energetic volunteers—people who want both to be involved in their local communities and to bring enthusiasm, energy and drive to local life. Following on from the story of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, when I was a member of a community council on the west coast of Scotland, volunteers and members of those communities persuaded the mighty Strathclyde Regional Council to support a town-twinning project and fund it. So you can find examples of this kind of thing all over the country.

I believe that, in all of the powers and strategic aims of this Bill, the key roles played by town and parish councils are forgotten; in fact, the Bill barely mentions them. Parish and town councils are key players in local communities. They are closest to the ground and most responsive to the day-to-day needs of communities. This Bill must contain a statutory obligation to work with the most local and community-rooted bodies—parish councils—as well as the other essential local groups and agencies that are involved in delivering services at a local level.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 100 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, to which I have added my name, and Amendment 101 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale.

If the arts, culture and heritage are rightly recognised as an area of competence, as the noble Earl argued persuasively they should be, it follows logically that they should also be recognised as a basis for collaboration. Amendment 100 would simply make that explicit, placing culture alongside economic and social well-being as something on which mayors may work together, rather than treating it as incidental or discretionary.

I understand, of course, that the Bill currently frames collaboration as applying between neighbouring strategic authorities. I acknowledge that intention, but I would gently suggest that culture does not always conform neatly to a geography. Cultural ecosystems are interdependent in ways that often cut across administrative boundaries and sometimes beyond immediate neighbours; that is not an argument against the structure of the Bill but a reflection of how culture functions on the ground.

The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, spoke powerfully about cultural ecosystems, and I agree with him entirely. They are both geographically and economically interdependent. Grass-roots venues feed major institutions. Studios, rehearsal spaces and local festivals sustain the pipeline of skills on which national and international success depends. As is well known, cultural infrastructure —including libraries, museums, theatres, music venues, studios and heritage sites—acts as a form of civic glue, regenerating high streets, anchoring communities and driving wider economic activity.

We already see good practice emerging. Manchester and Liverpool, for example, have used accommodation-based visitor charges through business improvement districts to reinvest in culture, the public realm and visitor services. Although these schemes are imperfect, they demonstrate how locally controlled funding can support cultural ecosystems in a way that aligns the interests of residents, visitors and the hospitality sector. In that context, I very much look forward to seeing how the tourism levy evolves and how it can best support this kind of joined-up cultural ambition.