English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis and as a director of Peers for the Planet.

I welcome this Bill, but I feel for the Minister. She has just about finished the Herculean task of taking the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and the Renters’ Rights Act through this House. To use the words of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, this is another doorstop of a Bill for her to take through.

This is a very important Bill on something that many Governments have grappled with over many years. So far, it has been tackled in quite a piecemeal way. There is a real need for that strategic-level approach to complete that process and seize all the benefits of comprehensive devolution across the UK.

I have worked for many years on regional issues in the Midlands. Noble Lords have mentioned many areas of the UK in this evening’s debate, but not yet the Midlands. The Midlands is a great test bed or case study for the issues we are talking about. When I came into Parliament, we had a single combined authority in the Midlands—the West Midlands Combined Authority—but there was nothing across the rest of the region. Where I was, in Derby, in the East Midlands, we looked on the west with a little envy. At the time, Andy Street had huge levels of success in being that voice and in bringing large levels of public and private investment into the West Midlands, while we in the East Midlands were lagging far behind. Now things have moved on. We have the East Midlands Combined County Authority and the Lincolnshire Combined County Authority as well.

There are issues with the way in which this devolution is being approached. I go back to something that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, brought out. He made a very perceptive comment on what was then the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill, earlier in the Session, which was looking at Skills England. The noble Lord said that devolution was something we could all get behind as a concept but, in doing so, we create joins and barriers that were not present before, and we have to learn how to get through those barriers that we have created.

From observing a lot of the legislation that has gone through the House in this Session, I have noted many areas where that is a problem. For example, I have talked about skills. The Government’s approach to skills in Skills England has been driven through combined authorities. Even though we now have three combined authorities in the Midlands, more than half the population lives in areas outside a combined authority, so they cannot take the benefits of some of these initiatives.

We have seen the same in the Social Mobility Committee, which has just reported on the approach to social mobility. The Youth Guarantee Trailblazers are being driven through combined authorities. Of course, that will be resolved in time through the Government’s plans but, even when we move to a model of strategic authorities that cover the whole country, we will need to break down those barriers and I suggest that a pan-regional level is the best place to do that: to look at investment into regions, skills, energy and social mobility. These are areas which require this broader, pan-regional approach. So I look forward to working with noble Lords in Committee to think about how we can put more of a broader—perhaps a pan-regional—structure into this, which is something that was brought out strongly in the Government’s White Paper as well.

My second point is that the Bill is surprisingly silent on energy. If we look at the areas of competence in Clause 2, a number of areas are brought out—transport, skills, housing, et cetera—but energy is conspicuous by its absence. There is a need for clarity here on how these strategic authorities are going, for example, to work with Great British Energy, and on the role of regional energy strategic plans and local area energy plans. We will need some discussion in Committee on how energy will be factored into the role of these new strategic authorities.

On the environment as well, we are retreading some of the discussion that we had on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, but the planning role of these strategic authorities needs to align with the strategic priorities of the country: environment and net zero. This carries on from our earlier discussion. I want to bring back in Committee how the planning system can better align with these strategic priorities to ensure that what gets built by strategic authorities aligns with those goals, and to empower the strategic authorities to deliver on those goals.

To finish, the vision is there. Many of the issues that the country has faced in recent decades can be traced back to that centralisation of power and opportunity. The regions have been left behind—the geographic inequality that the noble Earl, Lord Devon, mentioned—and the way to resolve that is to devolve power and resources and use all that local knowledge to revive the regions and, not least, deliver the Government’s economic growth agenda.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis. My Amendment 3 would make a simple change but it highlights something fundamental to the Bill, so I want to spend a bit more time going through it than that single-word change would imply.

In looking through the areas of competence, energy is conspicuous by its absence, given that it will be a central challenge for the country—and, indeed, the mission of the Government—in the coming years. I shall use the Midlands region, where I live, as an example; of course, the first energy transition really started in the Midlands. I recently visited the Science Museum down the road, where there is an excellent example of the Boulton and Watt steam engine, which was brought into use in Birmingham and started to turbocharge the demand for coal and the first energy transition from biomass to fossil fuels.

That was a locally led transition, of course, but today, the Midlands remains the industrial heartland of the UK. We have so many energy-intensive users and heavy manufacturing, ranging from nuclear reactors and aero engines to trains, excavators and cars. As a region, we want to help lead the latest energy transition, as articulated in the recent Midlands Engine’s White Paper on energy security; I chaired the task force to produce that.

For a number of years, I have been making the case that, to date, the energy transition has been delivered in a top-down fashion. We have had many welcome developments, such as the formation of the NESO—the National Energy System Operator—but there is still a sense that this is something being done to communities, rather than bringing them along on the journey. No doubt progress is being made on the regional planning for the local power plant through Great British Energy, but we are not yet in a place where we have a fully joined-up governance system that marries up the necessary top-down view of the energy system and the critical bottom-up view that informs it.

Why is it important to drive the transition locally? First, I have already mentioned bringing local communities along on the journey. We are talking about significant changes to buildings, including changes in how we heat and insulate them, and changes to both grid architecture and next-generation charging. All this will be much more effective if communities are helping to drive this themselves and seeing those benefits.

Secondly, local areas have the knowledge of how best to implement the energy transition. For example, they know their local housing stock best. They know which technologies are best for future heating solutions, whether that means district heating or heat pumps. They know where the grid, the charging and the local generation is.

That feeds into my final point, on costs. The cost of the energy transition is getting significant attention at the moment, but the benefits for the Government here are the cost savings possible with a locally led approach. Billions in savings are possible if the most appropriate solution is brought forward for local areas, using local knowledge rather than one-size-fits-all. Regions and authorities are recognising this and taking action, but the Government need to drive this approach forward and avoid the patchwork nature referred to in our debate on the previous group.

What is needed is proper energy planning, at a local level, which then feeds up into regional plans and, ultimately, into the spatial strategic energy plan for the UK that the NESO is producing. That is when we will have a transition where we bring in all the expertise at a local level, which means the most efficient solutions at the lowest cost. There is an opportunity here for the Government to recognise, in the areas of competence, the centrality of energy to what strategic authorities need to deliver; this would ensure that strategic authorities are delivering on energy for their regions. The Government could use that to define how a bottom-up governance system for energy could work, how that might flow up into the spatial strategic energy plan, how that will interface with GBE and NESO, and so on.

I was grateful to meet the Minister last week. We discussed how paragraph (a) refers to “transport and local infrastructure” and how that is slightly misleading, in that it may give the impression of a focus on transport. The other benefit of this amendment is that it would clarify that first part of Clause 2 and provide clarity in the language on what strategic authorities are trying to deliver. With that, I look forward to hearing from the Minister.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a visual artist. Amendment 4 in my name is a small but important clarifying amendment. It simply adds the words “including through tourism” to paragraph (d) of Clause 2, which already defines “economic development and regeneration” as a core “area of competence” for strategic authorities. This reflects the Local Government Association’s view that tourism should be explicitly recognised in the Bill rather than left implicit.

Tourism is not a marginal activity; it is one of the principal ways in which economic development and regeneration happen in practice. It supports local jobs, sustains town centres, underpins cultural and heritage assets and brings external spending directly into communities. In many places, particularly outside the large cities, it is the economic driver.

I have deliberately not proposed tourism as a stand-alone category nor sought to incorporate it into the important Amendment 6 tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, to which I have added my name. His amendment rightly strengthens the strategic recognition of the arts, heritage and creative industries. My amendment is narrower and more operational. It simply makes it clear that tourism sits within economic development and regeneration, which is how local authorities already understand and deliver it in practice.

Too often, tourism is grouped alongside the arts and creative industries in local authority structures, where its scale and commercial focus can unintentionally shape priorities and funding conversations that are not directly about culture itself. Placing tourism clearly within economic development helps to maintain that distinction while allowing cultural policy to retain its own strategic clarity. This matters particularly in the context of the Government’s emerging work on a visitor or tourism levy. Even at modest levels, published estimates suggest that such a levy could raise hundreds of millions of pounds a year in England and potentially over £1 billion annually if applied more widely—sums that would exceed Arts Council England’s entire annual capital budget and be comparable in scale to a decade of lost local authority cultural investment.

In the Cultural Policy Unit’s helpful paper A City Tourism Charge—the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, will no doubt develop this point further on Amendment 6, with which I entirely agree—there is a strong and well-evidenced case that a significant proportion of any such levy should be invested directly in cultural and heritage assets, which are often the very reason that people visit in the first place. For strategic authorities to play a meaningful role in shaping and deploying such tools, tourism needs to be clearly within scope. Without explicit inclusion, there is a risk that tourism falls between stools—assumed but not quite owned. This amendment provides clarity, not prescription, and I hope that the Minister will see it as a proportionate and helpful addition.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, for those additional points. In this Room there are many people from local government, who have spent many years working to make sure that what he called the machinery of state is not interfering with actually delivering at local level. What we are trying to do with the Bill is to make sure that we continue that, but no doubt we will have many discussions about whether or not it is going to work.

It is very important that what we do is driven by local people at local level. The Co-operative Councils’ Innovation Network, which I started with my right honourable colleague from the other end, Steve Reed, about 15 years ago now, sets up pilot projects to show exactly how you start with the impact at local level and then work up to what needs to be done in the machinery to make that work. That is what I want to do but on a national scale, and I hope that the Bill will go a long way towards doing so.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I raised a minor point around paragraph (a) in Clause 2—“areas of competence”—which refers to “transport and local infrastructure”. My point is about the wording. That could perhaps be taken to mean local infrastructure related to transport. That is probably not the intention of the Government and this is local infrastructure in general, but perhaps there is an opportunity to clarify that wording.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord knows, because we have had the conversation, that I feel that the order of that wording is a little unfortunate. We will reflect on that because it does look as though it is infrastructure related just to transport. That is not the intention of the Bill. The Bill is intended to reflect that the competences will include local infrastructure and transport. If that local infrastructure relates also to transport, well and good, but it might be other infrastructure. So I will reflect on that and come back to the noble Lord.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 29th January 2026 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, this group of amendments is, broadly speaking, about collaboration in its various forms—not just between mayors but between mayors of other parties, as well as other forms of collaboration.

I am grateful for the support of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, as well as that of my noble friends Lord Freyberg and Lady Prashar, for my Amendment 100. It would add “cultural” to the other categories of well-being, alongside “economic” and “social”, for mayors of neighbouring authorities who would like to collaborate with each other over areas of competence; in this context, I interpret “well-being” in a very general sense. I believe it to be logical that this amendment should be accepted if the arts, culture and heritage were to be added as areas of competence.

I support the other amendments in this group. Collaboration across boundaries should be encouraged, both within and outside the strategic authorities. I have added my name to Amendment 101 from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. I look forward, too, to what the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has to say about citizens’ assemblies.

In support of this amendment, I want to mention something that I probably did not emphasise enough in our debate last week on Amendment 6 and areas of competence but which is particularly relevant to this debate nevertheless: the importance of the arts and the creative industries as a generally well-functioning ecosystem. I say that despite the large and damaging cuts to the arts that we have seen in the past 15 years.

In some ways, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is often said that you tamper with this ecosystem at your peril because of the co-dependence of one part on another. There is considerable crossover in media and skills, as the Minister will appreciate—theatre, film and TV exemplify that—but there is also co-dependence geographically. The grass-roots arts, which are often subsidised, are traditionally where the most interesting, innovative work takes place and influence both what is taking place in London and what goes into London—for instance, into theatres in West End.

This is still true, to a large extent, but London is increasingly not the be-all and end-all of the arts. The way in which the regions negotiate the changes that are taking place—for example, with the new creative hubs—has to be done collaboratively. This is particularly true with such a significant shared cultural asset as Production Park in Wakefield, where “Adolescence”, the hit Netflix drama, was filmed.

It is also important for the regions that the new hubs are not simply colonial outposts of the big entertainment companies. The West and South Yorkshire mayoralties already have a long-standing relationship, which includes a common strategy for developing the skills that are needed to work in the many areas of the creative industries and for doing this regionally, in Yorkshire. This is something that is being fostered at Production Park, which, significantly, has its own educational facilities. There is a growing sense that work can be made in the regions—by local, original creators—that will have national, or even international, exposure. This is very exciting, but it does require mayors to come together.

Other areas of necessary collaboration across strategic authorities include cities of culture. Different regions may be rivals, but there will be much to be learned from previous experience. There are the big events, of course, including music festivals and national cultural events. Mayors should be sharing best practice for every level of cultural activity, from the provision of cultural services and access to the arts by local authorities to commercial opportunities, employment concerns, issues around trade and concerns around touring, including touring abroad. There is also the tourist levy; mayors should certainly be talking to each other about how that will be administered and how the money will be spent.

In some of these suggestions, I am talking about communication between different regions as much as I am about more formal collaboration between authorities that pass the “neighbour test”. The Minister may say that mayors are already collaborating in this area, but it is important to recognise the reality; indeed, where mayors are not talking to each other, talking absolutely needs to be encouraged. There is a real, practical use in treating culture in this context—for all the reasons I am setting out—as a separate, integral and identifiable area. I beg to move.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 101 in my name. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for their support. This flows on nicely from what we talked about on smaller-scale collaboration in the previous group. This is all about collaboration across larger geographies. I go back to something that I remember the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, saying in a debate back in 2024 on the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions) Bill, as it was at that time. He said that devolution was something that all noble Lords could get behind and support. We would perhaps differ on the means of achieving that but it is, as a principle, something that we should all agree on.

However, by undertaking devolution, as this Bill does, we are creating joins and barriers that were not there before. We therefore need a way in which to create a holistic approach that ensures collaboration across those boundaries. This drives us to more of a pan-regional collaboration, looking at larger geographies such as the north or the Midlands. I give a few examples of why this is important. On inward investment, for example, we have vast pools of capital across the world that are mobile and can invest anywhere in the world. Selling a region and its opportunities is an excellent way in which to focus on bigger opportunities, rather than leaving it to smaller geographies to help bring in that capital and investment. Also, on large-scale infrastructure, transport is a great example. Large-scale rail projects that impact across many strategic authorities need to be considered on a pan-regional basis. I have later amendments on thematic areas such as social mobility policy but one of the key findings from the recent special inquiry committee was that there needed to be bespoke regional approaches to this long-standing problem to fit with the circumstances of each area, and there needs to be better regional co-ordination and collaboration on these approaches.

In the last Parliament, we had pan-regional partnerships such as the Midlands Engine and Northern Powerhouse that aimed to undertake this collaborative approach across regions. I worked extensively with the Midlands Engine. I founded the Midlands Engine All-Party Parliamentary Group and led a number of work packages with the organisation, such as chairing the task force, which led to the Midlands Engine Energy Security White Paper. The Midlands Engine operated right across the Midlands region, from the Welsh border to Lincolnshire. It covered all local governments and the 11 million people in that geography, with the explicit aim of closing the gap in economic performance between the Midlands and the rest of the UK.

The economic argument sits at the foundation of all this. There is a persistent economic gap between the regions and the metropolis. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, highlighted this also. You could almost consider the UK as two countries in economic terms. We have a prosperous enclave in London and the south-east, with the rest of the country lagging far behind. Therefore, there is a strong argument that the Government need to focus on catch-up growth in the regions to meet their overall growth ambitions for the UK. I saw at first hand the benefits in the initiatives to join up the work of local authorities and combined authorities for the economic benefits of the Midlands region. So much great work was done, including setting the foundations of the Midlands Rail Hub, which has been taken forward today, large infrastructure investments such as fusion, and investment funds for small and medium-sized enterprises. However, I also saw some of the political difficulties in trying to do that with the pan-regional partnership approach. There were challenges in a separate organisation, with the remit it was given, in getting political buy-in on initiatives from a broad range of stakeholders.

In reading the devolution White Paper, I was encouraged by that aspect of the Government’s plans in that they intend to keep pan-regional collaboration going but focus it more around partnerships between mayoral authorities, which could help to resolve some of the difficulties in those separate bodies. I was surprised to see no mention of this approach in the Bill, and to perhaps pre-empt what the Minister will say—I thank her for the meeting we had and the engagement on this amendment—there is of course nothing to stop mayors and authorities creating these convening bodies. There is some progress here already in the Great North partnership, for example. However, the Government do need to play a role in making this happen.