English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have much sympathy with what the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, has said, but I am puzzled, because the Bill is very much in line with the direction in which the last Conservative Government were taking us, and I had thought that she was then a Minister. I have not forgiven the last Conservative Government for the artificial institutions they imposed on Yorkshire in the face of resistance from all the councils in Yorkshire. I have not forgiven the Conservatives either for starving local government of funds, without which it is impossible for local democracy to work.

The White Paper and the Explanatory Notes for the Bill set out the problem it was trying to address, saying that:

“England is one of the most centralised countries in the world”,


that there is a serious and “long-term decline” in public trust in politics, and that three-quarters of our citizens feel powerless to influence decisions affecting their local area. It states that Westminster politics faces a

“wider feeling of disempowerment and distrust at a local level”.

The Liberal Democrats fear that this alienation from democratic engagement feeds into a broader disillusionment with democratic politics and democratic parties as a whole.

The changes the Bill proposes will not meet these challenges. Strategic authorities are not local government, nor are many unitary authorities of 500,000 people or more. Local communities—the word “communities” is thrown around a great deal in the Bill—are found in our towns, villages and urban neighbourhoods. The White Paper promises that the Bill will

“empower communities to take back control from Westminster”.

Instead, it takes power and representation further away from local communities, giving it to mayors, who are responsible for several million people. It promises that the new authorities will cover

“areas that people recognise and work in”.

That may fit England’s metropolitan areas, but it creates unrecognisable and artificial authorities elsewhere. This is decentralisation, not devolution. The Secretary of State retains extensive powers to direct, intervene and alter the new arrangements. These are executive powers, without continuing scrutiny from Parliament—“elective dictatorship” is the charge that the late Lord Hailsham made about an earlier Labour Government.

The 1997 Labour Government, in co-operation with the Liberal Democrats, devolved powers to Scotland and Wales. Labour’s half-hearted plan to devolve some powers to regional authorities collapsed with the defeat in the north-east referendum, in which Dominic Cummings played as negative a role as he later did in Brexit. A Tory-Labour consensus has since emerged that fewer, larger local authorities are cheaper and easier for central government to work with, and that elected mayors are far more to be trusted than elected councillors. It became the conventional wisdom that these bodies should be as uniform as possible in size and functions, with a minimum of 500,000 people for unitary authorities, which is significantly larger than London boroughs—I point out to the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne—for some unexplained reason, with subregional strategic authorities significantly smaller in population than London.

This does not reflect the complexity and distinctiveness of England’s different regions. What suits London and Manchester will not easily fit Devon and Cornwall. I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, again that the last Conservative Government disregarded the overwhelming consensus of Yorkshire’s local leaders that we would prefer a regional framework to take powers back from London and imposed combined authorities and mayors on the moors and dales of North Yorkshire, as well as on the reluctant combination of urban Hull and rural East Yorkshire. The Bill will complete the imposition of the new strategic mayoral model across the country.

Moreover, it will ban the further introduction of mayors in unitary authorities on the spurious grounds that uninformed voters might be confused by the duplication of titles. French and American citizens manage all right with elected mayors at multiple levels, but English voters are clearly not able to understand.

The Bill is constitutionally incoherent and democratically deficient. Labour’s 2024 manifesto said almost nothing about English local democracy, except that:

“As recommended in the Report of the Commission on the UK’s future, we will establish a new Council of the Nations and Regions”,


and that, in the long term,

“Labour is committed to replacing the House of Lords with an alternative second chamber that is more representative of the regions and nations”.

We already know that serious reform of the Lords has been kicked into the long grass. The new Council of the Nations and Regions is a shadowy body, with the Mayoral Council for England tagged on as almost an afterthought.

We all agree that too much of our Civil Service is based in London. It is in London because that is where too many decisions about local policy and spending are made. The Bill does little to shift policy decisions out of London and nothing to ease the financial crisis of local government, nor to strengthen the ability of mayors or unitary authority leaders to negotiate fiscal priorities with the Treasury and central government. An alternative second chamber might well begin to rebalance UK politics away from overdependence on London, but that is far too radical an idea for Labour to pursue, for all that Gordon Brown recommended it.

The Bill’s answer to the problem of public mistrust and alienation is to offer an elected mayor for a distant strategic authority, accompanied by up to seven commissioners who will be

“independent appointees, made by and accountable to the mayor”,

who will

“act as extensions of the mayor”.

Once in office, strategic authority mayors will be almost as much elective dictators as Prime Ministers. This places excessive trust in mayors and excessive distrust in councillors.

Many of the most effective and useful Members of your Lordships’ House are former councillors. When I first joined the Lords, I rapidly learned to respect their experience and their understanding of how policies are implemented on the ground. Councillors are the elected representatives closest to our alienated and disillusioned citizens. The councillors I know in West Yorkshire, representing wards with 10,000 to 15,000 voters, struggle to get to know the different communities and issues within their enormous wards. This Bill will leave them with even less chance of representing the interests of their voters as it transfers powers upwards from local government to strategic authority mayors.

Clause 60 imposes a duty on local authorities to make

“appropriate arrangements to secure the effective governance of any area of a specified description”,

which it calls a “neighbourhood area”. There is no mention of any direct elections here for neighbourhood representation. Presumably, it envisages area committees of councillors for several wards, roughly the size of a parliamentary constituency. Under that, the vast majority of our citizens will not personally know or recognise any elected representative. Repeated reductions in local authority budgets and programmes have left swathes of our cities without any significant contact with democratic institutions or public services. No wonder so many of them are distrustful and suspicious, and inclined to vote for those who tell them that democracy is a conspiracy.

Labour believes that it is delivery that matters, not participation in public life. Liberal Democrats believe in active citizenship as a fundamental part of democracy. We will press for really local councils to be an essential part of this new structure. It should be a matter of concern for Labour that town councils exist most often in prosperous communities and least often in inner city communities where discontent with democratic politics is at its strongest.

There is a glaring contradiction here between this assumption of passive citizens and the weight the strategic defence review places on mobilising all our citizens in their local communities to strengthen national resilience and respond to threats to national security. We discussed the SDR’s call for a whole-of-society approach in this afternoon’s Questions. The concept follows Swedish and Finnish models—two countries with strong local government and much higher levels of public trust in government. We will never manage to build a whole-of-society approach to national resilience and to the response to threats if most of our population feel left outside democratic life.

The proposal to reintroduce the supplementary vote is a classic example of the half-hearted Labour approach to democratic change. This was Jack Straw’s reluctant compromise for London mayoral elections. He intended it to help Labour by capturing Liberal Democrat votes, thus maintaining the two-party competition between Tories and Labour. Now—as I am sure we all know—we have a five-party system in England, as the polls have consistently shown since last year’s election, and we need to move to a system which reflects the diversity of electoral opinion rather than the conservatism of the current Labour Government.

There are of course proposals in the Bill that we welcome: the much-needed restoration of an effective system of local audit, and the powers to take buses into firmer local control, for example. My noble friends will speak further on these and other clauses. I welcome the Government’s willingness in the Commons to accept some reasoned criticisms and incorporate them in government amendments, and I hope we will see a similarly constructive dialogue here. We on these Benches will do our best to improve this ill-thought-through Bill, while maintaining our commitment to a structure for English governance which would be more democratic and more attuned to England’s local and regional diversity.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I have no interests to declare, other than that I want legislation to be as good as it can be. I very much welcome my noble friend’s amendment because it provides the foundation for my Amendment 251 that would provide for post-legislative scrutiny, which we will come to much later. Too often, Ministers see legislative success in terms of getting a measure on to the statute book. The real measure of success is when the Act delivers what Parliament intended to deliver. To check whether it has done that, post-legislative scrutiny is necessary some years after it has passed.

To assess whether the Act has achieved what it intended, one needs to know clearly what its purpose is—in other words, the basis on which you are undertaking the measurement. This amendment has the great virtue that it stipulates the five purposes that the Bill is intended to deliver. That would provide the measure against which a body set up to engage in post-legislative scrutiny could examine whether it has actually delivered. That is the great value of this amendment and, for that reason, the Government should have the confidence to accept it, as it would show they believe that the Act will deliver what it is designed to do. If they will not accept the amendment, will they bring forward a purpose clause of their own to demonstrate what they believe are the key purposes against which success can be measured?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have no interests to declare. Like the noble Lord, Lord Norton, I am an academic and am interested in clear language, among other things. I was horrified when I first read the Bill by the looseness of its language. Devolution has already been mentioned. The PACAC report some three years ago on the governance of England noted that

“we … refer to what is currently taking place in England as ‘decentralisation’”

rather than devolution, but it is not really effective devolution. This Bill carries on what its predecessor under the Conservative Government was doing in providing a mayoral strategic structure throughout England.

“Local”, “community” and “neighbourhood” are used extremely loosely throughout the Bill. The use of “strategic” implies something that is not local and has to be seen separately from it. Incidentally, in talking about strategic authorities, we enter into the structure of government in the United Kingdom and are talking about constitutional matters—although, with the odd absence of constitution that we have in this country, Governments can muck about with local government in a way that no other constitutional democracy that I am aware of can.

I regard community as very local. In France, the commune is the village, and each commune has a mayor. I think about the ward represented by my colleague the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton; she has five or six separate communities within the one ward. Neighbourhoods are parts of towns or cities, and a neighbourhood is somewhere you can walk around, but the Bill uses those terms to cover much larger areas. That raises questions about its relationship with central government, in setting up a network of strategic authorities.

I have submitted a later amendment that refers to a mayoral council for England; that indeed has been set up by prime ministerial fiat, but is only a pale shadow of the structure for the Council of the Nations and Regions and the mayoral council associated with it, which Gordon Brown usefully proposed some years ago. If we are to have real devolution, there will have to be some mechanism for negotiation between strategic authorities and central government. That is why the absence of any reference to the fiscal issue here also indicates that we are not really dealing with devolution.

The last thing I want to say is that, according to all the opinion polls, we are in a situation in which public trust in national government is remarkably—horrifyingly —low. Public opinion polls also say that public trust in local government is less bad than it is in central government. Strong local government, with councillors whom your average voter might actually know, is one of the ways that one holds democracy together. Colleagues like the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, find themselves trying to represent 15,000 people per ward in a district like Bradford; that is not really effective local democracy. It is very hard for the councillor to know all the electors, let alone for the electors to know the councillors. When we come to the question of town and parish councils, and devolution from strategic authorities to the levels below, we will wish to emphasise that.

I signal that, as we talk about the context of the Bill and strategic authorities, we must first be clear how those strategic authorities relate to central government and, on the other side, how they relate to the single tier of effective local government and to the town and parish councils in which we hope your ordinary voter will find some sense of identity and participation.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

Before I comment on the amendments in this group, I send my very best wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. We had an online meeting with her last week, and I know how frustrated she is not to be able to be part of this Committee’s work at the moment. I hope that she will be able to return to work with us in due course, so please convey our best wishes back to her.

I thank all noble Lords who have continued to engage with me since Second Reading and for the amendments that have been submitted. This House does great work on Bills, as I have experienced on both occasions that I have taken Bills through the House recently, and I am very grateful for that engagement and the work that has been done between Second Reading and Committee. I will start with a brief introduction of my own.

The Bill will deliver a landmark transfer of power out of Westminster to mayors and local leaders, enabling them to unlock growth, transport and infrastructure and deliver the change that we need in our local areas. It will deliver our commitment to a fit, decent and legal local government as the foundation of devolution by establishing, for example, a new local audit office that will transform our broken local audit system. We have committed to transfer power out of Westminster to all levels, which is why the Bill will also empower our communities via a new duty for local authorities to establish effective neighbourhood governance, bringing decision-making closer to communities, and a new community right to buy, which will help our authorities to have the power to do with the assets that they value what they think is the right thing.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, I feel the need to stress that we should not write off deliberative democracy, where people can access information and ideas and come together to reach new conclusions. Let us also stress that the economy—businesses and jobs—is one part of a much larger whole that is the community. Our society needs resources, education, time and health, so a simplistic, one-directional look at what our communities need will not answer our issues.

It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, who made some very telling points about how this is a seriously half-baked Bill. Your Lordships’ Committee is going to have to add quite a bit of heat to get it anything like ready for the table. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and of the National Association of Local Councils. I too wish the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, well and hope that we can see her back soon.

I start with the noble Baroness’s Amendment 95, as it demonstrates why we need many of the amendments in this group. It sets out in clear terms that the role of local government is to provide “democratic, place-based leadership” and it should not be

“solely a delivery arm of central government”.

Increasingly, that is what local government has been forced into being through the decades-long power grab by Westminster, accompanied by swingeing austerity that has left councils unable to carry out pretty well anything but their statutory responsibilities, which are of course determined by Westminster. That is a major driver of the extremely high disillusionment with politics and why the slogan “Take back control” was so popular in 2016.

I set all that out because my Amendment 9 seeks to add to the list of areas of competence. Most of the amendments in this group, as well as Amendment 95, would take the Government in the direction they say they want this Bill to go. I will focus on Amendment 9, but, regarding Amendment 8 from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, on community engagement and empowerment, I have a lot of later amendments on this which are not necessarily contradictory but potentially complementary. I also support the community energy amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. Last night in the Chamber, I spoke about community energy; we are just not seeing the driving force that we need to bring renewables to local communities, which surely has to be a crucial part of the areas of competence of the new strategic authorities.

My Amendment 9 addresses food security and poverty. In terms of local food production, according to a recent report from the CPRE, 1,7 00 farms have disappeared around the edges of towns and cities since 2010. We have seen those peri-urban areas stop being food-producing areas when they should be at the centre of local food systems. We have seen a massive cut in the number of county farms; according to figures from 2019, over a couple of decades they have gone from 426,000 acres to about 200,000 acres. We have seen councils’ control over local food systems hacked away.

We know—this is why poverty and food fit together very well—that we have enormous spatial inequalities, arguably the highest in the OECD. That has been increasing over three decades. There is an understandable feeling in Cumbria, Cornwall, Northumberland and north Devon that Westminster does not understand their poverty problem or the reality of their lives. They are right. We cannot fix the problems of each of those places by making one rule from Westminster; tackling poverty in those places has to be a local responsibility, with power and, importantly, resources to go with it. We have been through regional development agencies, local enterprise partnerships, town groups and the wildly unpopular investment zones. There has been a huge democratic deficit in all those systems, and they all have failed.

I draw on two reports from the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. The first is The False Economy of Big Food and the Case for a New Food Economy, which focuses on how what is colloquially known as “big food”—large centralised systems—is making us sick. It is the first report I have seen to have calculated the estimated total cost of our broken food system: £268 billion. A lot of that is the costs of healthcare, welfare support, social care and loss of productivity, all of which are having to be met by local authorities. Those are the costs—surely we need to put the solution and a reduction of those costs together.

We have lots to do here in Westminster. We have an extremely uneven playing field with a handful of big supermarkets and big food manufacturers entirely dominating the markets, throwing their weight around against local communities and farmers. Westminster needs to act, but how are we going to fill in the gaps? What are we going to put in all these different communities up and down the land? There is no one answer. Westminster does not have the answers.

I stress that about 22% of people in the UK are in food poverty. That means people who have a limited opportunity to feed themselves well, often relying on food banks, et cetera. UKRI is funding the Food Systems Equality project, involving systems in local communities to ensure healthy, sustainable food that reflects cultural preferences. We have recognition from one arm of government that the solution to our food issues has to be local—that is what UKRI is doing—but we have to put the power into local and strategic authorities to deal with that.

I pick one example of where something great is happening. An organisation called Growing Kent & Medway is an inspiring effort to create healthy and sustainable food systems in what has traditionally been the garden of England. It is place based, with a huge number of small independent businesses. I have tasted some great cheese and cider here in the House when they have come to visit us. But if we are going to have those kinds of systems all around the country in each area, they have to be supported by the strategic authorities.

Finally, I bring together food and poverty issues, including local food security in the UK. There is an interesting piece of work by the Royal Geographical Society, which carried out a visualisation of what food insecurity looks like in different parts of the country. It is useful to have this as a map, because you can see what different colours come out on the map showing the difference in different places. Food insecurity is variable across the country because of the levels of poverty, but the way in which people’s foodscapes are configured are different in different places. There is no way in which Westminster can find the solution for each place, because the solution in each place is different. There is nothing more fundamental for government to ensure that people are fed, but the Government in Westminster have to let go and let local communities find their own solutions.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we have been talking about public safety under Amendment 5. I want to check with the Minister how far the Bill is linked to some of the issues with which other departments in Whitehall are dealing. We all know that all the complicated policy problems are cross-departmental. Chapter 6 of the Strategic Defence Review was about a whole-society approach to home defence and home security, and the need for a broad approach to the multiple threats that we now face, including terrorism, climate change and hybrid warfare of one sort or another. The review stressed that we need local resources, knowledge and co-operation in order to make sure that we face some of those threats. So, I am glad to see public safety here.

I recall that when the Salisbury poisoning took place, the public health officer in Salisbury played a vital and impressive role in sorting out its response. I also remember that, when the Covid pandemic struck, the Government outsourced the placing of testing centres to two large companies, one of which had its headquarters in Miami and made a remarkable number of mistakes in where to place the centres. We need not just strategic but local authorities to be leading on this. I hope that the Minister can assure us that public safety is one of the dimensions with which we are concerned.

I am struck that it has been eight months since the Strategic Defence Review was published. It also said in chapter 6 that we needed to start a “national conversation” on how we respond to multiple threats. I have not heard any of that national conversation yet. I hope that the Minister’s department and the Ministry of Defence are in active conversation about how this dimension is built back into our society and our government structure and how the resources—because it costs money—will be provided to local authorities, local civil rescue services, local fire services and police forces to make sure that we can face these multiple threats to our public safety.

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[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to add a small voice to the chorus of support for these amendments. I do so from the perspective of my role as the owner of a cultural institution in Devon and my work on the Exeter place partnership, which has been particularly successful in encouraging arts and heritage activities within the city over recent years, such as Radio 1’s Big Weekend, the Rugby World Cup and the Women’s Rugby World Cup. It has been a tremendous success for the city.

I do not want to repeat what has been so excellently stated by many noble Lords. It does not need repeating. But there is one area to consider that maybe has not been emphasised: the importance for the strategic authorities created under this Bill of having competency over the arts and creative industries within their region. If they do not have the competency over these areas within their region, obviously someone else is going to, and that will be a central authority. That is going to homogenise and fail to develop the cultural identity of the strategic authority region. If we can bestow that core competency on the strategic authority, we will see the identity of that strategic authority grow and improve. It will better sustain the health and vibrancy of the strategic authority itself—not just the region but the strategic authority—and we should think of that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches very much support the inclusion of this measure—above all because, if it is enlisted as one of the areas of competence, it will strengthen the argument that strategic authorities will have to make with the all-powerful Treasury that this is one of the funding elements that must be included.

I declare an interest: I live in Saltaire, which is a world heritage site. We are an open world heritage site, which means that we cannot charge for entry. The delicacy of our relations with Bradford Council, with a very strapped budget in terms of providing the resources to cope with the tourists and visitors, is very much one of the things we have to struggle with. As other noble Lords have said, Bradford has just had the most successful City of Culture year. It has done a huge amount for social cohesion and morale—indeed, for all the things the noble Lord, Lord Mawson, was talking about earlier, in terms of expanding people’s horizons and bringing people together.

Culture has been funded through a range of different streams. We all know about and remember the battles with Arts Council England about funding areas outside London. We have seen the way in which local councils used to pull cultural elements together through education in schools, local music arrangements and so on. They have dismantled those music hubs, which have been played around with—they have been constructed and put together, then taken apart—and schools have become very separate. If we are to build back to local intervention, local help and regional support, culture needs to be stressed as one of the things that is of enormous benefit to all of us, both socially and economically. It has been squeezed as councils at all levels have had to squeeze their budgets; they have found that culture is one of the things that has to go, as other things seem more important immediately, but it leaves a huge gap in the long run.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, before I speak to these amendments, I have a point of clarification: I believe that my noble friend Lord Parkinson was referring to Bristol, not Ipswich.

The amendments in the names of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, would add the arts, creative industries, cultural services and heritage as an area of competence. The noble Earl has long been a vocal advocate for the cultural and creative sectors; his contributions to these debates and their economic, social and civic value are well recognised by the Committee. The case made by the noble Earl is compelling, as is the case made by the noble Baroness.

Cultural policy is most effective when it is shaped locally, with the flexibility to reflect the distinct histories, assets and ambitions of local areas; we have heard this from pretty much every noble Lord who has spoken today. Taken together, these amendments ask an important question: what role do the Government envisage for culture within the devolution framework? The Bill as drafted is silent on this point. Many combined authorities already treat culture as a strategic priority; local leaders would welcome clarity that they may continue to do so within the new statutory framework.

As with earlier groups of amendments, the issue here is not simply whether culture matters—few in this Committee would dispute that, I think—but whether the Government’s model of devolution is sufficiently flexible and ambitious to allow strategic authorities to support and grow the cultural life of their areas. These amendments invite the Government to set out their thinking and explain whether the omission of culture from Clause 2 is deliberate or merely an oversight. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 29th January 2026 Grand Committee

I look forward to hearing more from the Minister on how the Government can act positively to fulfil the intent of the White Paper on pan-regional collaboration and support regions to ensure these bodies are set up to drive forward economic development and ultimately support the wider growth ambitions of the Government.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 102. Before I start, I must tell the Minister that, when I went home from the last session of this Committee, I found my wife watching an old episode of “Yes, Prime Minister”. The Prime Minister’s Cabinet Secretary and Treasury Secretary were discussing the threat of real regional government to Whitehall control, and how they needed make sure that some regions were set up sufficiently diversely to ensure that Whitehall and the Treasury maintained control. It deepened my already deep scepticism about whether this Bill will really achieve devolution or not.

Like others, this amendment talks about the problems of making sure that, at the regional and subregional level, we co-ordinate as far as possible. If I understand the purpose of the Bill, we will end up in England with somewhere between 30 and 35 strategic authorities with mayors. In some areas, they will meet the urban conglomerations; in others, they will be artificial, imposed on different counties. I note, however, that the Home Secretary is now proposing that we have in England perhaps some six to eight police authorities. At present, in Yorkshire where we wanted to have a regional single strategic authority, we now have four mayors and four police forces, so it fits relatively well. What the Home Secretary now proposes will tear that apart and make much more difficult again any sense of regional and local democratic control of the police. The next restructure of the NHS might well do something similar on a departmental basis. Can the Minister say how far there is any attempt in Whitehall to make sure that, when restructuring takes place, it does as far as possible attempt to make sure that boundaries coincide rather than cut across each other, as they have so often done?

Nevertheless, we recognise that there will always be different levels at which one has to co-operate. If you live in West Yorkshire, the trans-Pennine region is extremely important. If we ever get round to building Northern Powerhouse Rail, which will probably not be in my lifetime, we will have created a new region which is Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, and all those between it. That will require a range of different authorities. The water catchment areas are unavoidably difficult. We have spent ages in my region discussing how far the Humberside region fits into either Yorkshire, Lincolnshire or wherever. There will be a need for co-ordination.

The question I would like to leave with the Minister—perhaps she can come back to us—is this. How, following this restructuring of local and subregional government, will they do their best to ensure that, in the next set of restructuring of other bits of public agencies, we will try as far as we can to recognise that a sense of place and regional identity is fulfilled by ensuring that, where possible, those things coincide?

To finish, I just say to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, that I once spent a Saturday morning in Huddersfield marketplace—I used to be president of the Huddersfield Liberal association—trying to help people with their vote. At least half of the people who came up to me said, “Can you tell me what constituency I’m in? I do not know”. The constituency boundaries or their names had been changed, which is confusing for local people. It is all part of why public trust in our Government has weakened. The sense of place has also weakened. This Bill should be doing something to improve that, but I rather fear that it does not.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, Amendments 103 and 104 appear under my name. I confess that I can take no credit for drafting them; they started with my honourable friend Siân Berry in the other place. I take note of the Whips’ injunction on brevity, so I will largely focus on those two amendments. They may look rather long, with pages and pages, but they have the same injunction repeated three times relative to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act, the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act and the Greater London Authority Act, so they are actually much shorter than they look.

As the proposed titles state, they would create a duty on mayors to establish a deliberative citizens’ assembly within six months of being elected to inform strategic decision-making. That word “strategic” is important, because we have seen it demonstrated again and again that citizens’ assemblies provide a great way to address the big strategic questions. Proposed new subsection (6) in each amendment states that the mayor must take into account any recommendation made by the assembly, and publish a response.

Assemblies have really taken off up and down the country, if in a very piecemeal fashion—perhaps despite Westminster, rather than because of it. I am holding previous Governments responsible for that, but the current Government now have a chance to turn over a fresh leaf and act towards democracy by encoding citizens’ assemblies in this Bill. The organisation Involve, which has organised many of these, stresses how citizens’ assemblies are a way to

“strengthen legitimacy, foster trust, and solve complex problems”.

As it said in a recent blog post, it is a

“powerful answer to the breakdown in trust in our elected representatives and the wider crisis of democracy”.

Just to give noble Lords a sense of the kinds of government organisations that have been making use of citizens’ assemblies, Involve has organised various events along these lines for Innovate UK, UKRI, the Care Quality Commission and the West Midlands Combined Authority. There is a very long list; that is just a sample of them.

Under different structures and local initiatives, one area where citizens’ assemblies have proved particularly powerful is in looking at climate action. We have seen many local authorities set net-zero targets and communities have got together through citizens’ assemblies to work out how to do that. I take two examples of very different ones. In Kendal, right in the depths of the Covid pandemic, the town council organised a climate change citizens’ jury that was regarded locally as very successful. Then, in another place, very different politically and demographically, there was the Westminster citizens’ climate assembly in 2023. This is something that is taking off, but in a piecemeal fashion. This is a chance to really put a focus on deliberative democracy at the heart of this Bill.

Finally, on citizens’ assemblies, I draw attention to the powerful speech by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on the lead amendment in this group and the really powerful testimony from a group called Citizens for Culture, which is based in the south-west. It talks about championing citizens’ assemblies in terms of arts culture and says that:

“When diverse voices come together to learn, deliberate and decide, it leads to decisions that are more legitimate, more inclusive, and more connected to the lived experience of local people”.


Culture, brought together with a citizens’ assembly, creates a vital space where communities can make meaning, build identities and imagine new futures. I think that expresses the idea very well.

I can see the Whip looking at me so let me just say something about Amendment 104. There are many different amendments, both in this group and in previous groups, about mayors having to work with—in this case—local public service providers and other local government. This amendment would provide one more way of doing that. We have heard from all sides of the Committee that that is a really essential and necessary thing that is missing from the Bill; I am not attached to any particular way of doing it, but this would be one way of doing it.