English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Miatta Fahnbulleh and Paul Holmes

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Paul Holmes]

Q I have a quick follow-up question, particularly to Councillor Hicks: would it be fair to say that the policy on the local government reorganisation is a soft target, certainly, but it was portrayed as a hard target to local authority leaders at the time?

Matthew Hicks: We certainly felt in the beginning that Suffolk, with a population of 750,000, was right in the middle of the range and would be an ideal candidate for one unitary.

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

Q I have a question for Councillors Bentley and Hicks first on unitarisation, and then, if I may, a question to Councillor Craig on strategic authorities. Obviously you are going through the process of working hard with colleagues to put together a proposal for unitarisation. I am really interested in your perspectives and insights about how you—because we are putting it in the hands of local areas to do the heavy lifting—and we get that right. Critically, we are not doing this for fun; we are doing it because we fundamentally believe it will drive better services and better outcomes. I am interested in your perspectives, from your individual areas, about the sorts of impact that you think we can deliver if we get this right.

Kevin Bentley: Thank you, and welcome to your new role; I am sure we will be seeing a lot of each other the coming months, Minister.

In Essex, there are 15 councils. If you want to look at councils of any shape or size, come to Essex; we pretty much have them all, and a lot of them, as well. And while there are four different business cases coming from Essex—and you would expect that, as it is a huge county in terms of population and people have differing views—each has been done thoughtfully and carefully. The overriding message is that the 15 councils are made up of all political parties and none, and there is common cause. No one has fallen out. There is no argument. There is no row going on at all. We meet regularly in something we call the Essex leaders and chief execs meeting—I am talking about Essex here; I will talk about the LGA in just a second—and certainly our experience is of collaboration.

We may have different views from the Government for them to consider, but the understanding that we need to do things differently is really there. That goes for all political parties. We understand that the current system cannot carry on, because it will just run out of money if we are not careful. We are already seeing that.

The one thing to say is that everyone across the sector should be allowed to have their view and decide what is right for their area. When I started as a leader, the one question that I continually asked myself, and still do today, is, “What does this mean for the public and does it improve their lives?” Unless you can answer that question affirmatively, you should stop. So far, for me the answer has been yes—yes, we can do it better than we currently do it—and I think colleagues are in the same position.

It is also important that our colleagues in local government across the country consult not only with each other but with the public to ask whether we can do this better. If they believe we cannot, okay, but I think they will find that we can. The most important thing is to not lose sight of why we are doing it. It is for the public and the people of this country, not for politicians and councils.

Matthew Hicks: I would echo that. For us, it is about building on the experience of others who have been through this. We have been out to places such as Cumbria to ask for advice on what they learned and what works well. We have learned how others delivered on business cases or struggled to deliver on some of the items they included.

Ultimately, for us, this is about a new and more positive relationship between local government and our residents and businesses; it is about doing things differently. With the two cases in Suffolk, ultimately, everyone has the interests of our residents at heart. The big issue is how you analyse the data that people are using, and the forecasting. That is where we are seeing the major variants, but the delivery and what we want to deliver are not too different.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Miatta Fahnbulleh and Paul Holmes

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

Q If I can pick up on the point about scrutiny and accountability, there are two parts to my question. Some evidence has been raised in these sessions about the connection between people and communities and the mayors who serve them. We have had a decade and a half of this experiment, so I am interested in your views on whether the claim of a democratic deficit—which I do not buy—is about something genuine in the experience we have seen.

Secondly, we need to ensure strong scrutiny and accountability for any institution. We heard in the last session about some of the challenges with local government accountability and scrutiny. I am interested in your views on what we need to do to strengthen that and the provisions in the Bill to build on that.

Zoë Billingham: First, to your point on the democratic engagement of mayors, I do think, and I stand by the evidence that suggests this, that the more powers that mayors get, the more they are able to demonstrate to the public how they can tailor and do things differently in their places, according to what the public want. That is essential for the responsiveness of democracy; therefore, I also think that votes at 16 and the return to a supplementary vote are helpful additional aspects to this Bill, in terms of demonstrating that the Government are serious about broadening engagement with mayoral combined authorities.

I would also pick up the proposal in the Bill for neighbour area committees. Something along those lines is essential. We know that, as currently drafted, the Bill is proposing full unitarisation of local authorities to a 500,000 population level, which is far larger than we see in local government in our European counterparts, for example. There is a question about how those unitaries engage with those communities, not on an ad hoc basis, but as an ongoing community conversation. I wonder whether, for instance, the neighbourhood area committees could be predominantly made up of community representatives and young people, so that they do not replicate the district level that the Bill proposes to abolish, but instead create an ongoing, democratic renewal at that local level.

Secondly, to pick up your point on scrutiny, this is essential. If you speak to local leaders, mayors included, they are absolutely game for it. It is not something that central Government are imposing; it is an essential part of both enabling the further devolution of power and resources, and ensuring that the current model is not undermined because there is not enough scrutiny in place for what is already there. I totally support the proposal for a local public accounts committee—we have built on that idea ourselves at IPPR North, looking at mayoral accounts committees, which bring together overview and scrutiny, and local public accounts committees.

We think that those committees need to represent place leadership; this is no longer narrow lines of inquiry about certain budgetary lines or solely about audit. It must be much broader. This is about place-based leadership, not only by the mayor and the mayoral cabinet, but by other public leaders locally who could be brought in front of such committees. We think that is a really important thing to go hand in hand with the future of devolution.

Professor Denham: May I pick up and develop a couple of those points? There is no doubt that the Bill has a danger of an upwards movement of power: things are being moved from local authorities to strategic authorities and mayors have more autonomy. I understand why that is being done, but the Bill needs to build in a healthy counterpoint to that. I, too, would go beyond the neighbourhood governance proposal, which sounds a bit narrow and a bit prescriptive, as though the same model will work everywhere.

Sir David and I proposed what we called community empowerment plans, and we proposed them even when we did not know there was going to be local government reorganisation. The strategic authorities should have a legal duty to set out how they will engage with local people across the whole range of activity—I should have declared an interest, in that I am the honorary president of the Hampshire Association of Local Councils—

[Paul Holmes]

Hear, hear!

Professor Denham: So I am familiar with town and parish councils, and there are some very good ones, including in Mr Holmes’s constituency. But they are not uniform everywhere within the area, so a single prescriptive approach is unlikely to work.

There has also been, in the last 10 or 15 years, a transformation in our understanding of deliberative, participative engagement with local communities by many local authorities. We need both the strategic authorities and the unitary authorities to set out, in a document that should be challengeable, how they propose to do that. I think that would be useful.

Secondly—I will embarrass her—Zoë has written the best policy paper on local public accounts committees, so I will not say any more about that, except that I agree with Gareth Davies in an earlier panel: the challenge here is not local council audit, but the whole of public spending across a mayoral area. I was delighted to see the new Secretary of State backing the concept of total place, which is something I was involved in as a Minister 15 years ago; but, if that is going to work, you cannot combine that with upwards accountability to departmental accounting officers.

Local authority scrutiny has very good people, but it is not up to the job. You have to create a new local institution, the local public accounts committee and, picking up on what Mayor Houchen said earlier, make the chief executive within the area the local accounting officer. So you have a complete audit model at local level that is not then channelled upwards through departmental accounting officers. I think that is what we need to work towards. Those two things would not only empower local people, but ensure that you have local scrutiny of what is being spent and what is being done with their money.