English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Siân Berry Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I was fortunate to be part of the Bill Committee for this monstrous Bill—monstrous in size, I should clarify—so my summer was spent digesting each and every clause, and seeking to understand whether it does fulfil its ambitious title and move powers closer to communities. I must be clear that the last Government started the process of creating regional mayors and limiting the ability to access funding through this mechanism. I recall visiting the former Secretary of State in his office in Marsham Street, alongside my then council chief executive Graham Farrant and the former Member for Bournemouth West, to seek the zoning of Bournemouth town centre as the first retail-led investment zone, only to be told that unless I presented it as a devolution programme, there would be no money. We have been here before.

Devolution was expected in this Parliament, though perhaps not in this form, and it does have the potential to improve lives. A problem arises with this Bill, because for many people in England, it gives with one hand and takes with the other. Yes, it shifts some power and money from Westminster to the regions, but it abolishes the very councils that deliver vital services and completely ignores the hyper-local councils that residents know best: their town and parish councils. I know that the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes), loves hearing my references to towns and parishes.

This Bill could and should be so much stronger. As noted by the shadow Minister, the Bill Committee tabled many sensible amendments, and it is disappointing that so few have been accepted. Let me highlight just a few that sit in today’s grouping. I welcome new clause 29, in the name of the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry), which would require mayors and strategic authorities to act in accordance with the Climate Change Act 2008 and other environmental laws.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

May I invite the hon. Member to move new clause 29? I do not know if that is possible at this stage.

[Vikki Slade]

I am very happy to move new clause 29, should the hon. Member not have the opportunity to—

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Jamie Oliver played a significant part in the last Labour Government through his TV show “Jamie’s School Dinners” and his Feed Me Better campaign which outlawed turkey twizzlers from our children’s lunches. With the Government showing such commitment to healthy childhoods, I hope they will agree to work with Jamie Oliver again by accepting my new clause 74, which is also championed by the Town and Country Planning Association. New clause 74 simply notes that councils should be able to control what sits on the hoardings on private land, enabling them to regulate advertising and include duties on them to use that power in relation to health inequalities. Devolution should truly empower local authorities and local communities. I hope the Government will accept this new clause, and the other amendments I have tabled, as the Bill passes through its remaining stages.

[Siân Berry]

I, too, was pleased to sit on the Public Bill Committee, but sadly I cannot spare the time to review everyone’s performance, so I will get straight to the point.

My amendments for new combined authorities in parts 1 and 2 of the Bill include amendments 91 to 93, which add action on poverty and socioeconomic inequality to the areas of competence of new mayors in clause 2. The Government have promised again and again to enact part 1 of the Equality Act 2010 in respect of a socioeconomic duty for England. If that were done, these duties would need to be created in the Bill. To leave them out for brand new authorities is such a gap, and I find it hard to understand why the Government are resisting. I hope that either this will be taken up in the other place and debated again or the section will be enacted for England imminently, such that it has to be done through Government amendments there. I would like to hear that promised by Ministers today.

I mainly want to focus on and propose my new clause 29. This would help every new mayor support the principles in the Climate Change Act 2008 in a fair way. The Climate Change Committee has noted the yawning gap between national ambition and local action, and the Local Government Association has called for that gap to be closed through the Bill. We need every mayor agreeing on the action they will take—their fair contribution to national targets—and being empowered to deliver for our crucial carbon budgets and lifesaving climate resilience.

My new clause would also help every new mayor to support the principles in the Environment Act 2021 for nature protection and restoration, and action on pollution, wildlife and the ecosystem that is our only home. It would also help every new mayor to support the principles in Ella’s law, the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill. The Bill awaits Second Reading and comes from cross-party work with campaigners from the Healthy Air Coalition and Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, the mother of Ella, whose death from asthma was the first to be recorded as due to air pollution.

New clause 29 is supported by the UK100 group of local authorities, the Climate Emergency campaign, the Better Planning Coalition, Wildlife and Countryside Link, the Healthy Air Coalition, Friends of the Earth and a host of others. An open letter has been signed by over 450 local councillors from all parties and by council leaders. Hundreds of businesses have written in more than once to Ministers and many of our constituents have been contacting MPs, too. I am very grateful to every hon. Member, cross party, who has signed it. The case is clear. I intend to press new clause 29 to a Division, so that we can, on all sides of the House, vote for the climate, nature and clean air duties that are so vital. I hope that the Government will pledge clearly today to introduce them all as full duties at the next stage in the other place.

In Committee, I also worked with campaigners to fill a big gap in health determinants set out in the Bill, to which new mayors would have to plan action under clause 43, the health improvement and health inequalities duty. The Government left out of the Bill any environmental impacts on health. I argued strongly for that in Committee and have again tabled amendments 87 to 90 to fix that. I am pleased and grateful to see that Ministers have listened to the evidence and added their own Government amendments 116 to 118 naming environmental factors, including air quality and access to green space and bodies of water as the health determinants they are.

However, my original amendments have not been withdrawn, as they spelled out that environmental factors should also specifically include water pollution and land pollution. This would have brought the goals of Zane’s law into the work done by new mayors to document and plan strategically to avoid horrific problems with contaminated land of the kind that led to the sudden death of Zane Gbangbola, when floods brought poisoned gas from contaminated landfill into his home in Chertsey in Surrey. I would like to hear explicitly from the Minister today that the phrase “environmental factors” in the new Government amendments includes that kind of contamination, and that the amendments therefore bring parts of Zane’s law into the Bill.

Finally, I want the Minister—and the Lords in the other place—to look seriously at the need for amendments 159 and 160, which aim to ensure that the local growth plans from new mayors will help protect culture in a strategic way. I have worked with the Music Venue Trust on the amendments, and its annual report each year makes awful reading, as our grassroots music venues suffer and close due to business pressures, unfair business rates valuations and planning and licensing issues. Those issues could be tackled effectively using the new strategies and powers of combined authorities and mayors.

The amendments cover not just music but cultural and community spaces of all kinds, including theatres and other performance venues. I believe that all areas of the country will benefit from the amendments being added at a future stage of the Bill.

[Joe Robertson]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in that I am a serving Isle of Wight councillor. I want to speak to new clause 48 in my name and new clause 39 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage). The two new clauses seek to do similar things.

I thank Members across the House who have signed new clause 48, not only Opposition Members but those on the Government Benches, as well as from the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. It is my position that this support shows that new clause 48 is an objectively reasonable amendment to seek. It is about the principle of fairness: it ensures that the ferry services that connect communities all over this country of islands connect those islands, and the communities that live close to bodies of water, including rivers, under the same fare framework that trains and buses operate under.

New clause 48 sits in the following context: for generations, for decades, there has been a political consensus that train operators, whether they be state providers or private businesses, operate under a framework of regulation and licensing, and that Government have a say in how train fares and timetables are structured. The same goes for bus services. Indeed, even trains and buses in the private sector have, to a greater or lesser extent, been subsidised by the public purse.

Ferry providers in this country sit outside that consensus of regulation and licensing in public transport, so there is no comprehensive regulation that sets down how ferry operators may work. That has led to my constituents on the Isle of Wight relying on privatised, unregulated, unlicensed, foreign-owned, debt-laden companies for essential travel. Those companies are so profitable that they are regularly exchanged from private equity group to private equity group, including the Canadian pension fund. That is because private equity understands that it is a predictable form of income generation, as the service users—Isle of Wight residents—have no alternative but to use the ferry companies they control.

There is no effective market, as the private sector operates properly only when there is competition. However, the bar to entry into the ferry services market is so high—a company would need to buy land and ferries, and ensure compliance with all maritime law—that there is no alternative to the existing providers. I use my constituency as an example. One provider, now called Wightlink, used to be part of British Rail, when British Rail was a public service; the provider was unfortunately sold off without any obligation on it, and it is private equity investment that has benefited from that.

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[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

I thank my right hon. Friend for raising new clause 29, which I was just coming to, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) and other hon. Friends for championing the issue. We are clear that mayors and strategic authorities have an important role to play in the fight against the climate and ecological crisis. That is why climate and environment are included in the competences that will sit with strategic authorities under the Bill. We already have mayoral strategic authorities that are subject to the biodiversity duty. They are required to work with their constituent authorities to deliver air quality action plans. We are already seeing on the ground that our mayors and our strategic authorities are in the vanguard and are pushing, and I imagine they will continue to build on this area as they accumulate powers and more levers over this area.

We support the intention behind the poverty and equality duty, as I said in Committee. We think it is a thread that runs through the Bill. Any mayor and any strategic authority will fundamentally care about poverty and reducing inequality, and the functions within the Bill are the enablers of that.

[Siân Berry]

Will the Minister give way?

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

I will not give way, because I think Members are getting rather irate and everyone wants to go home. I will finish with Cornwall and the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon). He has been a passionate and consistent advocate for Cornwall. We recognise Cornwall’s minority status and we will continue to safeguard that. We cannot accept the amendment, because it cuts across the powers that we want to put with mayors. I reassure him and other Members from Cornwall that we are committed to working to strengthen the devolution deal that we have already done with Cornwall to ensure that we are unlocking opportunity in the area.