Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the statement, made on 8 June 2015 during consideration of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill by the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government, Baroness Williams of Trafford (HL Deb, cols 652–3), that “Any one-size-fits-all model is destined to failure. Every city and council is different. Through the decentralisation that the Bill will enable, each city will be empowered to forge its own path, to play to its own strengths and to find its own creative solutions to the particular challenges that they face" remains government policy.

Those comments of the noble Baroness set out one of the four key characteristics of the Government’s approach to devolution described in the Department’s written evidence to the Communities and Local Government Committee which was published on the inquiry page of the Committee’s web site along with its report “Devolution: the next five years and beyond. First Report of Session 2015-16” (HC 369).