House of Lords

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Thursday 23 April 2026

11:00

Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of Chester.

Oaths and Affirmations

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

11:05

Several noble Lords took the oath or made the solemn affirmation, and signed an undertaking to abide by the Code of Conduct.

Steel Sector

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:07

Asked by

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to incentivise investment in and strengthen the long-term competitiveness of the steel sector.

[The Minister of State, Department for Business and Trade and HM Treasury (Lord Stockwood) (Lab)]

My Lords, steel is a vital component of the UK economy. That is why the Government have published their first ever steel strategy, underpinned by up to £2.5 billion of funding, to create stable, competitive conditions and to secure the long-term future of British steel-making. The strategy will attract investment to strengthen long-term competitiveness. It will also introduce a robust new trade measure to counter the damaging effects of global overcapacity, and reflect the importance of steel for critical national infrastructure and defence. It will also lower barriers to investment, through energy, grid and planning reforms, and mobilise demand for UK-made steel.

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his Answer but, on that “robust” trade measure, can he say what proportion of UK steel imports of finished steel will be covered by the proposed reduced quotas and increased tariffs? Is it the intention to exclude Tata Steel and other finishing mills from import tariffs on their semi-finished feedstocks?

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for the advanced sight of his follow-up question; I also commend the forensic, technical nature of the Question. The trade measure to which he refers covers 20 categories of steel, including all steel that is made in the UK. That includes bright bar, wire and stainless steel. Categories that were not covered in the steel safeguard are all now in scope. This means that the measure protects 100% of steel production domestically in the UK, whereas the steel safeguard protected only 96%. We engaged extensively with industry when developing this measure, and have sought to balance the need to protect the domestic steel-making industry while maintaining secure, reliable supply chains for downstream businesses. We will continue to engage closely with industry as we implement the measure, and we have committed to reviewing it in the next 12 months to ensure that it is entirely fit for purpose.

[Lord Jones (Lab)]

My Lord, can my noble friend the Minister indicate what further helpful measures there may be for this beleaguered industry in terms of energy costs? Green taxes, which are necessary, have dealt severe blows to the long-term prospects for steel, and in Wales we have seen the erosion of tens of thousands of steel jobs. I also ask him to bear in mind that rail connections between steel producers are crucial: the giant steel plant at Port Talbot in south Wales, for instance, sends a daily steel train 150 miles to north-east Wales’s Shotton works. On that train, which is 26 huge wagons long, is hot-rolled coil. If the hot-rolled coil does not reach Shotton, there will be problems. I hope that he will bear that in mind.

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

On energy prices, the transition to green energy is absolutely critical for the sector. We remain as committed as always to sovereign energy supplies that can withstand the global shocks we are seeing through Iran and the war in Ukraine. We have that commitment and the only way we can bring down energy prices is with secure domestic supply. The noble Lord made a further point around the steel strategy in Wales. I refer him to the steel strategy; it is important that our steel industry is protected in the whole of the UK. The infrastructure he mentioned remains critical to ensuring that our steel industry can be competitive in the long term.

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, would the Minister agree that steel produced by the electric arc furnace method cannot match the quality standards of steel produced in traditional blast furnaces? Therefore, British industry will still need to import a large proportion of its requirements from countries which still permit the operation of traditional blast furnaces. Can the Minister tell the House what proportion of British steel will need to be imported in that way?

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

On the consultation with the industry, the industry clearly states that arc furnaces are the future. They have a lower cost of production and lower overheads in terms of manpower. I cannot give an exact number on steel production. We are trying to make sure that we have the right amount of trade barriers in place to protect our own industry while allowing business to be competitive and import the steel that they require. That balance will be critical, but we will remain in consultation with the industry and review that if it does not satisfactorily prop up the industry and make it fit for the future.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I return to energy prices, which are obviously one of the main constraints for the growth of the British steel industry. Earlier in the week, the Government announced that they are breaking the link between gas and electricity prices, with a view to reducing electricity prices. To what extent does this new measure impact the steel industry in a positive sense? To the extent that it will, how quickly does the noble Lord expect the measure to take effect?

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

Energy supply and the sovereignty of our energy supply remain critical. All departments are currently looking at measures where we need to intervene in the near term to protect those industries with high energy demands, and to come up with the right practical solutions for the long term, which is our transition to renewables. That is a live conversation. We have had many meetings in the past week, and I think we will hear something in the coming days.

[Baroness O’Grady of Upper Holloway (Lab)]

My Lords, both sides of the steel industry have welcomed government plans to speed up grid connections and make it easier for developers to build their own grid connections. All that will help to boost investment. Will my noble friend the Minister commit to regular updates on progress on those commitments so that we know that it is happening? Will he join me in congratulating the “Save our Steel” campaign for defending jobs and the progress it has made so far?

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for her question. The issue of grid connections partly sits in my department; the House might be interested to know that we have 800 gigawatts of demand in new projects to 60 gigawatts of supply. Grid connections and making sure that the grid is fit for the future will be a massive part of what we do. We also have a prioritisation process that helps prioritise the highest value projects, not just economically but socially. I would be happy to update the House on that.

As to the “Save our Steel” campaign, it is worth stating that the steel factory in Scunthorpe is close to where I grew up and I have many friends who work in the industry. I commend that organisation and the work that it does in ensuring that we do not lose sight of the fact this is not just an economic story for the UK but about real lives and communities. The work it has done has been excellent.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, the Government’s steel strategy and procurement guidance require all government departments to consult UK Steel’s digital catalogue and consider whether the national security exemption in Schedule 2 to the Procurement Act 2023 applies. However, at the same time, the Government are asking the Ministry of Defence to find £3.5 billion in savings, even as our Armed Forces are being asked to prepare for a far more dangerous world. In the circumstances, does the Minister agree that this is a wholly perverse bureaucratic requirement to place on the MoD? If the Government truly accept that national security must now come first, will they exempt the MoD from these domestic steel procurement requirements so that it can source steel rapidly?

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises a critical question around how we balance the national resilience of our steel industry with security concerns; that balance is paramount. We remain in conversation with the MoD about making sure that this does not have a prohibitive impact on its procurement and access to products. Equally, it is really important that we utilise the UK Government’s procurement processes to ensure that we are prioritising UK products and services to meet the demand of all our government departments. There are a number of initiatives working on procurement, but I agree that we need to make sure that that perverse incentive does not drive the wrong behaviours.

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

Will the Government make any payments to the Chinese owners of the Scunthorpe works, or take on any of their debts, bearing in mind that, to effect the transfer, there will be enormous continuing losses to the taxpayer?

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

The Government remain in positive and constructive conversations with Jingye. I know that the noble Lord would not expect me to comment on the specifics of that deal. All I can say is that we are hoping for a positive outcome. The real importance for us is ensuring that we have a steel industry that is fit for the future and for private investment. That is our target aim at the moment.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

Following on from my noble friend’s question, has the Minister made provision for ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer’s money to be paid into the steel industry?

[Lord Stockwood (Lab)]

The UK Government’s £2.5 billion commitment is provisioned for.

Home Ownership: First-Time Buyers

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:17

Asked by

[Lord Young of Cookham]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to promote home ownership for first-time buyers.

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

My Lords, we are increasing housing supply across all tenures to improve affordability for young people. Our ultimate objective is to help more people get the keys to their first home, increasing the overall home ownership rate. We support first-time buyers through government-backed schemes, including shared ownership, and the Treasury will shortly consult on a replacement for the lifetime ISA. Following FCA clarification, most buyers can borrow around 10% more, and this year we will publish a home-buying and selling reform road map, which is expected to save buyers £180 million a year and shave a month off transactions.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for that reply. Recently, the Prime Minister said:

“For my family growing up, the roof over our heads was everything. But for so many families today, homeownership is a distant dream. My government will make it a reality once again”.


For millions of people renting or living with their parents, it remains a dream. Many of them could actually afford the mortgage repayments, but without access to generous relatives, they cannot afford the deposit. Back in January, when I asked the Minister about hope for first-time buyers, she said:

“A great deal of work is going on in my department and with financial institutions to make sure that we make this process work for first-time buyers and others in the housing market”.—[Official Report, 8/1/26; col. 1314.]


Should there not now be a fresh initiative to deliver the Prime Minister’s promise?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord will not be surprised to know that I always agree with my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. Of course I also welcome the HCLG Select Committee’s work, which has particularly looked at the types of inequalities that the noble Lord highlights. Three in 10 people get help from family or parents and, increasingly, access is being determined by family wealth, not earnings. We are working hard on this. From speaking to lenders, we know that many first-time buyers are not aware of all the innovative mortgage products and recent mortgage reforms that may help them get on the housing ladder. We speak regularly to lenders on how to raise awareness of different options among first-time buyers, including hosting two major industry round tables last year, both of which were covered in the mainstream media. Of course, there is more work to do, and the Government are keen for all stakeholders who work with potential first-time buyers, including estate agents and brokers, to play their part in helping them understand their options.

[Baroness Primarolo (Lab)]

My Lords, I will follow up the important points that the noble Lord made. Home ownership makes up 62% of housing tenure, and getting first-time buyers to their first house is crucial, but social housing also plays a really important part in helping people to get into a decent, secure and affordable home. It is known that local authority social housing aids social mobility. Can the Minister therefore explain further the contribution of all tenures, particularly social housing, in getting people access to the home they want at a price they can afford in an area where they want to live?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Social and affordable housing sit side by side. We have confirmed a new 10-year £39 billion social and affordable homes programme to kick-start social and affordable housebuilding at scale across the country. Our ambition is to deliver around 300,000 homes over the programme’s lifetime. At least 60% of the homes delivered will be for social rent, with the remainder available for other tenures, including shared ownership, affordable rent and intermediate rent in London. This programme is active now. The councils and housing associations are bidding into that programme, as are other bidders, and I hope we will be able to deliver at pace very quickly.

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister agree that it is the longer-term effect of having fewer first-time buyers that really counts? When you retire as a tenant, you have not paid off a mortgage, you have not got a capital asset and you see your rent rising every year but your income falling. It catches up with you on retirement. In that longer-term perspective, I ask the Minister: what has happened to the Government’s long-term national housing strategy, which she promised me on 11 February would be out by 31 March? Is this on the way, and will it include a good chunk on how to bolster the number of first-time buyers, which is so important?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Lord is quite right to say that, where people are not able to buy their own homes, this can lead to problems later on where people on fixed incomes later in life are on rapidly increasing rent. So it is very important that we try to encourage as many young people as possible who are able to buy property to carry on doing so. On his point about the long-term housing strategy, it is on its way. We said we would publish in the spring, and spring is not quite over yet. I hope we will be able to deliver it very soon.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that a strong mix across all tenures creates a healthy market for first-time buyers? Does she therefore share our disappointment on these Benches that fewer than 15,000 social rent completions were achieved last year? Does she accept that that leads to first-time buyers having to achieve an almost impossible deposit of over £60,000, and that they will continue to be squeezed out of the market until the mix of tenures is much healthier?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I hope I set out in my earlier answer the importance we place on the mix of tenures. The £39 billion programme to increase the provision of social and affordable homes is designed to do exactly that. We are taking measures, particularly confidence measures for consumers, to help some of our young people to understand this. Probably two generations now have been told that house buying is out of reach, so, when I work with the financial institutions, which we have been talking to very closely, we are keen that they promote better some of the mortgage options that are available.

[Lord Hintze (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister recognise that freezing tax bands makes it much more difficult for those in work and those striving to earn money to get to that £60,000? That is the problem in my view.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I can only repeat what I said: it is very important that we encourage our young people, and others looking to buy homes, to consider the wide range of options that are available. I mention two particular institutions that I have been talking to, Lloyds and Santander, which are already going out there with very extensive campaigns. I encourage anybody who is keen to buy a house to go and talk to a broker or lender, because there are options available for people.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I am very glad that the Minister has mentioned shared ownership schemes, because the terms for new schemes are really very good, but many people are stuck on previous detrimental schemes. Following Grenfell and the requirements for them to pay for upgrading, they are absolutely stuck in their homes. Will the Minister say what she is going to do about that, so that people can move into homes where they can have families, because these are often one-bedroom flats? Secondly, will she consider asking the Government to increase the rent a room scheme allocation so that people whose mortgages are going up and are renting out a room can be to some extent compensated to stay in their current homes?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Shared ownership has a very important role to play in supporting households into home ownership that would otherwise struggle to purchase a property on the open market that meets their needs. We are aware, of course, that some people who have entered shared ownership have faced challenges. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his work during the passage of the Renters’ Rights Bill to introduce the measures to help with that. We have introduced new expectations for landlords to improve the customer experience. These include giving greater consideration to long-term customer affordability and increasing transparency and fairness on costs. Shared owners will also benefit from the wider leasehold and commonhold reforms in a variety ways. We will debate the commonhold and leasehold reform Bill in due course—but the Act of 2024 grants shared owners the right to statutory lease extensions and makes it easier for them to challenge unreasonable service charges.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, stamp duty is a huge drag on those wishing to have their own home. In London, for the average first-time buyer, stamp duty is £15,000—a huge sum for those seeking to get a deposit. It also makes climbing the housing ladder extortionately expensive and prevents those wanting to downsize, thereby freeing up family homes, from being able to afford to do so. Does the Minister recognise that stamp duty is a bad tax, and it should be abolished so that people can afford to buy and to move?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

That is a bit rich coming from someone who was in the government party for the past 14 years. First-time buyers benefit from paying no stamp duty on up to £300,000, and they can claim relief on purchases up to £500,000.

Sustainable Farming Incentive: Flood Prevention and Drought Resilience

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:28

Asked by

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

To ask His Majesty’s Government whether funding will be available under the Sustainable Farming Incentive to permit farmers to undertake environmental measures for the purposes of flood prevention and drought resilience.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)]

The sustainable farming incentive will continue to support flood prevention and drought resilience. The streamlined SFI offer for 2026 includes actions that slow the movement of water during periods of heavy rainfall, keep soil covered and increase organic matter, which improves the soil’s ability to retain water. Applications will open in June this year for small farms and those without an existing environmental land management revenue agreement, and in September for all farms.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome that Answer and the information. I also welcome the department’s recently published independent report on flourishing uplands, which highlights graphically the tensions between farmers and environmentalists. It makes no economic sense at all for productive farmland to be flooded when farmers are providing 62% of the UK’s food. In those circumstances, does the Minister agree that there is a positive role for farmers to play, particularly in the uplands, in flood prevention and drought resilience? Will she therefore make sure that not just the SFI but all forms of environmental payments will look to putting livestock back on the land and making farmland productive and, at the same time, contributing to flood resilience and drought resilience?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right: it is important that we recognise the role that farmers, land managers and landowners have in supporting the Government’s ambitions on flood and drought resilience, and that this should be delivered through any way that is practical and possible, while at the same time looking at continuing to support farm profitability.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, will the Government consider adopting the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management’s recommendation requiring large corporates to disclose climate-related and nature-related risks in their supply chains, and to align that with the UK’s sustainability disclosure requirements, using the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures? Will they also use that transparency to direct more private investment into flood prevention and drought resilience on farms?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes some really good points. The Government are keen to look at how we can encourage more private funding and support for much of the work that needs to be done, whether that is in the climate sector or in nature restoration. I completely take on board the points she has made.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, action under the ELMS budget, such as establishing buffer strips along watercourses or restoring peatlands, can improve biodiversity while naturally reducing flood risk, and would be important to consider, particularly with our changing weather patterns, which result in persistent rainfall during the winter and periods of drought over the summer. Can further thought therefore be given to storage ponds for such water to help with food security, farm production and overall resilience in our farming sphere?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Storage ponds are incredibly important. In where I live in Cumbria, for example, the West Cumbria Rivers Trust has been working closely with landowners to do exactly that—to look at storage ponds and balancing ponds, because they have an important role to play in flood management on land.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that there are 28,000 agri-environment agreements which cease either this year or next, and the applicants must wait for agreements to expire before they can start a new SFI application. We can imagine in terms of sustainability and the welfare of our farming community that those who have such environments need assurance that they will be able to apply and to continue delivering the outcomes without a break in their payment. Can the Minister give such an assurance?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

As I mentioned in my initial response, the window for all applications will open in September. We are also trying to give a bit more stability around the SFI. The aim is to completely minimise any changes from now onwards, because farmers need stability to support long-term planning. Having said that, there may be changes because we have targets that we want to reach and outcomes that we want to see, but the right reverend Prelate makes a good point.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, flood prevention still requires affordable insurance to back it up, because floods still happen when you try to prevent them. The eligibility criteria of Flood Re mean that for the outbuildings of small farms, if the farm office is inside the farmhouse, the farmhouse is not eligible for Flood Re. Flood Re’s eligibility criteria in this respect were set 10 years ago—is it time to look at them again?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I know the challenges around Flood Re and insurance that the noble Earl is referring to. The issue we have with the kind of outbuildings the noble Earl describes is that they are registered as businesses in the insurance field. As I am sure he is aware, businesses are not eligible for Flood Re. There are complications around including businesses in Flood Re, and I do not think that the Government are likely to change their position on that. Having said that, we need to consider how we look long-term at flood insurance for businesses so that it will be possible to insure them in these cases in the future.

[Lord Roborough (Con)]

My Lords, I refer the House to my interests in the register as a farmer and landowner. The Government have stated that each farm can have only one SFI agreement, even if that agreement does not reach the £100,000 cap. Given the ever-increasing importance of flood prevention and drought resilience, will the Minister commit to allow related SFIs to be exempted from these rules and stacked on other SFIs without a cap?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

It is not something I can confirm today, but I am more than happy to take that back to the department and to discuss the different options.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, as the Minister is obviously aware, all these schemes will require funding contributions from the farms in question. That will probably rule out most small farms, so we are discussing medium to larger-sized farms. The Minister mentioned sustainability, long-term planning and profitability, but these are the very farms that will be hammered by the family farm tax, which, as well as destroying jobs and family farms, will prevent money going into these schemes. I suggest that, if she wants to rebuild credibility and trust with the farming community, she and other Ministers should now call for this policy to be reversed.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I am sure that the noble Lord is aware that the Government made some changes to the inheritance tax policy. We are continuing to listen to farms and farm businesses. I am sure noble Lords know that we have a small holding; I am very aware of the challenges for small farms and know a number of small farmers where we live. It is important to look at how we get farms into profitability—that has to be the focus—which is why I was so pleased to see the report from the noble Baroness, Lady Batters. The Government are looking to introduce many of her recommendations.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, is not transferring resource support to smaller farmers and tenant farmers the right thing to do to stop rich billionaires getting funded, rather than the farmers who are trying to provide food?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

As I have already said, when the new SFI offer opens, it will be targeted at small farms. It is important that we look at how we support all farmers to ensure that they can support us with our aims on food stability and security.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, does the Minister appreciate that the arbitrary cap on SFI, which was mentioned by the noble Lord opposite, militates against economies of scale and driving the farm productivity and profitability that the nation needs and the land use framework requires?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The most important things we can do to move forward on farm profitability and to support farms are, first, to listen to them and, secondly, to look at what the noble Baroness, Lady Batters, says in her report. It is an extremely impressive, comprehensive report on how we improve farm profitability. We should listen to someone with her expertise and experience on how we move forward to increase farm profitability.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

Can the Minister say whether the SFI will provide support for on-farm reservoir projects aimed at mitigating environmental impacts from drought at the catchment scale?

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

The SFI26 offer has 71 separate actions, of which 35 are designed to support flood and drought resilience. It is incredibly important that we recognise the huge damage that drought can cause to our farmers. The new SFI offer, in looking very carefully at both flooding and drought, recognises the long-term implications of climate change for our farms and food production, which is important as we move forward.

Office for National Statistics Labour Market Data

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Question

11:39

Asked by

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Office for National Statistics labour market data published on 21 April; and what steps they are taking to address rising economic inactivity and falling vacancies.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Katz) (Lab)]

My Lords, April’s statistics show that economic inactivity has fallen by nearly 360,000 since we came into office. Vacancies began falling in 2022, but we have stabilised and slowed the rate of decrease. In the last 21 months of the previous Government, vacancies fell by 363,000, more than double the rate that we have seen under the first 21 months of this Government. We inherited a broken economy from the previous Government, but we are taking a different approach and driving a more inclusive labour market for all.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, with over half a million 18 to 24 year-olds unemployed, nearly a million 18 to 24 year-olds not in training, education or employment, and vacancies now down to 711,000, the Government’s answer seems to be to commission a review by Alan Milburn. Is it not blindingly obvious to anyone with an iota of common sense that the problem lies with the jobs tax, the unemployment Bill and rising taxes across the board? What a waste of human resources that now so many young people are just unable to find gainful employment.

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I note that the noble Lord has changed the usual formulation of his regular Question on unemployment figures because the unemployment figures fell to below 5%, as seen in the latest figures earlier this week, something I thought that he would have welcomed. It is rather rich that he talks about NEETs, when the number of young people not in education, employment or training increased by a quarter of a million between 2021 and 2024. We are well aware of the problem, and this is why we are investing £2.5 billion over the next three years, through the youth guarantee and the growth and skills levy, to support almost 1 million young people getting into education, employment or training. Unlike the last Government, we take this issue with the utmost seriousness and we are acting.

[Baroness Teather (LD)]

My Lords, we know that AI will have a profound impact on work, particularly for young people. As it is already getting harder for graduates to get work, will the Minister urgently commission and publish research into the future impact of AI on the labour market, so that we can have a transparent evidence base for future policy-making?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is absolutely right. AI is very much at the forefront of all our minds as we continue to grapple with the long-term impact that it will have on our economy. That is why, in January, we announced that every adult in the UK is eligible to take free courses to gain practical AI skills for work. This programme has already upskilled 1 million workers. Our ambition is to upskill 10 million by 2030. The noble Baroness mentioned research. We have already launched the AI and future work programme and are establishing an AI economic institute, which will lead cross-government analysis to monitor the emerging impact of AI on the economy and co-ordinate the Government’s response.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that the GDP per capita of Wales historically ran 20% below that of the UK, largely because of depressed activity rates arising from the work patterns in heavy industries, such as coal and steel. That has persisted. Now, there is a crying need for the activity rates to be raised in order to ensure that the standard of living in Wales can rise to be nearer the UK average. Will the Government undertake to co-operate with the next Government of Wales to give priority to getting this right?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

The Government have always worked closely with the current Government of Wales and we will continue to work with any future Government in Wales. It will help if they continue to be led by the Labour Party, but we will see what the electorate decide. We are constantly aware that we must do more to support people into work. That is why we are going further with our jobs and careers services, the youth guarantee and pathways into work across the country.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, in Northern Ireland, economic inactivity remains stubbornly high, as it does across the UK. Sadly, we have the highest per capita. In that context, I welcome the Government’s defence growth deal, which was announced in Northern Ireland yesterday—some £50 million of investment. Do His Majesty’s Government see such growth deals as a mechanism to try to deal with those who are economically inactive to get them into worthwhile jobs?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I am pleased to welcome the noble Baroness’s welcome for the defence deal. It is vital. We talk about repairing and improving the country’s infrastructure, and here we are talking about the defence infrastructure. It is a source of many high-skilled, high-paid, good-quality jobs across the whole country, including in Northern Ireland. At this point in time, the defence of our country is foremost in our minds, and this deal shows that we are very serious about it.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, one of the most worrying figures of all, in the most worrying of areas, is the increase of economic inactivity and people who are not required to look for work or who are not even searching for it. Given the impact on young people, which I know the Minister is very concerned about, why does he think that this figure and others are going up on this Government’s watch?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

It is important to understand what we are doing through our youth guarantee trailblazers in England to tackle inactivity and to solve the problem of the number of NEETs, which across the House we want to see solved. Through eight youth guarantee trailblazers in England there has been an expansion of youth hubs to more than 360 areas. The youth guarantee gateway being rolled out in jobcentres provides 16 to 24 year-olds on universal credit with a dedicated session and follow-up support to help move more people into work, training or education. That means that there are 300,000 more opportunities to gain workplace experience and training, including up to 150,000 work experience placements and 145,000 employer-designed training opportunities, such as the sector-based work academy programmes. It is important to give young people that start on the ladder of gaining work experience and an understanding of what the world of work is like. That is the way that we will tackle the problem of NEETs.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister recognise that one of the great benefits to British businesses and to young people for their employment opportunities was that they had great flexibility in working with our main trading partners in the European Union? Does the Minister see the Government’s reset Bill that we are likely to see in a new Session as a good opportunity to allow youth mobility with our key trading partners? Does he regret slightly that the Government may have said that that was a red line? Might they be a little more flexible for the benefits of our young people and our businesses?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

The noble Lord tempts me to cross a red line which is a little above my pay grade in talking about our trading arrangements and any future trading agreements with the European Union. However, it is clear already from what we have done with the Erasmus schemes that we take this seriously. The European Union is our closest trading partner and one of our most important trading partners. It is absolutely right that we promote good links between all participants in the UK economy and those in Europe.

[Lord Watts (Lab)]

My Lords, has the Minister noticed the improvement in economic performance that we have seen in the Manchester and Liverpool regions? Does that not show what a Labour Government can do with Labour regions to regenerate this country?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

I absolutely agree with my noble friend. Strong Labour councils and strong Labour mayors working with the Labour Government have delivered economic prosperity—and, I add, not only in Liverpool and Manchester but just down the road from me, in and around King’s Cross and the Knowledge Quarter that is being created there. The links between the Labour-run Camden Council, the Mayor of London and the Labour Government show that we are developing and are at the cutting edge, being the place to come, across the whole world, to develop jobs and skills in industry, the life sciences and other areas.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that many young people get their start in the workplace in leisure and hospitality. He will also know that UKHospitality estimates that, because of the Government’s fiscal changes, from April this year there will be an extra burden of £1.9 billion on those businesses and that 70% of them are going to curtail their recruitment, particularly of young people. Is it not the case that the Government’s changes are having a negative effect on youth employment? Is it not time that they review those fiscal changes, if they really are serious about tackling welfare dependency and worklessness?

[Lord Katz (Lab)]

We have taken action on business rates for businesses in that sector. Positively, just last year we introduced foundation apprenticeships for young people in targeted sectors. In the retail and hospitality sector, we introduced a sector-based work academy programme pilot, which was launched in partnership with UKHospitality and businesses in a number of areas, including coastal towns, which are suffering the most.

Malvern Hills Bill [HL]

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Cheltenham Borough Council (Markets) Bill

Motions to Resolve

11:50

Moved by

[The Senior Deputy Speaker]

Malvern Hills Bill [HL]

That this House resolves that the promoters of the Malvern Hills Bill [HL], which was originally introduced in this House on 22 January 2025, should have leave to suspend proceedings on the bill from the day on which the current session ends in order to proceed with it, if they think fit, in the next session of Parliament, according to the provisions of Private Business Standing Order 150A (Suspension of bills).

Cheltenham Borough Council (Markets) Bill

That this House resolves that the promoters of the Cheltenham Borough Council (Markets) Bill, which was originally introduced in the House of Commons on 22 January 2026, should have leave to suspend proceedings on the bill from the day on which the current session ends in order to proceed with it, if they think fit, in the next session of Parliament, according to the provisions of Private Business Standing Order 150A (Suspension of bills).

Motions agreed.

Procedure and Privileges Committee

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Motion to Agree

11:51

Moved by

[The Senior Deputy Speaker]

That the Report from the Select Committee Changes relating to Grand Committee and delegated legislation debates; Procedural changes resulting from the coming into force of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026; Highlighting International Agreements Committee Reports in House of Lords Business (7th Report, HL Paper 288) be agreed to.

[The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)]

My Lords, the first part of the report proposes changes to Grand Committee sittings and to debates on delegated legislation in order to increase the House’s capacity to scrutinise legislation before it and to give Peers more certainty around timings.

The committee recommends that the default maximum sitting length of Grand Committee should be increased to five hours, with Grand Committee on Thursday starting at 12.15 pm rather than 1 pm. Furthermore, we recommend that there should be an additional Grand Committee for delegated legislation only, on Tuesday starting at 11 am and sitting for up to three hours. As now, these provisions will be used only when necessary.

We also recommend changes to debates on delegated legislation to create greater certainty for Members—both those taking part in debates on delegated legislation and those taking part in business after such debates. We recommend time-limiting debates on delegated legislation in the Chamber to a maximum of 60 minutes and having a speakers’ list. The usual channels would, in exceptional circumstances, be able to extend the time limit to 90 minutes or longer.

The committee also recommends that, during debates on delegated legislation, both in the Chamber and in Grand Committee, the clock should time the length of speeches rather than the whole debate, bringing practice on the use of the clock into line with that for debates on primary legislation. All these changes, if agreed by the House, will be implemented for a trial period only and reviewed in spring 2027.

The second part of the report seeks the House’s agreement to changes to the Standing Orders and the Companion that reflect the coming into force at the end of this Session of the core provisions of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026. This requires the repeal of eight Standing Orders and the amendment of another, along with consequential changes to the Companion.

Finally, the report seeks the House’s agreement to minor changes to the Companion following the House’s decision on 14 April that departing hereditary Peers should have the same access rights as Members who retire under the House of Lords Reform Act 2014. I commend the report to your Lordships and beg to move.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak as the chair of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and I want to put on the record that I very much approve of the suggested additional day on Tuesdays specifically for delegated legislation. It is important that delegated legislation is given the stature that it deserves, and I think this will be a popular addition to the abilities of Members of your Lordships’ House to discuss delegated legislation. I note that it is only for a trial period initially, but I feel sure that it will be adopted on a permanent basis at the end of that period, which I would very much welcome.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to express some concern about paragraph 16 of the report, under “Proposals relating to Delegated Legislation”, on time-limiting debates to 60, or possibly 90, minutes. For the sake of clarity, I wish to know whether that also applies when there is a regret or fatal Motion—I am getting a nod from the Chief Whip—or, indeed, both regret and fatal Motions, or sometimes multiple regret and fatal Motions. At this point, I guess all I can do is ask the usual channels to assure us that they will appropriately use that possibility of extension—I am getting a nod here, too, which I am putting on the record.

I am thinking back to the debate, which I am sure many noble Lords will remember, in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb regarding the proscription of Palestine Action. From memory, that debate took three or four hours, engaged very many Members of your Lordships’ House and was a very serious issue for the country.

It is terribly important. We are seeing, and we hear many times, the problem with Henry VIII powers and the way in which the Government are using delegated legislation, instead of full legislation that we can debate and amend. This could very much be seen as a way to shut down debate on really important issues on which there is great concern in the House. I want to put that on the record and say that we will certainly be watching this very closely.

[The Senior Deputy Speaker]

Mr Lords, those were two interesting comments. I would obviously also want to take this opportunity to thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, and his committee for undertaking a very key part of our committee work. I say to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that I specifically said that the committee wanted to have this as a trial. The intention behind all this rationale, when we as a committee looked at it, was in no sense to stifle scrutiny—indeed, it was to give Peers greater certainty about timing. We had had a number of observations about the difficulty of this issue. It is, as I say, for a trial. In fact, I know from chairing the committee that at no point did any of us see this as a route to—to use the words of the noble Baroness—shutting down debate. It is very important that these matters are properly scrutinised.

As this is one of my passing and final shots as Senior Deputy Speaker, I would say that whenever I have spoken to the House, it has almost unanimously felt that we should all speak succinctly and to the point and not overstress your Lordships with lengthy contributions. In this trial, we all need to ensure that there is proper scrutiny, yes, but that it is done in a way that is conducive to the whole spirit of having these debates in the terms I have described.

On that basis, and with the points made by noble Lords, I hope that your Lordships will approve the committee’s report.

Motion agreed.

Standing Orders (Public Business)

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Motion to Amend

11:59

Moved by

[The Senior Deputy Speaker]

That the standing orders relating to public business be amended as follows: Delete Standing Orders 3 (Peers by descent not to be introduced), 9 (Hereditary peers: by-elections), 10 (Register of hereditary peers), 77 (Committees for peerage claims), 78 (Claims of peerage), 79 (Claims of Irish peerages), 80 (Claims of Irish peerages in abeyance), and 81 (Report if improper arrangement entered into between co-heirs).

Standing Order 21B (Temporary exclusion)

Paragraph (6)(c), delete “9 or”.

Standing Order 36 (Balloted and time-limited debates)

Paragraph (1) delete “If a balloted debate or a time limited debate” and insert at the start “If a balloted debate, a time-limited debate or a debate in the Chamber on delegated legislation”.

Motion agreed.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Commons Reasons and Amendments

12:00

Motion A

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendment 2, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 2A.

2A: Because the matters that are within the scope of the other areas of competence already cover rural affairs.

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

My Lords, in moving Motion A, I will also speak to Motions B, C, C1, H and H1. It is a pleasure to bring the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill back to the House of Lords to consider the amendments and reasons from the other place. I thank all noble Lords who engaged extensively in the brief period we had between Report and ping-pong. I also thank my colleague in the other place, the Minister for Devolution, Faith and Communities, for setting out the Government’s position on the amendments agreed by your Lordships during earlier stages of the Bill. As she outlined, the Government’s central aim with this Bill is to devolve power and money from central government to those with skin in the game, building a different type of state where communities with local knowledge are given the power to shape their areas.

I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell, Lady Scott and Lady Pidgeon, for the first group of amendments today. Lords Amendment 2, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, seeks to add rural affairs as a distinct area of competence to Clause 2. While I very much appreciate the good intention behind it, I do not believe this change would address the underlying concerns that noble Lords have raised. I have reflected on the points made on Report, and the central issue is not whether rural affairs appear as a separate area of competence, since rural affairs are already within the scope of the other competences. Rather, it is about how strategic authorities and their mayors exercise their functions, taking proper account of the needs of rural communities.

To address that, the Government propose to issue non-statutory guidance to strategic authorities to ensure that they consider the needs of those who live and work in rural areas when exercising their powers and functions. Separately, we are providing mayors with the ability to appoint up to 10 commissioners, which will give the flexibility to assign multiple commissioners to a particular area of competence. This approach enables commissioners to focus on specific aspects within those areas, such as rural affairs, should they wish to do so. With these points in mind, I ask the noble Baroness not to insist on her amendment.

Lords Amendment 4 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, seeks to ensure that appointments of commissioners by mayors are made through a fair and open selection process and that the criteria and process for appointments are published, as well as commissioners’ remuneration. Through the passage of this Bill I have been emphatic about the Government’s focus on accountability in local government, and commissioners are no exception to that. I trust that the statutory guidance published by the Government on 16 April, which covers important issues raised in this House, provides confidence to noble Lords in that regard. Members in the other place raised concerns about appointments being based on merit. I am pleased to confirm that the guidance explicitly states that appointments should be based on merit and fair and open competition, and that details of a commissioner’s role, once they are appointed, must also be published on the website of the combined authority or the combined county authority.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, queried directly with me how adherence to the guidance is monitored and enforced. As the guidance is statutory, relevant authorities must have regard to it unless they have a good reason to depart from it and can explain that reason. If the guidance is not properly considered, decisions may be unlawful and therefore open to challenge through a judicial review. Failure properly to consider the guidance will also be a relevant consideration for government in assessing whether an authority is meeting its statutory responsibilities, including compliance with the best value duty, and would form part of MHCLG’s assessment of governance and improvement.

Lords Amendments 13 and 87 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, would enable the London Assembly to amend the Mayor of London’s budget with a simple majority. The Government will simplify and ensure consistency in the voting arrangements across mayoral strategic authorities, including London. A general principle in that simplification is that the voting arrangements for exercising functions should match those for agreeing the budget that funds those functions. In mayoral combined authorities and combined county authorities, most functions will now be decided by the default arrangement of a simple majority of authority members, which must include the mayor, but some functions—strategic planning, bus franchising, mayoral development corporations and fire—are exercised solely by the mayor. For that reason, these authorities have two budgets, one for functions exercised by the authority as a whole and one for functions exercised solely by the mayor.

The Bill streamlines the process for setting and agreeing the budget for functions exercised by the authority as a whole. They will now be subject to a simple majority, including the mayor. However, mayoral budgets will continue to require a two-thirds majority to amend, as set out in existing secondary legislation. It is right that we empower democratically elected mayors to set the budget for functions exercised solely by the mayor, with the appropriate checks and balances that the two-thirds majority provides. The GLA’s budget and governance are fundamentally different from those of combined authorities. All functions are exercised by the mayor, so there is a single consolidated mayoral budget for the GLA. The assembly’s role is to scrutinise the mayor’s budget and exercise the functions, not make decisions on them. It is therefore appropriate that the threshold for amending the final draft of the Mayor of London’s consolidated budget remains a two-thirds majority, as is the case for mayoral budgets in other mayoral strategic authorities.

That is why it is the Government’s view that this House should not insist on these amendments, as they would put the scrutiny of the mayoral budget in London out of step with those in combined authorities and combined county authorities. I thank noble Lords for their engagement on this matter and in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, for raising it and for providing a helpful opportunity for the Government to clarify the position. I am happy to confirm that the Government will update the guidance and explainers setting out voting arrangements across mayoral strategic authorities to ensure that this principle can be easily understood.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, mentioned that there are a very few exceptions to that, and I will detail why that is the case. Those differences exist for technical reasons—for example, in the east Midlands, given the Nottingham tram contract, or where the number of constituent authorities within a CCA does not allow for a neat two-thirds split. The Tees Valley has five constituent authorities, and therefore a three-fifths voting threshold is the closest equivalent to two-thirds that is possible with that number of constituents. As I said, the Government will publish guidance setting out voting arrangements.

On Amendments 87B and 87C in lieu, the explanation that I have given clearly sets out that a review of voting arrangements for the London Assembly’s ability to determine the Mayor of London’s budget is unnecessary. I hope that this is sufficient to address the concerns of noble Lords, and that they will agree to the Motion from the other place not to insist. I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, not to press her amendments in lieu.

Finally, Lords Amendments 85, 86, 97 to 116, 120, 121 and 123 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, collectively seek to remove the powers for the Secretary of State to direct the establishment or expansion of a combined authority or a combined county authority, or to provide for a mayor in certain circumstances. The Government do not support these amendments. We remain firmly of the view that devolution can play a central role in boosting regional growth, attracting investment and improving outcomes for communities, with decisions taken closer to the people they affect.

The powers in the Bill are intended to ensure that progress towards those aims is not stalled indefinitely where there is a clear potential for devolution but, importantly, where no workable proposal has come forward locally—because that is what we all want to happen, ideally. They provide a backstop power to be used only where necessary and appropriate, and with clear statutory safeguards. In practice, our approach continues to be one of collaboration with local partners.

That commitment to partnership has been reinforced by the assurances given by the Minister for Devolution, Faith and Communities in the other place, where, as your Lordships will know, the Government made clear that for a period of two years following Royal Assent they will not commence the powers enabling the Secretary of State to direct the establishment of non-mayoral strategic authorities or the expansion of existing strategic authorities without local consent. They have further committed that for a period of four years following Royal Assent they will not use these powers to provide for a mayor without local consent. These commitments provide a clear and proportionate backstop power while preserving the legislation’s ability to support devolution over the long term. On that basis, I ask noble Lords not to insist on their amendments to Schedule 1.

Motion A1 (as an amendment to Motion A)

Moved by

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville]

Leave out from “House” to the end and insert “do insist on its Amendment 2, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 2A.”

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I beg to move Motion A1 as an amendment to Motion A. The Commons have disagreed with our amendment, which was carried 285 to 156: a majority of 129 and a pretty convincing endorsement of the strength of feeling in the Chamber for rural affairs to get the recognition they deserve. I am grateful for the Minister’s letter and offer for rural affairs to be included in non-statutory guidance.

The reasons given by the Commons were that rural affairs are covered by the other competences in Clause 2 of the Bill, as the Minister has already referred to. Just as rural-proofing was considered an essential element of any service delivery, infrastructure project or change to local government, it should have been an essential element of the planning all through the process. The question should continually be asked, “How will what is being proposed affect rural areas?”

Rural England covers the largest geographical area of England but has the smallest proportion of population. The large towns and cities, due to the ease of connectivity, attract business of every description and provide jobs and economic prosperity. Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s, this has been the case—but even Arkwright built his mills in rural Derbyshire.

This morning, I have been contacted by Richard Hebditch of the Better Planning Coalition, who emphasised how important rural areas are. If I may, I will quote from his email, in which he states:

“The concept of strategic authorities draws on the previous development of metro mayors for large urban areas. Much of their focus will be on economic growth, transport and other infrastructure, and the Government is clear that it sees its cities and larger towns as the focus for both economic growth and infrastructure investment. We are concerned that there is a strong risk that rural areas will be sidelined as strategic authorities draw up SDSs as well as in the other strategies and plans. We therefore welcome current Lords Amendment 2, which inserts rural affairs as a competency for strategic authorities”.


I am grateful to Richard Hebditch for his information this morning.

Those who live in rural areas want the same benefits as those who live in highly populated areas. We want the strategic authorities and the mayors to consider how their future plans will affect those in rural areas. The benefits of a thriving economy, good infrastructure, a buoyant jobs market, decent homes and good connectivity, especially digital as we enter the AI-dominated era, should be the right of those in rural areas. The town and parish councils are likely to be overlooked if care is not taken.

I recently returned from a short stay in rural Norfolk, where my mobile phone coverage was very patchy. Even at home in Hampshire, where I live on the outskirts of a village but only 200 yards from the secondary college which services a large area, bringing students in on double-decker buses, I have difficulty with my mobile reception. If I want to make a phone call or answer an incoming call, I have to go into the lounge at the front of my home to get sufficient signal to be able to have anything like a decent conversation.

The majority of 129 on the amendment on 24 March was one of the largest majorities, if not the largest majority, on this Bill, and demonstrates the strength of feeling in the Chamber on the importance of rural affairs. I remain convinced that rural England will get the recognition it deserves only if it is in the Bill and is covered in statutory guidance, not relegated to non-statutory guidance, which is not sufficient. Every policy and strategy brought forward by mayors and strategic authorities should have been through a process whereby the question has been asked and considered, “How will this affect those living in rural areas?” How will this affect their safety, environment, access to decent affordable housing and travel arrangements? Asking commissioners to consider rural affairs if they wish, I am afraid, does not cut it. I beg to move.

12:15

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, first, I give my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for bringing forward again her Motion A1 on the inclusion of rural affairs in the list of competences. I agree with every word she said, including about broadband and mobile reception in rural Norfolk, which I have to deal with on a regular basis. While we have been suspicious of the expanding role of commissioners, if this Government wish to push forward their reforms, it is only right that rural affairs be added to the list of competences.

I know the Minister has outlined that rural affairs are already within the scope of other areas of competences, but the same could be said about the addition of culture, for example. What is more, the Government tabled amendments on Report which allowed a commissioner’s work to relate to one or more aspects of areas of competence and allow work on cross-cutting issues.

I feel very strongly that a commissioner for rural affairs with a rural area as part of their responsibilities would allow that rural-proofing, not just of rural things but of all other services that the mayor is considering. As a result, my understanding now is that this would not mean that every mayor has to appoint a commissioner for rural affairs. That may not be suitable, as I have said, for each area. However, adding rural affairs to the list of competences would allow the work of commissioners to at least relate to rural affairs and enshrine them into law, rather than leaving them, as we have heard, to non-statutory guidance.

This brings me to the appointment of commissioners. I am very grateful for all the time that the Minister has given me and others and for her work and engagement on this and other issues. Amendment 4 sought to ensure a fair and transparent selection process for the appointment of the commissioners. I am very pleased with the draft statutory guidance, which fulfils most, if not all, of everything we asked for. I thank the Minister for early sight of that guidance and for assuring us that it has sufficient teeth so that mayors can be held to account. We will therefore not be pushing this amendment.

Turning to voting arrangements on the London Assembly, I am also grateful for the work that has gone into setting out the Bill’s exact position on this. It was very complicated, so it was useful to have that explanation of the voting arrangements for mayoral budgets, which usually require a two-thirds majority. But, as the Minister has continually said on the Bill, the Government want consistency. We are not all sure that we agree with that, but the Government have made it clear that they want consistency across the country—so why not in mayoral voting arrangements?

However, as we and the Minister have said, there are exceptions across the country. We have the Tees Valley Combined Authority, the North East Combined Authority and the London mayoral voting arrangements. Given that this extensive Bill seeks to simplify the system of local government as a whole, it is not clear why this has not been addressed. That is why we have tabled Amendment 87B, to ask the Secretary of State to review the London Assembly’s voting arrangements in the context of the budget-setting arrangements for strategic authorities across the country. I recommend that the Government do more work in this area to ensure that voting arrangements not only are consistent but allow sufficient democratic scrutiny of all mayoral budgets. I am therefore minded to test the opinion of the House.

Finally, I turn to our package of amendments to Schedule 1. On the Secretary of State’s powers to direct changes to combined authorities and combined county authorities, based on the principle that these changes should be based on local consent, I note that the Government have committed not to use these powers for two and four years respectively. Surely this concedes that their use is an unacceptable breach of local trust. We have made it very clear throughout the Bill’s passage that we do not agree with imposing any changes on local government, of any type, without the agreement of local councils and, particularly, of local communities. The use of these powers, whether by this Government or by a future Government, could do serious damage to the relationships between central government and combined authorities and, crucially, their constituency councils and their local communities. For these reasons, we remain concerned about the inclusion of these powers in the Bill. I hope that noble Lords will see the risk that they pose, not just now but in the future, and will support Motion H1.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I shall add some comments on rural affairs, but first, I am grateful for the Government’s movement on the appointment processes for commissioners. At Second Reading, in Committee and on Report, I had a lot to say about commissioners, their appointment, and their terms and conditions. My worry throughout was that we should never get to a position in which commissioners are appointed for reasons of political favour or similar. What we actually need are the best people for the job. Therefore, the guidance that has been issued is very helpful.

On rural affairs, there is a problem in the documentation that we now have. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, was absolutely right to point out that the Commons reason for rejecting our amendment was:

“Because the matters that are within the scope of the other areas of competence already cover rural affairs”.


That is not the case; they do not. The noble Baroness mentioned one or two of those areas. I will explain why this is not sufficient.

It is very important that rural affairs are embedded in decision-making among all the competencies that an authority has, such as transport. I am sure that they will be by the commissioners, the mayor and those charged with making decisions. The problem is that there are things that are not within the competence framework. One example is the impact of energy costs on domestic users and small businesses in rural areas. It is not clear that this lies within any of the competences that the Government have come up with. There are issues around the cost of living, and travel costs for young people to education and training. Indeed, many young people undertake placements as part of their education, and these require substantial travel costs. Travel is more expensive in rural areas than in urban ones. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, referred to the communications problem. There are communications problems for young people, and all residents of rural areas, that are not within the competence framework that the Government have come up with.

In general terms, the availability of public services would simply fall between two stools. The provision of NHS services would have a different focus if there were to be a rural affairs commissioner, and the same is true of leisure facilities. One can think of many areas of policy that are not within the areas of mayoral competence, so it would be very helpful if the Government would come back to this.

Having said that the Commons disagrees with the Lords amendment, the Under-Secretary of State said,

“I am happy to commit to bringing forward non-statutory guidance to support strategic authorities in delivering for rural communities using the powers and functions that they have been given”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/4/26; col. 244.]

It would be really helpful if that became statutory, as opposed to non-statutory, guidance. I would like to know more about what is planned and the timescales for that, because it really matters.

There is a danger. Some of these issues are of lesser importance in wholly urban areas because there are no rural areas within them. Where you have a wholly rural area within a mayoral structure, due attention inevitably will be given by the mayor. But I see a problem coming where there is a very large urban area and a smaller rural area in terms of population. That rural area may feel it is losing out. Unless something like statutory guidance is given, I think we will find, in a year or two, that people feel short-changed in rural areas.

That takes me to a final suggestion to the Minister. There is to be an annual review. The Government should state clearly in the other place—if the House decides that this goes back to the other place, as I hope it will—that an annual review to assess what is really happening on the ground could be very helpful. I hope the Minister will take in good spirit the points made across the Chamber. There are issues here that need to be addressed. If the noble Baroness decides to press her amendment to a vote, I will certainly support her.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I wanted to speak to Conservative Motion C1. As I was in the Chamber when that was addressed, I was told I could speak.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

The noble Baroness was not in the Chamber. I saw her take her seat.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

I have just had advice that I can speak, otherwise I would not have.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

If the noble Baroness was not here at the start of the debate, I do not think she is able to speak.

[Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Motion C1, in support of my noble friend Lady Scott of Bybrook. The Minister will be aware that, during the passage of the Bill, I have suggested on a few occasions that there should be a full review of the London mayoral governance process, because there is lots of learning since the original scheme was brought through that really should be revisited.

The Minister issued a letter to us this morning that, as I understand it, gave us this reason on changing to simple majority voting in London: the Assembly is actually a scrutiny function and not part of the mayoral budget process, and therefore that would not be right because it is not part of that policy-making responsibility. Indeed, in the Minister’s opening remarks she said that London is “fundamentally different” and “out of step” with others.

Does this not endorse my earlier proposal? Elsewhere in the country, in governance proposals that have been brought forward since, local council leaders are part of that policy-making process. That would give some opening for other people being involved. In London the current situation—the mayor has sole responsibility and there is a two-thirds majority for the assembly—means that it is unlikely to ever be challenged. Surely, London deserves better. Either it needs to be 50% or, as I suggested throughout consideration of this Bill, we need to relook at London.

12:30

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I will refer first to the amendments on rural affairs and the areas of competence. The issue here is not the areas of competence; the lack of an area of competence for rural affairs will not impede strategic authorities or disadvantage those who live and work in rural areas. The Bill is not prescriptive. The use of functions sits at the discretion of the relevant strategic authority or mayor. Where an authority has a significant rural population, it can and should consider the challenges and opportunities affecting those communities when exercising its powers.

As noble Lords will be aware, many existing strategic authorities and their mayors are taking the matter of rural affairs very seriously. In Devon and Torbay, for example, the combined county authority has published its working plan, which outlines the authority’s long-term goals for the next 10 years. Many of these goals focus on resolving the issues faced by the region’s rural communities, from poor transport links to digital isolation. I know our mayors have taken up the very important issue that noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, raised—the digital exclusion arising from poor broadband in many of our rural areas.

In York and North Yorkshire, the combined authority is rolling out DNA marking kits to reduce rural crime and thefts. The North East Combined Authority is investing £17 million into the rural economy, supporting farming businesses and rural tourism. The existing areas of competence and their associated functions empower authorities to engage in rural affairs, and that is why the Government view publishing guidance as the most effective means of ensuring rural matters are considered in strategic authority thinking.

To respond to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, about the culture competence—why that has been made a competence and rural affairs have not—the areas of competence are intended to capture broad, thematic priorities affecting communities irrespective of whether they are rural or urban. The challenges faced by rural communities are already addressed within the existing eight areas. Not all strategic authorities have substantial rural populations; some are predominantly urban. A stand-alone competence for rural affairs risks implying that the challenges faced by rural communities are unique to those settings alone. While the specific factors affecting communities will vary by place, many, such as poor transport connectivity, are shared across rural and non-rural areas alike. Where there is a significant rural population, strategic authorities should be considering the particular challenges and opportunities affecting those communities, as in the examples I set out.

On Report, noble Lords outlined many of the issues that rural communities face. One example was public transport and the infrequency of bus services. As we are all aware, the Bill provides for an area of competence for transport and local infrastructure. It confers upon strategic authorities, via Clause 32, functions over local transport planning, including securing public passenger transport services and bus franchising. This shows that the Bill gives strategic authorities the tools and the means to address the issues that noble Lords have raised. However, it does not highlight the challenges faced by rural communities or assist strategic authorities in recognising and effectively responding to these issues. That is why the Government view the issuing of non-statutory guidance on the consideration of rural needs as the most effective way of ensuring that rural affairs are not overlooked.

Turning to the issue of commissioners, I welcome the debate we have had surrounding the new commissioner role throughout consideration of the Bill. Noble Lords and Members in the other place have consistently raised questions about the number of appointments, their selection and their ability to be held accountable. It is important that the increase in appointments be viewed in the context of improving operational flexibility for combined authorities and combined county authorities. The amendments we have made mean that mayors will have the ability to appoint a commissioner to the new culture area of competence, as well as allowing more than one commissioner to operate in a single area of competence. They also ensure that commissioners can work or exercise functions in any aspect of an area of competence, rather than needing to work on the whole area.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for their comments about the guidance. I was really pleased that the guidance is thorough and deals with many of the issues your Lordships have discussed during the progress of the Bill. There are also clear arrangements around the remit of local scrutiny committees and commissioners when they are introduced to an authority. Commissioners will be subject to sanctions, including removal from post for failing to attend six consecutive meetings of a local scrutiny committee, and financial penalties if they fail to answer questions or provide information or mislead a local scrutiny committee. With the new guidance that has been published, I hope we have dealt with many of the issues that were raised during our discussions on the Bill.

On voting arrangements, I thank noble Lords, including the noble Lady, Baroness Pidgeon, for her very collegial engagement on Lords Amendments 13 and 87 concerning the London Assembly. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, that it is important that we remember that we are not debating whether there should be a review of voting arrangements in London. The Government believe that London’s devolution model has been successful over the last 25 years, but we will continue to work with the Mayor of London and London Assembly members to ensure that the model is fit to support the capital’s continued growth.

On the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, as I have set out, these amendments would bring scrutiny to the Mayor of London’s budget. If the amendments were passed, they would bring him out of line with his counterparts in the rest of England. As such, I ask that the House does not insist. For the same reason, I also ask that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, does not press her Amendments 87B and 87C.

Lastly, on ministerial powers of direction, noble Lords will be aware that, without a backstop power, there is a risk that some areas will get left behind. I have been very clear that these powers will only be used as a last resort when all other options have failed. However, notwithstanding the safeguards in the Bill, I have heard the concerns raised by noble Lords. That is why my colleague in the other place, the Minister for Devolution, Faith and Communities, made the commitment that we will not commence the powers to establish a non-mayoral strategic authority or expand an existing authority without local consent for a period of two years following Royal Assent, nor will we commence the power to provide for a mayor without local consent for a period of four years following Royal Assent.

[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I thank those taking part in this short debate, and I also thank the Minister for her comments. However, I disagree that leaving the consideration of rural affairs to the discretion of strategic authorities and mayors and not including it specifically on the face of the Bill, nor in statutory guidance, is sufficient. Non-statutory guidance can be easily set aside. Now is an opportunity to recognise the importance of rural affairs. I wish to test the opinion of the House.

12:38

Division 1

Motion A1 agreed.

Ayes: 220

---

Conservative: 138
Liberal Democrat: 54
Crossbench: 16
Non-affiliated: 5
Green Party: 2
Ulster Unionist Party: 2
Democratic Unionist Party: 2
Labour: 1

Noes: 143

---

Labour: 125
Crossbench: 15
Non-affiliated: 3

12:48

Motion B

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendment 4, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 4A.

4A: Because it is not necessary to legislate for the process of appointing commissioners.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I have already spoken to Motion B. I beg to move.

Motion B agreed.

Motion C

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendments 13 and 87, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reasons 13A and 87A.

13A: Because it would be inappropriate for changes to a proposed GLA budget to be subject to a simple majority decision by the London Assembly.

87A: Because it is consequential on Lords Amendment 13 to which the Commons disagree.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I have already spoken to Motion C. I beg to move.

Motion C1 (as an amendment to Motion C)

Moved by

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook]

At end insert “, and do propose Amendments 87B and 87C in lieu—

87B: After Clause 15, insert the following new Clause—
“Review of voting arrangements: Greater London Authority’s consolidated council tax requirement
(1) The Secretary of State must carry out a review of the voting arrangements for determining the Greater London Authority’s consolidated council tax requirement.
(2) The review under subsection (1) must consider the situation of the Authority in the context of the budget-setting arrangements for strategic authorities in other regions, and make recommendations on whether there is a case for reducing the majority required for the Greater London Authority.
(3) The review under subsection (1) must be published within one year of the passing of this Act.”

87C: Clause 92, page 86, line 34, at end insert—
“(ia) section (Review of voting arrangements: Greater London Authority’s consolidated council tax requirement) (review of voting arrangements: Greater London Authority’s consolidated council tax requirement);””

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move Motion C1 in my name. I wish to test the opinion of the House.

12:49

Division 2

Motion C1 disagreed.

Ayes: 152

---

Conservative: 138
Crossbench: 5
Non-affiliated: 3
Ulster Unionist Party: 2
Democratic Unionist Party: 2
Labour: 1
Liberal Democrat: 1

Noes: 207

---

Labour: 128
Liberal Democrat: 51
Crossbench: 22
Non-affiliated: 6

12:59

Motion D

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendments 26 and 89, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reasons 26A and 89A.

26A: Because national planning policy already ensures that brownfield land is prioritised for development.

89A: Because it is consequential on Lords Amendment 26 to which the Commons disagree.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Motion D, I will also speak to Motions G and G1. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Scott and Lady McIntosh, for their amendments in this group. Turning first to Amendments 26 and 89, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, for their engagement on this issue. As I have previously said to this House, the Government fully support a “brownfield first” approach to development. The NPPF is the framework within which planning policies and decisions are and should be made. The framework is a material consideration in planning decisions, and all strategic planning authorities must have regard to the need to ensure their spatial development strategies are consistent with it. Local plans are also required to be prepared with regard to the framework. As such, it is the right place in which to set clear expectations for how and where development should come forward.

I appreciate that there is a feeling among noble Lords that the NPPF has not had the full effect that is desired. However, conclusions on the effectiveness of brownfield policy are premature and cannot fully be seen at this stage. The nature of plan making means that there is often a lag between changes made to national policy and seeing impacts on the ground. Also, we have yet to publish our revised NPPF, so the full effects of our wider “brownfield first” policy interventions are yet to be seen. Prescriptive changes in primary legislation are therefore not needed to support this objective and would create overly rigid requirements that would not support effective delivery or allow local circumstances to be taken into account. It would also undermine wider government objectives to deliver the homes this country needs, including new towns. We therefore must resist the temptation to do this.

However, we understand the concerns from noble Lords, and to further stress the importance of prioritising brownfield land over greenfield land the Government are committing today to prescribing in secondary legislation that when preparing their spatial development strategies, strategic planning authorities, including mayors and strategic authorities, must have regard to the desirability of prioritising development on land that has been previously developed.

On Lords Amendments 89B and 89C specifically, spatial development strategies do not allocate or designate specific sites or land. That is a role exclusively for local plans. Instead, SDSs are there to set a spatial framework and to identify broad locations for development. It is likely that some of those broad locations will contain both greenfield and brownfield land, and it is for the local planning authority to work out which land should be allocated for specific purposes. We intend SDSs to be high-level documents that are relatively quick to produce, and introducing what amounts to a series of legal tests would serve to slow that process and open up potential avenues for legal challenge. This would have a drag effect on setting the framework for the development that the country needs. For these reasons I respectfully ask the House to agree with the Motion not to insist from the other place, and I kindly ask that the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, does not press her amendments in lieu.

I turn now to Amendments 41 and 94 from the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I thank the noble Baroness, as well as my noble friends Lady McIntosh, Lady Keeley, Lord Spellar and Lord Brennan, the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, for their insight and very constructive engagement on this issue. I am also pleased to have met the Music Venue Trust yesterday to discuss this amendment and to further understand its concerns. While the Government do not consider that primary legislation is the appropriate mechanism, we fully share the objective of ensuring that new developments do not unduly impact existing businesses. That is why my colleague in the other place confirmed on Tuesday that guidance will be updated to set clearer national expectations and promote best practice across local authorities. In parallel, we will write to local authorities highlighting the importance of this policy. This commitment will support national planning policy, which already carries significant weight within the planning system, while allowing decision-makers the necessary flexibility to apply it in the light of the specific circumstances of each development proposal, including a proportionate assessment of impacts and mitigation. Updated guidance will complement the steps we are already taking to strengthen the effectiveness of the agent of change principle.

As part of our most substantial revision to planning policy in a decade, we have recently consulted on setting out more clearly what information decision-makers should take into account in the National Planning Policy Framework. A policy approach is more agile than primary legislation, and we can continue to refine it based on feedback on how it is working in practice. This is exactly what we have done through our recent consultation. We sought views on whether our proposed policy is sufficiently clear, and we are currently in the process of analysing responses. I believe we have had 20,000 responses to the NPPF consultation.

Furthermore, as part of the NPPF consultation, the Government have been clear that the decision not to designate statutory national development management policies at this time will be kept under review, and we will return to it if the proposed policies do not have the desired outcomes of supporting more effective decisions. Therefore, I am not persuaded that primary legislation is going to be effective or necessary. Taken together, our changes to policy and guidance will help to ensure that businesses and cultural venues are robustly protected from the effects of new development within their vicinity. This is what we all want to happen, and that was certainly echoed by the Music Venue Trust yesterday.

For the reasons I have set out, I hope the House will agree to the Motion not to insist from the other place. I kindly ask that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, does not press her amendments in lieu. I beg to move.

Motion D1 (as an amendment to Motion D)

Moved by

[Lord Jamieson]

At end insert “, and do propose Amendments 89B and 89C in lieu—

89B: After Clause 37, insert the following new Clause—
“Brownfield land priority
(1) A spatial development strategy prepared by a mayor, combined authority, or combined county authority must seek to prioritise the development of suitable brownfield land within the relevant area before designating greenfield land for development.
(2) Greenfield land may be designated for development where the authority is satisfied that—
(a) the use of available brownfield land alone would be insufficient to meet identified development needs, or
(b) development of such brownfield land would not be viable, deliverable, or would give rise to unacceptable environmental impacts, having regard to subsection (3).
(3) In applying this section, the authority must have regard to—
(a) the availability and deliverability of brownfield land,
(b) the economic viability of development,
(c) the suitability of brownfield land for the proposed development,
(d) the environmental impacts of any development,
(e) the need to meet housing and economic development requirements in the relevant area, and
(f) and relevant national planning policy.”

89C: Clause 92, page 88, line 1, at end insert—
“(ka) section (Brownfield land priority) (brownfield land priority);””

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a councillor in Central Bedfordshire. Throughout the debate on this Bill there has been agreement across the House that there should be a focus on brownfield first, putting homes where they are most needed—close to jobs, facilities and infrastructure. It is better for the environment, helps to regenerate our towns and cities and saves our valuable green fields. The current crisis has highlighted the need to grow our own food.

While prioritising brownfield is in planning guidance, it is not working. Greenfield development continues to represent around 50% of all housing development, with the loss of around 50,000 hectares in the last three years according to government statistics—and that excludes solar farms. Why? Because it is easier and quicker for developers to build on green fields. If we are genuinely to move the dial, we need to do more. We need a more proactive approach. Strategic development strategies are an opportunity to proactively look at how more can be done to build on brownfield to regenerate those urban areas and build the homes we need, to remove barriers and to support doing the right thing. That is why we are moving this Motion to make clear that this should be the case and to give it legislative backing.

The Minister raised some concerns, and I appreciate the time she has given to discuss this. We have listened to those concerns and have changed our original amendment, which the Minister thought might have unintended consequences and, as such, legal challenges. Our amendment in lieu reframes this as policy-led and aligns more closely with how spatial planning operates in practice. We have specified the amendment as pertaining to spatial development strategies and have recognised that land is allocated to meet specific identified development needs. Our amendment recognises that authorities must have regard to relevant national planning policy; housing and economic requirements for relevant areas; environmental impacts; and deliverability and economic viability of brownfield development. We do not believe, as the Minister said, that it will cause delay. In fact, it is the reverse: this is an opportunity to have more sites available for development.

I reiterate that we are not seeking to stand in the way of development. Rather, we want authorities, mayors and central government to properly address and overcome the challenges of brownfield development. I hope the Minister will recognise the constructive intentions behind our amendments in lieu, on which I am minded to test the opinion of the House. I also thank my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering for her efforts on her amendment in lieu, to bring it more in line with the arrangements in Scotland while seeking to reflect English planning laws.

We must remember that this is not just about music or cultural venues. It involves several other existing businesses and facilities, which deserve recognition in this debate. I look forward to the responses from the Minister. I beg to move.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I echo the comments of my noble friend from the Front Bench, and I will speak to Motion G.

I take this opportunity to most warmly thank the Minister for meeting with a group of us this week and following that up with a meeting with the Music Venue Trust yesterday. I listened very carefully to what she had to say. I understood that, possibly, last week, the Government were minded to bring forward an amendment; it is still not too late for them to do so.

I declare that I am a non-practising Scottish advocate, and I would like to look to the Scottish model in this regard. The Scottish model gives a statutory legal basis, giving legal effect to the agent of change principle. The amendment is wider than the Scottish proposed law, which has now been in force for seven years, and our proposed amendment goes on to reflect English planning practice.

In the last seven years since the Scottish provision came into effect, the world has not caved in, and I do not think that, in that time, a significant number of music centres have closed, nor indeed have there been other instances of massive mitigation costs being sought. The Scottish provision has brought clarity and legal certainty to all those concerned. I am afraid I part company from the Minister: I think the House and the Government need to move on from light, fluffy, non-statutory policy to give statutory basis and legal certainty in the provision that I have set out.

We have set out in Amendment 94B that, in the event of an impact-sensitive development, regard is held and it is the agent of change—the new business—which takes any precautionary measures and pays the expense. It gives protection for existing businesses and facilities from unreasonable restrictions resulting from new developments.

I am very mindful of the fact that this mostly concerns music centres in England. We have had some figures recently from the Music Venue Trust in this regard. This is a wider issue than that. It reflects the fact that we have an urban-based problem here—a conflict between existing businesses facing competition and restrictions perhaps being imposed by others. While it is without doubt mostly music venues that have been affected by mitigation costs and the risk of businesses closing, the problem is wider and arises from dense urban living, brownfield regeneration and mixed-use development. The beauty of the amendment before us today is that it engages planning, licensing and nuisance in a way that would resolve this problem.

I firmly believe that the Government would be sticking their head in the sand by trying to go along with fluffy, non-statutory guidance followed up by a letter, and I ask the Minister to explain what status a letter would have. The provision proposed today, which would come into effect two months after the Bill is enforced, would resolve the issues once and for ever. It would give clarity to planners, developers, existing businesses and practitioners, and we could move on from the constant lack of clarity and uncertainty in various iterations of the National Planning Policy Framework and guidance. I am minded to test the opinion of the House when the time comes.

13:15

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support the amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, under Motion G1: Amendments 94B and 94C, on the agent of change. I do so with particular reference to music venues. I also thank the Minister for the meeting we had this week.

The principle of the agent of change is not an issue in itself; that is supported on all sides of the House. The question is very much how best it can practically be enabled, and it is clear that the guidance by itself has not worked. The experience of the Music Venue Trust in terms of cases is hugely informing, and points clearly to the distinction made between the Scottish system as outlined by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, which is statutory, and the English experience based on guidance. MVT says that the reason why the Scottish system works is that developers know applications will be rejected if they do not abide by agent of change. Response is, therefore, twofold: either applications abide by agent of change first time, which immediately speeds up the process, or if applications do not abide, the council has clear legislation to which to refer when declining the application. This means that organisations such as the Music Venue Trust do not enter a time-consuming back and forth of repeatedly objecting with the council and the developer.

Of the 300 music venues that have closed since 2015, the Music Venue Trust has documented 125 cases of venue closures where planning has been a direct cause of closure, rising to over 175 cases that include that as a contributory factor. But closure itself is not the only factor; as the MVT says, the absence of a clear statutory requirement means that every planning application near a music venue involves protracted negotiation over whether and how agent of change is applied. Venues spend months, sometimes years, in a process that a statutory requirement would resolve at the point of application. Moreover, as the MVT says, with only guidance in place, every time a developer seeks to circumvent the principle, a venue and its supporters must fund the legal and professional costs of enforcement through the planning process—costs that run to approximately £20,000 per case on average, rising to over £50,000 in more complex cases, which are not sustainable for the industry. A statutory provision would avoid this, but it is clear that the statutory solution has much wider support than in the industry itself.

In the just published and excellent Fan-led Review of Live and Electronic Music from the noble Lord, Lord Brennan of Canton, a report for the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the fans’ charter states:

“The UK Government should embed the ‘agent of change’ principle in planning legislation in England. Following Scotland’s example, we would like to see the principle strengthened in law across the whole of the UK”.


The Government are saying that they will strengthen the guidance. There is no guarantee that this will work, and at the end of the day guidance is still guidance. We have the luxury of a ready-made template of the Scottish statutory system, proven over seven years to work smoothly, quickly and with minimal dispute. There is really no reason why the Government should not accept this amendment, based on that law, inclusive of that law, other than their aversion to a statutory solution.

I fully support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. If she divides the House, I will support her in the Lobby.

[Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak for the first time on this Bill, and I apologise to the House for doing so rather late in the day. The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, has just explained why I have not been participating actively before: for the last year or so I have been undertaking a review of live electronic music, commissioned by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the House of Commons. He referred to one of the 50 recommendations in that excellent report, which I commend to noble Lords to study carefully. It is exactly as the noble Earl has just said: that the UK Government should embed the agent of change principle in planning legislation in England, following Scotland’s example. That is a key part of it.

I will just say the following on the Government’s Motion G and the amendment to it in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh. I pay tribute to my colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, who originally introduced the successful Private Member’s Bill many years ago in the House of Commons, which got the ball rolling, shall we say, on the whole agent of change issue around music venues and got it strengthened in guidance. That was a welcome step forward. However, even at the time I remember him saying to me, “This will not be enough; we will need a statutory provision eventually”.

I therefore very much welcome the engagement there has been from my noble friend the Minister, and the fact that the Government have acknowledged that this is not currently working effectively in practice and that it needs strengthening, and made clear commitments to do that within the National Planning Policy Framework. That is an extremely welcome move. However, I still have the view—I would not have said so in the review—that putting the agent of change principle around music venues in the Bill and making it a statutory provision will ultimately need to happen. Without that, there will always be the issues which the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, so effectively outlined for those people operating music venues.

Having said that, I would have preferred any amendment that was put down—I mentioned this to the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh—to replicate the Scottish position, which is specifically about noise nuisance caused by music venues. It is not about church bells, cockerels in the morning or living next door to a pig farm; it is about a specific problem that really needs to be dealt with, where an existing music venue produces noise but is operating legally, and a developer decides to move in next door and then expects that existing business to pick up the mitigating costs for any nuisance that might be caused to residents moving into the flats, houses or whatever they are. There is a danger, if you draw this too wide, that that principle will be diluted.

I am very interested to hear what the Minister has to say in response to the debate. It remains my view that this should be a statutory provision, but I am very pleased that the Government are acknowledging that there is a problem, because this is not working currently, and that they have already committed to responding in due course to all the recommendations in my report.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I too support Motion G1 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I thank the Minister for meeting us this week and for meeting the Music Venue Trust yesterday.

The Minister in the other place told us that the agent of change principle is “already firmly embedded” in national planning policy since 2018, yet the Music Venue Trust intervened in 200 cases in 2024 alone, at a cost of up to £50,000 each, to save grass-roots music venues from closure. If that is what “firmly embedded” looks like, one shudders to think what neglect would produce.

The Minister’s answer is more guidance—updated, strengthened, consistent. But that is precisely what was promised when the principle entered the NPPF in 2018, and again in every consultation since. The guidance says the right thing—it always has. The problem is that guidance is only guidance. Developers know it. They test it, challenge it and too often circumvent it, because they do not have to comply. No amount of strengthened wording changes that; only statute changes that calculus.

The Minister speaks of flexibility for local decision-makers, but flexibility cuts both ways. It means inconsistency: one authority holds the line while another folds under developer pressure. It means venues exhausting their reserves on legal fees to enforce what policy already supposedly guarantees, and it means that venues without access to specialist support do not achieve a remarkable success rate. They simply close—quietly, invisibly and without appearing in any dataset as a planning casualty.

Even the Government’s own Back-Benchers in the other place were unconvinced. Lewis Atkinson, Member of Parliament for Sunderland Central, cited his constituency, where flats remain unbuilt precisely because developers lack the clarity that only statute can provide. The Minister offered him a meeting. One can only hope that the music venue at risk survives long enough to hold it.

Scotland did not offer meetings or updated guidance; Scotland legislated. Disputes there are vanishingly rare because the law is unambiguous and developers comply from the outset. There is no costly negotiation, no charitable fundraising to protect venues, and no protracted back and forth with planning authorities. The Government have had seven years to make guidance work; it has not worked. This amendment does not invent a new principle—the Government themselves have endorsed that principle repeatedly—it simply gives it the legal force it has always lacked so that decision-makers have a firm statutory footing, and developers cannot treat compliance as optional. I support Motion G1.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, my name has not been attached to either of these issues to date, but I give our support to both of them. They are both extremely important and I find myself convinced, having listened to the debate so far on both matters, that the case is sufficient for us to send both matters back to the other place. The issue is primarily about whether guidance is enough or whether one needs to place one’s intentions on a firm statutory footing. We need to put them on to a firm statutory footing—there is so much evidence that things are not working properly in either case and that the Government should think again. In either case, if there is a wish to test the opinion of the House, we would be supportive of it.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, noble Lords have rightly highlighted the importance of prioritising brownfield land. The Government fully support the “brownfield first” approach, and we have set this clearly in national policy. We recently consulted on further measures to strengthen this, including higher densities in sustainable locations and greater intensification of urban and suburban sites. However, to reinforce the importance of prioritising brownfield over greenfield land, the Government are willing to commit to prescribing in secondary legislation that, when preparing spatial development strategies, strategic planning authorities, including mayoral and other strategic authorities, must have regard to the desirability of prioritising development on land that has been previously developed. Our intention is for the regulations to come into force this year. I hope this will further demonstrate the Government’s clear commitment to a “brownfield first” approach. I assure noble Lords that this issue is being taken seriously. and I hope they will not insist on this amendment.

The agent of change principle lends itself to a policy approach, and I am concerned that setting it out in legislation would not provide decision-makers with sufficient flexibility to weigh up different factors in the planning balance. National planning policy, as it stands, already carries considerable weight in the planning system; it is certainly not “light and fluffy”, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, described it. The National Planning Policy Framework is a powerful, material consideration in planning decisions and must be taken into account in preparing the development plan. Our consultation on a revised framework, which closed on 10 March, proposes the most significant rewrite since its introduction over a decade ago, with clearer, more rules-based policies designed to make planning policy easier to use and underpin the delivery of faster and simpler plans.

Through this consultation, we propose strengthening the existing agent of change policy, setting out more clearly the matters to be considered, including the need to identify the nature of potential impacts and to engage early on with existing uses. The policy would be explicit that both current and permitted levels of operation of existing activities should be considered, which would include licences for music venues.

The Government have also considered introducing statutory national development management policies and have decided not to at this stage, given the impact that we expect the proposals in the consultation will have. We will keep this decision under review and return to it if the proposed policies do not have the desired outcome of supporting more effective decisions. We are currently analysing all the feedback we have received and will publish our response in due course.

Furthermore, planning practice guidance is clear that a range of measures should be considered to mitigate impacts from existing uses. This includes using good design, incorporating noise barriers and optimising noise insulation.

13:30

As I set out for the first time yesterday, we will publish new planning practice guidance on the agent of change, following the publication of the National Planning Policy Framework. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, referred extensively to the Scottish experience, as did others. Despite the agent of change being placed on a statutory footing there, there is no clear evidence of any significant effect on implementation. Scottish Ministers have called in a number of applications where this is a central issue to make sure that a suitably balanced approach is being taken. That includes arguments from both sides, the developers and the venues. This demonstrates that primary legislation has not removed the questions of implementation at a local level, and I am not persuaded by the evidence that we have seen that this approach has made a material difference on the ground.

The Government are committed to supporting the UK’s music industry as part of our industrial strategy. At my meeting with the Music Venue Trust yesterday, it clearly highlighted that problems with the music industry are many and various. The agent of change is one of them, but there is often more than one issue when music venues are in trouble. We will soon publish a music plan drawing together all that the Government are doing to support the music industry. That includes a £30 million music growth package over three years from 2026 to support domestic growth, talent development and music exports.

We are also supporting the sector’s work to adopt a voluntary ticket contribution, where £1 from every stadium and arena ticket will go towards supporting grass-roots music. In 2026-27, all live music venues will benefit from 15% business rates relief on top of the support announced at the 2025 Budget. Their bills will then be frozen in real terms for a further two years to allow the vital infrastructure that showcases our vibrant music industry to continue to thrive.

Lastly, on the licensing regime, local authorities can already take account of the agent of change principle within the current licensing system. The legislation recognises that different areas face different pressures, and licensing authorities may reflect this principle in their statements of licensing policy where they consider it appropriate or necessary.

We conducted a call for evidence last November on reforming the licensing framework. It sought views on whether there is value in strengthening the existing approach. The call for evidence included a specific question on the agent of change principle, and the detailed analysis will be published in due course. This will help to guide our thinking on next steps on the issue.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

I thank noble Lords for their support and thank the Minister for her response. I appreciate that the Minister has offered assurances that the Government will set out in regulation that strategic planning authorities, when preparing spatial development strategies, must have regard to the desirability of prioritising development on previously developed land. However, as I said earlier, this approach has not worked. If we are genuinely going to move the dial, we need to strengthen the prioritisation of brownfield development. Therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House on Motion D1.

13:33

Division 3

Motion D1 agreed.

Ayes: 209

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Conservative: 130
Liberal Democrat: 53
Crossbench: 14
Non-affiliated: 4
Green Party: 2
Democratic Unionist Party: 2
Bishops: 1
Ulster Unionist Party: 1
Labour: 1
Independent: 1

Noes: 145

---

Labour: 130
Crossbench: 10
Non-affiliated: 5

13:44

Motion E

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendments 36 and 90, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reasons 36A and 90A, do not insist on its Amendment 155 and do agree with Commons in their amendments 155A to 155F.

36A: Because it is appropriate for the Leader and Cabinet Executive to be the principal type of executive arrangements for local authorities.

90A: Because it is consequential on Lords Amendments 36 and 155 to which the Commons disagree.

155A: Schedule 27, page 283, line 10, leave out “or remained”

155B: Schedule 27, page 283, line 11, after “resolution” insert “under this Part”

155C: Schedule 27, page 283, line 36, after “resolution” insert “under this Part”

155D: Schedule 27, page 283, line 37, leave out “or remained”

155E: Schedule 27, page 286, line 18, leave out paragraph (a),

155F: Schedule 27, page 286, line 23, leave out sub-paragraph (3)

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I will also speak to Motions F and F1. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for their amendments in this group.

Lords Amendments 36, 90 and 155 would remove from the Bill the provisions relating to local authority governance and executive arrangements. The Government cannot accept these amendments. We remain firmly of the view that executive models of governance, particularly the leader and cabinet model, provide the clearest accountability and lead to more effective decision-making in local government.

As I have said before, these provisions are intended to bring greater clarity and consistency to local authority governance in England. Your Lordships will recall my previous reference on Report to my own experience as an LGA peer reviewer and the examples that I gave highlighting the difficulties with co-ordination, decision-making and clear lines of accountability that can arise in councils operating the committee system. The Government have listened carefully to concerns raised in both this House and the other House and have responded constructively.

I will comment on the CIPFA governance review. In 2025, CIPFA led a sector-wide governance review and issued a framework, Delivering Good Governance in Local Government, which emphasised the importance of clear executive leadership, defined responsibility for decision-making and the ability to maintain a single coherent strategic overview. The review highlights the risks that can arise where accountability is diffuse or decision-making is spread across multiple committees. Executive models of governance are better suited to meeting these principles than committee systems, where responsibility and oversight are more dispersed, and leadership, responsibility and accountability can be less clear.

On Report in the Commons, the Government brought forward their own amendments to ensure that councils that have more recently adopted the committee system, whether by council resolution or by local referendum, will be able to continue with those arrangements for the remainder of their moratorium period and, where agreed locally, beyond that point. We continue to believe that this approach strikes the right balance between encouraging a more consistent model of governance and respecting more recent local democratic mandates, while avoiding unnecessary disruption for councils that have only recently changed their arrangements. In addition, the Government have responded to concerns about changes to statutory notice requirements and their potential impact on local media by retaining the existing requirement for councils to publish notice of governance changes in at least one local newspaper.

Lastly, I emphasise that the leader and cabinet model is not a uniform structure. As the independent Centre for Governance and Scrutiny has highlighted, there are many variations in the way the leader and cabinet model can operate, allowing councils to adopt an approach to decision-making that best suits their needs within the overall model. The Government stand ready to support any council required to change its governance model to ensure that it is able to operate a version of the system best suited to its local needs. For those reasons, I urge noble Lords to agree the Motion that this House do not insist on these amendments.

Amendments 37 and 91 would require the Secretary of State to develop and implement a strategy for parish governance in England. We have heard noble Lords’ valid arguments about the important role that town and parish councils can play in delivering local services and representing their communities, and we agree with those comments. We have therefore proposed an amendment in lieu that helps to clarify the role that we intend parish and town councils to have within neighbourhood governance arrangements. The amendment adds an explicit provision to the clause that allows for regulations to provide for representatives of town and parish councils to be included as members on neighbourhood governance structures.

Our intention here, which we will also set out when we publish our neighbourhood governance framework later this year, is that neighbourhood governance structures should include representation from town and parish councils where they exist in an area. The amendment gets the balance right. Some local authorities have hundreds of town and parish councils, so mandating the inclusion of each individual parish within structures would be impractical and inappropriate. Instead, we should ensure that we set a clear expectation of representation that retains the appropriate flexibility for places to develop the mechanisms that will work best for their communities.

Noble Lords have also raised concerns about the creation of new town and parish councils. While it is right that decisions on the creation of new town and parish councils are and should remain local decisions taken by local authorities in consultation with communities through community governance reviews, we will commit to reviewing and updating the statutory guidance that supports this process. That has not been updated since 2010, so it is time for it to be refreshed with examples of good practice for establishing new town and parish councils.

Clause 60 aims to complement the work of town and parish councils where they exist and to ensure that all communities, whether or not they have a town and parish council, have effective ways to address local issues. We will be setting all this out in non-statutory guidance alongside the regulations. In addition, I can confirm that we will be publishing further principles of our neighbourhood governance framework later this year. It should be evident to your Lordships that we, too, value the role of town and parish councils, and see them as important contributors to effective neighbourhood governance.

In summary, there are three points here. First, our amendment in lieu allows for regulations to provide for representatives of town and parish councils to be included as members on neighbourhood governance structures. It is right that they should be included. Secondly, we have committed to review and update the statutory guidance on community governance reviews to better reflect good practice around establishing new parish councils. Thirdly, we have committed to setting out our overall intentions for how neighbourhood governance arrangements should interact with existing groups and institutions in a framework to be published later this year, ahead of laying regulations.

For the reasons I have outlined, I urge noble Lords not to insist on Lords Amendments 37 and 91, and to support the Government’s amendment in lieu. I beg to move.

Motion E1 (as an amendment to Motion E)

[Lord Shipley]

Moved by

Leave out from “House” to the end and insert “do insist on its Amendments 36, 90 and 155 and do disagree with the Commons in their Amendments 155A to 155F to the words so restored to the Bill.”

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s statement a moment ago. We have debated this issue several times. I still believe that the case I have been making, with colleagues, remains the right one.

I was interested in the fact that the Minister cited in evidence a moment ago research done by CIPFA on a mayoral cabinet system, but of course what that research did not mention was that local people might have a view about it and wish to change the system. The problems have arisen in places where there has been a cabinet model that has worked badly, and where local people have wanted to change the model back to a committee system. That is the issue, and what is happening under this Bill is that they will no longer have the power to do so.

I read carefully what the Minister said in the other place when it debated our amendments on Tuesday. She said that the Bill

“sets a floor for devolution, and we intend to build on the foundation set out in the Bill to give communities the power and control they are demanding to drive the change they want to see in their place”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/4/26; col. 238.]

If that is what the Government believe, why does that not extend to the governance structure under which decisions are being made on communities’ behalf? They do, of course, pay the bills. I just find that the Government say one thing but are simply entering now the straitjacket of a single governance structure, giving no power to local people to affect change in their area where that does not work well.

I feel strongly that, even at this late stage of the Bill, we must safeguard local consent for local government changes. We need to promote parish governance for unparished areas and prevent the compulsory imposition of the executive model on all local councils. I have never understood why central government can claim that this Bill is about devolution and community empowerment, at the same time as forcing Clause 59 upon us, which does precisely the opposite of what the Government are seeking to do, and this very simple issue stays in place. There is still time for the Government to change their mind.

Throughout this Bill, my amendments have been to produce a more transparent system that the public can understand and thereby support. It would extend democratic engagement by all councillors across all parties and groupings and really help to improve the quality of decision-making at the point a decision is made. I have found this overcentralisation of power, which is the reality, very worrying in a Bill that masquerades as being about devolution in England and community empowerment, because in some respects, that is true, but in most respects, it is not. Therefore, I beg to move my Motion E1.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I want briefly to speak in favour of my noble friend Lord Shipley’s amendment. I listened very carefully to what the Minister said about how the committee system does not necessarily work.

I want to share the Sheffield experience with the noble Baroness. In Sheffield, when we had a strong leader model, the leader picked her cabinet, and we ended up with 10 people deciding for the entire city. There were 84 councillors and 10 people chosen by the leader. There was one occasion—I think my noble friend Lord Scriven will remember this—where, in one ward, all three councillors were part of the cabinet and large swathes of the city had no say. What we ended up with—I hope noble Lords go and Google this—was the Sheffield tree fiasco, where even the noble Lord, Lord Gove, who is not in his place, came up and could not see what was going on. That was a result of the groupthink that existed within that strong leader model.

Let me tell your Lordships what the situation is at the moment in Sheffield. There is no party in overall control. You would think that would be chaos, but it is not. It is made up of nine councillors drawn from all political parties representing different parts of the city, who all sit on a particular committee. There is a leader of the council—at the moment, he is a Labour councillor. All the committee chairs sit on what we call a strategy and resources committee. Therefore, all councillors have a say. We do not have the ludicrous situation where the scrutiny boards, as previously under a strong leader model, are picked by the same leader who is in charge of the cabinet. It was a ruling group which had all the cabinet positions and the scrutiny positions. That is why we ended up with bad decision-making.

It is why I say: let local people decide. If this Bill is about community empowerment, let them decide. People in Bristol and Sheffield have decided to go for a different model. I referred to Birmingham on a previous occasion and how it had a strong leader model but was not able to make the difficult decisions that Sheffield most recently has, despite no party being in overall control and moving to a committee system. We have not been in the financial crisis that the likes of Birmingham have been in.

What I am saying is that different models can work, but let us trust local residents. Let central government loosen a bit of control and let local people decide. Given what is written on the tin of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, why are we not empowering communities? At the moment, it feels disempowering. Therefore, I hope the Minister will address the issue of the Sheffield experience.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Motion F1 and particularly Clauses 37 and 91. Large parts of England—about 20% or one-fifth—will be unparished when the Government have finished vandalising our councils with LGR—the historic county boroughs, cathedral cities such as Norwich and Oxford, coastal communities such as Great Yarmouth, Hastings or Eastbourne, and new towns such as Stevenage, where the noble Baroness served with distinction as leader for many years. I note my noble friend Lady Maclean is not in her place, so I will save her from saying that the town of Redditch, which she represented with distinction, is wholly unparished—save for little Feckenham in the south-west of that new town.

When Labour is done, these places will not have a properly constituted, legally incorporated and democratically legitimised local council to mow the park, heat the baths and run the carnival, complete with a proper mayor, wearing red robes and a tricorn hat, with ribbon-cutting, convening powers. Through Clause 60, what the Government have in mind for these unparished areas is a system where out-of-town patsies are parachuted in to play politics in toothless talking shops with no resources, because there is nothing left in the precept once social care has feasted on it.

I read with astonishment this morning what the Minister wrote to us in proposing Amendment 37A, which will allow town and parish councillors to attend those meetings. Does she not see the problem here? In those places, there are not going to be any town or parish councillors—that is the point. By what alchemy will she conjure up councillors from thin air to attend these meetings? It is just magical thinking. That is why Amendment 37A is worthless: you cannot send people who do not exist.

14:00

By contrast, my noble friend’s amendment will ensure that elected community champions exist, that they have real resources to respond to local needs and, probably most importantly, that the self-selecting cronyism, nepotism, back-scratching and special interests with an axe to grind do not hold the majority over a barrel because nobody will be given the chance to cast their ballot for people who live in and love their town.

Without the cast-iron commitment to parish England from top to bottom, we risk making perhaps one quarter of our population second-class citizens, including by far the majority of Redditch. From start to finish, the Bill has been mis-sold. It is not about empowerment that any reasonable person would recognise but about the wholesale disempowerment of entire communities in the most historic corners of our country. I commend Motion F1 to the House.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, I simply say that I entirely agree with Motion F1; in the interests of time, I will not go further. I declare my interests as vice-president of the Local Government Association and the National Association of Local Councils, which have particular relevance to that Motion.

I will chiefly speak to, and offer the Greens’ the strongest possible support for, Motion E1. We believe in democracy; this is about democracy. I was intimately involved in the Sheffield tree campaign that the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, set out. I will just tell noble Lords of one occasion at the end of that story, when the cabinet model was falling apart. The cabinet member responsible for overseeing the cutting down of trees stood in the council chamber and brandished a slice of a tree that had just been cut down. It was a memorial tree to two twin brothers killed in the Second World War. He celebrated how they cut down that tree. That was where groupthink and that model of governance had led us to: the council was set against the people of the city.

I will not go into any more depth on that; it is an issue I have majored on since Second Reading. Instead, I will refer to something that has happened very recently in Bristol, where we have a similar situation to Sheffield and where the people decided they wanted democracy and did the very difficult job of delivering that democracy against the current, the push, from Westminster. There was a glowing peer review for the Local Government Association just this month, specifically noting how in Green-led Bristol council the committee system had strengthened democratic engagement and transparency of the council.

If an independent, non-political overseer can see the benefits of the committee system, surely the Government can too. I am not saying that they should mandate a committee system—I believe in local democracy—but surely they should see that they cannot apply their own authoritarian ideology to local communities up and down this land. That is unacceptable at any time, but it is particularly so in a Bill that is supposed to be about devolution and community empowerment. This makes no sense. I urge your Lordships’ House, in the strongest terms, to oppose and to keep opposing Clause 59.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I am also a vice-president of the Local Government Association. At this very late stage, this is the first time I have spoken on this Bill. This is like a map of Sheffield—Manor Castle, Tinsley and Hunters Bar, and I am a former leader of Sheffield City Council—and the reason why we are speaking on this issue is not just because we saw what happened in Sheffield. We understand the power of giving local people the ability to hold others to account, not just at election time but in how they are governed, the administration and the powers devolved through all 84 councillors. This not only changes behaviour but helps to make the correct decision for a particular community.

I notice that a noble Lord opposite is shaking their head but, for Sheffield, it was the right decision. People turned out at the ballot box and decided that this was what they wanted, and—surprise, surprise—it has not created chaos. People in our city know who to go to about their bins or roads; they know who the chair of the committee is. They know that when they go to their local councillor, they have some power to influence the committee system, unlike the cabinet model where it is down to 10 people. My noble friend Lord Shipley has moved this Motion because if another Sheffield happens, once this Bill has gone through, there is no way the system can be changed. The community is left with an administrative system that they are completely locked out of other than at the ballot box in four years. Under the strong leader model, when I was leader of Sheffield I could have decided to hold all except reserve powers. I could have decided to have a cabinet of three people deciding what happened strategically.

The reason for this amendment—and why the Government must go away and rethink—is that we need to ask the Minister to answer this question. If another Sheffield arose in a year’s time after this Bill was passed, how would the local community change that system to make sure that local councillors had powers to ensure they were not held to ransom by three people within the strong leader model? If that question cannot be answered, it is really important to understand that communities are going to be left with systems that do not necessarily meet their requirements. It is really important. The reason why three people from Sheffield have spoken is because we understand what happens when it goes wrong, and we have faith in local people to use their knowledge and their votes to put that system right.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will raise a couple of broader points about where we are. A strong leadership system operates well when you have only two parties represented on a council. We are about to have local elections in which the number of councils elected with only two parties represented, and one party holding a clear majority, will probably be smaller than it has been for a very long time. Where we have multi-party politics, the need for co-operation and engagement among all those on council is of a different order than under the strong leadership model. If the Government do not recognise that, they are utterly failing to future-proof this Bill.

On Motion F1, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, is going around the country talking about the Government’s failure to recognise the very radical implications of the strategic defence review. He talks about the need for mobilisation of the population at local level to deal with the new hybrid, civil and other threats facing this country. If we want to mobilise local volunteers and local services, we will have to engage our local population. If we have only distant councils representing half a million people, the population in Bradford will not be mobilised and will remain as disillusioned and unengaged as before, and the SDR will fail.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has just said, and I will add a couple of points. One is that in a committee system, every single member of the council has a role to play, has a function and is a part of the system. It is a really good way of encouraging good people to stand as councillors. In a cabinet system, nine-tenths of the council has nothing to do and you just get total disinterest in wanting to sign up for that, particularly if you are likely to be in opposition. We need good people in councils—we might even apply the same to Parliament. Having a system where only a few people have a real role to play is a big disincentive to seriously talented people joining an assembly of any variety.

Secondly, on Motion F1, as has been said I am a resident of Eastbourne, and we will have nothing that represents Eastbourne except a committee of a unitary authority, which may well have a completely different political make-up from the councillors elected in Eastbourne. There will be no way of expressing our voice as a community; we will just be waiting to be trampled on by other people’s ambitions. That is not the right way to run a local community. Yes, we need to improve on what we have at the moment—having one big town council with a runaway precept with no limits on it is not much fun either—so we need to think through what we should do at the parish level. But to have nothing—no initiative or sense that this is important—is a big hole in the Government’s thinking.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for bringing forward his Motion on the cabinet model. In doing so, he raises a question about how best local authorities should be governed and where the balance should lie between consistency and local discretion.

I support this Motion to leave out Clause 59. The removal of the requirement to retain a leader and cabinet structure would allow local authorities the freedom to determine governance models that best reflect their local circumstances, as we have heard so strongly about in Sheffield. That flexibility is not only sensible but at times necessary. Local government is at its most effective when it is responsive to the communities it serves. Imposing a single governance model risks overlooking the diversity of those communities and the different ways in which effective leadership and accountability can be achieved. Allowing councils to make these decisions for themselves is a recognition of their democratic mandate and their capacity to govern in the best interests of their residents.

That principle of local discretion and trust in local leadership brings me directly to my Motions on town and parish governance. Throughout the passage of this Bill, we have quite rightly championed the voices of town and parish councils. These communities represent the most immediate and tangible layer of local democracy, rooted in the everyday lives of the people they serve. I and many others have been very disappointed with the lack of strong support from the Government in this Bill for parish and town councils as part of our true local government. Town and parish councils are the custodians of local identity, the stewards of community assets and often the first point of contact for residents seeking to shape the places in which they live. For this reason, Clause 60 must go further.

This Motion is modest yet important. It would enable parish council representation within neighbourhood governance structures—not just maybe in them. We are not imposing a rigid requirement, but we are encouraging inclusion where it is appropriate. This is a matter of democratic coherence. If neighbourhood structures are to speak credibly for their areas, they must reflect the full spectrum of local government within them. Excluding parish councils, bodies with a direct democratic mandate, with the word “may” in the government amendment would risk creating a disconnect between decision-making and those who know their communities best. Such inclusion would strengthen collaboration rather than complicate it. We should champion and encourage this important layer of local democracy, and this amendment reflects and respects its role.

14:15

In short, this amendment reinforces a principle that has underpinned much of our debate: that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the people they affect and that those already entrusted with local representation should not be overlooked. That is about empowering local communities. I therefore urge noble Lords to support both the Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the Motion in my name as sensible, constructive steps towards more inclusive and effective local governance. Throughout the passage of this Bill, we have championed localism and the voice of communities. It is therefore right that we now test the opinion of the House on these important issues.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I return to local authority governance arrangements. The Government have been clear and consistent in their view that executive models of governance, particularly the leader and cabinet model, provide clearer accountability, stronger leadership and speedy and more effective decision-making for local government. That remains our firm view, and that is why we cannot accept these amendments.

However, as I set out earlier, this is not a rigid or prescriptive approach. The Government have listened carefully to points raised throughout the passage of this Bill and have responded. Councils that have only recently adopted the committee system will not be required to change immediately but may continue for the remainder of their moratorium period, after which they will undertake and publish a review of their governance arrangements. Meanwhile, the existing statutory notice requirements are being retained. Furthermore, it is also important to note that the executive forms of governance and the leader and cabinet model are also not rigid or prescriptive, but in fact leave room for flexibility in how they are implemented. While formally operating within the leader and cabinet framework, councils already employ a wide range of approaches to delegation, decision-making and scrutiny.

I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about most of the council doing nothing. I think that is completely wrong and denigrates the role that local councillors hold. Local councillors perform many important roles in councils, including scrutiny, licensing, planning and many other functions, as well as their very important role as ward councillors and, in the future, in the neighbourhood governance arrangements we are introducing. Some councils operate highly collective cabinets while others centralise decision-making. Some may choose to adopt a hybrid model, any of which can and should be employed best to reflect local needs. As I said, under the Government’s plans, councils that more recently adopted the committee system will retain this model.

In terms of evidence to justify moving away from the committee system, there are several individual examples that highlight the challenges of the committee system. Decisions can be slower. When Cheshire East switched to the committee system in 2021, an LGA corporate peer challenge found that its structure was large and meetings were intensive, with six policy committees and nine subcommittees involving 78 out of 82 councillors. It can be much harder for councils to keep a single strategic view. Co-ordination across individual committees can be a persistent challenge. That same peer challenge flagged the siloed nature of the council, with poor joint working across departments contributing to challenges in service delivery and communication.

Moving into and out of the committee system absorbs time and attention and increases administrative costs. Several councils that adopted the committee system later reverted to the leader and cabinet model, such as Brighton and Hove in 2024, and Newark & Sherwood District Council and Nottinghamshire County Council, both in 2022.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

The Minister is making the case in her answer that local discretion is required to move from one model to the other depending on local circumstance, rather than being centrally prescribed by Westminster.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am making the case that moving backwards and forwards between different models does not serve the public we serve.

Accountability can feel diffuse and unclear, with some councils judging the leader and cabinet model to be more transparent, agile and accountable. With collective decision-making spread across multiple committees, it is not always clear who is in charge.

The Government are not seeking total uniformity of internal process but clarity and effectiveness at the point of accountability and delivery. Residents should be able to see who is responsible, and scrutiny should be able to operate against clearly identifiable decision-makers. That is where executive models, and in particular, the leader and cabinet model, add the most value.

Councils can and should adopt a version of the leader and cabinet model that best suits their individual needs. When we were in opposition, Hertfordshire County Council had a set of cabinet panels that were very good at both pre-scrutiny and post-scrutiny of decisions. Councils should learn lessons from operating a committee model and then move forward with arrangements that deliver against local priorities, while strengthening accountability, effectiveness and clarity. I therefore urge noble Lords to support the Commons’ position and allow the Bill to proceed.

Clause 60 is about community empowerment, giving people a stronger voice in shaping local priorities, while allowing local authorities to build on what already works locally. Our amendment in lieu strikes that balance, recognising the valuable role of town and parish councils, where they exist, and setting out explicitly that regulations can provide for membership of neighbourhood governance structures to include representatives from town and parish councils. Our intention is that neighbourhood governance structures should include town and parish council representatives, where they exist.

Some places have hundreds of town and parish councils, ranging from very small hamlets to larger towns, so we want to retain the flexibility for local places to work out the right arrangements for parish council membership within governance structures.

We will set out expectations of town and parish involvement in neighbourhood governance arrangements in a framework on neighbourhood governance, to be published later this year, and in subsequent guidance, once regulations are laid.

I always find the noble Lord’s rhetoric entertaining, but rhetoric it is, I am afraid. We have committed to review and update the statutory guidance that underpins the community and governance review process, including adding good practice. That is the proportionate way forward for locally led neighbourhood governance. I therefore invite the House not to insist on its Lords Amendments.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Motion E1. It has been a very helpful debate. Indeed, each time we have debated this issue it has been very helpful.

At the end of it, the issue is a simple one: are local people, who actually pay the bills, going to be trusted to make their own decisions about the governance structures that they want in their area? What the Government are doing in the Bill is saying that one model fits all. There has to be an alternative, and people have to be enabled to maintain the possibility of effecting change.

Examples can be quoted of some things having worked well, and others not so well. In the end, the government issue is: let the local people decide on the model they think is best for them in all the circumstances they know about in their area. For that reason, I beg to test the opinion of the House on Motion E1.

14:23

Division 4

Motion E1 agreed.

Ayes: 207

---

Conservative: 129
Liberal Democrat: 56
Crossbench: 12
Non-affiliated: 5
Green Party: 2
Ulster Unionist Party: 1
Democratic Unionist Party: 1
Labour: 1

Noes: 141

---

Labour: 128
Crossbench: 10
Non-affiliated: 2
Bishops: 1

14:33

Motion F

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendment 37, do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 37A in lieu and do not insist on its Amendment 91, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 91A.

37A: Clause 60, page 61, line 39, at end insert—
“(3A) Regulations under this section about the membership of specified organisational structures may, in particular, provide for the membership to include one or more members representing any parish council or councils within the neighbourhood area.”

91A: Because it is consequential on Lords Amendment 37 to which the Commons disagree.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I have already spoken to Motion F. I beg to move.

Motion F1 (as an amendment to Motion F)

Moved by

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook]

Leave out from “House” to the end and insert “do insist on its Amendment 37, do disagree with the Commons in their Amendment 37A, and do insist on its Amendment 91, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 91A.”

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to test the opinion of the House.

14:34

Division 5

Motion F1 agreed.

Ayes: 197

---

Conservative: 125
Liberal Democrat: 54
Crossbench: 8
Non-affiliated: 5
Green Party: 2
Ulster Unionist Party: 1
Democratic Unionist Party: 1
Labour: 1

Noes: 144

---

Labour: 128
Crossbench: 12
Non-affiliated: 3
Bishops: 1

14:45

Motion G

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendments 41 and 94, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reasons 41A and 94A.

41A: Because it is not necessary to make provision in primary legislation about the agent of change principle.

94A: Because it is consequential on Lords Amendment 41 to which the Commons disagree.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I have already spoken to Motion G. I beg to move.

Motion G1 (as an amendment to Motion G)

Moved by

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

At end insert “, and do propose Amendments 94B and 94C in lieu—

94B: After Clause 63 insert the following new Clause—
“Protection for existing businesses and facilities from unreasonable restrictions resulting from new developments
After section 70D of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, insert the following new section—
“70E Protection for existing businesses and facilities from unreasonable restrictions resulting from new developments
(1) A development that is the subject of an application for planning permission is an “impact-sensitive development” if residents or occupiers of the development are likely to be affected by significant impact from existing activity in the vicinity of the development.
(2) Without prejudice to the generality of section 70(1), a planning authority—
(a) must, when considering under section 70 whether to grant planning permission for an impact-sensitive development subject to conditions, take particular account of whether the development includes sufficient measures to mitigate, minimise or manage the effect of the anticipated impact of existing activities on the development from any existing cultural venues or facilities (including in particular, but not limited to, live music venues), or dwellings or businesses in the vicinity of the development, and
(b) may not, as a condition of granting planning permission for an impact-sensitive development, impose on existing cultural venues or facilities additional costs relating to design measures to mitigate, minimise or manage the effects of that impact.””

94C: Clause 92, page 88, line 21, at end insert—
“(z1) section (Protection for existing businesses and facilities from unreasonable restrictions resulting from new developments) (protection for existing businesses and facilities from unreasonable restrictions resulting from new developments);””

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to everybody who spoke. For all the reasons we rehearsed in our arguments when we moved the amendments, I would like to test the opinion of the House.

14:47

Division 6

Motion G1 agreed.

Ayes: 208

---

Conservative: 126
Liberal Democrat: 53
Crossbench: 17
Non-affiliated: 5
Green Party: 2
Democratic Unionist Party: 2
Bishops: 1
Ulster Unionist Party: 1
Labour: 1

Noes: 138

---

Labour: 126
Crossbench: 10
Non-affiliated: 2

14:58

Motion H

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage]

That this House do not insist on its Amendments 85 and 86, 97 to 116, 120, 121 and 123, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reasons 85A and 86A, 97A to 116A, 120A, 121A and 123A.

85A: Because it is consequential on Lords Amendment 103 to which the Commons disagree.

86A: Because it is consequential on Lords Amendment 120 to which the Commons disagree.

97A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

98A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

99A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

100A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

101A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

102A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

103A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

104A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

105A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

106A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

107A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

108A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

109A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

110A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

111A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

112A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

113A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

114A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

115A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

116A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

120A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

121A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

123A: Because streamlining the processes relating to the establishment, expansion and functions of combined county authorities is necessary to ensure that Strategic Authorities are in place across England.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I have already spoken to Motion H. I beg to move.

Motion H1 (as an amendment to Motion H)

Moved by

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook]

Leave out from “House” to the end and insert “do insist on its Amendments 85 and 86, 97 to 116, 120, 121 and 123, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reasons 85A and 86A, 97A to 116A, 120A, 121A and 123A.”

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I beg leave to test the opinion of the House.

14:59

Division 7

Motion H1 agreed.

Ayes: 199

---

Conservative: 131
Liberal Democrat: 52
Crossbench: 6
Non-affiliated: 5
Green Party: 2
Ulster Unionist Party: 1
Democratic Unionist Party: 1
Labour: 1

Noes: 146

---

Labour: 128
Crossbench: 14
Non-affiliated: 3
Bishops: 1

Women’s Health Strategy

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Statement

15:11

The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Thursday 16 April.

“With permission, I will make a Statement on the Government’s renewed women’s health strategy.

The NHS was founded on the principle of equality and the right care for everyone, whenever they need it, but there is no getting away from the fact that it has failed to live up to that founding promise. For too long, women have been left to navigate a confusing system, fighting to get the basic care they deserve, and underrepresented in health research. Above all, women’s voices and choices have been dismissed, and it is truly shocking how often women have been ignored when telling medical professionals about their pain. From pelvic mesh to endometriosis, we are expected to put up with pain as our lot in life, as if it were normal. But it is not normal, and since coming into office this Government have taken a number of measures to improve women’s health.

We have taken action to bring down gynaecology waiting lists, introduced menopause questions into routine health checks, made the morning-after pill available for free at high street pharmacies, stood up a rapid and independent investigation into maternity services, and introduced Jess’s rule, so that GP teams have to ‘reflect, review and rethink’ if a patient presents three times with the same or escalating symptoms.

The blunt reality is that the NHS is failing women and girls on even the most basic measures of healthcare. Indeed, we do not treat all women equally either. The wealthiest 10% of women live almost 10 years longer than the poorest 10%, while the most deprived spend over a third of their lives in bad health—something I see starkly in my constituency of Bristol South. Disabled women experience poorer outcomes, and we should recognise the additional disadvantage faced by Black and Asian women, who face the double discrimination of racism and misogyny all at once.

Our renewed women’s health strategy will address those and other glaring injustices. It will give women and girls faster care from a health system that actually listens. It will make it simpler and faster for them to access the care they need the first time they ask for it, and it will make sure that the latest innovations work for women, ranging from reproductive and maternal health to menopause and chronic conditions. Of course, every day women are receiving outstanding, compassionate care from our dedicated NHS staff, but being ignored, gaslit, humiliated and disrespected are all too common experiences for far too many. More than eight women in 10 say there have been times when healthcare professionals did not listen to them. Our mission is to dismantle the culture and ingrained behaviours that allow that medical misogyny to fester and grow, and that starts by listening to women.

Women’s voices and choices are the golden thread that runs through this renewed strategy. Their voices will be heard, as we work to reduce variation in how GPs listen to and respond to women, using patient survey data in a quality improvement programme. Their voices will be heard as we capture whether women have been treated with respect, kept informed, and involved in decisions about their own care. Their voices will be heard, as we co-develop new standards of care for procedures such as hysteroscopy, so that every woman has informed consent and a real choice over her pain relief.

Yesterday, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State announced that we will do the first trial of a scheme known as patient power payments, which will cover gynaecology services. Women will get a say on whether the NHS provider should get full payment for the services women receive, based on the quality of their experience. It means that if a woman is not happy with her experience, a portion of the tariff paid to that provider would be redirected to fund improvements in the same services instead. In other words, women will have the power to kick medical misogyny where it hurts: in the budget.

All this is building on the evidence and expertise that informed the original strategy. I wish to acknowledge the intended ambition of that work, not least because it was based on the contributions of thousands of women. However, the changes that were promised have not translated into consistent improvements in access, quality of care or outcomes. Take gynaecology services. The waiting list for gynae care was north of 600,000 when we took office. Today that figure is finally moving in the right direction, but we cannot make as much progress as we would like because the system simply was not designed with women in mind.

I pay tribute to Baroness Merron, who has led this work on behalf of the Government. As she made clear in her foreword, this system was not designed in such a way—to be fair to Nye Bevan, in 1948 he was largely thinking about working men who were dying early in their 60s from the awful consequences of poor work, with some support for maternity services. We need to change that. We will support integrated care boards to introduce a single point of access for all non-urgent referrals to gynaecology and women’s health services, to speed up access. We will redesign the most common clinical pathways for heavy periods, menopause and urogynaecology, to remove unnecessary delays. Women with fibroids and endometriosis will be listened to at first presentation. They will be seen faster, and offered clear information through our new virtual hospital, NHS Online.

Women’s health pathways are being prioritised in NHS Online, and menopause and menstrual health services will be among the first to go live when it becomes operational this year. There will be a relentless focus on reducing women’s pain, improving standards, and reducing variation in both procedural and chronic pain management, including for chronic pelvic pain. We will launch a new programme to help young girls grow up understanding their menstrual health and know when to seek help.

From gynaecology to pain relief, our renewed strategy takes forward the work of the previous Government, and goes further and faster to fill the holes they left. It has only been made possible by the record £26 billion in funding for the NHS that was secured by my right honourable friend the Chancellor, the first woman to hold that office. All that will be underpinned by an NHS that finally listens with respect, dignity and compassion to the voices and choices of every woman and every girl, every time. That is not least with the creation of the women’s voices partnership, which is a new space for organisations representing women, giving them a direct line to Whitehall to inform national decision-making. The partnership will have a particular focus on those women who are most excluded from traditional services, and through it we will ensure that women’s voices help to shape the long-term direction of NHS reform.

Unlike the original strategy that was based on an outdated model of care, this renewed strategy maps across the three shifts in our 10-year plan for health. The shift from sickness to prevention will mean that women can better understand and act on their risk of conditions such as breast cancer and diabetes. The shift from hospital to community will mean services designed around women’s lives, with much faster access to diagnosis and treatment. The shift from analogue to digital will mean that women will avoid long waiting lists for painful conditions through NHS Online. Within two years we will launch a new challenge fund, backing the most promising women’s health technology start-ups, with a focus on tackling health inequalities in community settings. We are embedding new sex and gender policies into studies through the National Institute for Health and Care Research, so that findings are genuinely representative and no woman is left behind by science.

As every woman hearing this Statement knows, to fully exercise power over our lives we need to be at the top of our game, both mentally and physically. We also know that women’s health has been neglected for too long. It therefore falls to this Government to restore the founding promise of our National Health Service, and to deliver the right care for everyone when they need it. From the classroom to the clinic, our renewed women’s health strategy promises a fairer, healthier future for women and girls everywhere, acting on women’s voices and choices, transforming NHS performance in services that matter most to women, supporting all women to live healthier lives, and creating an approach to research and development that works for and empowers women. We are designing the system to fit around women’s lives. This will not be a strategy that sits around gathering dust on a shelf, because women are counting on us, and we will not let them down”.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for tabling the Statement. I am sure that the ambitions for the renewed women’s health strategy will be supported by noble Lords from all Benches. I know that the Minister recognises that women have too often felt unheard, as conditions such as endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain go underdiagnosed.

There was emphasis in the Statement on listening to women and tackling entrenched inequalities. This is, of course, welcome. We support the focus on a shift from treatment to prevention and from hospital to community, as well as the ambition to unlock the potential of digital innovation through NHS Online. I also thank the Minister for acknowledging that these initiatives build on work undertaken by previous Governments.

However, many women will judge this strategy not by its intentions and words but by whether it leads to tangible improvements in their day-to-day experience of care. All Governments announce grand strategies, but sometimes fail to deliver. While many of these individual announcements are welcome, I hope the Minister will allow me to ask for further clarity on a few points.

First, on waiting times and access to care, it is encouraging that waiting times for overall gynaecology have begun to move in the right direction, but many women are still waiting too long for diagnosis and treatment. We know what that leads to—a range of conditions, often worsening outcomes and poor quality of life. Can the Minister tell us what the department is doing to speed up the whole pathway from when the patient first presents through to treatment? How will it ensure that there is greater transparency for patients, so that they know where they are in the queue and how long they really have to wait, rather than estimates?

Secondly, the strategy rightly places an emphasis on listening to women and acting on their experiences. I am sure that noble Lords across the House share that objective. However, experience suggests that, unless you have clear structures for accountability, good intentions do not always translate into change. How will the department ensure that any feedback gathered in a patient consultation is not just perfunctory but consistently acted upon, and that it reflects a diversity of women’s experiences? There will be a range of experiences; it will not be the same for all women, especially for those who face additional barriers to being heard.

I will give your Lordships a couple of examples from my time in the department. I wonder what progress has been made. I remember when a young official came up to me and told me about her friend, a young Black lady, who had lost her baby. When they asked for the investigation and the paperwork, it had magically disappeared. How do we make sure that that sort of incident does not happen again, that there is real accountability and that there is no gaslighting, particularly for women from ethnic minority communities?

Another example comes from when I spoke to the baby loss charity Sands. Of course, we value the work that the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, is doing on maternity care. I recently received an email from a lady whom I met at Sands, which said: “For almost three years, my case was handled by the same caseworker. Of course, sometimes I questioned their competence, but at least the caseworker knew my case and they knew about things. And, despite being advised that my complaint was at its final stages, I’ve just been told that it’s been reallocated to a new case handler. Someone has to relearn the case, but has not yet been given a date for when that case will be heard”. I wonder what the Minister’s department can do to ensure that people who have suffered terribly, and are still suffering physically and emotionally from what has happened, really get the justice that they deserve.

Let us move on to patient safety and redress. The Statement refers to unacceptable experiences of women harmed in the past. As the House will be aware, the recommendations of the Hughes report were intended to provide redress for medical interventions such as the pelvic mesh, sodium valproate and hormone pregnancy tests, but many women are still waiting for some form of redress or help. Often, they are racking up bills, such as taxi bills to go to appointments, and many of them are still in pain.

When I was in the department and I was being asked the question, in the Minister’s place, I would go back to the department and ask what we are doing about this. The first answer I would be given was that I should leave it to the responsible Minister as I was the Minister responsible for technology, innovation and life sciences. When I probed again over time, I was told by one official that the Treasury does not like to write blank cheques. That is understandable—the Treasury is the guardian of the national finances. I used to ask whether anyone was doing any work on how much this would cost so that we could then present to the Treasury the cost of providing some form of redress.

The Hughes report suggested £20,000 each for mesh victims and £100,000 for sodium valproate victims. We welcome the fact that 100 of the 10,000 women who suffered from the pelvic mesh issue have received some payout from manufacturers. What about the others? I am told that many women missed out due to limitations for civil claims. What can the Minister’s department do to help those poor women who are still suffering and make sure that more women receive redress as quickly as possible? As a result of the Hughes report, we now know that it is not a blank cheque. We know that there will be negotiations between the Department of Health and the Treasury. Can the Minister update us on those discussions so we can better understand whether these women are finally going to achieve some form of justice?

Going forward, we need not only to make up for the mistakes of the past that have occurred under all Governments but to address the outstanding issues, making sure that those women who suffered are receiving long-term support and learning the lessons so that if, sadly, this ever happens again, we know how to address those issues and give the appropriate care, compassion and redress to those who suffer.

Overall, there are a number of different issues covered by the women’s health strategy. I know some noble Lords will be concerned that, although it is wonderful to have a grand, overall strategy, what about the individual interventions that we need from the departments, clinicians and others? How do we deliver on all those various issues that women suffer from to make sure that patients across the country—whatever party they support or however they feel—particularly female patients, believe that the renewed women’s health strategy will finally deliver a safe system of health for all of them and justice for those who have suffered in the past?

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and I, too, welcome the women’s health strategy, as it includes many important objectives. In communities up and down the country, we have seen the devastating toll of sustained failures to invest in and deliver better women’s health. Women’s lives, families and economic productivity are damaged when they do not receive treatment in a timely way. Indeed, this also happens when menopause difficulties are ignored. This is because vital services remain understaffed and underfunded, while women and girls go without the care they need.

In 2022, we had the previous women’s health strategy, which had similar important goals to this one with similar delivery mechanisms and the same reliance on local systems to make it happen. Yet four years on, the problems remain stubbornly in place, with half a million women suffering long waits for gynaecology, patchy access to services, women reporting that they are not listened to, women not being given pain relief when they need it and serious conditions diagnosed too late. These facts must give the Government pause for thought that perhaps things need to be done differently this time.

Medical misogyny is still a perverse and unacceptable norm in the health service and that requires a culture change, which is notoriously difficult to achieve. How does the Minister’s department plan to go about it?

This strategy is being implemented when the NHS is already stretched and ICBs are facing cuts while, at the same time, taking on some of the responsibilities of the disappearing NHS England. Now we also have soaring inflation, due to Trump’s war in Iran. In this climate, can we reasonably expect the strategy to deliver meaningful change? I really hope so.

Although the issues affecting women’s health generally are numerous, the NHS failures in maternity services are the most widely reported and deeply shocking. Review after review has uncovered the same failures across the country: a failure to listen to women, a lack of time for training, inadequate staffing levels leading to staff burnout, a lack of proper assessment, poor management of risk and a failure to learn lessons when things go wrong. All this is leading to a rise in perinatal mortality, with the figures showing inequality between different groups, such as those on lower incomes and some ethnic minority groups. How will that be tackled by the strategy?

That is why the Liberal Democrats recently launched our maternity secure package to make Britain the safest place in the world to give birth. We want every maternity unit in the country brought up to a good or outstanding level of safety. That could be done by guaranteeing one-to-one midwifery and specialist doctors on every unit. Will the Minister consider incorporating these proposals into the new strategy?

On medical misinformation, many people now get their health advice online, particularly via social media. Long waits for NHS services and GP appointments are pushing people into getting their so-called information this way, but advice on those platforms does not adhere to clinical standards or guidelines, which is leading to rampant medical disinformation, with sometimes disastrous results. There is some evidence that this is a particular issue in women’s health, where gaps in scientific knowledge and public awareness are being exploited. Does the Minister have any plans to tackle that?

It is possible to fight back. In order to be helpful, we are calling for the following for the Minister’s consideration. The first is a new kitemark for health apps and digital tools that are clinically proven to help people to lead healthier lives, regulated by the GMC. The second is a big effort by the NHS, with a ring-fenced budget, to dominate the health advice social media ecosystem and algorithms, with clinically approved information in plain English. That could improve patient care and save staff time and costs. The third is a new verification requirement for any social media account claiming to be written by a medical professional.

I have a few more questions before I finish. In line with the 10-year health plan’s objective to make care more local, is the Minister confident that women in every area will benefit from a family health hub, as promised, without the threat of closure or cuts, especially in this time of reduced resources for ICBs?

How will the new system linking feedback from patients to provider funding work? Will the results for each unit be made public? Will improved staffing be funded to achieve the promise that women no longer face long waits for diagnosis for conditions such as endometriosis? Will we be able to hear from the Minister in the education department about the promised menstrual education programme to ensure that girls are better equipped to recognise the difference between healthy and unhealthy periods, and will the programme be evaluated by the girls receiving it? Finally and most importantly, will women themselves be involved in developing the implementation plans for the new measures in the strategy and coproduction of their communication with other women?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord and the noble Baroness on the Front Benches for their warm welcome for this renewed women’s health strategy. It represents a major shift in this country and, as the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, said, it recognises the fact that women’s voices have not been heard. It is shocking, although sadly not surprising, to know that some eight out of 10 women report not having been listened to. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talks about a culture change. The biggest culture change that we can make is to embed women’s voices into women’s healthcare, and that is exactly what we will do.

This strategy gives women and girls voice, choice and power over how they receive their healthcare. When we say that we are transforming care as part of the 10-year health plan, we mean it. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord that strategy is one thing, but delivery is another.

I was asked why this is different from the 2022 strategy. Let me first acknowledge the importance of the 2022 strategy: it was the first time we had a women’s health strategy. I spoke to the women’s health ambassador, Dame Lesley Regan, about this, and she told me that, with this renewal, we have embedded women’s healthcare in the NHS in a way that has never happened before. I have been moved and struck by the responses I have had from stakeholders, women, parliamentarians—the list goes on—because their voices were heard.

I will pick up some of the points; I am sure that a number of the points raised will come up. The matter of waiting times is key. They have improved, as the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, said—the number of patients on gynaecology waiting lists is down by over 25,000 in the same period—but there is much more to do. If I had to make just one point about this women’s health strategy, it would be that this is not the end of it but the start of the continuum of work we have been doing. How will we drive down waiting lists? I am very excited to say that, when we launch the NHS online hospital next year, we will prioritise gynaecology pathways. It is one of the limited number of pathways that there will be.

We are prioritising gynaecology for treatment in surgical hubs. We are piloting gynaecology pathways in clinical diagnostic centres, which are now in place up and down the country. We are increasing relative funding to incentivise more gynaecology procedures, as and when they are clinically appropriate. Those things are very practical and, alongside shorter waits and more convenient gynaecological care for patients, they will make that shift not only in practice but in culture.

One way in which this strategy is different from the 2022 strategy is in its considerable emphasis on measuring impact, which noble Lords have asked for. If we cannot measure something, we do not know what it is. There are three overarching measures of success: reversing the decline in healthy life expectancy, which was seen to decline in the 2010s; improving healthy life expectancy in the poorest regions to at least 61 years of age; and reducing the time that women spend in poor health, particularly for women experiencing the greatest health inequalities. That will be measured in the short, medium and longer terms. I would be happy to provide further information if required.

Women’s voices are a key focus, again in both practice and culture. We are establishing a women’s voices partnership, which means that women’s organisations, particularly those representing the more marginalised, will be able to influence national decision-making. We have described it as a direct line to Whitehall; in other words, this is not the end of the conversation. We have consulted very widely and will build on what was done with the 10-year health plan—that will continue. This has been welcomed.

In particular, we are introducing patient power payments as a trial. We will see how this goes, and I look forward to monitoring it. It will link provider funding to women’s experiences, particularly in gynaecology services, and whether a service is found wanting. The noble Lord asked about including those who are often excluded, and I absolutely agree with him. Again, culturally—to the noble Baroness’s point—women will not just have to come forward with a complaint. They will be asked, “What is your experience of care?” That is crucial. It may be that the care was excellent but the experience was terrible, and I think many of us will know about that. If that is the case, the provider will have money withheld. As I said to a former Health Minister, how do you make real change? You do it through finance, funding and systems. The money will be withheld, but it will come back into the improvement of those services. So women will not lose out, but that provider will have its feet held to the financial fire.

On the important matter of redress, we are carefully considering the work done by the Patient Safety Commissioner, and I am glad that she welcomed the women’s health strategy. I re-emphasise my deep sympathy with those who have been harmed, and I recognise the harm to those individuals and the families. We continue to look at the recommendations for redress and, as soon as we are able to make a comment, we will of course do that. In view of the time, I will just say that reducing inequalities is hard-wired throughout the women’s health strategy.

15:31

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, on osteoporosis and post-menopause in particular, we could save a lot of money in the health service if interventions came in earlier. I am very concerned that we do not talk enough about this, and we certainly are not looking particularly at lower-income households and women, especially from minority communities, who do not always have diets that enable their bone health to be good. Will the Minister tell us what she is doing there?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I would be pleased to. This is an important point because MSK conditions disproportionately affect women. We are investing in diagnosis, and this financial year we are funding 21 new DEXA scanners in priority locations. That will mean some 60,000 scans per year, so we will be upping the game in that respect. On the noble Baroness’s important point, we aim to use polygenic risk scores to identify those at higher risk. It is about being proactive, not reactive. A study by Our Future Health, which is currently focused on cardiovascular disease, will be expanded to osteoporosis and dementia in the future. As your Lordships’ House knows, we will roll out fracture liaison services in every part of the country, and we have set an expectation for ICBs to roll out community service models in line with the 10-year plan.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists trust board, which greatly welcomes this strategy. But will the Minister agree that a well-resourced workforce is vital if we are to deliver it? In this context, is she aware that an RCOG survey finds that one in five obstetricians and gynaecologists is considering leaving the profession, citing burnout, poor working conditions and, above all, staff shortages. It would be helpful if she could tell the House, in this context, exactly when the workforce plan that I know she intends to publish will actually be completed and come out. I am sure she will agree that this plan is absolutely central to delivering the new strategy that we all welcome so much.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for echoing the warm response we have had from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and from a number of the other royal colleges. I put on record my thanks to the royal colleges, including RCOG, for their engagement throughout to help us get to where we are. That is another reason I have confidence in this renewed strategy.

I absolutely agree with my noble friend about the centrality of the workforce and the need for a comprehensive workforce plan. The trajectory, which I looked into, is on the way up for consultants in obs and gynae: we have 3.8% more than we had in 2025 and—I was rather shocked by this figure—81.5% more than we had in 2018. That is not to say the matter is over. The workforce plan will be published in the spring—we are currently in that season, so that gives some idea to noble Lords. We have discussed in this House many times how long spring goes, but we are definitely still there.

I have just one other point. I do not wish to speak for my noble friend Lady Amos, who is conducting an independent inquiry into maternity, which the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, also referred to, but I am sure she will have a number of things to say, including about workforce.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, my interests are well known in regard to women’s health. I congratulate the Minister on this report, which I think is a good one. The gaps are in how, in some places, it will be delivered on. But I also recognise her personal commitment to improving women’s health, and I applaud that.

I hope she will forgive me, but I observe that the strategy is called The Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England, so there is a suggestion that there was one before. And the Command Paper number is 1558. That was the year Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne, so I presume the strategy had not been renewed since then—but I joke.

The important point I want to make is related to research. Many of the issues recognised in the report are because of failure of research, conducted over a long period of time, in better understanding the biology and molecular basis of these diseases. They are treated empirically, and when they are treated empirically, the treatment cannot always be right. We need a strategy in research that focuses over a longer period on better understanding the biology of some of these diseases and finding treatments for them. One way to do this is not by project grants in areas of research, as this report suggests, but by promoting long-term research through what are known as programme research grants. These are given over a longer period of time and competitively allocated into academic institutions to address the issue of understanding the biology of diseases in women’s health and find treatments.

Polygenic risk scores sound sexy, but they will not be the answer. They are exactly what they say they are: they are based on scores. Some of them are evidence-based, and some are not. What we need is better evidence. My suggestion and question to the Minister is this: would the Government look at the possibility of investigating, with their research institution, developing programme grant funding for a longer period for research in women’s health? If she would like a more detailed conversation, I would be delighted.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I am very grateful, as ever, for that offer and the engagement of the noble Lord. To his point about Command Paper 1558, I do not think that is the year the first one or this one were published. I understand there have been that many Command Papers, but this is a cracking one, and I am glad that the noble Lord has welcomed it.

Research is extremely important, as the noble Lord identified. Through the strategy, our approach will be to research and development that actually works for, but also empowers, women. That is why I am glad we will be launching a femtech challenge fund. We want to accelerate the adoption of innovations and make sure they transform women’s healthcare. There is also an accelerator for female founders, and that is also key. I can confirm that the NIHR will be applying its new sex and gender policy. That will make sure that research is inclusive—as it has not always been in the past, as the noble Lord says—and is representative of women, and I welcome that.

On the point about the long-term research and programme grant, as we develop this work I will ensure that my colleague, Minister Ahmed, builds this in. I also offer the noble Lord a discussion, because this is an important point.

[Baroness Sugg (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the commitment in the strategy to women’s health hubs:

“Where high quality women’s health hubs exist, they will continue to lead service delivery. In other areas we anticipate there will be a dedicated space within broader neighbourhood health centres”.


However, the guidance for neighbourhood health centres states that gynaecology is a minimum requirement, which is welcome given the waiting lists, but the women’s health hubs are not. Will the Minister explain the Government’s plan for women’s health hubs? How are they supporting and expanding the ones that are open, and how are they ensuring that women across the country do not face a postcode lottery for care?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

The whole point about the strategy is to ensure that the last point about a postcode lottery does not apply. Access to NHS Online will help hugely with that because it will not matter where you are. If you are referred to the NHS online hospital, you will be able to access the best without initial travel. That will help hugely.

On women’s health hubs, we are building on the pilots that were established. We are now asking integrated care boards to integrate women’s healthcare properly into neighbourhood health centres. It is a big push in the 10-year health plan and, obviously, because this is aligned with it in the women’s health strategy, it is about neighbourhood health, which I know the noble Baroness is a strong voice for. We will also develop more guidance for integrated care boards about how they provide quality and the right amount of speedy and appropriate healthcare for women in neighbourhood settings, which may well be through women’s health hubs. They have taught us a lot. I think we can probably move even further than women’s health hubs, so in that respect the pilot has been extremely helpful.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in responding to the Front-Bench questions, the Minister referred to holding providers’ feet to the financial fire. I believe that she was referring to the part of the strategy that says it will empower women to have a stronger say by asking them to say whether, based on their experience, money should be withheld from providers or where it should be invested. This is returning to the idea of competition, which has done such damage to our health and education systems. Surely if a service is struggling, it needs support; taking money away from it is going to be a real problem. We know that services very often struggle in the most economically deprived areas. Does the Minister agree that reducing funding has never improved a medical system or made it safer, more accessible or better?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

That is an interesting invitation to consider. It would probably be helpful if I reiterate or explain better the points about the patient power payments. As I said in response to the Front Benches, its strength—by the way, I emphasise that it is a pilot—is that women’s voices are the voices that are least heard, and we know that creates the biggest problem in women’s healthcare. We know that just asking women what they think—we will be doing that, and we will be transparent in publishing the results, which will drive improvement—will not be enough. The reason for the financial point is that if the provider—it could be a private or a public provider—is not providing the right service then why can women not be heard on that? What will happen is not a cut in funding but the direction of an amount to go into the improvement of the service. In other words, at present there are no consequences for giving poor service. I do not see why women should have to put up with that.

[Baroness Nargund (Lab)]

My Lords, having served as a front-line doctor in women’s health for more than 40 years, 30 of them as a consultant gynaecologist in the NHS, I warmly welcome the new women’s health strategy and congratulate my noble friend the Minister on her efforts in making it happen. I also applaud the Government for the commitment to address the gender health gap and to tackle health inequalities in our country. Will the community hubs function as genuine one-stop clinics, with ultrasound and other facilities, to give women the diagnosis that they need without any delay, and will they take into account the needs of the local population so that women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic minorities are not left behind?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I am glad that my noble friend, with her professional experience, welcomes the women’s health strategy. I assure her that community diagnostic centres are absolutely key, as I mentioned earlier, to the ambition and intent to shift care closer to home and improve women’s experience. By their very design, they are streamlined and more convenient; they offer a wide range of tests, often in a single visit and, increasingly, same-day testing and consultation, where that is clinically appropriate. There are about 170 CDCs operating across the country; many have extended hours to fit around people’s lives—and, on the point about inequalities, we are working with local systems to make sure that they are located and developed according to the needs of the population.

[Baroness Altmann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Government’s women’s health strategy. I know that the Minister is passionate about it.

I want to return to the first question, on osteoporosis. In her answer, the Minister talked about the rollout of fracture liaison clinics across the country—Scotland and Northern Ireland already have 100% coverage. She mentioned the 10-year plan but did not mention that by 2030 the Government still intend to have rolled out FLCs across the country. Can she confirm that that date still exists and is still a commitment? I welcome the DEXA scanners, too—but could she comment on the comments made by some radiographers that there are staff shortages in operating those and say whether there is anything that the Government can do about it?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I am pleased to confirm to the noble Baroness the date of 2030, which she rightly gave. I thank her for her welcome for the strategy and kind comments.

On the matter of the workforce, I again refer to the workforce plan, which we will see shortly; it will take account of the very point that she makes. I also refer to the use of technology, because this is not about standing still—it is about enhancing what technology we use, which will drive productivity improvements. With the kind of improvements that we have been talking about, we estimate an up to 21% increase in productivity, which will make a big change and take pressure off the workforce.

[Baroness Hyde of Bemerton (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, warmly welcome this strategy and thank my noble friend the Minister for all her hard work and persistence with it. It touches on many aspects of my experience but, in the interests of brevity, I shall focus my questions and comments today on endometriosis, having waited eight years myself for diagnosis. I am delighted that the strategy includes a new programme to help young girls to grow up understanding menstrual health and when to seek help. Knowing when to seek help would have saved me many years of monthly agony, vomiting and fever, convulsed on a cold bathroom floor. I note the commitment that women with fibroids and endometriosis will be listened to at first presentation. I have had many bad experiences of clinicians over the years, so I ask my noble friend how we ensure that primary care practitioners listen at first presentation and how we embed that so that future generations of primary care practitioners continue to do so, to save many women the kinds of experiences that I and other people I know have had.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I am sorry to hear of the experience my noble friend has had, and I am sure continues to have in some way. Her experience is reflective of so many women. The education programme for girls about their menstrual health, in which we are investing an additional £1 million, will be delivered through schools and community settings and is absolutely important. If I had to say one thing about the strategy, I would say to women—to us—that we do not need to put up with this. In saying that, you do not always know what is normal, and that is where education comes in and why this is so crucial. Heavy periods are potentially a sign of a number of conditions, including endometriosis, fibroids and others. We will also be working with GPs to improve diagnosis, and we have already introduced “Jess’s Rule”, where, if somebody presents three times with the same or an exaggerated condition, the GP will be required to review it.

[Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson (Con)]

I would like to add my thanks to the Government and the Minister personally for the commitment and work done to renew the women’s health strategy. Other noble Lords have mentioned maternity services. Could the Minister tell us a bit more about the timetable for the conclusion of the review from the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, and how the new maternity and neonatal taskforce will then translate her recommendations into action and fully integrate maternity and neonatal services into this women’s health strategy, as the Royal College of Midwives has called for?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness. The noble Baroness, Lady Amos, has recently published an interim report. She has been meeting hundreds of families and the national call for evidence is still going on. In the next few months, she will give her final report. The Secretary of State has already chaired a new maternity and neonatal taskforce to develop a new action plan.

We have also not waited to take action on maternity and neonatal care. We have recruited 800 more midwives. We have invested over £140 million to address critical safety risks in terms of the estate, and we are also rolling out guidance to tackle the leading causes of maternal death. This is absolutely crucial and that is why it is taking such a high priority.

Victims and Courts Bill

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Commons Amendment

15:52

Motion A

Moved by

[Baroness Levitt]

That this House do not insist on its Amendments 4B and 4C, and do agree with the Commons in their Amendment 4D in lieu.

4D: Clause 12, page 16, line 30, at end insert—
“(b) after subsection (4) insert—
“(4A) Before making regulations under subsection (1A) that relate to costs orders under section 17, the Lord Chancellor must—
(a) consult—
(i) the Law Society,
(ii) the General Council of the Bar, and
(iii) such other persons as the Lord Chancellor considers appropriate, and
(b) publish an impact assessment in respect of the regulations.””

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Baroness Levitt) (Lab)]

My Lords, these amendments relate to private prosecutions. I start by expressing my thanks to all noble Lords for their thoughtful contributions to the Bill throughout its passage.

I thank the Opposition Front-Bench team, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen, for their scrutiny and for all the time they have given in these debates. The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, gave up his time on Monday to meet me and my officials and we had a productive discussion, for which I thank him.

I would especially like to express my sincere gratitude to the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench team, in particular the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, for their constructive, helpful and friendly engagement throughout this Bill. While we have not always agreed, it has been a real pleasure doing business with them.

It is clear that this Bill has benefited from the quality of scrutiny in this House and has been strengthened by the considerable expertise and insight contributed by Members of your Lordships’ House, both during debates and in the informal discussions we have had around the edges.

I turn to Motion A, relating to Amendments 4B and 4C, tabled in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen. I am grateful to both Houses for the depth and seriousness with which Clause 12 has been scrutinised. I will briefly explain the Government’s position and set out the statutory assurances that we have brought forward for your Lordships’ consideration.

From the beginning, we acknowledged the concern about a possible chilling effect on private prosecutions and I reiterate the Government’s reassurances that this is not, and never has been, the intention. We recognise that Amendments 4B and 4C were aimed at encouraging scrutiny and bringing transparency in relation to any regulations that may be made to determine the rates at which private prosecutors can recover costs from central funds. The Government share those objectives. Where we differ is not on the importance of oversight but on the appropriate and proportionate legislative mechanism by which that oversight should be secured.

Amendment 4C would require any such regulations to be subject to the affirmative procedure. The Government recognise the desire for parliamentary scrutiny, and we are committed to ensuring that any use of this power is subject to proper oversight. The question is not whether there should be scrutiny but what form of scrutiny is proportionate to the power that Parliament is being asked to confer.

As I have said on many occasions, Clause 12 is merely an enabling provision. Self-evidently, it does not itself prescribe rates, and, as matters stand, it is not yet possible to know the degree of technical complexity or granularity that future regulations may contain. To require in primary legislation the affirmative procedure in every eventuality would mean that there would have to be full debates in both Houses on regulations that may prove highly technical, detailed and/or operational in nature. The Government’s view is that such an approach would not represent a proportionate use of Parliament’s time, nor would it necessarily enhance the quality of scrutiny.

The negative procedure strikes the right balance. It ensures that regulations are laid before Parliament and are subject to scrutiny, including by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and that they may be prayed against, debated and annulled where either House considers the substance of the regulations, the supporting evidence or the consultation undertaken to be insufficient. That procedure preserves Parliament’s ability to intervene where there are genuine concerns, while allowing the detail of implementation to be addressed in a practical and efficient manner.

I turn to Amendment 4B, which would require the Ministry of Justice to publish an impact assessment prior to the laying of regulations. Again, I wish to make it clear that the Government believe in the importance of transparency and evidence-based policy-making. That said, as drafted, this amendment is not appropriately framed for the established process. Proposed new paragraph (b) appears to be based on a misunderstanding of how impact assessments operate. The Government do not respond to an impact assessment; rather, an impact assessment is published alongside a consultation to inform it. It is then updated to reflect the final position when the Government respond to the consultation and bring forward regulations. That is the established and proper process.

However, we have listened carefully to the strength of feeling expressed in your Lordships’ House about the need for proper evidential underpinning and stakeholder engagement before any rates are set. For that reason, we are now tabling an amendment in lieu that embeds those objectives effectively by placing clear, workable and enforceable requirements in statute.

First, the amendment will place in primary legislation a statutory duty requiring the Lord Chancellor to consult before laying any secondary legislation to set rates. This will not be a discretionary power but a legal obligation. The consultation will be full, thorough and public, engaging those with relevant expertise of those who may be affected, as well as those who may be affected—for example, charities and specialist lawyers. As part of the process of setting any rates, the Government will publish a full response to the consultation. This will not be a box-ticking exercise. The Government remain open minded about where the rates should be set. The consultation will take place at a formative stage, allowing evidence to inform and shape the rates in a meaningful way.

Secondly, the amendment requires that an impact assessment be published before any regulations are made. This will provide Parliament, and others with an interest in these matters, with a clear assessment of the likely effects on any groups affected by the proposed policies. Overall, the amendment in lieu will embed consultation, evidence gathering and impact analysis directly into the statutory framework governing the exercise of this power. It will ensure that the decision-making is transparent and accountable, while preserving the necessary flexibility for an enabling power to operate proportionately and effectively in practice.

I hope that this explanation demonstrates that the Government have listened, reflected and responded constructively to the concerns raised by your Lordships’ House. The alternative approach we now propose strikes the right balance between parliamentary oversight and practical administration, while ensuring that any rates set are founded on good evidence and tested through full and open consultation. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Bull) (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I invite the noble Baroness to speak.

16:00

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am going to intervene very briefly to say that it is good that an agreement has been reached on the difficult issue of the processes and arrangements relating to private prosecutions. As with many of the other issues we have discussed during the passage of this Bill, private prosecutions are a complex issue, and not one that can be resolved swiftly or even with a clause or two on the face of the Bill.

I thank the Minister for meeting my noble friend Lord Marks and me on a number of occasions during the Bill to discuss how we can set in place mechanisms to ensure that the Government’s changes will not have surprising or unintended consequences. My noble friend Lord Marks will talk about the details of those changes, which he proposed to the Conservatives at the previous stage of ping-pong; their amendment then reflected his proposal, for which we thank them.

I welcome the government proposals in Motion A. Amendment 4D includes the two key elements of any effective organisation: that there is data to inform decisions—in this form, an impact assessment that would be published—and that the Lord Chancellor must consult the Law Society, the General Council of the Bar and others considered appropriate. I hope that the Lord Chancellor will not use these methods just once. My noble friend Lord Marks has identified core action that will work elsewhere in the court system, where reform may well be needed.

As we come to the end of this Bill, I also want to put on record the support and help of Elizabeth Plummer in our Whips’ Office, and the many individuals and organisations who have worked with us, especially the offices of the London Victims’ Commissioner and the Victims’ Commissioner, Claire Waxman. We would not be where we are today without them, and I thank them.

Finally, I want to return to the discussions with the Minister. During the passage of the whole of the Bill, her officials have been enormously helpful and her personal willingness to discuss, both publicly at the Dispatch Box and privately in meetings, speaks volumes about her approach. I thank her for that and look forward to working with her again.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, I repeat and echo all the thanks that my noble friend Lady Brinton has just made to the Minister, her officials and all the others who have helped with this Bill. I was going to say this at the end, but I shall say it now—I am also enormously grateful to and in awe of the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, during the course of this Bill. Her dedication and thoroughness on issues that have concerned her and on which she has worked for many years has been awe-inspiring. Principally, I echo her thanks to the Minister for meeting us and, in particular, for meeting me after the first round of ping-pong last week to discuss our concerns. Notable has been the way in which she has recognised the risk of deterring private prosecutions by introducing inappropriate regulation of costs, and the way she and her officials have framed government Amendment 4D to Clause 12, laid in the Commons, which government Motion A today addresses.

Last Wednesday, we sought consultation on the regulations proposed by Clause 12 and an impact assessment and, as the noble Baroness rightly points out, a response to that impact assessment was also sought. On consideration, and after the discussions we have had, we are completely content that the consultations proposed involving the Law Society, the Bar Council and anyone else the Lord Chancellor believes should be consulted, meet the need for consultation on the regulations proposed.

Importantly, the Government have agreed to publish an impact assessment, and I accept the assurances that that will be thorough and worked-through. The fact that we originally sought a response to an impact assessment may have reflected a procedural misunderstanding. I take the Minister’s point, however, that the response will be apparent when the regulations, such as they are proposed, are in fact made and the response to the impact assessment will be reflected by the Government’s laying of the regulations.

I also take the point—as do the Government—made last Wednesday by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, that there may be some urgency to the introduction of such regulations, and that insisting on a government response to an impact assessment beyond publication of the proposed regulations may delay them. So we are quite content with the steps taken, or to be taken, by the Government. Crucially, however, no regulations will be made before the consultation and the impact assessment are complete. That is the most important point. This is going to be a meaningful exercise in consideration of what needs to be done.

Granted, the Government have not conceded the affirmative resolution but, following a favourable consultation and a positive impact assessment, I accept that that is a secondary consideration. I also accept the points made by the Minister on proportionality. We are content that the Government have met our concerns and we will support Motion A.

Having mentioned my thanks to my noble friend Lady Brinton, I also extend my thanks to others in this Chamber, including those on the Conservative Front Bench, who have been helpful in achieving what is now a much better Bill than the Bill that came to this House.

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Amendment 4D. This is likely my last appearance on the Front Bench though not, I anticipate, my last speech in this Chamber. I shall simply say that I have greatly enjoyed debating Home Office and justice issues, of which I have had practical experience both as a barrister and as a recorder and deputy judge. I have enjoyed sparring with the Minister, who some 20-plus years ago was a member of the Bar Council’s legal services committee when I chaired it. I continue to respect her ability and expertise, as demonstrated in all aspects of her portfolio in this House. It has been a pleasure to do friendly battle with her.

Moving on, private prosecutions are a vital safeguard within our justice system. They ensure that when the state cannot or does not act, victims, particularly charities, are not left without recourse. For charities, this mechanism is especially important. Fraud and theft—crimes that can often become cumulatively significant—divert funds from vital causes. They then erode public trust in those charities. With limited police and Crown Prosecution Service capacity, many such cases would, I fear, otherwise go unaddressed. Private prosecutions are therefore an essential backstop. They secure convictions and compensation without burdening public resources.

Crucially, the costs recovered from central funds are modest, and typically only partial. They represent a small proportion of overall public expenditure—just 0.18% of the overall legal aid budget. Yet recovery of the costs of private prosecutions enables charities to pursue recoveries that would otherwise be financially out of reach. If charities cannot rely on private prosecutions as a shield against theft and fraud, then we fear that the public will be unwilling to donate towards their causes.

Due to the importance of private prosecutions for access to justice, we tabled an amendment that Clause 12 do not stand part of the Bill on Report. Unfortunately, the Government cited financial privilege as a reason for rejecting the Conservative amendment.

My noble and learned friend Lord Keen instead tabled an amendment in lieu. That amendment would have achieved the following. First, it would have ensured that an impact assessment was launched on the potential effect of Clause 12, with particular regard to its consequences for charities and victims’ access to justice. Secondly, it would have constrained the Government in exercising their regulation-making powers until after a response had been published to the impact assessment. Thirdly, it would have required such regulation to be subject to the affirmative procedure of both Houses.

The amendment in lieu offered by the Government today partially fulfils at least the first two of those aims. It would require the Lord Chancellor to consult the Law Society, the General Council of the Bar and other bodies considered appropriate before publishing an impact assessment. I suggest that charities as well as private prosecutors themselves would fall under this final category. There is no reason why not.

I thank the Minister in the other place for confirming that the Government will publish a full response to the impact assessment before setting any rates. That assurance is most welcome. Unfortunately, however, there is no provision that regulations made under Clause 12 will be subject to the affirmative procedure. The Minister in the other place said that, given that it is unclear how complex the structure of the rates will be,

“it would be disproportionate to mandate a process that risks lengthy debate”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/4/26; col. 88.]

We argue that precisely because of the novel and complex nature of these regulations, the affirmative procedure is all the more important and in no way disproportionate. To reject it is to undermine proper transparency and accountability. However, I recognise that the Government have moved some real way on the issue of private prosecutions, so we will not oppose their amendment in lieu today.

The Conservative Party will always champion access to justice and the rule of law. We therefore keenly await the publication and findings of the impact assessment. We are also grateful for the co-operation and discussions that we have had with representatives of the Liberal party in this place and the impact that has had on the whole Bill and on the particular aspect of private prosecutions. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been a pleasure to bring the Victims and Courts Bill through this House; it is now another step closer to becoming law. The Bill will deliver on our manifesto commitment to support and protect victims, restore confidence in our justice system and implement swifter and fairer justice.

I cannot leave the Bill without taking the opportunity to thank all the officials in my department who have worked so hard to bring this legislation forward. I wanted to thank them all by name, but I was told I was not allowed to, so I shall have to settle with doing a group thanks. They worked late into the night, tirelessly and always good-humouredly, which is quite something.

In closing, I urge noble Lords to support the Government’s amendments related to private prosecutions, and I look forward to working with your Lordships in this House as we take forward the implementation of the Bill.

Motion A agreed.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Returned from the Commons

The Bill was returned from the Commons with reasons and amendments.

Crime and Policing Bill

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Lords Chamber

Returned from the Commons

The Bill was returned from the Commons with amendments and a reason.

House adjourned at 4.13 pm.