English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 26th March 2026 Lords Chamber

In that White Paper, the Government set themselves a specific target in terms of skills. The Select Committee recommended that the Government should also set a target for a reduction in youth unemployment. If one can have a target for education and skills, why not a target for a reduction in youth unemployment? I hope the Minister will be able to respond positively to the suggestions in the Select Committee report.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to talk about the south-west, following the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and about how well the greater south-west grouping is working. To give noble Lords an example, they have come together and commissioned a successful system of getting wifi continuously on intercity trains. Some noble Lords may think that a complete waste of time, but when you have a five-hour journey, like I do, it is quite nice to have a bit of wifi. All the five counties, I think, have got together and done this. They are about to write to the Secretary of State for Transport to say, “We’ve proved that it works, even in tunnels and things like that. Will you give a small amount of funding to make it cover the whole of the network?” So co-operation works.

I have a question for my noble friend that relates to the relationship between Cornwall Council and the Council of the Isles of Scilly. There is a certain occasional antipathy between the two. Size is one thing: one is very much bigger than the other. The smaller one, the Isles of Scilly, feels that it has been “done down” and that Cornwall has not given it the share of the money that it was due for the last co-operative project. Co-operation sounds very good and I fully support it, but what can be done when it goes wrong?

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I see group 5 on social mobility as one of the most important that we have to consider on this second day on Report. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for his commitment to increasing social mobility and his work to promote that and to promote pan-regional working. These are very important. The Government are determined to reduce youth unemployment and among the ways they will do that is the promotion of growth and devolving power to mayoral authorities. I think all these things can work.

The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, in his contribution on the previous group, said that we need a duty on local service partners to co-operate, because we have to promote co-operation rather than competition. I think the same rule applies to Amendment 93 from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, on pan-regional working.

One of the history lessons of the regional development agencies, which were ended in 2012, was that they competed against each other far too much. One of my fears in this English devolution Bill is that what could well happen is that mayors will compete with each other for funding, rather than trying to work together to increase the outputs from the money that they have. I have found this a very useful discussion, because if we are to have partnerships at a pan-regional level—let us say the north of England or the Midlands—then to enable broader collaboration between strategic authorities would be very helpful, rather than having mayoral authorities within, say, the Midlands or the north of England competing with each other to earn the favours of the Treasury through their mayoral structure.

I have said previously that I think there has to be a system of assessment of the success of devolution to mayoral authorities. How do we know if they are working? We discussed that on a previous group, in one sense. I think that mayors should be targeted far more than we currently seem prepared to do. I think mayors should have a duty to reduce youth unemployment, unless they can demonstrate that central government has done something that prevents them from achieving that objective. I think that that would give a focus on the reason why mayors exist in a local area, which is to ensure that training gets better and that fewer young people, 16 to 24, are not in education, employment or training. Young people must be helped more and we have to invest more in their futures.

Finally, on Amendment 183, to which my name is attached, I think that consulting with the Social Mobility Commission on how we collect the data, and on how the evidence of social mobility outcomes is assessed, will matter. It is about achieving real outcomes, and those outcomes will depend on having the data to assess them. The Social Mobility Commission may have ways in which it can assist us. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said something that I thought was very important: the cost is tiny in terms of the potential gains that can be made. I think that is absolutely right, so I find the three amendments in this group, led by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, to be particularly helpful and appropriate, and I hope the Government will agree when the Minister sums up.

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[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, my task is very simple this afternoon, and that is to thank the Government and congratulate them on bringing forward Amendments 245 and 265, which will ensure that proper enforcement action can now be taken against those who breach parking conditions and park on pavements. This has long been a problem in local government; I can remember it back when I was a local authority leader in the 1980s and 1990s. London has benefited from enforcement greatly and now this is to be shared across the rest of England. The Government should be congratulated on that. The Minister was extremely generous when we were in Committee and said that he would look at this favourably. He has done so, along with his colleague Lillian Greenwood, who I also thank for the time that she has given to this issue.

Local authorities up and down the country will be enormously grateful, but the most grateful will be those who must use wheelchairs, buggies and any other form of transportation to move along our pavements unimpeded and to make those pavements more useful to us as pedestrians. I was happy to put my name to the amendments and my noble friend Lord Blunkett, who cannot be here today, asked me to record his thanks to the Government as well.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I join my noble friend in congratulating the Government on this pavement parking issue.

I will speak in a bit more detail to Amendment 100 and focus on insurance, which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, has been speaking about. She was talking about things that she does not remember in the Highway Code. I suppose that I do not remember things in the Highway Code that were published 50 years ago, when I had a driving licence. The issue is: what are we trying to achieve? Surely the most important thing is safety on the roads. That safety covers not just fast cars, large trucks, fire engines and ambulances but ordinary people trying to get around, often on equipment which has wheels. Are we looking at a series of amendments in this group which say that anything with wheels is, by definition, bad? I hope that this is not the case, because wheels are an essential part of mobility.

Occasionally, the use of this equipment needs to be separated. We spend a lot of time talking about scooters, freight bikes and other related things in between, some of which need insurance and some of which probably do not. You could widen this to a situation where if you are a pedestrian in London and cause an accident which is demonstrated to be your fault, you get the blame. Should you therefore, as a pedestrian, have insurance? It is a very wide subject and I am not sure that it is covered in this amendment.

As it stands, I cannot see why we should have special regulations

“to prohibit the provider of micromobility vehicles from providing a pedal cycle or electrically assisted pedal cycle to a person who does not have insurance”.

Surely it is for the user to decide whether they should have insurance and what the insurance is for. The alternative is to lock it. I cannot support Amendment 100 and hope that my noble friend will agree.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, my name appears in two or three places in this grouping. I join the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, in saying how important Amendment 245 and the consequential amendment are. I have campaigned for many years on pavement parking. I finally feel that action is being taken, so I thank the Government and congratulate them on the step that they have taken.

I began being concerned about some of the transport issues when I was advised that there was doubt about who, between a mayor and a local authority, would be responsible for traffic calming measures in residential areas. In some parts of the country, it was being alleged that mayors would control the decisions on where traffic calming would take place, rather than the local council. I had a concern about that, and I wanted it clarified.