Representation of the People Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendments 18 and 19 in this short group. Both are related to the way in which looked-after children are encouraged to register to vote and the information that has been provided to them to inform that choice, and they would ensure that party politics can play no part in that decision if there is automatic registration, so that one political outcome was not unduly influenced over the other. Both my amendments relate to the entirety of the United Kingdom, with Amendment 18 referring to Great Britain and Amendment 19 the mirroring provision for Northern Ireland. It is the local state in Great Britain—the councils and their agents—that has responsibility as corporate parents for looked-after children, the “relevant young people” referred to in these amendments. In some cases, that corporate parenting responsibility lasts all the way up to the age of 24.

There are some things that should be apolitical, but it is an inescapable truth that councils are political organisations. While this amendment does not suggest that councils behave politically in every decision they take, given the importance of this Bill to the underpinning of democracy in the United Kingdom, the amendments take a belt-and-braces approach to being explicit that, in encouraging young people to come on to the register, that choice cannot, or should not, be tainted or otherwise influenced by party-political considerations. We must remove the temptation for anyone to improperly influence the register by tilting the balance so that only some cohorts are registered but not others.

Nothing in this group is meant to imply that councils are seeking to act improperly. We have to recognise that councils now engage with certain external organisations, such as private care homes, privately run caring establishments or even charitable bodies, to deliver their caring and corporate parenting responsibilities. They may be within the council’s own territory or in another part of the country. Together, my amendments would ensure that the duty of neutrality would be extended to not only the local authorities or health boards but those in that wider care ecosystem that benefits children and is paid for by local government wherever they are. Those organisations, councils or care homes, are in an extraordinarily influential position in the care of relevant young people. They provide food and accommodation, are responsible for health and welfare and all the other issues of day-to-day life.

By definition, without the guiding hand of their natural parents, these children are more socially vulnerable and susceptible to undue influence. These amendments therefore provide an additional level of certainty and assurance to ensure that such vulnerabilities are not taken advantage of politically by the council, through its policies, or more subtly by the political predispositions of individual care workers, wardens or other members of the professional staff on the front line, as well as by that ecosystem of contractors and charities. It is as simple as that. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in speaking to my Amendment 18, I will also touch on issues raised in the similar amendments, Amendment 43 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and Amendment 44 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

We are very much concerned that the reduction of the age limit to 16 has to be accompanied by a real effort at proper civic education. As a Liberal, I would say there should be a much greater effort at civic education anyway. The extent to which our young are not taught about British values and the rights and obligations of British citizenship is profoundly worrying and needs to be overcome.

Others will speak about some of the surveys that have been done on the thinness of civic education in schools. I went around three schools in the spring, one in Yorkshire and two in London, just to see from a very unrepresentative sample what they were doing, and was shocked, even in the public school I attended—one of Britain’s best public schools—at how little time was spent on this. I was given the lesson plan by the head of PSHE at one school for all the things she had to teach in one hour a week each year, including sexual behaviour, financial education, disease, and heaven knows what else, and of course, with political education fitting into that. All the teachers I spoke to said, “This is simply not possible to achieve; we need to have more time”. That is part of the message we want the Minister to give us some answers on: that the current curriculum review recognises this and that it will be expanded.

For Liberals and for people who believe in liberal democracy, the teaching of citizenship is a fundamental part of teaching people how to take their part in a democratic society. I am well aware that there have been many, particularly in the Conservative ranks, who are doubtful about the possibilities of teaching people political education, particularly in state schools. As a historian, I have read a number of debates from the early 19th century in which Conservative Peers doubted that education as such should be provided to the working class, because it would give them ideas above their station. Education is, of course, subversive. It teaches people how to question the conventional wisdom and how to think for themselves. That is part of what we should be doing.

In the United States, we have seen recently an even more fundamental attack on liberal education in the Trump Administration’s attack on American universities as unavoidably left-wing and liberal institutions, because they are concerned about evidence, doubt, argument and a number of things that the Trump Administration appear not to like. I hope none of us here share such a view.

As we see in some amendments in this group and later, there has been some concern about the possibility of neutrality. I declare an interest as someone who spent much of my career teaching politics and international politics in various universities. Of course, we all come with our biases, but we try to teach people how to think for themselves. At the London School of Economics, I had a number of Hong Kong and Singaporean students. The hardest job I had with them was to persuade them that they were supposed to disagree with their teacher. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, nodding in agreement.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Report stage
Monday 13th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendments 216 and 318 in this group, which relate to parish and town councils. Amendment 216 makes provision for unparished electors in the unsatisfactory neighbourhood governance arrangements contemplated by Clause 60 to petition to incorporate into properly constituted and sovereign precept-raising parish councils. Separately, my Amendment 318 applies to the largest town councils, most of which have been wholly or in part district billing authorities before, but which henceforth will be unconstrained in their ability to raise council tax.

I turn first to Amendment 216. In Committee the penny dropped for the first time that those parts of England that were former county boroughs—20% of the land mass, so much greater by population—such as Kings Lynn, Ipswich or Great Yarmouth, or new towns like Stevenage, which is home to the Minister, would be for the most part unparished, and thus second-class citizens in the new arrangements. That is recognised by Amendment 214, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, and the noble Lords, Lord Jamieson and Lord Shipley, which I endorse entirely. I have no problem with it. But I think we need to go further and move beyond the simple promotion of parish councils to the right for unparished areas to become parishes if the measures in Clause 60 are found to be unsatisfactory.

The Government tell us that community or neighbourhood governance will be provided by councillors from the parent unitary authority in unparished areas. Those of us who have been around for a while have heard that duck quack before. We know that these structures are just talking shops, with no resources, capacity or status. This is what we discovered in Committee. People literally from out of town will try to sweep up the crumbs left over, once social care has feasted on the precept, to find what money is left to sweep the pavements, cut the grass, breathe life into the theatre and heat the swimming baths. But with social care consuming two-thirds of the precept, what resources will those toothless talking shops have? These are the things that the larger parishes do, with the consent of their parishioners to raise a precept.

I make no apologies for talking about Norfolk. There are 900 parishes there, and some 10,000 nationally. But when Labour gets its way, 20% of England will be disfranchised and have no parish at all—no money or say, for the most part, in how England is run. That includes the whole of Ipswich, for example, or Oxford. The so-called strategic authorities and the mayor are not going to be interested in the carnival floats, the local antique street market, the food festival or those local culture groups that town and parish councils spawn. The civic life of town mayors will evaporate altogether, with their soft convening and ribbon-cutting powers. No, they will go the way of the local pub, the park café and the high streets, in the vandalisation of high-street Britain.

Do not talk to us about Pride in Place when they disband that whole panoply of civic life, with the sheriff and the burgesses, that illuminates our nation’s story. No, under the dismal and undemocratic Clause 60, the unitary and its councillors will hold all the cards—the budget, the representation and the staff—to hold everyone else over a barrel, because there is no parish council. Of course, they will have no incentive to cede powers either, and all the incentive, on the other hand, to hoard powers and pet projects.

My amendment offers hope to these places: to reject the way in which the Bill creates sock-puppet sinecures for out-of-town councillors from miles away. Where an appointed community council is established, those residents can petition to incorporate—creating the empowerment that the Bill purports to foster and encourage—to create a town or parish council with proper elections, a proper budget and a precept that local people can vote on and endorse, so as not to rely on cast-offs after the social care monster, LGR costs, the recast debts and pension fund liabilities have eaten the rest. I want to help people make their part of England better: more local, more responsive and more accountable. My amendments give hope for democracy for these places, including the cathedral cities, coastal communities and new towns—places such as Stevenage and, for the other part, Gorleston, from where I take my territorial designation, within the historic county borough of Great Yarmouth.

I will listen closely to the rest of the debate and may signal my intention to divide the House on this. The requirement and the ability for local people to force incorporation of their neighbourhood arrangements is important.

Moving on to council tax for our largest town councils, I will be brief. Many of the former principal authorities and districts may become parishes under the new arrangements—or perhaps not, if my Amendment 216 is carried. By charging council tax where they have been districts, they have been able to benefit from formula grant, redistributed business rates and whatever the local government finance system has delivered. But there is a real risk that the parishes will be suckered into taking many of the expensive cast-offs from the home authority in a deliberate cost-shunt. Parks, playgrounds, theatres, moorings, cemeteries and all manner of public buildings will be flipped on to these parishes. They will need to find space in their precept to pay for them, but they will be on their own because they will have no central support and will be living hand to mouth.

My noble friend Lady Scott hates me using this example, but the facts speak for themselves. Council tax under Salisbury City Council is up 44% in just four years and its band D is £383. In my own district, South Norfolk, where I am a councillor, we collect the bins, clean the streets, house the homeless and have built a new generation of housing for just 180 quid—less than half of the parish. The problem with the Bill is that it lumps tiny little Howe, a hamlet of 50 souls in my own ward, in with the village of Hempnall, where next week we will welcome a new vicar, the Reverend Austin Uzoigwe—gosh, I should have practised this—and which has perhaps 1,000 people, together with Horsham, a district of 146,000. In law, all places of 50 to 150,000 will be equivalent. That is crazy, because there is no equivalence between Howe and Horsham, but the people of Horsham need to be spared what has been visited on the residents of Salisbury.

My amendment would create a new sub-class of third-tier authority where there is a population of 50,000 or where the precept exceeds £1 million, so that they fall under the same budgetary constraints as the larger principal authorities. I do not want your Lordships to think that this is anti-town or anti-parish. In fact, it is quite the reverse. The wholesale reconditioning of local government is already going to cost a bomb and create those perverse incentives to pass off the expensive stuff to the parishes. My amendments would strengthen parishes’ hand in the negotiations, as part of LGR, so that they will be able to push back and say no. If they think they cannot afford these gift horses, having looked them in the mouth, they would not have to take them on.

I am seeking to strengthen local democracy and accountability by putting the largest parishes on a proper financial footing, so that they can do the work they do at a price residents can afford. This is not a dig at parishes; they do a lot of valuable work at the level closest to the people. With this amendment, I have their back, as it would stop those councils with the broadest shoulders imposing liabilities and cast-offs on those with the most limited means.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I looked last night at Labour’s 2024 manifesto and would like to quote, extremely briefly, a few phrases from it. It said:

“Labour is committed to strengthening our democracy”.


It attacked the Conservatives for failing to encourage

“full participation in our democracy”

and said that Labour was committed to encouraging such participation in our democracy and to increasing

“the engagement of young people in our vibrant democracy”.

If we do not have local councils and local elections, we have no way of increasing participation, of gaining a real sense of active citizenship or of encouraging the sort of people many of us are now going around to talk to in schools, who will have the vote for the first time. This is why local councils, throughout the country, are extremely important in maintaining and strengthening the sense that every citizen in this country can take some part in public life.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, uncharacteristically, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Bassam.

Clause 57 and Schedule 26 should play no part in the Bill because the claim that larger units of local government are more cost-effective has been thoroughly debunked. We will just end up with larger, more expensive units that deny the pattern of life that people live. The 500,000 argument was comprehensively debunked by the Blair Government in 2006 with a seminal document that is still available on their website. More recently, the claim that this current round of unitisation will save money was initially made by the County Councils Network, citing evidence dating from 2020. Last year, the people who wrote the report said, “Actually, we made a mistake and there are no more savings to be had”. The savings that were promulgated in 2020 had already been made.

Bigger is no longer better. A forced reorganisation across the entirety of this country is likely to crystallise at least £1 billion-worth of unaccounted for pension strain costs for those who would be entitled to retire on a full pension up to 10 years early, having been forced out on grounds of efficiency. There is special meaning to those words. However, those billion pounds or so have not been taken into account, and it is local people who will pick up the tab. Through the Bill, we will end up with more expensive additional layers to have mayors who can raise taxes on things for which they are not even responsible.

I do not intend to relitigate the arguments I made on Monday, but there is no clarity on where the new town and parish councils will sit. This is unfinished business that we will need to revisit on Report. We must ask: is there even capacity in national government, let alone local government, for this reorganisation at a time when councils should be in the van of building homes, growing the economy and picking up the pieces for those who have fallen on hard times?

I ought to alight for a moment on the consequences of council tax equalisation in a territory, none of which has been considered at all. I am a veteran of several rounds of local government reorganisation over many years. In the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, there were some statutory tests, including on value for money, equity between areas and consistency of electoral quotient. There needs to be a broad cross-section of support, but none of this is included in the Bill. The requirement for consent has been abandoned—this is something that is going to be done to people.

Last night I was at a dinner in London and people told me how, 20 years ago, they travelled from all parts of the country to go to Norwich to celebrate their octocentenary; it was 800 years. Among them were lord mayors, honorary aldermen, the sheriffs and the reeves. The Bill is silent on how this important civic part of our nation is to be treated. In an unthinking reorganisation, the civic life of our nation will be vandalised. In future, there will be no more trips to Norwich, or anywhere else for that matter, for those people who are part of the social grease of the way our nation works.

I have heard it said that this will make local government simpler and more straightforward. As we have learned over many days in Committee, however, it will cost more, there will be plenty more expensive layers and there will be more complication. Last week we discovered for the first time that, among the 40 fire authorities in this country, there will be 10 different structural arrangements. What a missed opportunity this is. Rather than reorganising the deckchairs in local government, perhaps we could do something about simplification. But no: there will be less accountability and it will be more impenetrable.

Ultimately, families, businesses and the economy outside the M25 will suffer while London and the mets get to sit this one out. There is no equity there at all. People will be paying more for less, having powers taken further away from them. Nobody wants it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I feel bound to remind the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, that the Bill is a Labour continuation of a local government reorganisation started under the Conservatives. This is very much the Michael Gove—now the noble Lord, Lord Gove—view of how England should be governed, with mayors as the key element and large units imposed regardless of place.

I have done my politics in Yorkshire over the years. I think the imposition of a single unitary council, against the preferences of almost all local authority members in North Yorkshire—except York, because York was, by and large, a contest between Liberal Democrats and Labour—was a crucial example of ignoring place-making in everything else.

When I do my politics in Bradford, I am conscious that it is a large unitary authority and I see good councillors struggling to represent their wards, and councillors who are not so good leaving their wards pretty much unrepresented. I support very strongly everything that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said about the importance of place, and of recognising that different areas require different patterns. I also regret the tendency of successive Governments to go in for restructuring when they are not sure what else to do, the unlikelihood that this will lead to better government and, sadly, the likelihood that it will leave more people across England feeling unrepresented and ignored.

I was very struck by a letter I saw this morning from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Fire Safety, Building and Democracy. That seems to me to place the importance given to democracy in the appropriate place according to the Bill. This is supposed to be a democratic Government and a democratic country. All politics is local. The figures on public trust that I see every year show that the public trust Westminster less than they trust local government. Weakening local government is a very bad idea but, unfortunately, that is what the Bill is all about.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a really important debate because it has emphasised and demonstrated the muddle that is in the Bill: the vacuum that will be created following the local government reorganisation process. How is it that Clause 60 cannot even bring itself to mention the town and parish councils that have formed the bedrock of our society?

I know it is inconvenient to have those pesky politicians interfering in that administrative competence: why do we want delegates and deputies at that lowest level? I can understand why the dead hand of Marsham Street has written Clause 60 as it has, but it is not good enough, because it does not have the golden thread of legitimacy that comes only with elections or democratic accountability. We are not seeing authoritative governance, but authoritarian governance; we will be leaving it to local authorities to impose relationships in some smaller parts of their territory without any regard or requirement for democratic legitimacy.

We have had an interesting discussion. The number bandied around was that 20% of places are unparished. It is not equally spread throughout the nation but, by and large, the historic county boroughs have not been parished because they have been billing authorities and districts in their own right. Areas such as King’s Lynn —a proud Hanseatic town—are currently going through a consultation to form their own parish so that there is not a vacuum. I am very attracted to Amendments 207 and 210, and especially Amendment 209A from the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, because they would prevent a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, but there will be one unless we have these absolute requirements here.

In our discussion about parishes, there was some confusion over what we might call ecclesiastical parishes —those parts of a town with a parish church—but we have not really got to constituted, incorporated parishes that are part of a parish council. It is important that our nomenclature is straightened out. I will talk about civil parishes as opposed to ecclesiastical ones.

There are already multiple arrangements. In my electoral ward, the two parishes of Alpington and Yelverton are inconveniently at both ends of the alphabet but have come together to form a community council—a joint parish council with warding for periodic elections. A minimum number of councillors from Alpington and a minimum number from Yelverton must come together as part of that. Put together, about 400 or 500 people live in those two parishes. Where is the equivalence between Alpington and Yelverton working together and Weston-super-Mare? We are trying to shoehorn this. The Bill should be clear.

In the previous session on the Bill on Monday, I ploughed a lonely furrow as I tried to make some sort of size distinction between these smaller parishes and the larger towns. I was on my own; had that debate been held today, I feel I might have got more support. Nevertheless, we must make sure that we end up with properly constituted, incorporated bodies to govern these smaller bits. Just establishing a joint committee or sub-committee of the new body that sits above it will not be any good, exactly because of the library point that was made so well.

The Bill is deficient because none of this texture is explained or laid out. There is just a muddle, with no legitimacy. This must be brought back on Report with significantly more flesh on the bones and I encourage the Minister to do so. I am not sure whether even Stevenage is parished; it was certainly a new town. That is a whole new class of authority that we may need to look at in this regard. We must try to bring together all those bits from my noble friend Lord Lansley, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and others to bring some order to this. Otherwise, it will be disorderly.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I apologise for intervening, but it is not just about legitimacy—it is also that local areas occasionally want to pay for local amenities that the large unitary does not want to pay for. Shipley, in which Saltaire is based, now has a town council because Bradford decided that it could not afford to pay for public toilets. Ilkley had its own town council so it could do it, and the other tourist destination, Haworth, has a Brontë museum, which pays for its own toilets. Saltaire is a world heritage site, but it had no money to pay for its toilets, so we had to form Shipley Town Council to reopen an absolutely essential part of our local community and economic area. That is a new tension that we have; for libraries and other things, we need some degree of fundraising power for local activities.