Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Heseltine Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Snape (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. I hope that she will forgive me if I am not quite so enthusiastic about some aspects of the Bill as she was, but it was certainly a pleasure to listen to her. I will explain my reservations in the course of what I have to say. I apologise to the Minister for not being present at the meeting that she held last week when I understand that some of the questions I will put to her today might have been resolved. I was away all last week, so I hope that she will forgive me if some of the things that I say during the course of my speech she could have answered had I been able to make the meeting.

One issue on which I would be grateful for some further explanation from the Minister is the extent to which areas other than combined authorities can seek to obtain the powers described in the Bill. Looking at the Explanatory Notes that accompany the Bill, it appears on the one hand that these powers are reserved for combined authorities that seek to go down the road of electing a metro-wide mayor—I share the reservations voiced by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, about some aspects of that—yet paragraph 1 of the Explanatory Notes, says:

“The Bill takes forward a number of reforms which are intended to allow for the implementation of devolution agreements with combined authority areas and with other areas”.

Perhaps the Minister can clarify these other areas and tell us under what circumstances these other areas, not including a mayor, would be able to enter this brave new world of devolved powers.

My other question relates to timing. It would possibly be a few years before an elected mayor could be up and running and managing his own kingdom, or—out of deference to my noble friend Lady Donaghy—her own queendom. Greater Manchester is of course further down the line and much preparation has already taken place, as we heard today, from the exchange at Question Time. But the Bill is littered with order-making powers which will be made, perhaps necessarily, in a piecemeal way. Perhaps the Minister will say that that is the very essence of devolution—local solutions for local problems. But we could end up with lots of bits of legislation passing through both Houses of Parliament at various times.

I also notice that the majority of the statutory instruments that can be made under this legislation will be subject to the negative resolution procedure. We will be introducing sweeping changes in local government throughout the country with only the bare minimum of parliamentary scrutiny. I do not necessarily complain about that, but I hope that the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee of your Lordships’ House will look carefully at what is proposed.

It would be churlish not to pay tribute to some of the intentions behind the Bill. The Minister, in an exchange earlier today, did not mention transport. In my decade or so’s membership of your Lordships’ House, I have largely confined my remarks to local government and travel and transport matters, so I am concerned. Will we see a separate Bill for transport, a Bill for delegated powers so far as local passenger train services are concerned and a separate buses Bill or, indeed, will these matters be combined? I spent some time many years ago on a passenger transport authority and more recently as chairman of a bus company, and there is a great deal of uncertainty within the bus industry about what will happen—whether there will be reregulation and what powers over bus services will be given to the mayor. The longer that that uncertainty persists, the more likely it is that investment in the industry will be held back until we see exactly what the Government’s proposals are and how power over these matters is to be devolved.

In a way, we have been down this road before. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, mentioned, in an unjustly self-deprecating way, his own efforts to be involved in local government reform 40 or so years ago. I have never actually forgiven him for abolishing the Bredbury and Romiley Urban District Council with his legislation all those years ago. I know that it is a long time to bear a grudge, but I wanted to get that off my chest. We formed the larger authorities at that particular time under the 1972 Act, and the metropolitan county councils as well. Again, there was a lot of sense in the formation of the metropolitan county councils. Matters such as planning and strategy ought to be devolved to a wider area such as that. They cannot be properly resolved at a purely local level. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, had moved on when it was decided to abolish the metropolitan county councils a few years later. The cynics among us—the ex-councillors, thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine—decided that those authorities had been abolished because the Conservative Party could not win them very often. But perhaps that is with the benefit of hindsight.

[Lord Heseltine]

Just for the sake of accuracy, I was responsible for helping to create the metropolitan county councils in 1972, but I also got rid of them in 1992.