English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Baroness Freeman of Steventon

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I was going to speak in support of the amendment of my noble friend Lady Royall, which is great, but I will respond to the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, wearing my ex-energy hat.

There are sometimes tensions between growth and environmental protections. I pray in aid the saga of Hinkley Point C and the waste of years and millions of pounds spent in relation to acoustic fish deterrence. There are many examples of very bad practice by some of the environmental authorities in the way they deal with these issues. The history of major infrastructure projects in this country is so appalling in relation to the length of time taken that we need to look at this very carefully.

The noble Baroness is probably aware of the Fingleton review into the regulation of nuclear power stations, which was commissioned by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister and came out in the autumn. Broadly, they have accepted it, but at the end of this month they have to respond in detail. What Fingleton recommended is controversial. He basically said that there needs to be one overriding regulator. This is subject to pushback from environmental lobbies at the moment, but people interested in growth are saying that we really have to go with Fingleton. All it illustrates is that sometimes there are tensions and I am not sure that we have yet found a way through them. Clearly, we all want to protect the environment and our habitats, but we also need to have growth. It will be interesting to see how the Minister responds to this.

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

This is supposed to be a guide to best practice. The noble Lord has noted some of the poor practices. A guide would help to avoid some of those. That is important. I totally agree that there has been some terrible practice and it is usually done through ignorance.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

We also have a terrible risk-averse culture among regulators in this country, which we need to tackle as well—but I really rose to support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I have a later Clause 53 stand part notice, which partly covers the same ground.

Nye Bevan is a great hero of mine. He founded the NHS, but he made one mistake. He beat Morrison in Cabinet in 1947 in terms of the role of local government. Morrison of course had been leader of the London County Council, which, pre-war, had certainly been the largest hospital authority in the world. He argued that local government should be at the centre of the National Health Service. That was rejected, which was a great pity.

I have always believed that local government should play a much larger role, not just in health service provision, but also in health as a whole. My noble friend illustrated why that is important. She mentioned the Health Foundation’s report, which is stark in making clear that health outcomes in the UK are falling far behind those in other countries now. The country that we are most aligned with now is the US, whose health outcomes are pretty disastrous.

We know that we need a co-ordinated, system-wide approach, but what we have is fragmentation. The health service is outwith a lot of the discussions that noble Lords have been having in this Committee. It is very centrally driven. I had some happy years driving it from the centre, but I have concluded that it just does not work like that. We have seriously got to devolve. Local government deals with so many issues that relate to poor health, including transport, low incomes and poor-quality housing—all the things that noble Lords have been discussing. What I am doing, basically, is encouraging my noble friend the Minister to say that her department recognises that it has a bigger role to play in health than it may think.

Clause 44 is welcome. What we are trying to do is urge the Minister’s department to be as ambitious as possible and to do everything that it can to ensure that local government as a whole takes advantage of this. Mr Osborne’s agreement with the leader of Manchester City Council and its chief executive—in 2014 or 2015, I think—led to Devo Manc, which embraced health; it was the responsibility of the combined authorities rather than the mayor. There is enough evidence there to suggest that this is a good thing and that we need to build on it. My disappointment is that nothing has happened since then. The moment Mr Osborne left, no one in government was interested any more. I hope that we can resurrect it and say to local government, “We’re not going to improve our health without you being really important partners in this”.