English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, as noble Lords can see, this is a doorstop of a Bill. I draw attention to my registered interests as chair of the Cambridgeshire and Oxfordshire development forums, and I support development forums in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cheshire as well—but of course anything I say is entirely my own view.

As a former Leader of the House of Commons with responsibility for parliamentary counsel, I draw the House’s attention to the fact that more than two-thirds of this Bill is to be found in its schedules. When parliamentary counsel published their most recent document on the drafting of Bills, they said that technical detail should not interrupt the narrative—the story one is trying to tell in the Bill—but that special attention should be paid to the question of whether material should be relegated to the back of the Bill. Well, virtually everything has been relegated to the back of the Bill. We have something like two dozen clauses that do not tell you what their intention is but simply tell you that there is a schedule to go and look at.

A rather effective example, referencing the interesting speech by the noble Lord, Lord Best, is Homes England. The powers of Homes England in relation to the acquisition of land are to be found in Schedule 16, introduced by Clause 35, but it makes no reference to Homes England; it references only strategic authorities. So the uninitiated reader of the Bill would not find anything about Homes England in its contents at all, yet there are powers provided for it.

I will take only a couple of minutes, because there will be many opportunities in the Bill to take up many of the issues that I know the Minister understands very well. As we finish the Planning and Infrastructure Bill on Wednesday, we will start this Bill with some of the same issues in our minds: neighbourhood planning, how to relate local growth plans to spatial development strategies and, for that matter, what the spatial development strategies of strategic authorities should do in relation to the national land use framework when it is published.

On the principle of the Bill, I share the view that many have expressed that we want to see devolution achieved. I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, referenced the Localism Act 2011, but the then coalition Government, of which I was very proud to be a member, set us down this important path, which we wanted to see completed. I think our expectation was that, 15 years on, we would probably see devolution across the whole of England and Wales, but it is tough to do.

My own experience is in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, which is interesting and instructive, because it is not one of the city mayoralties with a metro mayor. From the outset it illustrated the difficulty, because we had parish and town councils—actually, there was no town council in my own constituency, because we had nothing in those days as large as a town. But we had parish councils, a district council, a county council and a combined authority. That was too many, and in principle the Government are right that we should arrive at a simpler structure. If we are going to have a strategic authority, we should have beneath it unitary authorities, to which people can relate, that are responsible for the delivery of the great majority of those local government functions.

At the same time, as these authorities get bigger, we must have effective neighbourhood governance. I am interested that there does not appear to be a schedule that tells us the detail of what effective neighbourhood governance looks like. We just have Clause 60, which tells us that appropriate arrangements should be made for that, but that is something that the Minister in the other place told us would be set out by way of principles in statutory guidance. Well, noble Lords might well find that it would be instructive for us to set out what the principles for effective neighbourhood governance might look like, rather than leaving it to civil servants in the ministry to do so at a later stage.

The only other thing I want to draw attention to is the importance of pace. When we had a devolution priority programme, I thought it was a priority programme because we would get on with it. I declare that I live in Suffolk—we have had contributions already from Norfolk, and we will have at least one more. We thought that we would get on with it, and people in local government thought that we would get on with it and have responded on that basis. It feels a bit like that memorable occasion: being sent to the crease having had one’s bat broken. I am afraid that, after the Bill’s passage through another place, it feels like the Minister—for whom I know we all have the greatest respect—had her bat broken by that decision before she came here to stand at the crease, as it were, to look after the Bill.

I have to say that I am a cynic. My noble friend Lady Shephard talked about this decision and why it might be motivated. It may be to do with this Bill because it will allow those mayoral elections to be conducted under the supplementary vote system in the future, rather than the first past the post system next year. Cynical politics is not what we were looking for in the devolution priority programme; we were looking for the positive politics of devolving decisions to local government and seeing local government take up that mantle. I hope that we can see that principle through in the Bill.