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Written Question
Electoral Register: British Nationals Abroad
Tuesday 2nd May 2023

Asked by: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask His Majesty's Government when the provisions of Part 2 of the Elections Act 2022 relating to overseas electors will be brought into force.

Answered by Baroness Scott of Bybrook - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities)

The secondary legislation to deliver the overseas electors change is expected to be made and come into force in January 2024.


Written Question
Town Twinning
Thursday 21st April 2022

Asked by: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they maintain a central register of cities and towns in England with international twinning arrangements; if so, whether it shows which cities and towns are twinned with cities and towns in Ukraine; and what discussions they have had, if any, with local authorities in England about encouraging twinning arrangements with cities and towns in Ukraine.

Answered by Lord Greenhalgh

The Government does not maintain a central register of cities and towns in England with international twinning arrangements. Whilst twinning is a matter for councils themselves, the Government has recently used the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities’ daily local government bulletin to highlight the Cities4Cities initiative; an on-line platform, sponsored by the Council of Europe’s Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, that matches the demands and needs of Ukrainian cities with the capacity and know-how of local authorities across Europe, including those in the United Kingdom.


Written Question
Society of Antiquaries: Rents
Tuesday 22nd December 2020

Asked by: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what progress they have made in reaching a resolution with the Society of Antiquaries with regard to the rent paid for its premises in Burlington House.

Answered by Lord Greenhalgh

The Society of Antiquaries, along with four other Learned Societies, pay rent under the current rent agreement which was formally agreed between the Learned Societies and the Government following a High Court settlement in 2005. The agreement was also approved by the Charities Commission.


Written Question
Bookshops: Non-domestic Rates
Tuesday 17th July 2018

Asked by: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they intend to introduce a business rates relief scheme for bookshops analogous to that provided for public houses.

Answered by Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth

The Government has introduced a range of business rates reforms and measures to support businesses, including bookshops, worth over £10 billion by 2023. This includes, from April 2017, permanently doubling Small Business Rate Relief and raising the threshold for relief meaning that over 600,000 small businesses now pay no business rates at all, and helping all business by switching the measure of inflation, used for the indexation of rates, from Retail Price Index to Consumer Price Index.


Written Question
Housing: Construction
Thursday 15th December 2016

Asked by: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the answer by Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth on 24 November (HL Deb, col 2050), on what evidence the statement that "we are building more houses than ever before" was based.

Answered by Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth

The government’s policies mean that we have delivered nearly 900,000 new homes in England since 2010 and private new build housing starts are at their highest financial year level since 2007/08. Our planning reforms also mean that major planning applications determined on time are at the highest percentage on record. However, we acknowledge that we have not been building enough homes in England for decades and that we have more to do. The Autumn Statement set out £5.3 billion of investment to build more homes. We will set out a further comprehensive package of reform to boost housing supply and halt the decline in housing affordability in a Housing White Paper to be published in January.


Written Question
Local Government
Tuesday 10th March 2015

Asked by: Lord Lexden (Conservative - Life peer)

Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to support and champion England’s traditional counties.

Answered by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon - Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)

England’s traditional counties date back over a thousand years of English history, but many of the counties have been sidelined by Whitehall in recent decades, whether by the bland municipal restructuring of Edward Heath’s Government in 1972, or by the imposition of artificial regional structures by the last Labour Government based on the EU’s Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (the appropriately-named “NUTS” Regulations).

Yet the tapestry of England’s counties binds our nation together, and is interwoven with our cultural fabric – from our cricket to our ales. So this Government has taken a series of steps to champion our traditional counties:

• We have amended planning regulations to allow local and county flags to be flown without planning permission, and published a plain English guide to flying flags. Previously, flying a county flag on an existing flag pole required a princely sum of £335 to be paid to the council.

• We have supported the Flag Institute in publishing a new guide for would-be vexillologists to encourage a new wave of county and other local flags to be designed and flown. http://www.flaginstitute.org/wp/british-flags/creating-local-and-community-flags/

• My Department has flown a range of county flags in Whitehall to mark different county days, including Cumberland, Huntingdonshire, Westmorland and Middlesex. We have also flown flags to celebrate other historic localities such as those of the Ridings of Yorkshire and of Wessex – the kingdom which gave birth to the united English nation.

• We are changing highways regulations to allow traditional county names to appear on boundary road signs. The previous rules prevented unitary councils like Blackpool from having a road sign saying ‘Lancashire’, or Poole saying ‘Dorset’ – since they were not considered to be part of the ‘administrative county’.

• We have a new online interactive map of England’s different county boundaries. http://communities.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Compare/storytelling_compare/index.html?appid=7b0e661ef66b4a7aacb5a9acf55108ac

• Ordnance Survey, the Government’s National Mapping Agency, now provides a dataset of current, ceremonial counties (counties retained for the purposes of representing Her Majesty by Lord Lieutenants and High Sheriffs). http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/help-and-support/products/boundary-line.html

• I can also announce to the House today that from May a dataset of the traditional, historic counties based on 19th Century boundaries will be available on the OS OpenData portal. These datasets are compatible with the OS Boundary-Line product which is available to all free of charge. Ordnance Survey is also going to provide a viewing map window on their website showing both the historic and ceremonial County boundaries on top of a base map.

• Later in the year, Ordnance Survey is hoping to publish a paper map of the Historic Counties of England, Scotland and Wales (as defined in the Local Government Act 1888 for England and Wales and the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889 for Scotland), which will be available to the general public to purchase and proudly display.

We are stronger as a nation when we cherish and champion our local and traditional ties. This Government is proud to wave the flag of St George and Union flag alongside our county flags. Whatever one’s class, colour or creed, we should have pride in our English identity within the United Kingdom’s Union that binds us all together.