Local Government Reorganisation

Lord Porter of Spalding Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord was part of the discussions on the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, which set out clearly the role of town and parish councils as we develop neighbourhood governance processes. I went to the National Association of Local Councils—NALC—conference recently and spoke to them, and they will be fundamentally involved and engaged in that neighbourhood governance process. The noble Lord is quite right that we need to make sure that, where funding is devolved, it does not stop in the mayoral authority but is devolved to our communities. We are keen to see that happen. The dialogue with town and parish councils is ongoing, and I look forward to those discussions with them as we take this process forward.

[Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)]

My Lords, it is obvious that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs, but this seems to have left rather a lot of shell in there, if we listen to the complaints from around the country. Can the Minister confirm that, if the new Prime Minister’s focus for the department will be mayoral devolution to mayoral combined authorities, the department has the bandwidth in this Parliament to deliver the set of unitaries that has been set out? It is clear from some of the conversations we are having that there is not enough bandwidth in the department to deal with all of this now. If the Government add to that the mayoral stuff, they will run that set of civil servants off their feet. I do not think the Government will have the capacity to deliver it.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for mentioning our new Prime Minister, because he is quite keen on devolution—that might have something to do with his background in the last few years. I am sure he will want to see those building blocks of strong unitary authorities in place so that we can get on with the devolution process without further delay. Local government reorganisation is an existing policy that is already well under way, and the £63 million of funding that places will receive to support them with transition costs had already been agreed. We have announced this now, and I expect that my department will have active discussions—through our new Secretary of State, Angela Rayner, whom I welcome to her role—about how we do this. We have already asked those local authorities to consider the footprint they want to see for their foundation strategic authorities. The noble Lord asked about bandwidth in the department. The department has been outstanding so far in managing this process, providing us with the information that we need to take effective decisions against the criteria we set.