Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 13th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I apologise for not being present on the first group that the Committee discussed today, courtesy of Avanti trains. We now have three very important amendments, which go to the heart of whether levelling up can be achieved. It cannot be achieved unless there is a massive input of finances to local authorities and to CCAs in order to achieve it.

We all know how the system works at the moment. When this place signs off on an Act of Parliament which places new duties and responsibilities on local authorities, government Ministers are always quick to say, “This will all be covered by the new burdens doctrine”. That means that the new cost will be assessed in Whitehall, by some process which is more or less invisible to the general public, and a number will be added to the amount of grant which is then allocated by Whitehall to local authorities. Putting it more accurately, the original amount will be subdivided so that the new burdens are one fraction of it and the reduced grant overall, because of the economic situation, is the other. In other words, there is no extra money at all because the envelope of money has been predetermined by the Treasury and is simply divided one way or another.

Perhaps the key point in what the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, said was about the need for much more transparency on that funding relationship between central government and its decision-makers in Whitehall and the recipients of their decisions—the CCAs and local authorities. These three amendments are ways of establishing a process which would begin to deliver that. I very much hope that, in replying, the noble Earl will be able to give us some comfort that the message has been heard.

I say to the Government Front Bench that, if we could have some assurance that the new burdens doctrine was going to mean a genuine increase of funds for additional processes, we would have much more confidence that the levelling-up process could deliver, rather than simply reapportioning a few crumbs on the side of the plate from one place to another. It is about that process of funding the Government’s ambitions on levelling up; we really need to have some certainty that they have that process clearly in focus and in mind. We shall otherwise pass in due course, no doubt, a Bill that we all know will not provide a route for funding the initiatives which are absolutely essential if it is to succeed.

Turning quickly to the three amendments in front of us, I have characterised the first as a fair funding audit of local authorities which, it seems to me, would reveal at the local level some of the issues that I have just described. Increasingly large burdens are being placed on local authorities and combined authorities to achieve certain outcomes, but the Government are withholding money which would allow the authorities to deliver those.

Amendment 123 is asking about parliamentary oversight. I shall be very interested to hear how the Minister chooses to answer that. There is a great pressure—this was the topic we were talking about on the previous group—on auditing the performance of local authorities when they spend and allocate money, and when they undertake their risk assessments, but there is less investigation of how the Government are handling their side of that equation. Maybe there is indeed scope for enhanced visibility and transparency and parliamentary oversight of that process.

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I am sure that the noble Baroness will not be surprised to know that I fully support it; I have talked about bus services before, as she mentioned. Obviously, I am fully aware of how many bus services have been cut and how much funding local authorities will need if they are to take on these new responsibilities. The next group of amendments concerns transport; I have a number of amendments in it and will talk about this issue in further detail.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

Has the noble Baroness given any consideration to one of the provisions here about the statement that the mayor must make on consent by the constituent councils? I think she said that it would be only if they gave their unanimous consent but, on page 51 of the Bill, subsection (4)(b) says that,

“if the mayor is unable to make that statement, the reasons why the mayor considers the order should be made even though not all of the constituent councils agree to it being made”.

So it is not even the case that all constituent councils are engaged; indeed, it does not even say that it should be a majority. It would appear that the mayor has absolute discretion to make a statement, regardless of constituent councils’ support.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

Absolutely; the noble Lord is completely correct. I was trying to get across that there should be unanimous consent for anything as serious as that matter; I thank the noble Lord for drawing attention to it.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for the direction of travel of this whole group of amendments. I was not able to be here for the previous group, but I offer support for Amendment 469 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Randerson, about allowing local authorities to run their own bus services.

I turn to the specific points in some of the amendments in this group. We have already heard the case set out. I agree with pretty well everything that has been said by the previous speakers about the parlous state of local transport in the UK, particularly in England, and the way in which we are so badly trailing other parts of the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, talked about electric buses. I was just looking up the stats. The most recent ones I could find for the EU are from the end of 2021. There were 8,500 electric buses in the EU then, and I have no doubt that that figure has grown significantly. That is based on my own experience of arriving in a number of small European cities and finding that a line of little electric hopper buses, as we might call them, taking people from the bus station to the train station or around the city is just normal—yet for us that would be a rare and amazing pilot scheme.

I shall pick up some specific points. Amendment 93, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, would allow residents of the combined county authority to petition their authority and the Government for new transport infrastructure. Creating that democratic framework, explicitly putting it in the Bill, would be useful. We know how much hunger there is in local communities. Mostly they are trying to defend the bus services that they are about to lose, but in many places if people saw the potential for a route towards a new service that everyone knew was needed, the petition would provide a mechanism for that.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, said, Amendment 94 refers to the assessment of the sustainability of transport infrastructure. With 27% of our total emissions coming from transport, and 91% of those from road vehicles, heading towards public transport and indeed active transport—cycling and pedestrian routes—is crucial. To ask the CCAs to put down on paper where they are at and where they are aiming to go is also crucial.

Sustainability also means looking at the issue of resilience. We are in the age of shocks, climate and other, and as I was listening this to this debate I was thinking about the situation at Dawlish and the number of times that we have seen that crucial rail route cut off. That first really came to public attention in 2018, and we have got precisely nowhere on that issue since.

Amendment 97, which we have not yet heard formally introduced, would mean that CCAs could formally designate rail, bus and particularly cycle paths as key routes. If we are going to have the kind of modal shift that we need to see in transport then bus routes and cycle paths are crucial. We need to give CCAs the power to take control over those, see the way forward and make sure that they are secured and treated as important in the same way that we do, far too often, with the main road network.

This is all fine detail and not the kind of stuff that is ever likely to set the headlines ablaze, but it is crucial if this levelling-up Bill is going to go anywhere towards delivering what the Government say is its aim.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, this has been rather a depressing afternoon. We have had a long debate about where money was coming from, and the answer is, “There isn’t any”. Now we are on to a debate about another vital aspect of levelling up: you need the money, but you also need a transport policy that works. Reference has been made to the mission statement. I am becoming increasingly concerned that in every debate we essentially get the same message: the Bill is not about implementing the mission statement, delivering on the five pillars or any of the stuff that was in the White Paper, but about something completely different—and so far it has completely eluded me what the something completely different is. Here we have an opportunity to put a bit of substance in the Bill, which this set of amendments would certainly do.

I appeal to the Government just to join up some of the dots in their own levelling-up White Paper and their own set of mission statements, and to look at this piece of legislation as a way of delivering, or at least of outlining how they intend to deliver, these challenging targets. The mission statements have dates attached to them, yet we have already heard that the financial review is going to be quite a long way ahead—probably in the next Parliament, let us be honest. The transport amendments here would give the new CCAs some powers, chances and opportunities to begin to help the Government to deliver on their mission statement. I cannot say I am hoping, but I must surely have some expectation, that the Government are going to rise to that challenge.

I want to remind the Government that one of these aims is to have a similar level of public transport outside London as there now is in London, by an end date. I will leave aside whether that was a promise that could ever be fulfilled, but it would certainly be easier to achieve if you started now rather than starting in two years’ time or whenever the next big Bill or funding round comes.

In light of that government ambition, the Built Environment Committee, of which I was at that point a member, published a report called Public Transport in Towns and Cities outside London at the end of last year. We took a lot of evidence on what the impact of the pressures of single-pot funding are on transport authorities around the country, and some were much more successful than others. As somebody who lives in the area of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Transport for Greater Manchester, I rejoice in the fact that we usually do pretty well out of all this. But you have only to look across the Pennines to other transport authorities to see some that do not. We took evidence that they have essentially given up bidding because every bid that they have made, which costs money, has been unsuccessful, and they do not get the feedback that they need to improve or find a way through the system. It is single-pot funding which is not delivering levelling up in the way that it should do.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, mentioned Northern Powerhouse Rail and Transport for the North. Plenty of work is going on pointing out to the Government what they could and should do, and how it could be delivered to achieve outside London that London level of public transport. Yet these opportunities are being missed again and again, so I say to the Government that these amendments are a way of getting that process started.

In Greater Manchester, the mayor—not of my political persuasion but certainly with a strong mandate—has been pushing ahead to get public transport to operate in a co-ordinated and fully functioning way across that city. Successive Conservative Transport Ministers have been deeply sceptical of what Greater Manchester has been trying to achieve, and I have challenged the Government on two or three occasions about whether they were or were not actively supporting the model of Greater Manchester and encouraging others to do so. The evidence that was given by the then Transport Minister to the committee was that the Government are completely neutral about all these funding models, and that it is entirely up to anyone to do what they want—except that the Government prefer that they do not do it the Greater Manchester way. Sometimes the Government seem incapable of learning from the practical experience of what works, and allowing or indeed encouraging others to take advantage of the experience that has been developed on the ground. Obviously we see this in Committee, and will see this all the way through it—“If it is not invented here, it cannot be any good.”

From that point of view, I dare say that the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, are doomed to fail today, but I ask the Minister to take a look and go back to the Department for Transport, and whoever else needs to be talked to, picking up the point the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, made. Please can the Government, and not just the department, put some guts into the Bill and make it deliver on the missions and objectives that they have set out, that they are so proud to boast about, and which these amendments could facilitate the delivery for?