English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 13th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendments 216 and 318 in this group, which relate to parish and town councils. Amendment 216 makes provision for unparished electors in the unsatisfactory neighbourhood governance arrangements contemplated by Clause 60 to petition to incorporate into properly constituted and sovereign precept-raising parish councils. Separately, my Amendment 318 applies to the largest town councils, most of which have been wholly or in part district billing authorities before, but which henceforth will be unconstrained in their ability to raise council tax.

I turn first to Amendment 216. In Committee the penny dropped for the first time that those parts of England that were former county boroughs—20% of the land mass, so much greater by population—such as Kings Lynn, Ipswich or Great Yarmouth, or new towns like Stevenage, which is home to the Minister, would be for the most part unparished, and thus second-class citizens in the new arrangements. That is recognised by Amendment 214, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, and the noble Lords, Lord Jamieson and Lord Shipley, which I endorse entirely. I have no problem with it. But I think we need to go further and move beyond the simple promotion of parish councils to the right for unparished areas to become parishes if the measures in Clause 60 are found to be unsatisfactory.

The Government tell us that community or neighbourhood governance will be provided by councillors from the parent unitary authority in unparished areas. Those of us who have been around for a while have heard that duck quack before. We know that these structures are just talking shops, with no resources, capacity or status. This is what we discovered in Committee. People literally from out of town will try to sweep up the crumbs left over, once social care has feasted on the precept, to find what money is left to sweep the pavements, cut the grass, breathe life into the theatre and heat the swimming baths. But with social care consuming two-thirds of the precept, what resources will those toothless talking shops have? These are the things that the larger parishes do, with the consent of their parishioners to raise a precept.

I make no apologies for talking about Norfolk. There are 900 parishes there, and some 10,000 nationally. But when Labour gets its way, 20% of England will be disfranchised and have no parish at all—no money or say, for the most part, in how England is run. That includes the whole of Ipswich, for example, or Oxford. The so-called strategic authorities and the mayor are not going to be interested in the carnival floats, the local antique street market, the food festival or those local culture groups that town and parish councils spawn. The civic life of town mayors will evaporate altogether, with their soft convening and ribbon-cutting powers. No, they will go the way of the local pub, the park café and the high streets, in the vandalisation of high-street Britain.

Do not talk to us about Pride in Place when they disband that whole panoply of civic life, with the sheriff and the burgesses, that illuminates our nation’s story. No, under the dismal and undemocratic Clause 60, the unitary and its councillors will hold all the cards—the budget, the representation and the staff—to hold everyone else over a barrel, because there is no parish council. Of course, they will have no incentive to cede powers either, and all the incentive, on the other hand, to hoard powers and pet projects.

My amendment offers hope to these places: to reject the way in which the Bill creates sock-puppet sinecures for out-of-town councillors from miles away. Where an appointed community council is established, those residents can petition to incorporate—creating the empowerment that the Bill purports to foster and encourage—to create a town or parish council with proper elections, a proper budget and a precept that local people can vote on and endorse, so as not to rely on cast-offs after the social care monster, LGR costs, the recast debts and pension fund liabilities have eaten the rest. I want to help people make their part of England better: more local, more responsive and more accountable. My amendments give hope for democracy for these places, including the cathedral cities, coastal communities and new towns—places such as Stevenage and, for the other part, Gorleston, from where I take my territorial designation, within the historic county borough of Great Yarmouth.

I will listen closely to the rest of the debate and may signal my intention to divide the House on this. The requirement and the ability for local people to force incorporation of their neighbourhood arrangements is important.

Moving on to council tax for our largest town councils, I will be brief. Many of the former principal authorities and districts may become parishes under the new arrangements—or perhaps not, if my Amendment 216 is carried. By charging council tax where they have been districts, they have been able to benefit from formula grant, redistributed business rates and whatever the local government finance system has delivered. But there is a real risk that the parishes will be suckered into taking many of the expensive cast-offs from the home authority in a deliberate cost-shunt. Parks, playgrounds, theatres, moorings, cemeteries and all manner of public buildings will be flipped on to these parishes. They will need to find space in their precept to pay for them, but they will be on their own because they will have no central support and will be living hand to mouth.

My noble friend Lady Scott hates me using this example, but the facts speak for themselves. Council tax under Salisbury City Council is up 44% in just four years and its band D is £383. In my own district, South Norfolk, where I am a councillor, we collect the bins, clean the streets, house the homeless and have built a new generation of housing for just 180 quid—less than half of the parish. The problem with the Bill is that it lumps tiny little Howe, a hamlet of 50 souls in my own ward, in with the village of Hempnall, where next week we will welcome a new vicar, the Reverend Austin Uzoigwe—gosh, I should have practised this—and which has perhaps 1,000 people, together with Horsham, a district of 146,000. In law, all places of 50 to 150,000 will be equivalent. That is crazy, because there is no equivalence between Howe and Horsham, but the people of Horsham need to be spared what has been visited on the residents of Salisbury.

My amendment would create a new sub-class of third-tier authority where there is a population of 50,000 or where the precept exceeds £1 million, so that they fall under the same budgetary constraints as the larger principal authorities. I do not want your Lordships to think that this is anti-town or anti-parish. In fact, it is quite the reverse. The wholesale reconditioning of local government is already going to cost a bomb and create those perverse incentives to pass off the expensive stuff to the parishes. My amendments would strengthen parishes’ hand in the negotiations, as part of LGR, so that they will be able to push back and say no. If they think they cannot afford these gift horses, having looked them in the mouth, they would not have to take them on.

I am seeking to strengthen local democracy and accountability by putting the largest parishes on a proper financial footing, so that they can do the work they do at a price residents can afford. This is not a dig at parishes; they do a lot of valuable work at the level closest to the people. With this amendment, I have their back, as it would stop those councils with the broadest shoulders imposing liabilities and cast-offs on those with the most limited means.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I looked last night at Labour’s 2024 manifesto and would like to quote, extremely briefly, a few phrases from it. It said:

“Labour is committed to strengthening our democracy”.


It attacked the Conservatives for failing to encourage

“full participation in our democracy”

and said that Labour was committed to encouraging such participation in our democracy and to increasing

“the engagement of young people in our vibrant democracy”.

If we do not have local councils and local elections, we have no way of increasing participation, of gaining a real sense of active citizenship or of encouraging the sort of people many of us are now going around to talk to in schools, who will have the vote for the first time. This is why local councils, throughout the country, are extremely important in maintaining and strengthening the sense that every citizen in this country can take some part in public life.