The Union (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am a mongrel Scots-Englishman, with a father who served in a Highland regiment and a son in Edinburgh, so I am a natural unionist. However, it is clear that, if we are to maintain the United Kingdom, its constitutional arrangements must change. We should face the real possibility that we might not maintain the union.

As I came in today, I was thinking of the conference that took place in Prague in 1990, in which one of the Czechoslovak participants said, “I am Czech but my brother has decided he is a Slovak.” I remember, two or three years later, teaching students from what had been Yugoslavia—many were struggling with deciding whether they were a Bosnian, a Croat or a Serb, and feeling, as one of them said to me, “orphaned” by the collapse of the state.

The electoral system that we have at the moment accentuates the difficulties of holding the union together. We have, based on roughly half the population of Scotland, a phalanx of SNP MPs in the House and an underrepresentation of the other currents in Scottish opinion. We have a Conservative Government dominated by southern England, a Labour Party that represents Wales and the north, and a further party—mine—that hangs on to bits of south-west London, bits of north-east Scotland and wherever else we can manage in our electoral system to get through. That accentuates the problem, and I fear that, if we were to have another five years of Conservative Government, the union would break.

I want to talk briefly about chapter 7, on the governance of England, and chapter 3, on parliamentary sovereignty. This report rightly addresses the problem that England is the most overcentralised state in the democratic world and that it will be increasingly difficult to sustain the balance between England and the three devolved nations unless the governance of England is itself transformed. The political and economic imbalance within England is starkly portrayed by the betrayal of the grandiose promise of levelling up. Small packages of funding, distributed by Ministers according to opaque criteria, offer gestures from the centre without any sharing of power. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, that there is a link here with public disillusionment in western politics and a sense of powerlessness, which I hear from friends and neighbours in West Yorkshire, when they say that “those people down in London” are neglecting Bradford, Leeds and the trans-Pennine rail route. That is all part of the disillusionment with our constitutional democracy.

I have lived between London and Yorkshire for 40 years and have witnessed the widening gap between London and the north, while local government has been weakened and shrunk through successive reorganisations, and local control of finance has shrivelled. The Government’s approach to the reorganisation of local government, as others have said in the debate, has been incoherent, with evident political bias in redesigning the shape and size of the new authorities and the powers that they are given. Almost every authority in Yorkshire and the majority of Yorkshire MPs stated their clear preference to maintain district authorities within a “One Yorkshire” regional authority. The Government nevertheless insisted on four sub-regions, each with an elected mayor but without an elected assembly to hold the mayor to account. London has a regional authority with local governments beneath it; the rest of England is denied that.

The regional centres of government that linked central departments to the concerns of the north-west, the south-west and elsewhere were abolished 12 years ago. The Government now think that sending contingents of civil servants to Durham or Lancashire to continue to carry out the instructions of Ministers in London amounts to some form of devolution. If they were to return to the regions and cities the powers that they held 50 years ago, the civil servants would, of course, naturally follow.

The Conservatives promised in their 2019 manifesto to set up a constitutional commission, but broke that pledge, like many others. I hope that the next Government will address the governance of England as a high priority. We will not succeed in reducing the acute inequalities between the south-east and the rest unless the political imbalance is redressed. As paragraph 267 of the report says:

“The devolution framework should include steps to achieve greater coherence in England’s sub-national governance arrangements to improve democratic accountability. We recommend the development of devolution within England should ensure greater alignment between subnational bodies to create functioning economic geographies which also respect local identities”.


Hear, hear. I agree strongly, and the Government are absolutely failing to do that.

A reformed second Chamber should play its part in this. Interparliamentary relations would work better if Members of the second Chamber were elected, directly or indirectly, on a national and regional basis, and saw it as their job to assert those regional and national concerns against the dominance of London. When I was appointed to this House, I hoped and assumed that I would make the transition from an appointee to an elected representative from Yorkshire when the next stage of reform brought us regional and national representation in the House. But Labour hesitancy on this, as on so many other issues, and Conservative opposition in the Commons, blocked the 2011-12 reform.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

And a very good thing too.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

This report reminds us that we will have to return to that, in spite of the resistance of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack.

I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame. I hope that his expertise as an international lawyer will feed into our debates on the topic of sovereignty and its place in the constitution of a multinational state. Constitutional discussions in the UK are blighted by the undue reverence still given to the views on sovereignty of Albert Dicey, an academic whose interpretation of sovereignty was twisted by his embittered opposition to Irish home rule and his consequent insistence that sovereignty was indivisible and rested in the Government who held the confidence of the Imperial Parliament. Sovereignty in the contemporary world has to be shared—upward and downwards, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, was saying—with other states, and with the constituent bodies of states. The ideologues who deny that sovereignty can be shared with our neighbours are the same people who resist sharing it with Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It is they who threaten to destroy our union, just as their great-grandparents destroyed the union between Great Britain and most of Ireland. That is a real threat, and we have to adapt our constitutional arrangements to prevent it.

Voter Identification Regulations 2022

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, I spoke in Committee on the Elections Bill on this issue because I was offended then, and am still offended today, by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, saying that black and ethnic minority communities will be marginalised and will not want to be part of this process. I have spoken to lots of people from my community and not one has said that they would be offended by having a voter ID card. To be quite frank, I agree with the Opposition Benches that a review to see how it works would be great, but I take offence at the point continuously being raised in this House that minority communities will somehow feel disenfranchised. We do not. Please take that away. We are citizens of this country and we will use our right, just like every other citizen.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my local politics are in Bradford, where elections are often quite boisterous affairs, and in some cases threatening. I do not entirely accept the classification that the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, has made of what happens in elections; we have a very large community of Kashmiri origin, now in its third or fourth generation, in Bradford. Some are now extremely prosperous and others are still marginalised. We also have a very poor and marginalised white community in Bradford in a similar position, so it is a question of not just ethnic minorities but the poorest and most marginal council tenants in our society.

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

I also come from a very mixed community: the city of Leicester. We have very boisterous elections there too, but that does not stop people wanting to have something that will make it easier for them not to have those boisterous discussions.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I wanted briefly to make one other point. I am holding the National Security Bill, which we will discuss in Committee next week. Clause 14 and Schedule 1 are on foreign interference in British elections, and the Bill lists a number of offences that need to be considered in terms of foreign interference, including personation, proxy voting, postal voting fraud, sources of donations and others. Yet, in the Elections Act, we have extended overseas voting rights for British citizens from 15 years to a lifetime, without any serious checks on or verification of identity either for those who will give donations once they are on the register or for those who will use postal and proxy voting, which they of course have to do. I hope that, in Committee on the National Security Bill, the Minister will engage fully on the changes to the Elections Act that this will make necessary, because the gap between this emphasis on much greater verification and checks for voters who vote in person and the almost total absence of verification or checks for overseas voters is astonishing, is too wide and needs to be addressed.

[Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)]

My Lords, the purpose of this regulation is to prevent election fraud, and the Minister quite rightly referred to the success in a similar situation in Northern Ireland. Before 2002, there was considerable fraud in elections there, and the election Act was therefore introduced. It was a challenge at the time, but, after a lot of discussion, there was agreement between all the parties to introduce the election fraud Act, which has proved very successful.

In Northern Ireland, the law requires electors to produce one of seven photographic identifications, including, for example, passports, driving licences and senior transport passes. But, in the argument today, some people say that this will exclude many people—but, in Northern Ireland, we have the electoral identity card, which is produced free of charge by the Electoral Office. This form of identification is acceptable to a very high proportion of the electorate in Northern Ireland. It excludes no one, and it is free. Before the election, vans go out to housing estates and different parts of society in Northern Ireland, producing this so that people can get it for free. It does not exclude people, so I do not accept the argument that people, perhaps from lower sections of the community, are excluded. This has been extremely successful in Northern Ireland, and the Minister referred to this success. So we should think very carefully, and we should introduce these regulations.

United Kingdom: The Union

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, with the evolution of the three devolved Governments, the United Kingdom has become a very unbalanced and insecure centralised country. I mention in passing that the question of whether the UK includes the Crown dependencies is left deliberately ambiguous. The Council of the Isles was set up with representation from the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. The Procurement Bill with which we are currently dealing contains a clause that says that UK suppliers include suppliers from the Crown dependencies. However, I recall very well that the last commission on the constitution, in the 1970s, made it clear that the Crown dependencies are not part of the United Kingdom. I will leave that aside for this debate, although we will no doubt continue to address this, with all of the intricacies of tax avoidance that are involved.

The stresses upon the union are clearly growing, but I will talk mainly about the stresses being caused within England. In passing, I say that I am conscious that not all Conservatives below the leadership are still unionists: some English nationalists—the Ukippers of the Conservative Party—would be quite happy to see Scotland and Northern Ireland go, although they have not really thought about Wales. They think that it would save on tax transfers, but it would leave a very discontented north of England dominated by southern England and suffering as a result. That is not an impossible prospect, and we need to be very carefully aware of it.

Mention has been made of the Whitehall mindset, but it is also the ministerial mindset and what one has to call the Diceyan mindset—namely, that Parliament only temporarily devolves powers and may take them back whenever it feels like it. That is clearly not compatible with the continuation of the union. I keep reminding Ministers that Dicey wrote his doctrine on the constitution at the same time that he was writing violent pamphlets against any devolution to Ireland, and this clearly biased and influenced the way he wrote about UK sovereignty.

England has the most centralised democracy in the developed world. What is more, successive Governments muck about with local and regional structures. The Constitution Committee’s report on a stronger union says:

“we believe continued and frequent restructuring will risk undermining Whitehall’s capacity to manage a fundamental part of the United Kingdom’s governance arrangements.”

The latest example that I am aware of is the enforced dislocation of the governance of North Yorkshire by the abolition of district councils and the imposition of a single council, which means that some councillors will have to spend over two hours driving from the ward that they represent to the basic unit of local government to which they will now belong. I note that district councils still exist in Surrey, and I hope that they are about to be abolished in the same way; if the Government believe in single-tier local government, they have to impose it everywhere.

This change was made in the face of all but one of the 19 councils in Yorkshire saying clearly that they preferred an overall Yorkshire structure which would represent the clear identity of the region and its 5 million people—twice as many as in two of the three devolved Assemblies. This was overruled by the Government, with the imposition of metro mayors—some even wish to impose a metro mayor on North Yorkshire somehow. This is not a competent way to restructure local government or rebuild public trust in democracy as a whole, particularly when Governments mistrust metro mayors and very infrequently consult them on arrangements.

What do we need to do? We need to think hard about how we devolve powers within the dominant country of the United Kingdom. We need to think about how we make the necessary fiscal transfers much more transparent, and about how we build that into our union structures. I increasingly believe that the second Chamber should be based on representation of the nations and regions of the United Kingdom, which is part of what would build in the checks and balances of the United Kingdom as a whole. For the clearly neglected regions of England—they feel even more neglected now—it would also symbolise that they are represented and seen in this disunited country.

We must worry about Scotland and we have to worry about Northern Ireland, but we must not forget that there are many parts of England which are now fundamentally discontented with our current Government. No doubt the voters of Wakefield will demonstrate that today, but I read in the Financial Times yesterday a very good interview on the sense of betrayal at the abandonment of most of Northern Powerhouse Rail; at the refusal to build an underground station in Manchester even though they are building one at Old Oak Common; and at the abandonment on the grounds of cost of putting a new tunnel through the Pennines even though they are putting a large and much longer tunnel under the Chilterns for HS2. All those things build distrust and discontent at the local and regional level. This very southern-based Government need to be aware of that, and as we look at the problems of maintaining co-operation with the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish, it should not be forgotten.

Constitutional Commission

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I must declare an interest as I had a memo published in the Kilbrandon commission’s report; one can find it in the second half of volume 10. That shows my age.

It is a huge disappointment to us all that the commitment in the 2019 Conservative manifesto to hold a commission on the constitution is one of the many promises that our Prime Minister has broken. We need one; there is general agreement here that we need one. It is a huge disappointment that we have such a London-based Government. The resentment against them is not only in Scotland, Wales and parts of Northern Ireland; we are increasingly seeing it in the north and south-west of England.

It is a puzzle for many of us that the most devolved part of England is London itself. It has more powers than the regions and allows two levels of representative government, whereas we in Yorkshire are told that we all must have only one level. The new model for this absurd, single-tier government that has just been imposed on North Yorkshire was very reluctantly accepted by the people there.

The assertive, aggressive unionism that this Government respect is as disastrous as the unionism represented in the 1880s and 1890s. The extent to which AV Dicey, the authority on Westminster sovereignty, was quoted to me last year by a government Minister as defining our approach to sovereignty, governing this Government’s assumption that they are allowed to tell everyone what to do, is part of what is wrong. Remember that AV Dicey wrote what he wrote because he was avowedly against Irish home rule and aggressively unionist. What did it lead to? The division of Ireland and nearly a civil war.

That is where we are. I recognise that Boris Johnson is very much part of the problem. Last weekend, I was talking on the phone to one of my Scottish relations, who I know voted Liberal Democrat in the local elections in Edinburgh. He said to me, “If he’s still there in three or four years’ time, I know which way I’ll vote in another referendum”. That is there—the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser, knows it—in the way a lot of people in Scotland think. I am going up to Scotland tonight; I have no doubt that, tomorrow, lots of people will tell me much the same thing. We need to address this. We cannot ignore the problem.

I merely wish to add that resentment in the regions of England about what is going on is also rising. If you saw the Yorkshire media’s response to the integrated rail strategy provisions, you will have seen the extent to which the assumption is that everything is done for London: “You don’t begin to understand what happens in the north and you’ve cut down the degree of autonomy that we thought we had, even in local government”. We need a constitutional commission. We need to consult as widely as possible, using citizens’ consultations, if we are to hold this country together. We should not ignore the real possibility that the United Kingdom could disintegrate.

UK Community Renewal Fund

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

No, it is not—absolutely not. A clear methodology has been set out. It will benefit all the regions of the UK pretty much in equal part.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, can the Minister tell me how many different pots there are for levelling up for councils to bid for? I was told that there are now over 100. If so, do councils have to spend money trying to fulfil different sets of criteria for each one?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I have some sympathy with the noble Lord’s first question: there are probably too many funding pots. We are doing our best to narrow those down as we move towards the levelling-up fund for capital and the UK shared prosperity fund. We do not want local authorities to become grant farmers. We want them to focus on the vision for their place and then to apply for a limited number of pots. It is appropriate to have deals as well, on the other side, but, in terms of central pots, we are broadly going down to two main ones.

Public Services

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to review (1) the comparative costs, and (2) the effectiveness, of the provision of public services in England by (a) local authorities, and (b) private contractors.

[The Minister of State, Home Office and Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Lord Greenhalgh) (Con)]

Local authorities are required to support continuous improvement through the delivery of their functions under the Local Government Act 1999. They decide how to run services. Services can be outsourced, or delivered jointly with another authority, provided that quality and value for money are maintained. As public bodies, they are subject to the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. Central government provides funding, improvement support and overall oversight. There are no current plans for a central review.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this Question was prompted by the Government’s choice on test and trace to turn to multinational companies and expensive consultancy firms instead of making use of the expertise of local government and local public health officers. But it applies more widely: after 50 years of outsourcing, and having acquired experience on outsourcing local transport, probation services and others, will the Government not consider that the time has come to conduct an independent inquiry—or would they prefer an inquiry to be undertaken by an ad hoc Lords committee, for example?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

I think the specific question relates to test and trace; I am sure that is part of the review of our response to the pandemic. But as a former local authority leader, I agree with the noble Lord’s comments about the experience that local government has in the competitive tendering of services.

Inequalities of Region and Place

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have lived between London and West Yorkshire for 40 years, balancing two careers, family obligations and politics, and I have watched the inequalities between the south-east of England and the north widen. I have seen how the distribution of taxation and spending, under Labour as well as Conservative and coalition Governments, has reinforced the advantages of the south-east. For several years, we have paid significantly higher council tax on our house in Bradford than in Wandsworth, in spite of the sharp differences in income and wealth between these two local authorities.

This Government refuse to recognise that reducing regional inequalities cannot be achieved through central direction. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, and others said, local leadership has to be a central part—both political and business leadership. Powers and finance have to be returned to local government; local democracy must not be squeezed further or required to bid against others for limited pots of funding. I have to say to the Minister that Conservatives look to be hostile to local democracy.

Local enterprise and local business leadership are also important. That does not fit with the financial free-for-all in which successful local enterprises are taken over by distant private equity companies. Twenty-five years ago, Saltaire had two promising young electronics companies working out of the old textile mill; both were taken over by US multinationals. Their role in the local community shrank, as did the number of their employees. The innovation they created is now enriching California and Florida, rather than Yorkshire.

The largest enterprise based in Bradford, and in many ways the most socially responsible corporate actor in Bradford, has been Morrisons. Will its new owners care about contributing to the prosperity of West Yorkshire or providing local economic leadership? How will the Government nurture the growth and financial sustainability of locally owned enterprises across our country’s regions, since banks and private equity seem committed to taking their short-term profits and selling them to others abroad? That does not fit very well with the Government’s insistence that they represent national sovereignty and patriotism, and the liberal elite, whom they attack, does not.

My wife, alongside the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, sits on the advisory board of a Bradford academy trust. She sees the dedication of teachers and the challenges they face with pupils from some of Bradford’s poorest estates and with the children of first-generation immigrants and refugees. Long-term investment in education spending, on the scale recently proposed to but rejected by the Government, is an essential part of any coherent strategy to reduce regional inequalities. That has to include the transformation of the funding and status of further education colleges to provide the technical skills and apprenticeship training that Michael Gove and others say they care about but have neglected so far.

Others have talked about the gap in the funding and provision of transport infrastructure. Across much of the north, the buses are infrequent and expensive and the trains old and crowded—where they exist. If you cannot get to work, you cannot work. There are too many industrial communities across the north without much local employment and without transport links to where there is employment.

We also need to pull the cities of the north closer together. HS3, the proposed new line for Leeds and Manchester via Bradford, would transform the region, bringing the trans-Pennine area together in the same way that London transport brings Greater London together. It would also provide, incidentally, extra freight possibilities, which would reduce the enormous number of trucks that drive between Liverpool and Hull across the M62. We are desperately short of freight paths in the north. The eastern leg of HS2, which is also essential, would link Sheffield. It takes one hour to get from Sheffield to Leeds in this network.

I hope the Minister recognises how much cynicism there is in the north about the Government’s promises of levelling up. We were sold the northern powerhouse, which did not seem to extend very far beyond Manchester. We have listened to Ministers rattle on about northern powerhouse rail, while giving the Oxford to Cambridge line much higher priority. We hear the Prime Minister make jokey speeches with catchy slogans, promising that he will work wonders and bring prosperity to everybody. But nothing much will change unless power and finance are returned from London to our regions, cities and towns, and the Government commit to sustained investment in education and training, and in public transport outside the south-east.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, is taking part remotely. I invite him to speak.

England: Historic Counties

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I recognise that we need stability and point out that many areas have not seen significant change. The last reorganisation in London, where I was a local councillor, was in 1965 which, I have to say, was before I was born. I recognise that we need stability in our administrative structures.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, all surveys suggest that Yorkshire has one of the strongest senses of common identity of any region or county in England, historically as a single county but occasionally divided into three. The Government, nevertheless, seem determined to divide it into four, each with its own elected mayor, and have just forced a reorganisation on to North Yorkshire. Why have the Government insisted on disregarding very strong representations from almost all councils in Yorkshire, in the way they have pushed their version of “devolved” government?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I point out that Greenhalgh is a Lancastrian name, so I dispute Lancashire being second to Yorkshire, but that is a matter for debate. Devolution has required a degree of local consultation and decision-making. We are seeking to reflect functional and economic areas in our devolution programme, so it is important that it continues to be locally led.

Levelling Up

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the Minister will be aware that England is the most centralised democratic country, and that the greater the centralisation that a country has, the greater the regional inequality. Here we have competitive funding decided by Ministers in London as the answer to devolution. Can the Minister tell us what he understands by the word “devolution”? Can you have devolution without transferring real power and long-term finance to local and regional governments?

[Lord Greenhalgh (Con)]

My Lords, I fear that this is a mixing up of issues. We need to see that the levelling-up agenda is around the duty of a national Government helping to level up all areas of the United Kingdom, while devolution of funding is also occurring, as I have already mentioned.

West Yorkshire Combined Authority (Election of Mayor and Functions) Order 2021

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 26th January 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I would add, on the railway system, that the new trans-Pennine link is as important as the eastern leg of HS2 and is particularly important for Bradford. I remind everyone that Leeds is now the biggest conurbation in Europe lacking a mass transit link.

I welcome the conclusion of this deal, but with qualifications. It provides West Yorkshire with some of the additional funds it needs. It builds on the constructive co-operation of the councils over the past 15 years. It provides for a spokesman for the region, in the shape of an elected mayor, but it does not fulfil the promise of the 2019 Conservative manifesto, which set out the aim of

“full devolution across England … so that every part of our country has the power to shape its own destiny”.

The funds this deal provides are conditional, and in a number of separate packages, subject to continuing central oversight and partisan ministerial interference—slush funds, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said. The mayor will join other city mayors across England without any institutionalised structure for representing their concerns to Whitehall, as we have seen in ministerial resistance to intervention from existing mayors over recent months. I understand that some Conservative MPs are now opposed to devolution as such, and that a few may even oppose this order in the Commons tomorrow. In today’s Yorkshire Post, Philip Rycroft, formerly a senior official concerned with constitutional issues, called what the Government are proposing “a mess”.

We should have had a devolution White Paper by now, setting out the Government’s plans for the whole of England, as others have mentioned. Instead, we have had plans to parcel up bits of Whitehall departments and scatter them across the country, taking directions still from Whitehall. The commission on democracy that the manifesto promised has disappeared. This deal is not what councils in Yorkshire asked for. They wanted a Yorkshire regional authority. The Government are forcing city mayors on unwilling communities. A Populus poll last year showed 27% of voters in Yorkshire supported a full rollout of city mayors, while 31% preferred the established collective council model and 30% were not sure. That is hardly a vote of confidence.

Throughout this year, we watched the Government bypass local councils, giving generous contracts to consultancies and outsourcing companies to set up test and trace schemes while ignoring the local expertise and experience that councils possess. People in Yorkshire have noticed UK Ministers consulting the three devolved Administrations in detail while failing even to inform existing mayors and local councils of shifting plans for lockdowns for schools. There is, and the Minister must realise this, a growing consensus across England that we would be better governed if there were real devolution within England rather than detailed central control, with favoured deals for Conservative target seats from Cabinet Ministers.

So, I welcome this only as an interim arrangement. It transfers funds to West Yorkshire to improve transport, manage flood risk, support local business and improve adult education, but it is not enough. If this Conservative Government are to fulfil their promise to level up this country, as the Prime Minister regularly repeats, the centre will have to transfer substantial powers and financial autonomy to cities and regions outside the south-east. The Prime Minister waffles on about promoting the Anglo-Saxon model of democracy across the world, yet, around us, this country is moving towards a constitutional crisis. Our voters are increasingly disillusioned with all parties. Ministers are attempting to bully the Electoral Commission and to raise sharply the limit for campaign spending. The Prime Minister has misused the royal prerogative against Parliament and overridden the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Scotland and Northern Ireland are beginning to move away from the union. Against that challenge, this modest improvement in funds transferred to West Yorkshire, with a mayor whose voice is likely to count for little at the centre, deserves, at best, a lukewarm welcome.