Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Shipley

Committee stage
Monday 22nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I will add a very brief footnote to the speech we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. Amendment 477 asks for a devolution Bill. In a sense that takes us back to the beginning.

In September 2019, at my party conference, the then Chancellor announced that there would be a White Paper on English devolution. The Queen’s Speech in 2019 said that the Government would publish a White Paper on

“unleashing regional potential in England”.

The following year the then Minister, Simon Clarke, said in answer to a Parliamentary Written Question on 9 July that

“our English Devolution and Local Recovery White Paper will set out our plans for expanding devolution”.

It was hoped to publish that in autumn 2020.

After that, the line went dead. In 2021, it was announced that the plans for strengthening local accountable leadership would be included in the levelling up White Paper—so what was initially going to be about devolution morphed into being about levelling up. There is inevitable tension between devolution, on the one hand, and levelling up, on the other. Devolution is about pushing decisions down to the local level; levelling up is about ironing out the differences between regions, which, inevitably, means more central control. This dilemma has gone all the way through the Bill, and indeed through the White Paper—it was not the White Paper on devolution, it was the White Paper on levelling up. There are some powerful words in the foreword by the then Prime Minister:

“We’ll usher in a revolution in local democracy”.


But we have not seen that.

To take a very small example, I proposed a very modest amendment that would enable local planning authorities to recover the costs of running the planning department—something that at the moment is set nationally. Far from ushering in new local democracy, that decision has to rest in Whitehall. Instead of pushing spending down to the local level and letting local people get on with it, we have all the pots people have to bid for: the levelling up fund, the pothole action fund—which, I think, has now been added to that list—the future high street fund and the towns fund. The thing about all those funds is that the final decision is taken centrally, not locally. So the question I pose to my noble friend is: when it comes to devolution, is this it? Is this all we are going to get?

We are approaching the end of a Parliament, and there may not be time for fresh thinking, but I agree with the thrust of what the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said: we are overcentralised and need to push decisions down locally. To do that, we need a buoyant source of local revenue, which local government does not have at the moment. When I looked at Amendment 477, the word “devolution” caught my eye. I felt that somebody ought to draw attention to the tension between levelling up, on the one hand, and devolution on the other. To my mind, there is too much about levelling up but not nearly enough about devolution. I suspect that, at some point, whoever is in control in the next Parliament will have to come back to devolution.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young, for reminding us how we got to where we are. He was absolutely right on every single point he made. This is terribly important, and I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, for giving us the amendment. If I have one criticism, it is that I am not sure we are yet at a Bill stage. Although it says “draft legislation” in subsection (1) of the proposed new clause—I understand that—I personally favour a royal commission or something that would actually look at the nature of local government and central government powers.

The noble Lord, Lord Young, has rightly identified the difficulty of devolving and at the same time levelling up, which, as he said, requires a greater element of centralised control. I have said several times over the course of this Bill, and before, that you cannot run England out of London; with 56 million people, we are steadily learning that. One of the reasons we are having these constant changes in the Government’s intentions for Bills is that they do not know either what they want to do—so, in the end, the Civil Service carries on and Ministers carry on trying to move forward.

There are elements in the Bill which are very important in assisting us down the road of greater devolution, and they lie in the combined county authorities. The more we have combined county authorities—much though I do not like the centralisation which can result, because they do not have, for example, a Greater London assembly; they do not have a structure such as that to underpin them—the more we will have a move away from Whitehall.

I do not want to say any more about that; I welcome what the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has proposed in this amendment. I think we should note what the noble Lord, Lord Young, said about the overall situation that we are in, but I hope that the Government and the Minister will see the importance of trying to bring all this together, because inevitably we are going to come back to this on Report anyway, as we look at the first parts of the Bill that, in Committee, we debated many weeks ago. I welcome the amendment and I hope the Government will see that there would be benefit in moving us forward, not just with structures like the combined counties but actually with real devolution of real things.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Shipley

Committee stage
Monday 24th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

May I ask the Minister to clarify one issue? I have listened very carefully to this debate but there is an issue that I have not fully understood. I heard her say that prescribed bodies will be able to secure cost recovery, but she has not said that local planning authorities will be able to recover their costs. She said that there could be an increase in the fees they are allowed to charge following the consultation, but that is not the same thing as permitting cost recovery; indeed, a lack, as yet, of a definition of cost underpins this whole debate. To my way of thinking, there is the immediate cost of administering and managing a planning application, with all the costs that may apply to that application. However, there is also the cost that a local planning authority might have in terms of the provision of IT services to the planning system, web services, office costs, heating, lighting, and so on—essentially, the overhead cost. As the Minister is going to think about all these issues, I hope very much to hear that the Government will consider full cost recovery for local planning authorities. However, as I say, I have not yet heard that during this debate.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to everyone who has taken part in this debate. There have been a lot of Youngs involved, and I will try to respond on behalf of both of them. Let me say straightaway that I very much welcome the government amendment, and I am sure that, in her absence, the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, would also do so.

On the rest of it, I had hoped that, with this group of amendments, we might have found a chink in the Government’s armour that has been deployed throughout our debates. I am disappointed that we have not been able to make progress, and I know that the Local Government Association will also be disappointed.

I am grateful to all those who took part. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, made the valid point that the flat rate prescribed by the Government simply does not reflect the costs to a local authority of a complex planning application that spans a number of years; that point was not adequately dealt with.

I was most concerned to hear what my noble friend Lord Moylan said about developers offering to second to an overstretched planning department a planner who might assist them. That is rather like me saying to Test Valley Borough Council, “I understand your electoral department is under some pressure; I would like to second a returning officer to the forthcoming election”.