Future of the UK Constitution and Devolution

Alex Norris Excerpts

Wednesday 8th March 2023 Westminster Hall

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami) on securing this important debate. I believe that our constitution, and in particular the devolution ideas in it, holds the key to many of the challenges that we face as a country. With the right approach to these issues, we can unlock the enormous potential of all our nations and regions and embark on a period of national renewal.

With characteristic courage, the hon. Gentleman set out a full new constitutional settlement. I thought that was a good place to start the debate. I agree with the need for greater coherence. Like the hon. Members for Aberconwy (Robin Millar) and for Leigh (James Grundy), I would probably stop short on standardisation, but the clarity that the hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden gave on that helped too.

This is an interesting issue, because I think we meet in the middle on a lot of these things. There are disagreements on the Government Benches and there are disagreements within the Labour party, whether on Lords reform, electoral reform or devolution. That we have disagreements within our parties is a good thing, and pretending we do not is a bad thing. That disagreement makes these debates very interesting.

I agreed with an awful lot of what the hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden said, particularly the twin points that our constitution and the Union more generally are under strain, and that the constitution and devolution are at the root of tackling our economic challenges as well. Those points were very good.

The Cheshire caucus was well represented in the debate. In his intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) talked about getting a deal for Cheshire and for Warrington, and my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) talked about the multiple hoops and hurdles that it feels like his local community has to clear just to take some degree of control over what happens to them.

I was particularly taken by what my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Samantha Dixon) said about the way in which local people there had got themselves organised. A lot of the complications and hurdles that the hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden talked about do not apply to them because they are organised. I have an awful lot of confidence in our local leaders—I love local government and am a localist at heart—so my commitment to the people of Cheshire is that we believe they should have access to the maximum powers. I will set out how we will go further than the powers set out in the Levelling-Up White Paper. That should not be contingent on a governance model; it is for local people to decide, not for me. I strongly believe that.

That takes me to the points that the hon. Member for Leigh made. I think the different models of local government are a strength, because I want them to reflect local realities, whether that is geographic realities, cultural things or whatever else. The thing for me is that local authorities should all have access to the same powers; as to how they organise themselves, that should be a local decision.

The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made important points about the Union. This is fundamentally a question of our Union. He used the word “legacy”; the thing that weighs on me is that every generation and every Parliament that is elected are, for that period of time, the custodians of our constitution, democracy and Union. That is quite a heavy weight to be bear. We all have a responsibility to say at the end of our time here, whether short or long, that we safeguarded and protected those things and bequeathed them to the next generation in a strong and healthy way. That is much of our challenge.

The hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden said that we are too centralised, and I wholly agree. We hold communities back because we have a system that hoards power in this place. It is a system that thinks that, whether we are discussing what is best for skills, transport, planning or job support, we know better than the people who actually live in our communities. I fundamentally disagree with that view. It has created an unbalanced economy that makes too little use of the talents of too few people in too few places, with the rest of us—my community included—being written off as not being able to contribute. That is why there is so much appetite for a new approach. So much of our political debate over the last decade has been underpinned by people’s yearning to have more control over their lives and over the country; the clamour for a fairer future, with new opportunities for the next generation; and the desire to build back for our communities, supported by strong local economies and underpinned by decent public services.

The country knows that it is time for a change. We have seen the devolution of power to England’s regions in recent years, but it is not sufficient. There are too many deals, the ambition is too modest, and too many places have been shut out. It should be a point of great anger for many of us—especially those who are locked out of the current settlement, as many colleagues are—that at some point Ministers looked at leaders in parts of the country, whether the West Midlands, Teesside or Greater Manchester, and thought they were good enough to have certain powers, and looked at the rest of us and thought we were not. That is fundamentally wrong.

By dint of our common personhood, we should have access to the same opportunities. That is why the Leader of the Opposition asked Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, to produce a report on the future of the UK. We are currently consulting on it, but it contains really great proposals that, at their heart, would represent the biggest ever transfer of power from Westminster to the British people.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)]

From a Welsh perspective, the Gordon Brown report was extremely unambitious. I encourage the shadow Minister to realise that there is a huge opportunity for Labour, as it goes into the general election, to deal with many of these issues, especially by empowering the Welsh Government with the necessary fiscal levers they need to deal with the Welsh economy. I encourage the Labour Front Bench team to be as ambitious as possible going into the next election.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, which I will take as a contribution to our consultation. That point has been well made by our Welsh colleagues, so it has been heard.

In January, the Leader of the Opposition set out the type of thing that we are talking about today when he spoke about our “take back control” Bill, which is about new powers for our communities over skills, the Department for Work and Pensions, transport, planning and culture, all to help to drive growth by developing hundreds of clusters of economic activity. It would be a fundamental shift in power and something to be really excited about—I know I certainly am.

Power is one half of the arrangement, but the other half is, of course, finance. We have to change what the Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands called the “broken begging bowl culture”. Local Government Association research shows that over the four years to 2019 there were 448 separate funding pots from which councils were invited to bid. Much of that was for fairly basic services, such as cleaning up chewing gum or having more public toilets.

We need to get away from that competitive bidding process in which the Government pick winners and losers, and someone always loses. In fact, the winners are also losers, because the money they get back is less than they have had cut from their budgets. We need to end the beauty parades as soon as possible. The Government must address the point that they do not want to address in respect of round 2 of the levelling-up fund: many communities up and down the country put hearts and souls into good bids, only to find out later that they could never win. Communities being held in such contempt has to change.

I will use my remaining time to talk about our Union, because a debate about the constitution and devolution is a conversation about union. I am a unionist in many senses of the word: a trade unionist all my adult life and a UK Unionist for as long as I can remember. I believe strongly in the power of the collective and co-operation. I value others’ contributions and they value mine, and together we are better than the sum of our parts. Unionist is what someone is; unionism is what they think and do every day. We work that muscle to build that.

It is clear that the next Government will have a huge job in restoring our Union. I am sad to say, because it is a loss to us all, but the Government have been the best friend to nationalism that those who wish to leave our Union could ever have. We need to restore our settlement to a union of equals, restating that self-government and shared government are hugely beneficial to all the nations of the UK. The Brown commission spoke persuasively on that.

We need to restate that we believe in local decision making not just when the decision is one that we want made, and that differences strengthen rather than weaken us. We should also restate that there is huge economic potential across all our nations and regions, but there is not the same degree of opportunity. I believe we have reached a positive consensus on devolution, at least in England, although we have to do much more in Scotland and Wales, as colleagues have said.

The challenge is to get that power and those resources out of this place and to those communities, setting them free. That is how we will improve communities, restore the public’s faith in democracy and get economic growth that benefits everyone. That is a really big prize that is incumbent on us to deliver.