English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 310, which seeks to insert a duty to consider the needs of rural communities into the Bill. The duty would require

“strategic authorities and their mayors, when considering whether or how to exercise any of their functions, to have regard to the needs of rural communities”.

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Cameron of Dillington and Lord Best, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for their support. Like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, I lament the fact that the rural-proofing unit was taken away, and I hope it will be restored one day.

I am very grateful to my noble friend the Minister for meeting with me and for her letter of 17 March, which went to all noble Lords. The letter informed us that amendments would be tabled to increase the number of commissioners to up to 10 and would thus support the appointment of commissioners dedicated to cross-cutting issues such as rural matters.

Government Amendments 42, 51 and 60 will be debated in group 9 and naturally, I support them. However, there is still no mention of “rural” in the Bill, which runs the risk of not presenting a devolution-for-all approach. The distinct lack of reference to rural communities, along with many provisions drawing from the Greater London Authority Act, means that the Bill currently reads as urban-centric in its approach to devolution.

Rural areas have distinct needs, as has been so well pointed out this afternoon, and they present a unique opportunity as important economic drivers for this country, through farming, food production, local businesses and tourism. With the creation of new strategic authorities and the devolution of powers to strategic authority mayors, we need to consider carefully the application of “strategic” within a rural context.

Historically, strategic investment has typically focused on urban areas, ignoring the potential and opportunity for rural areas to contribute to the local and national economy, inspire forward investment from the private sector, and meet essential needs for food production, health and well-being, climate resilience and nature recovery. We have an opportunity here, as we move forward with this programme of devolution, with rural parts of the country now being covered at strategic level, to ensure that our rural areas are not forgotten and that our rural communities have fair representation and the strategic investment to support and drive rural growth.

Rural areas have very different characteristics across the country and benefit from tailored approaches to economic growth and development. This legislation provides the opportunity to empower areas to provide the bespoke solutions needed for their rural communities. That, in itself, is fundamental to the devolution agenda.

My amendment, which addresses the points raised by the Royal Town Planning Institute and a recent report commissioned by the Rural Housing Network, entitled English Devolution and Rural Affordable Housing, would embed rural representation in the Bill and offer safeguarding provisions. That would lead to better consideration of rural communities and their context, specific needs and opportunities through the devolution process and the implementation of the new strategic layer of local power.

With 85% of the country’s land being classified as rural and 17% of the population living in rural areas, let us reaffirm our recognition of the value of our rural communities and ensure that they have every opportunity to thrive in this new era of regional empowerment, growth and identity. I urge my noble friend the Minister to include this duty and, at the very least, to ensure that there is specific reference to the needs of rural areas in the Bill. It must be clear that the Bill relates to rural as well as urban areas, so that the needs of rural areas are properly considered at every stage.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in the debate on this very important group, having attached my name to Amendment 5 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, and Amendment 310, which was just very ably introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall.

All these amendments constitute a group; I chose these two because we are introducing rural affairs as an area of competence for strategic authorities, giving them a duty to “have regard”, which makes quite a nice package. Interestingly, in the last group the Government conceded the power of the argument for including culture as a key element of the Bill. I really cannot see why they have not done the same thing with rural affairs, having heard the very powerful arguments made in Committee. I live in hope that, having now heard the arguments on Report, the Government will see the sense of including rural affairs in the Bill.

We spoke extensively about this issue in Committee, and we have already heard three powerful arguments today for taking this direction, so I will just add a couple of points. The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, put it very well when she talked about young people gathering at the bus stop in the early evening because they know that a bus will not come along and disturb them for 15 or 16 hours—or possibly six days, the way these things work. That really is a measure of deprivation. At the other end of the population age scale, of course, we have a fast-ageing population, many of whom live in rural areas. They may once have had enough money to have access to a car, but that does not mean they are going to be able to use one indefinitely. That is a crucial issue in relation to bus services in rural areas. If you have a metro mayor, it is going to be very hard to get attention paid to that kind of issue.

I want to major, as I did in Committee, on the issue of food growing. Many other things happen in rural areas—people live in rural areas for all sorts of reasons—but our rural areas should be regarded far more centrally as part of the way in which we feed our population. Speaking at the NFU conference in Birmingham recently, Professor Tim Lang, a well-known food expert, reflected that the UK is only 54% self-sufficient in food. Lest someone say, “It’s a crowded island”, the Netherlands is 80% self-sufficient in food. We need to treat our land, our local areas, as places that produce a lot of their own food. Professor Lang said that our model of agri-food capitalism has just relied on the idea that others can feed us, but we all know the state of the world, the state of geopolitics and the state of climate. That is not something we can continue to rely on.

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If the Minister’s response is not helpful to my proposal, it is my intention to test the opinion of the House, because this has become such a fundamental issue. So I move this amendment with a request to the Government: they need to empower communities. We are about to have much bigger local councils and are about to remove power from people in local areas, as there is upwards mission creep to mayors. The Government must take action to enable the mayors and existing local authorities to devolve powers to towns and parish councils. I beg to move.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, having attached my name to this crucial amendment. I declare my position as vice president of the Local Government Association and the National Association of Local Councils.

What we are trying to do here is to save the Government from themselves, because without this amendment, this Bill risks being entirely referrable to the Advertising Standards Authority for false advertising. This is supposed to be the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, but instead it concentrates power and does nothing about empowering communities, so this is the essential amendment.

We know how much parish and town councils are embedded in and are part of their communities. We are taking away that district council layer and putting all the power in the hands of one person. It is no secret that we in the Green Party do not believe in elected mayors, but even if you do believe in them, just think about that concentration of power. Should we not also refer power outwards?

There are two crucial parts of the amendment. Proposed new subsection (3) states:

“Each local authority within the area of a strategic authority must … consider whether any of its powers may be exercised at a more local level … and … where it considers that to be the case … enable such devolution”.


Proposed new subsection (5) states that local authorities must have a community empowerment plan to work out how to empower their communities. These are absolutely basic provisions.

I guess I apologise to noble Lords for bringing up the Brexit referendum, but last week I was with a group of young university students. Ten years ago, they were, of course, quite small children, and it was really refreshing and telling that they were asking me what had actually happened: “How did Britain get itself into this mess? Why are we in this situation?” One answer I gave them was that “Take back control” was a very powerful slogan which lots of people felt really spoke to them. We now know that, now we have left the European Union, people do not feel any more in control. If we do not make this Bill provide some sense of taking back control in England, that enormous problem of lack of trust in politics will only increase.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, democracy starts with local engagement. As the saying goes, all politics is local, and people start by worrying about their own local community.

We talk about pride of place in government policy, but place is not usually the whole of Yorkshire, for example, or even the whole of North Yorkshire; place is your local community. What this Bill assumes is that a local area in governance terms is roughly half a million people, and a combined strategic authority should perhaps be somewhere between 1.5 million and 4 million people. There are nearly 50 independent states, members of the United Nations, with populations smaller than half a million. There are two European states, Malta and Iceland, with populations below that, and Luxembourg is not that much larger. When we get to the equivalent of combined authorities, we are talking about Denmark, Estonia and Latvia: states that seem not only quite capable but have extensive local government structures underneath them—and they work.

I looked with interest at the closing ceremony of the winter Olympics the other week, at which the mayors of the various localities and the local region were all present. They have several layers of local government, which is the norm across the rest of Europe, and what this legislation is intended to reduce as far as possible. Local politics is essential to maintaining popular engagement with democracy, party politics and public life. People care about bins, allotments, public toilets, playgrounds: things that, ideally, are not left with strategic authorities and mayors, who would be roughly equivalent to the President of Finland—to whom I was listening the other day—in terms of the number of people they are responsible for. Let us be realistic about that and recognise that, unless we have active town and community councils at a lower level, with elected representatives who know those who voted for them and who are known by those who voted for them, we will lose an essential part of a liberal democracy to which my party—and, I hope, everyone else here—is committed.