English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Baroness Freeman of Steventon Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome back the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. Having broken my ankle before, I feel her pain. I will speak to Amendments 132 and 222B in this group and, if time permits, Amendment 241E in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon.

The Minister will be aware of my interest in SUDS. What I am seeking to do here is align her department with Defra, because Defra is much keener than her department is on bringing in mandatory standards for sustainable drainage. I hope that we can bring them closer together so that they speak with one voice.

The importance of SUDS as a natural containment of water is twofold, but it is primarily to prevent flooding and to prevent floodwater from being displaced. For example, if as few as 30 or 60 houses have been built on a waterlogged field—it does not need to be a major development of 300 houses—it can displace the water into existing developments. I saw this when I was the MP for Filey, for my last five years in the other place. Flooding of sewage was caused when rainwater mixed with the additional sewage into the combined sewer. It went onto the highway, meant that households, including some pensioner households living in bungalows, had to be evicted for six months and caused £1 million of damage to Filey School.

I know that the noble Baroness will reply by saying that the Government published guidance in June 2025 and that SUDS is part of the National Planning Policy Framework, to which I would say, even more firmly than before, that these are, regrettably, not mandatory. Since my earlier attempts to put SUDS on a statutory basis during the passage of the levelling up Bill and the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, there has been a court case, which I will come on to now.

With this amendment, I am seeking to ask the noble Baroness to conduct sustainable drainage assessments relating to planning applications by strategic authorities, before those applications are approved. The assessment

“must include consideration of whether existing public sewerage systems have capacity to support proposed developments in planning applications.”

I refer to the excellent report by the Environmental Audit Committee in the other place, Flood Resilience in England, which was published last year. It makes two references to SUDS, one in particular. I quote its paragraph 48:

“We heard that the Flood Risk Management Strategy requires Lead Local Flood Authorities to maintain a register of flood risk assets, but that implementation is inconsistent and that many assets, especially SuDS and nature-based features are not captured”.


That was the initial background to this. It also emphatically recommended, in its conclusions in paragraphs 30 and 31, that more needs to be done on the whole issue of surface water.

I part company with the Minister in that I believe the guidelines need to be mandatory, we need a legal basis and we need to implement Schedule 3 to the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, because of the ruling last month in the case of Gladman Developments Limited v the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and Lancaster City Council. This is important and has caused much concern among practitioners, in particular the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, with which I did some interesting work on bioresources, removing the solids out of sewage and making money out of that, but that is for another day.

CIWEM is deeply concerned because this case set aside the sequential test. I quote from its letter, which I will make available to Hansard. The court judgment

“has a large impact on Planning, not just the Sequential Test which is worrying but also the status of SuDS in development. At the original appeal the inspector dismissed the application as A sequential Test was not carried out but required. The applicant then went to the High Court, contending that the inspector has erred in law, by treating the NPPF as establishing a requirement that planning permission must be refused in every case where the sequential test had not been undertaken… The court agreed and quashed the decision, finding that this is one matter that needs to be weighed up against the other factors and not a sole reason to refuse an application. The scheme was for 64 new homes in Lancaster”.

In the view of CIWEM and others:

“This not only weakens Flood Risk Policy but also the implication that weakens the stance that if a development does not include SuDS is this a strong enough reason in the planning balance to refuse an application on its own”.


That court case has driven a coach and horses through government policy, and I would argue most vigorously that we need to have a mandatory basis and set aside these voluntary guidelines. We need to have one mandatory standard respected by all planning authorities the length and breadth of the country—otherwise we are not doing our duty to householders to have a safe residence, free from the prospect of flooding and, in particular, free from sewage coming into their homes.

I turn now to Amendment 222B. I spoke in the clean energy Bill, when the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who has just taken his place, was an excellent Minister. He has now been replaced by another excellent Minister. I was staggered by the way in which these battery energy storage systems were criss-crossing north Yorkshire and the rest of rural England and causing complete havoc. We do not yet know what additional resources are being given to the fire and rescue services, but we know that they are not statutory consultees to these developments. We had a major wildfire—and there were 196 wildfires in England last year, which takes an enormous amount of resources in terms of water and the fire and rescue services. The wildfire came perilously close to burning down farms and residences, and it also imperilled livestock.

The thinking behind Amendment 222B is to ensure that fire and rescue services will be statutory consultees going forward. My main concern is that, for example, in my former constituency, the village of Scotton, which is very important to me, because my niece lives in Lingerfield, one of the villages next door to it, is going to have two of these large battery storage plants, and for good measure, one of the largest solar farms in the country is next door to it. There is another one elsewhere in what was my constituency, in South Kilvington, also perilously close to a school. If both those units were to go on fire at the same time, as well as there being a wildfire in a different part of north Yorkshire, what resources are there? To make sure that that is considered at the time of a planning application, I am asking that there be a duty to consult fire and rescue services and that they be statutory consultees.

Briefly, I bumped into the chief executive of the North York Moors National Park, who briefed me on the earlier amendment on national parks and strategic planning. I put on record that it goes the extra mile to ensure that it consults with every single body, including other planning authorities such as North Yorkshire Council and others, including NGOs, to make sure that any planning application on its land is fully considered.

With those few remarks, I hope that the Minister will finally agree to a mandatory duty for SUDS, and also that fire and rescue services will be statutory consultees.

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 241E is in my name. I hope that it does not need much introduction, because it pretty much does what it says on the tin. Where a spatial development strategy involves a national park, the national park authority should be involved in the development of the strategy. That sounds so much like a no-brainer that I would not be surprised if the Minister tells me that it is in the Bill already, but my understanding is that, without this amendment, although the national park authorities need to be consulted before a strategy is submitted, they do not need to be consulted while it is being developed in the first place.

This may come from the thinking that a national park is a big, empty wilderness just for nature, but the South Downs National Park and New Forest National Park are places where nearly 500,000 live, and even more work, and cover around 10% of the land in England and Wales, including key bits of national infrastructure, such as roads and energy projects. It seems clear that working with the national park authority is the best way in which to plan a spatial development strategy within or affecting a national park. The relevant national park authority has experience and expertise about so many aspects crucial to an SDS—infrastructure and planning, the rural economy, the tourist economy, opportunities for nature recovery and climate targets—so excluding it seems to set things up for failure. This amendment aims to give national park authorities a statutory role during the planning of an SDS in a really simple way, and I very much hope that the Minister agrees with its sentiments, at least, and will consider tabling a government amendment along these lines.

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[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 140 would strengthen the link between economic growth and health improvement, complementing the Government’s intention for devolution to support inclusive growth in stronger communities while maintaining local flexibility.

Devolution should give local leaders the tools to make a tangible difference to the lives of their citizens. However, if poor health and widening health inequalities continue to constrain economic participation and the effectiveness of public services, and if local growth plans are not used to drive better health, devolved leaders will fail to deliver real change to their communities. I believe that this Bill is a hugely significant moment for regional governance, with its explicit expectation that devolution should support improved outcomes, including health outcomes, for communities.

In many UK regions, long-term illness is now the single largest driver of economic inactivity. This can be seen most clearly in areas of historically high deprivation. The economic impact of poor health is stark. The Health Foundation’s independent Commission for Healthier Working Lives found that

“8.2 million working-age people report a long-term health condition that limits their ability to work … Poor workforce health is estimated to cost UK employers up to £150bn a year through lost productivity, sickness absence and recruitment costs”.

I warmly welcome the Government’s ambition to address regional economic inequality. Improving health and reducing inequalities are prerequisites for economic success. However, health currently remains largely absent from most local growth strategies, although not all. In the Oxfordshire strategic plan—the plan that I know best—health inequalities are a primary focus. The plan explicitly integrates social well-being with economic growth to address the county’s stark internal disparities. It pays specific attention to the foundational economy, which is to say the sectors providing basic goods and services, such as health and education, and identifies these as providential elements on which well-being depends.

Without considering health as a core objective and precondition for growth, local growth plans are less likely to be effective in delivering long-term sustainable growth. Some places in the UK are pioneering new approaches, including the West Midlands, which has implemented the inclusive growth framework. This aims to ensure that everyone benefits from growth by focusing on all types of investment, such as public, private, capital, revenue and time, which are all given attention. However, practice is uneven and lacks a consistent understanding of impact. This amendment aims to recognise the relationship between health and local growth so that further devolution reduces rather than widens inequalities.

I recognise that the number of co-operatives and mutuals is expanding and that the Government are calling for new growth plans across the mutual sector. That is very welcome—I am a Co-operative Member of the House of Lords. My amendment therefore dovetails with the current policy. It is right that local growth plans should promote co-operatives, mutuals and community wealth building—the practice of creating an inclusive and democratically owned economy. This puts people before private equity profits and champions the kind of economic development activity that gets overlooked by industrial strategies. Instead, it focuses on the everyday economy where most people work.

In Preston, for example, community wealth building is changing lives and has been linked to an incredible 9% increase in life satisfaction and an 11% rise in median wages. This has led to a reduction in daily antidepressant prescriptions of 1.3 units per person and a drop in depression prevalence compared to similar areas of 2.4 per thousand. I am sure that the Government would agree that these results should be replicated across the whole country.

I suggest that community wealth building is the missing piece of the puzzle to unlock growth for the benefit of all citizens, everywhere. Scotland already has a community wealth building Bill passing through its Parliament and I hope that this amendment ensures that England does not fall behind. I very much hope that my noble friend the Minister will take these things into account. Economic growth will be the lifeblood of mayoral combined authorities, but their ability to achieve that growth will be diminished if health and health inequalities are not an integral part of their plans. I beg to move.

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, I will introduce Amendment 141B in my name. This amendment is designed to help address perceptions that economic growth and environmental growth are in competition with each other. Tony Juniper of Natural England said it as eloquently as anyone could:

“we need to ensure that Nature and the economy are partners rather than seen as choices. That means weaving Nature recovery into the growth planning up front—the cheapest point at which to invest in Nature, and the one that also yields the biggest returns”.

In essence, this amendment calls for the Secretary of State to publish a local authority guide to constructing a win-win: best practice in growing the natural economy as part of the growth plans, and how nature-based solutions and easy mitigations to protect wildlife can help local economics.

The amendment covers a range starting with responsibilities to individual wild animals and birds under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which was picked up by the Animal Sentience Committee as something that was slightly missing when we discussed the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. I cannot help mentioning my beloved bird-safe design of buildings as a specific example of something that might be covered. Just as a reminder to those who might have missed the fun and games on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, buildings that are poorly designed in their use of glass and light can pose a serious threat to birds and are thought to kill around 30 million a year in the UK. Simple tweaks to the design of buildings in the planning stages can make them much safer to birds at no cost at all. But not many people know this, so guidance is necessary. Local authorities can use that guidance as they wish.

The amendment goes on to cover broader responsibilities to the environment and natural world. It would carry best practice advice on all the environmental services that can be harnessed to reduce flooding and pollution and to provide green spaces—all opportunities that can help local authorities to reach environmental as well as economic targets. So many developments that have gone badly wrong at the interface between economic and environmental growth could have been entirely turned around if, at the very outset of planning, the right expertise had been applied. It could make all the difference if a guide to best practice was a necessary part of the pack given to support local authorities. Without it, more avoidable issues might arise to the detriment of both the economics and the environment.

I completely recognise that I am not a drafter of legislation and that this amendment is very roughly worded. I anticipate that the Minister will say that the schedule already allows the Secretary of State to publish any guidance that they want, but I hope that the Government grasp this opportunity to put forward their own amendment to the Bill that commits to publishing a best practice guide that shows that they do not believe that protecting wildlife and helping nature is an opposing aim to wanting economic growth and that helps local authorities to see how both can be done together in a virtuous circle.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I will be very brief. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, and to recollect with great fondness the debate on bird-safe buildings. The Committee will probably be pleased to hear that I will not go further, but please, if noble Lords were not there, they should read it—is really important.

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[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I was going to speak in support of the amendment of my noble friend Lady Royall, which is great, but I will respond to the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, wearing my ex-energy hat.

There are sometimes tensions between growth and environmental protections. I pray in aid the saga of Hinkley Point C and the waste of years and millions of pounds spent in relation to acoustic fish deterrence. There are many examples of very bad practice by some of the environmental authorities in the way they deal with these issues. The history of major infrastructure projects in this country is so appalling in relation to the length of time taken that we need to look at this very carefully.

The noble Baroness is probably aware of the Fingleton review into the regulation of nuclear power stations, which was commissioned by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister and came out in the autumn. Broadly, they have accepted it, but at the end of this month they have to respond in detail. What Fingleton recommended is controversial. He basically said that there needs to be one overriding regulator. This is subject to pushback from environmental lobbies at the moment, but people interested in growth are saying that we really have to go with Fingleton. All it illustrates is that sometimes there are tensions and I am not sure that we have yet found a way through them. Clearly, we all want to protect the environment and our habitats, but we also need to have growth. It will be interesting to see how the Minister responds to this.

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

This is supposed to be a guide to best practice. The noble Lord has noted some of the poor practices. A guide would help to avoid some of those. That is important. I totally agree that there has been some terrible practice and it is usually done through ignorance.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

We also have a terrible risk-averse culture among regulators in this country, which we need to tackle as well—but I really rose to support the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I have a later Clause 53 stand part notice, which partly covers the same ground.

Nye Bevan is a great hero of mine. He founded the NHS, but he made one mistake. He beat Morrison in Cabinet in 1947 in terms of the role of local government. Morrison of course had been leader of the London County Council, which, pre-war, had certainly been the largest hospital authority in the world. He argued that local government should be at the centre of the National Health Service. That was rejected, which was a great pity.

I have always believed that local government should play a much larger role, not just in health service provision, but also in health as a whole. My noble friend illustrated why that is important. She mentioned the Health Foundation’s report, which is stark in making clear that health outcomes in the UK are falling far behind those in other countries now. The country that we are most aligned with now is the US, whose health outcomes are pretty disastrous.

We know that we need a co-ordinated, system-wide approach, but what we have is fragmentation. The health service is outwith a lot of the discussions that noble Lords have been having in this Committee. It is very centrally driven. I had some happy years driving it from the centre, but I have concluded that it just does not work like that. We have seriously got to devolve. Local government deals with so many issues that relate to poor health, including transport, low incomes and poor-quality housing—all the things that noble Lords have been discussing. What I am doing, basically, is encouraging my noble friend the Minister to say that her department recognises that it has a bigger role to play in health than it may think.

Clause 44 is welcome. What we are trying to do is urge the Minister’s department to be as ambitious as possible and to do everything that it can to ensure that local government as a whole takes advantage of this. Mr Osborne’s agreement with the leader of Manchester City Council and its chief executive—in 2014 or 2015, I think—led to Devo Manc, which embraced health; it was the responsibility of the combined authorities rather than the mayor. There is enough evidence there to suggest that this is a good thing and that we need to build on it. My disappointment is that nothing has happened since then. The moment Mr Osborne left, no one in government was interested any more. I hope that we can resurrect it and say to local government, “We’re not going to improve our health without you being really important partners in this”.

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What we have is a huge inequality of arms between those who are trying to support public health and to support people to eat healthily, and technology and huge multinational companies that want to make massive profits. It is crucial that we give mayors the power to take some action to rein this in. It is late in the evening. Let us be really optimistic and think about how instead of billboards we could have more public art, more community spaces and more trees. Let us give mayors some power to start to reshape their communities for people rather than for multinational corporations.

[Baroness Freeman of Steventon (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 159, to which I have added my name, and a series of amendments in my name. I apologise to the Committee that they had to be put in individually for procedural reasons, but essentially they would add to the list in Clause 44, and they all have to be done twice because it appears twice. I hope to keep this as short as possible. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, these amendments were all suggested by researchers into the determinants of health to bring the clause into closer alignment with current research on the subject, as well as definitions, such as those used by the World Health Organization.

Everyone is delighted to see Clause 44 because there is good evidence that structural changes without changes in resourcing can make measurable differences to people’s health. I hope I can delight the noble Baroness, Lady Griffin, further by picking on Manchester as another well-studied, brilliant example of the effects of devolution. The results showed higher life expectancy in the lower income areas, which researchers think are related to improved collaborations between different services rather than more money being spent. If this is a causal effect and can be replicated elsewhere, it would obviously be great, and it would be great to measure it. This is why the researchers want to get right the things being measured and being taken account of by a mayor.

This is where my little list comes in. First, it is important to take account of the right health outcomes. Researchers suggested the list of health outcomes in Amendment 159, which I did not prepare to speak about, but I think they are self-explanatory, so we can leave that there. The series of amendments in my name alter the list of determinants of these outcomes. They are things that we know might affect someone’s health, so we have to keep an eye on them. Some that are known from research are missing in the current draft of Clause 44. Amendment 167A would add the availability of housing to standards of housing in new Section 24A(5)(a) because homelessness and housing security, which are known to affect physical and mental health, would not technically fall under standards of housing.

Amendment 167B would add noise pollution as one of the environmental factors in new paragraph (b). It is well recognised by those who study public health that exposure to noise pollution can contribute to cardiovascular risks and poorer mental health, so we need to take it into account like we do other forms of pollution.

Amendment 167C would put educational opportunities and attainment alongside employment and earning prospects in new paragraph (c). In the WHO’s report, A Conceptual Framework for Action on the Social Determinants of Health, education is a key underlying structural determinant that can affect jobs, income and all the other downstream aspects. So improving access to educational opportunities is key to reducing inequalities, including in health.

Amendment 167D is more specific on the sorts of public services referred to in new paragraph (d), making it clear that they should include retail and health and leisure facilities—they can, therefore, include the negative effect of retailers of less healthy foods, for example, or the absence of active transport facilities—as well as education, employment and access to health and leisure facilities, encompassing all the key services that are known to shape people’s health.

Amendments 167E and 167F would modify new paragraph (e). As drafted, it is about the use of tobacco, alcohol and other lifestyle factors that may be harmful to health. Amendment 167F would explicitly add diet and physical activity as important determinants to be considered. Of course, we know how much these can positively or negatively affect health. Amendment 167E would therefore add “exposure to”, as well as “the use of”, to recognise that some people are passively exposed to not just tobacco but advertising for tobacco, alcohol and less healthy foods; this is a known determinant of health and driver of inequalities.

Finally, Amendment 167G would specify that

“any other matters that are determinants of life expectancy or the state of health of persons generally, other than genetic or biological factors”

should include

“social and structural conditions, including social class, gender, race, ethnicity and any other characteristics or forms of social inequality that influence exposure to advantage or disadvantage”.

That would better cover the remainder of other determinants of health that are well recognised and to which we would want mayors to have regard.

I hope that the Minister will consider the substance of these amendments because, although they are not professionally drafted, they are based on professional research in the field and, I think, get at exactly what the Government hope to achieve: a great step forward in public health.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman. What I have to add is that my Amendments 160, 161, 163, 164, 165 and 169 would bring a more climate change-related and environmental aspect to the asks of the Government. As the noble Baronesses, Lady Freeman and Lady Bennett, said, we are really pleased that this is here; I very much feel that we can work together to build on it. Here, I note the work of Leeds University and the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission.

My first amendment is on energy. A 2023 European scoping review found that energy poverty and fuel poverty are significantly linked to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, excess winter mortality and poor mental health, with older people and children among the most vulnerable. A 2022 UCL Institute of Health Equity report found the same facts. It impacts population health at a structural level. In addition, I stress the low-carbon part of this amendment. Since the introduction of the ULEZ in London, gas boilers have somehow managed to become the largest source of nitrous oxide pollution. Air quality is listed in the Bill, but it is important to emphasise the interlinked nature: one impacts on the other.

My second amendment is on water pollution. Recent storms have highlighted—in fact, we were talking about this last night—the number of learning hours lost because of the fact that schools are flooded. We are extremely vulnerable to this, and we have very poor flood defences in our schools. I will not bore the Committee at length about the state of our waterways—every Peer in the place has already done this; I expect a Bill in the next Session—but, between 2010 and 2022, there was a 60% rise in hospital admissions for waterborne diseases in England. This is serious, as they are associated with gastrointestinal illnesses and reproductive and developmental issues.

On resilience, excess heat affects deprived communities more than wealthy ones due to the quality of buildings. A simple thing such as having leafy streets provides proper cooling.

I included my third amendment, on participation in democracy, because studies have shown that increased community involvement can have a really positive impact on health. Personally, I am very excited that, from this month, the National Lottery will devote either 20% or 25% of its entire funding to community engagement, such as community gardening and things like that. It makes a great statement about what really matters to people.

On food and diet, I very much support Amendment 168 on advertising. We know how bad food deserts are and how access to healthy food really affects poorer communities. Last week, I raised the issue of PFAS in a debate on the schools Bill. That is a Defra issue, of course, but it is relevant here because one of the prominent forms of exposure comes through our diet, particularly heating food in a plastic container in a microwave; that is, I am afraid, what lower-income families end up doing—so there is a double whammy.

Amendment 169 proposes a duty relating to allotments and nature-rich spaces. Again, this is something I have talked about a lot. I know that it is difficult for councils to create allotments because they are forever spaces, in a sense, but it is not difficult for councils to grant the right to grow in their communities and to issue meanwhile leases, which is what we did with capital growth in London; we created 2,500 spaces that are still going on now. These really make a big difference to communities. As I say, I am very pleased that the National Lottery is going in this direction on funding, because it will work with the Government and make a substantial difference to people’s real, lived experience.