Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Twenty Seventh sitting)

Debate between Emma Lewell-Buck and Alex Norris

Committee stage
Thursday 20th October 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for that answer. I am not particularly excited by how this happens; my wish is just that it does happen. But I am grateful for the Minister’s answer and his explanation of how he feels. I have absolutely no issue with it sitting as a departmental prerogative. I do not think the two things need to be in tension. The thing for me is that we will keep pushing on this point. I was not as clear, I have to say, from the hon. Gentleman’s answer as I have been from previous answers from previous Ministers that it remains the position of the Government. Perhaps that is something that will be followed up on in due course, because this is really important. The one thing we know about levelling up is that it takes active interventions and that if we leave things to the market or to how things currently are, that will not deliver, so there has to be something different in this regard. I think that this measure was something different, and improving. It has not been successful today and I will not push it to a Division, but we will, again, stay on this point. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

New Clause 76

Standards Board for England

“(1) There is to be a body corporate known as the Standards Board for England (‘the Standards Board’).

(2) The Standards Board is to consist of not less than three members appointed by the Secretary of State.

(3) In exercising its functions the Standards Board must have regard to the need to promote and maintain high standards of conduct by members and co-opted members of local authorities in England.

(4) The Secretary of State must by regulations make further provision about the Standards Board.

(5) Regulations under this section must provide for—

(a) a code of conduct of behaviour for members and co-opted members of local authorities in England,

(b) the making of complaints to the Standards Board a member or co-opted member has failed to comply with that code of conduct,

(c) the independent handling of such complaints in the first instance by the Standards Board,

(d) the functions of ethical standards officers,

(e) investigations and reports by such officers,

(f) the role of monitoring officers of local authorities in such complaints,

(g) the referral of cases to the adjudication panel for England for determination,

(h) about independent determination by the adjudication panel its issuing of sanctions,

(i) appeal by the complainant to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman,

(j) appeal by the member or co-opted member subject to the complaint to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, and

(k) the governance of the Standards Board.

(6) In making regulations under this section the Secretary of State must have regard to the content of Chapter II (investigations etc: England) of Part III (conduct of local government members and employees) of the Local Government Act 2000, prior to the repeal of that Chapter.

(7) The Standards Board–

(a) must appoint employees known as ethical standards officers,

(b) may issue guidance to local authorities in England on matters relating to the conduct of members and co-opted members of such authorities,

(c) may issue guidance to local authorities in England in relation to the qualifications or experience which monitoring officers should possess, and

(d) may arrange for any such guidance to be made public.”—(Mrs Lewell-Buck.)

This new clause seeks to reinstate the Standards Board for England, which was abolished by the Localism Act 2011, but with the removal of referral to standards committees and the addition of appeal to the Local Government Ombudsman.

Brought up, and read the First time.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Murray. As this is probably one of the last times I will speak in this Committee, I want to thank you, your fellow Chairs, the Clerks of the Committee and all House staff.

I am presenting new clause 76, in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for York Central. It would increase accountability and transparency and restore public faith in local government. Since the Standards Board for England was abolished by the coalition Government in 2011, local authorities have been tasked with making up their own rules and standards of conduct for local councillors. As the current system stands, the monitoring officers, who work side by side with councillors every day of the week, are the very ones tasked with handling complaints about those same councillors. Should they feel that a complaint warrants further investigation, they can ask that the local authority’s standards committee looks further at the matter and decides on suitable sanctions. The committee can be comprised of other councillors, largely from the authority’s majority ruling group. They then decide what happens to their close colleagues and friends. They can decide whether the hearing is in public or not. If they decide to put any sanctions in place, they may be limited to, at most, simply barring them from meetings for a few weeks or taking away their ICT resources. It is abundantly clear that that system is totally unacceptable. Councillors should not be free to police themselves, and monitoring officers should not be put in such potentially impossible situations.

In 2019, a report by the Committee on Standards in Public Life highlighted the fact that the vast majority of councillors and officers maintain high standards of conduct. However, there is clear evidence of misconduct by some councillors. The majority of these cases relate to bullying or harassment, or other disruptive behaviour. We have also heard evidence of persistent or repeated misconduct by a minority of councillors. This misconduct occurs at both principal authority level and at parish or town council level.

I know all too well from my own local authority the consequences of limited checks and balances, and of processes open to interference. In 2020, the former leader of my council resigned suddenly in the wake of allegations of bullying and financial concerns, just weeks after our chief executive walked out after 10 years in post. Police and other investigations are ongoing.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Emma Lewell-Buck and Alex Norris

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

I will keep my comments brief as I do not wish to detain the Committee too long.

The Minister listed ways in which the Government are helping, but I politely remind him that people on universal credit have a five-week wait with no money at all. Pensions, benefits and wages are nowhere near keeping pace with inflation. The fact that the Government have had to put in emergency support funds to help families is indicative of their failure to help the hardest hit for such a long time.

I will not press the amendments to a vote on this occasion, but this is not the last time I will talk about this topic in Committee. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Alex Norris]

I beg to move amendment 14, in clause 1, page 1, line 14, at end insert—

“(2A) The first statement of levelling-up missions must include—

(a) a requirement to improve pay, employment and productivity of every UK region by 2030, with the gap between the top performing and other areas closing,

(b) a requirement to increase domestic public investment in Research and Development outside the Greater South East by at least 40% by 2030 and at least one-third over the Spending Review period,

(c) a requirement by 2030 to improve local public transport connectivity across the UK with improved services, simpler fares and integrated ticketing,

(d) a requirement by 2030 for there to be nationwide gigabit-capable broadband and 4G coverage, with 5G coverage for the majority of the population,

(e) a requirement by 2030 the number of primary school children achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths to have significantly increased so that in England 90% of children will achieve the expected standard, and the percentage of children meeting the expected standard in the worst performing areas will have increased by over a third,

(f) a requirement that by 2030 the number of people successfully completing high-quality skills training will have significantly increased in every area of the UK,

(g) a requirement that by 2030 the gap in Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) between local areas where it is highest and lowest will have narrowed, and by 2035 HLE will rise by 5 years,

(h) a requirement that by 2030, well-being will have improved in every area of the UK, with the gap between top performing and other areas closing,

(i) a requirement that by 2030 people’s satisfaction with their town centre and engagement in local culture and community, will have risen in every area of the UK, with the gap between the top performing and other areas closing,

(j) a requirement that by 2030, renters will have a secure path to ownership with the number of first-time buyers increasing in all areas; and for the number of non-decent rented homes to have fallen by 50%, with the biggest improvements in the lowest performing areas,

(k) a requirement that by 2030 homicide, serious violence, and neighbourhood crime will have fallen, focused on the worst-affected areas,

(l) a requirement that by 2030, every part of England that requests one will have a devolution deal with powers at or approaching the highest level of devolution and a simplified, long-term funding settlement, and

(m) a requirement to build Northern Powerhouse Rail, a high-speed rail line, between Leeds and Manchester.”

This amendment would require the statement of levelling-up missions to include the levelling-up missions detailed in the Levelling Up White Paper.

One of the quirks of the Bill is that although the Government have kept their commitment to enshrining levelling-up missions in law, they have not enshrined “the” levelling-up missions in law. Clause 1 states only that a Minister of the Crown will set out those missions at some point, but there is no sense of what that means, so I want to explore that and hear from the Minister about it.

So much effort, light and heat went into heralding the new dawn of the levelling-up mission, and into the release of the White Paper and all the press releases—each releasing a bit of the same information every time—and so much work went on in the Chamber, including all the oral questions, but all we ever hear about is the Secretary of State and those missions that drive him out of bed every morning; he cannot do anything but those missions. They are the whole reason we are here—the centrepiece of the Government’s domestic agenda—but they are completely absent from the Bill.

Indeed, the Minister himself nearly fell into that very trap in the debate on amendment 13, when he addressed a point from my hon. Friend the Member for York Central and said, on one of the missions she is very enthusiastic about, “That is why we are putting it into the Bill.” In fact, we are doing no such thing. We are not putting anything into the Bill. We are putting missions into the Bill, but there is no sense or prescription of what they are. The Committee is being asked to fly blind and trust that these will be very good things that really ought to be the focus of the Government of the day, but we just do not know what they are.

That is compounded by the fact that we are also working without an impact assessment. I raised that point on Second Reading, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Marsha De Cordova), when she asked the Minister for Housing, who was winding up the debate, to confirm that an impact assessment will be published and when that would happen. The Minister responded:

“Yes, there will be, and it will come at the second stage of Committee.”—[Official Report, 8 June 2022; Vol. 715, c. 914.]

I am not quite sure what “the second stage of Committee” means in that context, but I do know that we do not have an impact assessment now. We are in a really odd situation where the Government are telling us that they have this centrepiece domestic commitment to levelling up that will right all the wrongs of everything they have done over the past 12 years—“Don’t worry, we’ll get this right now!”—but they cannot even tell us what impact it will have.

I put it to the Minister—hopefully he will tell me I am wrong—that none of this will make much of a difference, will it? The Government want to enshrine the missions in law, but the Minister cannot even say what they are. The Government want to change the missions themselves without the engagement of Parliament. They set them for five-year cycles, but they want to be able to move away from that, too. They do not want any independence in the system either—we have had that debate already.

This legislation is light and substance-less. Both the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), and myself have been criticised by the Secretary of State for saying, “Is this it?” when it comes to this agenda. However, once again, we are left to ask, “Is this it?” There seems to be no substance to the legislation; there is certainly no demonstration of it. I hope the Minister can address that.

In the absence of even the most basic analysis of what the Government themselves think they are going to deliver, we are being told that they ought to be left unfettered by ministerial decree to set the direction for levelling up. However, they cannot even tell us what they are seeking to achieve. That seems so odd and indicative of qualified commitment; we hear of strong commitment, but this is qualified commitment.

Amendment 14 is not the most elegant amendment that I have ever managed, but it seeks to address the issue that I have outlined. It does nothing more than add back to the Bill the Government’s own levelling-up missions—plus another of their centrepiece commitments that they have discarded along the way, because it was in my mind. Those commitments were important enough for the White Paper, so I think they might be important enough for us to have a quick look at them today. I will not go through them all.

The amendment would add back in a commitment to improve the pay, employment and productivity of every region in the UK by 2030, while closing the gaps between the best and worst off. We know from the recent Resolution Foundation report that, outside of London, no progress has been made in this area during my adult lifetime. In fact, this lack of overall income change hides growing gaps in investment and self-employment income, driven by richer households in London and the south-east. The report also found that the Government’s investment plans will not move the dial on this issue. Again, it is perhaps no surprise that that commitment is not on the face of the Bill.

The second commitment is to research and development investment. The Minister made reference to research and development spending outside the south-east to at least three different witnesses that I can think of, and he has referenced it in two debates we have had so far. We support him in this venture, as it is really important. Why is the commitment not in the Bill? I cannot imagine that will change. When he mentioned it earlier, he talked about it in the context of the spending review period and the fact that that spending review will end at some point. Surely, the one-third element at least will be met in that time and the 40% element will be met by 2030. Otherwise, why has it been set so often?

Moving on a little, it is, perhaps, not a huge surprise that pledges around education, healthy life expectancy and wellbeing no longer feature in the legislation, given the record over the last decade. We will have plenty of time to talk housing, but that is not much better either.

I had hoped we would be able to probe the commitments, if they were on the face of the Bill. Perhaps the Minister will give us a commitment or a direction of travel on that. It might save us the bother of drafting a new clause, if we heard a commitment that the Minister and his colleagues were going to make levelling-up missions a statutory objective of the Homes and Communities Agency—Homes England to its friends. Indeed, they might be minded to say that all non-executive agencies that sit under the Department will have levelling up as one of their core missions. I hope the Minister can address that point. Then at the end of the amendment, we also make reference to Northern Powerhouse Rail—an oft-promised, core part of the levelling-up programme that has been downgraded too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

That is exactly right. The RAG rating point is well made—it is what we would expect. There are lots of former councillors in the room, and that is what we would expect at local authority level, so it is not too much to ask central Government either. That would help us to address one of our concerns on the Opposition Benches.

I have no doubt that whatever happens between now and the next general election or the next eight years to the end of the 2030 mission, the Government will present the policy as a success—that is what Governments do. My concern is that it will be a political spinning of an expression of progress rather than a real one. But having the action plans beneath and seeing whether those individual actions have actually been delivered would make a significant difference to building confidence. Again, it would help with clarity of purpose, because it would show precisely what we are hoping to achieve.

The scope of the policy is vast—it will touch on every domestic policy area. It will be cross-departmental, but there still needs to be significant individual programmes to deliver on it. We might need to know what those individual programmes are, to give clarity on how the Government intend to achieve that.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

Bearing in mind that the Government have had 12 years to come up with this policy, although they are able to say what will they do, they cannot say how they will do it. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is easy to conclude that the Government might not be really committed to delivering any of it?

[Alex Norris]

That is my concern. My biggest anxiety is that the Government have got to this point, after a long time in government and with the highly publicised problems that they face, a little out of ideas and energy. The omissions may amount to a to-do list, which we make when we have loads to do that we never quite get to. We write the to-do list because that is a small step in the right direction. I fear that without concrete, clear, public and transparent action plans, that is what they will be. They will not be in the Bill, but things suddenly will not be on the to-do list anymore, because they have stopped being a priority.

We need a laser-like focus on the problems we face in this country, not imprecise policies with imprecise actions that lead to policy failures and end up devaluing the levelling up brand, breaking public confidence and not delivering for people. That is not what people want. There is expectation across the country that levelling up will happen, will matter and will be different. At the moment, we cannot tell our constituents how and why that will be the case other than in quite a broad and abstract way, which does not mean an awful lot on the street and at estate level.

Sadly, I cannot say to councillors or residents, “This is what they were trying to drive from the centre, and this is your role in it. Don’t just sit back and wait to be levelled up—participate. Here are the things that you get to participate in.” At the moment, we cannot say that and I hope we might be able to do a little better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O'Brien]

There is a continuity between those two things. We might get rid of something and replace it with something that is in the same space. The subsections just give a clear framework for how that works—transparency, the statement to Parliament, the debate, and so on and so forth. I am not totally clear about the policy intent behind the amendment: is the idea that missions should be changeable only through primary legislation? Is that the concept here?

[Alex Norris]

indicated dissent.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

On another point of clarification, subsection (4) clearly states

“no longer intends to pursue that mission”,

but the examples the Minister is giving are about changing missions, and perhaps improving them. They are very different things.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Emma Lewell-Buck and Alex Norris

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

What assessment his Department has made of the effect of tiered covid-19 public health restrictions on businesses’ ability to trade.

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

What assessment his Department has made of the effect of tiered covid-19 public health restrictions on businesses’ ability to trade.

[The Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth (Kwasi Kwarteng)]

We know that certain areas of the economy have faced enormous challenges this year, and that is why the Government have provided an unprecedented range of support packages to help businesses precisely to continue trading.