The Union (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 20th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to those given to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for this excellent report. I too welcome the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, who I am sure will make distinguished contributions to this House.

I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, is not in his place, because it was with him that I had my first dealings with devolution, when in the 1970s we toured various parts of Britain asking, “Would you like to be run by Merthyr Tydfil council?” The answer we got generally was no, but we have come a long way from there and we now have much devolution in this country.

I spent many years in the European Parliament and travelled widely in Europe. My experience was that, with one exception which I shall come to, in every country where they had devolution the people who had got the devolution did not think it was enough and the people who had given it thought it was too much. We therefore need to be careful when we look at how much we devolve. The one country that was the exception was Germany, where they seem to have divided, but there, the second Chamber is concerned particularly with regional policy and the Länder. If we need to look at a second Chamber, it may need to be totally different from this one. It would certainly not have most of us in it, because I doubt that many of us would wish to serve on a regional authority and then be posted to the upper House, let alone at our age stand for another election. If we have a second Chamber, my conclusion is that it has to have a specific job to do; it cannot just be a revising Chamber given basically the job of “sort out the mess they leave behind”.

I would like to move on to that, because we do now have a lot of devolution of course. In my area, we have a police and crime commissioner, unknown and voted for by a handful of people—less than 20%; we have a Mayor of Cambridge, who is resident in Peterborough, so we do not know what he gets up to; we have a district council and we have a county council; and now, of course, we have a number of working parties between all four of them. None of the working parties is elected; no one really knows what they get up to, apart from the fact that they are about to wish a congestion charge on us—although I do not think that it will ever get through because they do not have much support for it. I suggest that the first thing that we should do is to look at the level of devolution that we actually have and see whether any of it needs sorting out.

The second—and, because of time, final—point that I want to make is in support of what Andy Street said about the devolved powers. The fact of the matter is that Whitehall still has too much power. Can we talk about devolution when the Secretary of State for Levelling Up is deciding whether Great Yarmouth should be given money to renew its pier? Of course not—it is absolutely ridiculous. The first thing that we need to devolve is financial responsibility which, since the days of Jim Callaghan, has been gradually pulled back into Whitehall. If the Labour Party’s devolution proposals are worth the paper they are written on, they have to be accompanied by the financial devolution that will let local authorities set their own financial priorities and raise the tax to pay for them, with a suitable grant from the centre but not one that is tied to whether or not you modernise your pier.