English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Bassam of Brighton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bassam of Brighton (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest: I chair a seafront development and regeneration board on behalf of Brighton & Hove City Council.

I am delighted to speak in this debate for a number of reasons. First, I enjoy a discussion about local government almost as much as I enjoy watching Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club. Secondly, it is a genuine pleasure to speak on a Bill being fronted by my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage, whom I think we all admire and respect—we enjoy her passion for all things local government. Thirdly, I am a big supporter in principle of both devolution and unitary councils. Indeed, I have been arguing for these probably for the better part of the last 40 years. Like others in your Lordships’ House, I have served on district and unitary councils and was privileged to be successful in arguing for Brighton and Hove to become a unitary back in the 1990s. My experience from back then informs my comments and words of advice to the Government today.

Brighton and Hove was carved out of East Sussex, with the Brighton element, previously an old county borough, and the Hove district. My task as leader was to merge two organisations with different cultures and approaches, and to blend in county services of highways, education, social services, transport, et cetera—no easy task. We got most of the reorganisation right largely because we were well led in our officer core, because we settled the big decisions early and because we established a cabinet-style authority with clear lines of accountability. We also developed a vision for the city and a radical programme of change and service modernisation, behind the mantra of “M&S quality and First Direct banking service enthusiasm”.

Getting it right meant setting effective working structures early in the process. This gave us two and a half years before the authority was set up—the first in a sort of pre-shadow year and the second as a shadow authority. So on 1 April 1997 we hit the ground running. The lesson I took from this was to give authorities time. Do not try to do everything at once. To make unitaries successful, roll them out; do not just impose them. If I were to be critical of the Government’s approach to the combined mayoral authorities and unitaries, it would be on this point.

For understandable reasons, the Government want to crack on with change—they should not. They should pause and think about it, and do as their predecessors did. They should do it gradually and sensitively. Why? So much of a Government’s programme relies on getting councils to deliver, whether it is social care, new housing, stronger environmental programmes, the growth mission, nursery schools, getting people into work, retraining or meeting the challenges of the digital age. We cannot expect councils to do that and more while they are being set up from scratch. Councils that are unfamiliar with each other, having different systems and offering different organisational structures, will need time. We need to make sure that they are well resourced to do it, and we should not expect savings. In my experience, local government reviews rarely ever achieve a net saving.

For me, the Government made a wise decision last week in delaying the creation of the combined mayoral authorities for Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, Hampshire, and Sussex. The reason why the mayoral model has worked in the mets in Greater Manchester, Merseyside, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and so on is that they were built on a sound unitary council base. The councils need a strategic body for the bigger issues to be resolved. Sadly, that went in the 1980s and had to be reinvented in the last decade or so, and in London back in 1999. Additionally, the issues in Manchester, Merseyside and so on are very different from those in the south and East Anglia. Will the same structure work for Sussex and Hampshire as for South Yorkshire or Greater Manchester? A one-size-fits-all approach may not be best. The Government should use the time that has been provided to pause and think through some of the issues and some of the structures.

Finally, the Bill is strong on empowerment, which I approve of—I think we probably all do. The UK is far too centralised, with some of the biggest regional disparities and inequalities in Europe. We need to do more to help communities, so we should use and develop parish and town councils, let strong neighbourhoods emerge and ensure that they have the resource to run things close to people and places. On place-making, which I know a bit about, we should not create local government structures that people cannot identify with. We should not make the unitaries so big and disparate, with big divides between rural and urban. Place-making will be harder because it will get lost, which I think would be a great shame. The Bill provides us with an opportunity. If we want bottom-up governance with citizens in control, let us use neighbourhood funding as a way of empowering people in their communities.

To finish, I applaud the Government’s commitment, but they should not rush this, otherwise the objectives will get lost amid structures that are dysfunctional. They should not expect big savings, but should place an emphasis on creating renewed local government that is about responsive services based on quality and excellence. That is what the public want; they do not want more cuts and austerity. They want the improvement of the public realm and the higher quality of local service. If this reorganisation and the development of strategic combined mayoral authorities do one thing, they should focus on delivering that.