English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Grand Committee

Debate on whether Clause 59 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I am putting the proposition that Clause 59 and Schedule 27 should not stand part of the Bill. I was very grateful to my noble friend and her colleagues last September for the modest amendments they moved to what was then Clause 57 in the Commons —Amendments 152 and 153. They at least gave some credence to the Long Title of the Bill, which includes the words “community empowerment”. It is quite hard to believe those words when you are disempowering the people you are talking about.

I am absolutely certain that there will be excellent high-quality expertise in the department and people who know a great deal about local government, as well as my noble friend. However, when I went into the Cabinet in 1997, I found that that no one above grade 7 in the Department for Education and Employment had ever had anything to do with education. Not one single person had taught in a school, college or university, or had been an administrator of education. We had to do something rapidly about that. If you do not know how local government works, it is not surprising that you get technocratic tidiness. There is nothing worse than bureaucratic tidiness, where people are told what to do when you talk to them about empowerment. I feel that this is a philosophical issue.

I have always tried to be a communitarian. I often failed in education—we were in such a hurry to transform the life chances of children that we were very top-down. However, I have kept in touch with Robert Putnam at Harvard and I still believe that we should build our democratic structures from the bottom up. It is the only way in which we will counterweight globalisation—and, by the way, disillusionment and disgust with democracy. Once people feel that they have some small power, they start to learn how to use it—I realise that that is a dangerous thing.

This afternoon, I propose that enforcing a particular model of democratic process—of course it must be democratic, open and transparent, and have probity and fiduciary duties—is completely contrary to the intention of the Bill and, I would have thought, that of my noble friend. So, I am putting my neck on the block this afternoon just to say: please stop it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the other noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. I turn first to my noble friend’s intention to oppose the clause and Schedule 27 standing part of the Bill.

This clause and the related schedule will bring further consistency to local authority governance arrangements across England. As your Lordships may know, the Government still have a strong preference for executive models of governance. We believe, and I believe because I have operated in both, that the leader-and-cabinet model, already operated by over 80% of councils, provides a clearer and more easily understood governance structure and can support more efficient decision-making.

To answer the question from the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, there are several individual examples that highlight the challenges of the committee system. When Cheshire East switched to the committee system in 2021, an LGA corporate peer challenge found that its structure was large and meeting-intensive, with six policy committees and nine sub-committees, involving 78 out of 82 councillors. Co-ordination across individual committees is a persistent challenge. The same peer challenge for Cheshire East flagged the siloed nature of the council, with poor joint working across departments, contributing towards challenges of service delivery and communication.

Several councils that have tried committees have later reverted to the leader-and-cabinet model, for example Brighton and Hove in 2024. This is wasteful of both time and resources. With collective decision-making spread across multiple committees, it is not always clear who is in charge. Councils that return to the leader-and-cabinet model, such as Newark and Sherwood District Council and Nottinghamshire County Council, have judged it to be more transparent, agile and accountable.

At the same time, we recognise the genuinely held concerns of those councils that have adopted the committee system following a public referendum or a council resolution. That is important and I take seriously the words of noble Lords who have raised that. The Government’s amendments made in the other place to these provisions were intended to allow some councils that have recently adopted the committee system, following either a council resolution or a public referendum, to continue operating that governance model until the end of their moratorium period. At that point, the local authority will be required to undertake and publish a review of whether it should move to the leader-and-cabinet executive model or retain its committee system. The Government believe that this approach strikes the right balance between encouraging a more consistent governance model for local authorities across England and respecting local democratic mandates and voter expectations where councils are currently operating a committee system and are within their current moratorium periods. With these points in mind, I invite my noble friend to support these measures.

I turn to the government amendments in this group. As I have set out, the Government introduced an amendment in the other place to allow certain councils operating the committee system to continue to do so where they were within their statutory moratorium periods. The Government are now bringing forward additional amendments to clarify the circumstances in which a local authority’s committee system may be protected from the requirement to adopt the leader-and-cabinet executive model. This will mean that the protection period applies only where the council has previously adopted the committee system following either a council resolution or a public referendum and is within its statutory moratorium period at the point this provision is commenced.

The amendments clarify that the prior resolution to change governance must be made under Part 1A of the 2000 Act. This will ensure that the Bill strikes the right balance between encouraging a more consistent local authority governance model across England and respecting more recent local democratic mandates and voter expectations. It will also reduce disruption where councils are operating a committee system within their statutory moratorium period.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for that response. I shall of course not press my amendment at this stage. I cannot promise the Liberal Democrats what I shall do when we reach Report, not least since—as I said in a meeting a couple of days ago—I am a critical friend working very hard on the friend bit rather than the critical bit, and I will continue to be so.

I have only one further remark to make; I think it will be well worth my noble friend taking this back to the Secretary of State. Sadly, from my point of view, from May, there will be a large number of local authorities that will have possibly five substantive representations of political parties. In those circumstances, the cabinet form of government will be extremely difficult. With just three big groups in Sheffield, the only way that the current leadership of the council has been able to make it work effectively is by sharing the committee system. I think we should bear that in mind as we move towards a very turbulent time in local government.

Clause 59 agreed.