West Midlands Combined Authority (Functions and Amendment) Order 2017

Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

That the draft Order laid before the House on 6 March be approved.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)]

My Lords, the draft order which we are considering today, if approved and made, will bring to life the devolution deal which the Government agreed with the West Midlands on 17 November 2015.

The Government have already made significant progress in delivering their manifesto commitment to devolve far-reaching powers and budgets to large cities in England which choose to have directly elected mayors. This House has now debated and approved a number of orders establishing combined authority mayors and devolving powers, including Greater Manchester, the West of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and, more recently, the Tees Valley and the Liverpool City Region, for which the noble Lord, Lord Young, stood in my place.

I am very grateful to the House for the attention it has given to these matters. We are now nearing the end of the first stage of this devolution process, with one final order after those today which confers powers on those combined authorities with May elections to be considered—that is, Greater Manchester, which was at the forefront of the devolution process. We also have the draft Combined Authorities (Finance) Order, which we will turn to following this debate.

The order we are considering today will confer important new powers on to the West Midlands mayor and the combined authority as set out in the devolution deal, particularly on transport, housing and regeneration, air quality, smoke-free premises, places and vehicles, anti-social behaviour, and culture. The overall result is to create for the West Midlands arrangements which will materially contribute to the promotion of economic growth across the area, improve productivity, and facilitate investment and the development of the area’s infrastructure. Through this deal, the West Midlands combined authority will receive: first, a devolved transport budget to help provide a more modern, better-connected network, allowing the West Midlands to choose how to spend the money across the area; secondly, new housing and regeneration powers to provide a strategic local approach to tackling these issues in the West Midlands; and thirdly, control over an investment fund of £36.5 million a year for 30 years to boost growth and prosperity in the area.

The implementation of the devolution deal agreed between local leaders and the Government has already seen two orders made, having been approved by this House and the other place, in relation to the West Midlands. First, the West Midlands Combined Authority Order established the combined authority on 17 June 2016, with functions in relation to economic development, regeneration and transport. Secondly, the West Midlands Combined Authority (Election of Mayor) Order created the position of mayor for the West Midlands, with the first election to be held on 4 May for an initial three-year term. Second elections will be held on 7 May 2020, with elections subsequently taking place every four years.

Today’s draft order is to be made under the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009, as amended by the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016. As required by the 2016 Act, along with this order we have laid a report which provides details about the public authority functions we are devolving to the combined authority. The statutory origin of this order is in the governance review and scheme prepared by the combined authority, together with the seven constituent councils of Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton, in accordance with the requirements of the 2009 Act.

The scheme sets out proposals for powers to be conferred on the combined authority, some to be exercised by the mayor, for funding and constitutional provisions to support the powers and functions conferred, and for the addition of a further five non-constituent members to the combined authority: North Warwickshire, Rugby, Shropshire, Stratford-on-Avon and Warwickshire. As provided for by the 2009 Act, the combined authority and the councils consulted on the proposals in their scheme. This was a public consultation which was entirely undertaken by the authorities concerned. They decided the approach, which was a matter for them.

I know noble Lords are interested in the consultation so will provide some further details. The local consultation undertaken by the combined authority ran for seven weeks from 4 June to 21 August 2016. In that time, 1,328 responses were received. Of these, 777—60%—agreed that the mayoral combined authority will promote more efficient and effective governance in the West Midlands. With regards to some of the specific functions covered in the deal and conferred by this order, 79% agreed with the transport proposals, 71% with the air quality proposals and 69% with the housing proposals. On all the questions asked, more people supported than opposed the proposals.

Following that consultation, as statute requires, the combined authority provided the Secretary of State with a summary of the responses to the consultation in September. Before laying this draft order before Parliament, the Secretary of State considered the statutory requirements in the 2009 Act. He is satisfied that these requirements are met. In short, he considers that conferring the functions on the combined authority would be likely to lead to an improvement in the exercise of the statutory functions across the area of the West Midlands combined authority. He has also had regard to the impact on local government and communities. Further, as required by statute, the seven constituent councils and the combined authority have consented to the making of this order.

The detail of the draft order reflects the commitment in the deal that the mayor should take on responsibility for a devolved and consolidated transport budget and a key route network of local authority roads. This key route network of combined authority roads is identified in Schedule 1 to the draft order. It is clear that a lot of consideration and detail have gone into this network, and I congratulate the local area on the work that it has done in identifying this strategic network. The order provides that the mayor, with the assistance of the combined authority, will exercise the following powers over this network: powers to enter into agreements with highway authorities, Ministers and Highways England in relation to the maintenance of roads; powers to promote road safety and regulate traffic; powers to operate a permit scheme to control the carrying out of works on the combined authority roads; and powers to collect contributions from utility companies for diversionary works needed as a result of highways works carried out on the key route network.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have participated in the debate. I shall try to pick up the points made. I thank noble Lords for the generally positive way in which they want to take things forward, although there are some understandable concerns. I shall try to address the points in the order in which they were made.

Turning first to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, I thank him very much for his comments on progress, on checks and balances and on the consultation response. As the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has just said, the response was much more positive than has been the generality and was perhaps the most positive of all such consultations. Positive responses outweighed negative ones on every single question asked in the consultation, in most cases by a significant margin.

In that regard, I happily concur with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, about the intelligence of people in the West Midlands. In relation to the wider and very fair point that he made about an intelligible guide on how this will operate, in the department we are going to publish a plain English guide. I welcome that, because sometimes the language about how mayors and combined authorities will work is obscure and Byzantine. I hope that that guide will be helpful.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, rightly said that compulsory purchase powers are exercisable by the mayor. I can confirm, as he has raised the issue, that planning permission stays, as before, with the constituent councils. There is no change on that point.

I take the noble Lord’s point about the independent remuneration panels existing in isolation. Clearly, each authority is bespoke and they are different one from another, so one would expect the remuneration packages to be somewhat different. I shall take away the idea of having some way of cross-referencing the independent remuneration panels, so that we can both share experience and perhaps seek to keep costs down. That seems a sensible approach.

On the point that the noble Lord raised about the political adviser, within the mayoral office there is the capacity for a political adviser. That is paid for out of the mayoral budget, and we anticipate that the cost will be proportionate to that budget.

On my noble friend Lord Hodgson’s point about the scrutiny committee—it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, who made this point—there must be political balance on the scrutiny committee. With regard to the combined authority, there is no statutory requirement, just as in any local authority election. The balance is the balance as represented in the elections and the process that follows from that. However, there is a legal requirement that carries across to scrutiny committees of combined authorities in the same way as for other authorities.

On my noble friend Lord Hodgson’s point about the extent of the authority, I think that it is important to distinguish the combined authority, with its seven constituent members, from the larger area that he cited as stretching from Nuneaton to just outside Montgomery and from north to south. That larger area includes non-constituent authorities, which do not have rights to vote and do not participate in the mayoral election. They are part of the broader engagement because of the strategic interest that often arises in relation to transport, housing and so on. They are not tacked on in any casual sense; they are important for strategic concerns.

The noble Lord, Lord Snape, echoed the point about remuneration, which I have already addressed. He talked about how the Government would work with mayors. I share his view that it is important that we work well with mayors. The experience of the Government working with the Mayor of London has been positive—we have engaged with Sadiq Khan on a regular basis on issues such as housing and last week’s atrocity—and it has been a positive exercise.

I pay tribute to the work that my noble friend Lord Heseltine has done in my department. It was considerable. Of course, he was not elected in the same way as a mayor, as the noble Lord knew when he was making the point. However, I place on record the debt that we all owe to the work of my noble friend Lord Heseltine.