Devolution: English Cities

Lord Desai Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine. He has tirelessly worked on decentralisation and the improvement of urban life in this country and this is another a great step. He started by saying that we are in a constitutional crisis. I shall take up that theme because, as my noble friend Lord Adonis said, a crisis is also a time of opportunity. The crisis is the crisis of Brexit. To make a long story short, I believe that Brexit is an English crisis. It is because England is the only non-devolved region in the union, because we are one of the most centralised administrations in the world, as the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, and other noble Lords said, and because the other places are devolved that England faces the full burden of centralisation. That is why we have created mayors, combined authorities and so on. The power to decide what they can do and what they will have by way of money is very much in Whitehall. You may want to decentralise by putting Whitehall ministries all over the country, but the power will still remain in Whitehall. Therefore, one of the issues to tackle would be how we can devolve and decentralise England.

That is what I want to speak about, because I believe it is a challenge. My link is going to be reform of the House of Lords, which is one of my hobbies. The last time we had a House of Lords Reform Bill we had a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament but the Bill came to nothing, for reasons that I will not go into. However, at that time I submitted a note to the Joint Committee saying that what we needed was the three devolved regions, plus England being carved up into 10 regions, each sending 30 elected representatives to the reformed House of Lords. Each region would send those 30 representatives on a list system, so that MPs would not feel threatened that in their constituencies they had rival representatives. The House of Commons could remain the House of Commons, and the House of Lords could be changed into a federal Chamber. The idea was that some of the representatives would be mayors, for example.

We need the regions to be able to come here and exert direct influence on the Westminster Government. If that process could be furthered, we could reform a lot of these top-down reforms and all this ordering about, especially the dependence of local authorities on central government for finance, and so on. For example, we could allow different regions to have different tax systems. As was mentioned, we have an unreformed council tax system, because although house prices have risen, we have not revalued those houses. That was the crisis on which the poll tax was created. If different regions could revise their local house prices in the way that they like, that would in some cases relieve their financial problems.

I do not want to go on because I am the 19th speaker and people must be getting pretty tired by now. We need to crack the problem of over-centralisation without devolution in England. If we can tackle that, we shall make a lot of progress.