English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis. My Amendment 3 would make a simple change but it highlights something fundamental to the Bill, so I want to spend a bit more time going through it than that single-word change would imply.

In looking through the areas of competence, energy is conspicuous by its absence, given that it will be a central challenge for the country—and, indeed, the mission of the Government—in the coming years. I shall use the Midlands region, where I live, as an example; of course, the first energy transition really started in the Midlands. I recently visited the Science Museum down the road, where there is an excellent example of the Boulton and Watt steam engine, which was brought into use in Birmingham and started to turbocharge the demand for coal and the first energy transition from biomass to fossil fuels.

That was a locally led transition, of course, but today, the Midlands remains the industrial heartland of the UK. We have so many energy-intensive users and heavy manufacturing, ranging from nuclear reactors and aero engines to trains, excavators and cars. As a region, we want to help lead the latest energy transition, as articulated in the recent Midlands Engine’s White Paper on energy security; I chaired the task force to produce that.

For a number of years, I have been making the case that, to date, the energy transition has been delivered in a top-down fashion. We have had many welcome developments, such as the formation of the NESO—the National Energy System Operator—but there is still a sense that this is something being done to communities, rather than bringing them along on the journey. No doubt progress is being made on the regional planning for the local power plant through Great British Energy, but we are not yet in a place where we have a fully joined-up governance system that marries up the necessary top-down view of the energy system and the critical bottom-up view that informs it.

Why is it important to drive the transition locally? First, I have already mentioned bringing local communities along on the journey. We are talking about significant changes to buildings, including changes in how we heat and insulate them, and changes to both grid architecture and next-generation charging. All this will be much more effective if communities are helping to drive this themselves and seeing those benefits.

Secondly, local areas have the knowledge of how best to implement the energy transition. For example, they know their local housing stock best. They know which technologies are best for future heating solutions, whether that means district heating or heat pumps. They know where the grid, the charging and the local generation is.

That feeds into my final point, on costs. The cost of the energy transition is getting significant attention at the moment, but the benefits for the Government here are the cost savings possible with a locally led approach. Billions in savings are possible if the most appropriate solution is brought forward for local areas, using local knowledge rather than one-size-fits-all. Regions and authorities are recognising this and taking action, but the Government need to drive this approach forward and avoid the patchwork nature referred to in our debate on the previous group.

What is needed is proper energy planning, at a local level, which then feeds up into regional plans and, ultimately, into the spatial strategic energy plan for the UK that the NESO is producing. That is when we will have a transition where we bring in all the expertise at a local level, which means the most efficient solutions at the lowest cost. There is an opportunity here for the Government to recognise, in the areas of competence, the centrality of energy to what strategic authorities need to deliver; this would ensure that strategic authorities are delivering on energy for their regions. The Government could use that to define how a bottom-up governance system for energy could work, how that might flow up into the spatial strategic energy plan, how that will interface with GBE and NESO, and so on.

I was grateful to meet the Minister last week. We discussed how paragraph (a) refers to “transport and local infrastructure” and how that is slightly misleading, in that it may give the impression of a focus on transport. The other benefit of this amendment is that it would clarify that first part of Clause 2 and provide clarity in the language on what strategic authorities are trying to deliver. With that, I look forward to hearing from the Minister.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a visual artist. Amendment 4 in my name is a small but important clarifying amendment. It simply adds the words “including through tourism” to paragraph (d) of Clause 2, which already defines “economic development and regeneration” as a core “area of competence” for strategic authorities. This reflects the Local Government Association’s view that tourism should be explicitly recognised in the Bill rather than left implicit.

Tourism is not a marginal activity; it is one of the principal ways in which economic development and regeneration happen in practice. It supports local jobs, sustains town centres, underpins cultural and heritage assets and brings external spending directly into communities. In many places, particularly outside the large cities, it is the economic driver.

I have deliberately not proposed tourism as a stand-alone category nor sought to incorporate it into the important Amendment 6 tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, to which I have added my name. His amendment rightly strengthens the strategic recognition of the arts, heritage and creative industries. My amendment is narrower and more operational. It simply makes it clear that tourism sits within economic development and regeneration, which is how local authorities already understand and deliver it in practice.

Too often, tourism is grouped alongside the arts and creative industries in local authority structures, where its scale and commercial focus can unintentionally shape priorities and funding conversations that are not directly about culture itself. Placing tourism clearly within economic development helps to maintain that distinction while allowing cultural policy to retain its own strategic clarity. This matters particularly in the context of the Government’s emerging work on a visitor or tourism levy. Even at modest levels, published estimates suggest that such a levy could raise hundreds of millions of pounds a year in England and potentially over £1 billion annually if applied more widely—sums that would exceed Arts Council England’s entire annual capital budget and be comparable in scale to a decade of lost local authority cultural investment.

In the Cultural Policy Unit’s helpful paper A City Tourism Charge—the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, will no doubt develop this point further on Amendment 6, with which I entirely agree—there is a strong and well-evidenced case that a significant proportion of any such levy should be invested directly in cultural and heritage assets, which are often the very reason that people visit in the first place. For strategic authorities to play a meaningful role in shaping and deploying such tools, tourism needs to be clearly within scope. Without explicit inclusion, there is a risk that tourism falls between stools—assumed but not quite owned. This amendment provides clarity, not prescription, and I hope that the Minister will see it as a proportionate and helpful addition.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak on Amendment 8 in my name, which would have the effect of adding to the list of areas of competence in Clause 2 an additional paragraph (h), “community engagement and empowerment”. Noble Lords would not be surprised by the suggestion that this should be designated as one of the areas of competence of strategic authorities and mayors, as the clue is in the Title: the Bill is about community empowerment, and community engagement is instrumental to the achievement of community empowerment. It is therefore one of the areas of competence for mayors.

This led me to thinking about what the Government are trying to achieve by listing the areas of competence—let us understand that and then we can decide what it is sensible to put into the list. As it happens, the White Paper was somewhat more helpful than the Bill itself in this respect, since quite clearly what is intended, as the White Paper puts it, is that this list should comprise

“areas where Strategic Authorities should have a mandate to act strategically to drive growth as well as support the shaping of public services, where strategic level coordination adds value”.

I am looking at that and thinking that “competence” is not necessarily the right word for this; perhaps it is “responsibility”. Let us not worry about the word, but let us at least understand what the Government are trying to achieve. Then I realised that, of course, the point is that they have listed seven because subsequently there is an intention to have up to seven commissioners. Is the answer, “Well, there just has to be seven”? I do not think we need constrain ourselves in that regard.

I then thought that perhaps these are listed because they are the areas of functional responsibility where additional functions are provided by the Bill at a later stage, but when one looks at the functions of mayors, six are the subject of additional functional responsibilities and powers itemised later in the Bill. Environment and climate change is left out but is none the less an area of competence, so we are clearly not talking just about what the Bill adds to mayors by way of responsibilities; we are talking about what mayoral strategic authorities should be engaged with to drive growth, to create social cohesion and to shape public services.

It seems to me, therefore, that there are a number of additions and no problem about how many, as long as they are genuinely representative of the areas of competence—meaning, responsibility and functional powers that are available to mayoral strategic authorities. It seems to me—this will save me getting up and saying anything more on the next two groups—that both Amendments 6 and 7 have merit, in that respect, in adding arts, cultural and creative industries on the one hand and definitely adding rural affairs on the other.

The number of commissioners should be determined in their own right, rather than by reference to the number of areas of competence. If there are more areas of competence than there are commissioners, that is not a problem. Interestingly, while listing the seven areas of competence as we have them in Clause 2, the devolution White Paper said:

“We are interested in where this list could be expanded now or in the future”.


I think that we can help the Government by expanding the list. I personally think that all three that I mentioned could be added without any demerits. They would then be more comprehensively illustrative of the range of functional activities that strategic authorities should be engaged in, in order to achieve maximum growth, as the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, quite rightly illustrated by reference to tourism—how they can promote growth, shape public services and improve the circumstances for the populations that they serve.

From my point of view, community engagement and empowerment is central to the delivery of many of these. I have no intention that community engagement and empowerment should be the responsibility of a commissioner. It should be the responsibility of the mayor and, of course, it is a cross-cutting area of competence. I can see no reason why one would leave it out, since it is instrumental to the achievement of the objectives.

I shall finish with just one question to the Minister, which I am perfectly happy to take up with her at a later stage. If it is indeed the Government’s belief that this list may be expanded, either

“now or in the future”,

as the White Paper said, where is the power to add to this list? I cannot find such a power. It seems to me that on the face of it there should be such a power. Even if the Government are not persuaded today, clearly in the future, if, for example, using later powers, the mayors of established mayoral strategic authorities were to make proposals for changes to the Secretary of State and acquire additional functional responsibilities, this may be in a new area of competence, but where is the ability to put that into the legislation? I hope that the Minister may, at this or a later stage, agree that we should add an order-making power at that point.

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I urge my noble friend to include these important and world-renowned sectors—consider Liverpool’s film success at the Golden Globes recently—as an area of competence for strategic authorities in their own right. I know this would be welcomed and optimised by strategic authorities across England and beyond.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to support Amendment 6, to which I have added my name, and to express my full agreement with the case made by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. I also support Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar. Both amendments address a clear omission in the Bill by placing the arts, culture and creative industries, cultural services and heritage explicitly within the areas of competence of strategic authorities, precisely where local government, the Local Government Association and the sector itself understand them to sit. Amendment 51, also in the noble Earl’s name, provides the necessary consequential provision to ensure that this competence can operate coherently in practice. Together, these amendments bring clarity, not complication, and I strongly support them.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendments 6 in the name of my noble friend Lord Clancarty and Amendment 10 in the name of my noble friend Lady Prashar. I have spoken to a number of people in local government and become convinced that the new strategic authorities could benefit their regions if they had competence over the heritage and cultural sector.

Noble Lords have only to look at the catastrophic situation in the arts and cultural sector in the West Midlands to understand their importance. Birmingham has reduced the funding of arts in the city from £10 million in 2010 to a mere £1.1 million in 2024-26. In 2015, when the first big cuts were announced, they were in part because the political dysfunction of the city council persuaded the Arts Council to redirect funds, with a terrible effect on the city’s cultural and heritage life. Since then, the crisis has continued. The result of this long decline in funding was that in 2024 the city council signed off 100% reductions to funding for some of the most internationally recognised city institutions—the CBSO, Birmingham Rep, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Ikon Gallery, Fabric dance and dozens of community cultural organisations; the list goes on.

Some of these cuts have led to entrepreneurial responses by the city’s cultural sector. For instance, John Crabtree at the Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre has put on a more commercial and popular offer that has helped to stabilise the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which is also housed there. The Mayor of the West Midlands, who has strategic authority over the region but does not have legal competence for the cultural sector, has been able to direct some financial support through the regional authority’s cultural leadership board. It has managed to use money left over from the underspend on the Commonwealth Games and wider devolution funding to channel money to at least some of the most important cultural bodies in the city.

However, all these payments are one-off and do not replace longer-term core funding. They are not able to reach many smaller community cultural bodies, which have subsequently closed. In a city where there is huge concern about youth crime, that seems to be a retrograde and regrettable step. Imagine how much more effective the authority could have been if it had a statutory board to oversee and direct more extensive funds to the cultural sector across the region. I would hope that the establishment of a statutory heritage board in the West Midlands Combined Authority, with constituent authorities as members, would bring stability and greater funding to the sector across the region. In the process, that would allow local and national funding bodies to release money to the region and attract private philanthropy.

The acceptance of Amendment 6 would allow this competence and support for the cultural sector and the creative industries. As many other noble Lords have said, the heritage sector is so important for bringing together communities in a region, for giving them a sense of identity and for attracting tourism into the area. I ask the Minister, with her impressive career in local government, to appreciate how important such an additional competency could be in boosting regional development and cohesion.