English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, this is the latest legislation in a long line of tinkering that has made our sub-national governance structures more fragmented, complicated, opaque and financially unsustainable. That the opening clauses enumerate 13 types of so-called strategic authority proves that point unambiguously. Such complexity has sown confusion among councils, voters and governments, preferring the wants of the administrative state over the people and taking power further away from residents and business to the dead hand of Marsham Street.

Over 20 years as a councillor, I have seen a mania from officials who live in the London borough bubble to tidy up things outside the M25 for their own bureaucratic convenience. This is just another attempt to lard on half-baked new structures in a half-done settlement that is already unwinding and unravelling before the legislation is even passed. For example, the Budget announced that mayors could raise a new tourism tax, and the Minister lauded that in her opening remarks. Surrey was promised a mayor to do so, but now that has been taken away in the same breath as the cancellation of the mayoral elections. The Bill asks mayors to write growth plans in pursuance of the urgency of driving economic growth. I thought this Government were all about growth and that the mayors were the key to unlocking it—it is clearly not that urgent, given that those mayors have been delayed for two years.

I have heard it all before: let us get rid of the districts and the 86 things that residents value the most, so that it can all be lost in a system where 70% of the money is spent on adult and children’s services, but somehow it will all be all right. It is nonsense. If we were really interested in community empowerment, the Government would sort out a system in which three-quarters of local government expenditure is spent on the 5% of the residents who need social care and those with special educational needs and disabilities. On this, the Bill is silent—another can kicked down the road.

Nowhere in the Bill do the Government set out what local government is for. There are lots of administrative functions listed, but none viewed through the lens that, if it is not foreign policy or defence, it is capable of being done locally. It is not hard to articulate a purpose. Local government exists to raise a family, grow a business, invest in local infrastructure and protect the local environment. On this, the Bill is silent. Instead, we get 380 pages of schedules and impenetrable processes so complex and convoluted that they come round to meet themselves in the opposite direction without working out whether they benefit either the resident or the firm.

As if to prove that point, whole parts of the Bill contain duplicative provisions for mayoral and non-mayoral authorities, with extra discriminations between London and everywhere else in a metropolitan apartheid that is all about shoring up Labour’s electoral heartland at the expense of everyone else. There are more councillors within the M25 than in all the county councils of England. Some 3,108 electors get to choose a councillor in London but in the shire counties it is typically more than 10,000. That is a cynical dilution of democracy.

Schedule 26 is all about reorganisation everywhere apart from London and the mets in Birmingham and Manchester—funny, that. It is nothing less than a gerrymander to save Labour’s councillors in the city while pursuing Labour’s war on the countryside by other means.

The Bill’s title is a confidence trick that promises more structures, not fewer. There will be mayors able to raise unlimited taxes for things they have no control over, new combined authorities with dodgy decision-making provisions, and confusion between tiers. Even smaller-scale powers such as taxi licensing will be transferred up to strategic authorities without the systems, staff or experience to execute them. Proud city councils will be disbanded and relegated to parish council status with unconstrained council tax raising powers.

There will be a vandalisation of our historic county boroughs and cathedral cities, which will lose their identity and civic pride, including their lord mayors, sheriffs and lieutenants. County councils with their pension funds, which the Chancellor wants to control, will be split up. There will be destroying of the districts, which do the things that people value most, with net budgets of only around £10 million to £12 million but which scoop up the most vulnerable people Labour tells us they are most concerned about.

Worse, we now get a new war on the motorist, with new civil enforcement powers for traffic contraventions. This is not a Bill about empowerment; it is about disempowerment and centralisation. It is a disembowelment of local accountability, because part of community empowerment is all about helping people to stand for election, but the Bill actually makes it harder for single mums or community-minded businessmen to stand, with larger councils further away from people and relying more and more on the rich and retired motorist. That is the effect of Labour’s vision for devolution and empowerment: more layers taking powers further away from people while creating a new professionalised councillor class.

I have heard it said that this will save money, but the people who called for this in 2020 now say it will not save a bean. Look at Somerset, bankrupted by an LGR process that is now to be visited elsewhere, and pension strain costs of at least £1 billion, which we know will have to be factored in but have so far not been calculated, to be borne by the local ratepayer. As for the parishes, Salisbury council, for example, was converted from a city to a district, and council tax for a £383 band D is up 44% in four years—a stealth tax if ever there was one.

Fly-tipped right at the end of the Bill are some provisions on investment-sapping commercial rent reviews, as if that improves devolution or community empowerment. It is well-meaning but counterproductive. Let us pin the tail on the donkey: everyone affected will pay more for less. It is all about top down, not bottom up. We should send the Bill back under the Trade Descriptions Act: it is about neither devolution nor community empowerment.