Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Heseltine Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 1 and 2: indeed, my name has been attached to them on the Marshalled List. I declare at the outset my vice-presidency of the Local Government Association.

I made a number of very positive comments about the importance of devolution into England from Whitehall when we discussed the Bill at Second Reading. It remains an aim that we share with the Government. The amendments we have tabled for today and for the next two days in Committee are meant to improve the Bill and make it stronger.

These are two important amendments. As the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said, this is an enabling Bill. Therefore, it is important that it can enable and is not so restrictive that it prevents good proposals from local areas being approved because they do not fulfil over-strict criteria set out in the Bill.

The Bill needs to be able to meet the needs of areas as diverse as metropolitan areas, smaller cities and towns, rural areas and coastal areas. I said at Second Reading that one size could not fit all, so it matters that there is enough room for manoeuvre within the Bill to permit different sets of proposals to succeed. To this end, Amendment 1 would require the Secretary of State to lay a report to explain within three months how it is proposed to meet the diverse needs of all parts of England, and that is welcome. Amendment 2 would enable Parliament to review the success of the Act on an annual basis. It would enable us to learn how effective the Act was in enabling non-metropolitan areas, for example, to secure devolved powers and responsibilities.

I hope that the Minister will feel that these two amendments add to the Bill rather than detract from it, and that therefore they can be supported. From discussions that are going on outside the House, it is clear that guidance is required by local authorities and others on how councils can request new powers and responsibilities. Criteria need to be clearly stated—both the terms of devolution and the process by which it can be achieved.

I conclude by raising issues that have been brought to our attention by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. It has given us a number of extremely important comments and it would be helpful to the Committee to know whether the Minister plans to bring forward amendments on Report to reflect those comments. I draw the Committee’s attention to three of them. One is in paragraph 10, which is very important in its context, in that it comments on the very wide powers to define the scope of functions that may be conferred on a combined authority and how they might be used. The committee points out, secondly, that there is no requirement in the Bill for anyone other than local authorities to be consulted on the effect of changes in the location of functions. I draw to the Committee’s attention, in particular, business organisations, which clearly would have an important stake in the decisions that were made. The third point is in the area of overview and scrutiny—the power to define membership and who, in particular, is to be chair. It is very important that we follow the affirmative procedure here, and we have tabled a number of amendments that we hope will assist in meeting the concerns expressed by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee.

That is all that I want to say at this stage of the debate but I hope that the Minister will feel in a position to agree that Amendments 1 and 2 enhance rather than detract from the Bill.

[Lord Heseltine (Con)]

My Lords, the one clear message from the two speeches that we have heard so far is the unanimous view that the direction of travel from central government back to local people is welcomed on all sides of the House. In the view of many of us, it is long overdue and much to be welcomed.

I have the privilege of acting as a special adviser to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and, in that capacity, perhaps I see something of the response to the Government’s proposals in a way that persuades me that the questions asked by the two noble Lords are not pressing in the need to amend the legislation, because in the wide community affected by the Bill they already know the answers to the questions that are being posed.

The most important question, which the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, raised, was about the generality of the application of this legislation throughout the whole of England. There is not the slightest doubt in any local authority—or business community—of which I have any knowledge that the door is open for all of them. Indeed, not only do they know, but I cannot remember a period in which there was such intense activity at every local level in the form of meetings, discussions, plans and ideas to prepare them to take advantage of this new opportunity. Without naming names, self-evidently the trail has been blazed by Manchester which, let us be frank, has been working on these ideas for decades. There are unitary counties in a very different part of England which are equally apprised of the opportunity. We can understand that the questions are not only being asked but answers are being positively sought. I would be very surprised if, over the course of the discussion and debate on this legislation, we do not see significant suggestions coming forward from local people about how to take advantage of the opportunities.

The second point that both noble Lords made reflects the diversity of opportunity from different parts of the English political scene. The fact that both noble Lords recognised this point clearly argues against the proposals that they wish to inject into the legislation. It is precisely because there are such different features that, were the Secretary of State to produce a strategy, it would either be so general as to have no real meaning or, in practice, it would be so prescriptive that it would prevent the very devolution that the House is trying to achieve. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. He has a clear understanding of how these matters work, but if you ask for an impact study by a government department about how the devolution would work, what is that department going to do? It is going to do what government departments always do: it will lay out all the complexities which the department wants to see answered in a way that prescribes the solutions that Members of this House are unanimous in wishing to see emerge from the locality. The more you ask central government to set the pace, the more prescriptive you will become. I see many noble Lords who have spent their life in local government. We have been around this track before. We have been around it decade after decade, and the more you ask central government departments what they think, the more detailed the answers will be, and that is precisely what we do not want. What we want is to say to the communities that make up England, “You know best how you could administer the framework of local decision-making, you know the strengths and weaknesses that make up your community, and it is therefore for you to address the diversity and complexity in putting forward your proposals”.

My reading of the situation is that there are not clear answers in many cases. There are not clear answers about the boundaries of these areas, which is one of the reasons why we have overlapping boundaries for the LEPs. There are not clear answers about whether an authority should be committed to one unit or another or whether it could be associated with more than one. In making progress, the Government are right to say we should wait until we have the local plans before us before we try to model those plans into what conforms to central departmental thinking.

This is a new concept. Noble Lords will know all too well that we have told local authorities and imposed upon them every manner of solution over decades, and many of us have played a part in trying to achieve just that. This is a new approach. In a sense, if you are to trust people with responsibility, you have to trust them with the opportunity to make mistakes—that goes with the new freedoms we are talking about. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords in this House will not seek to be prescriptive from the very start, because that would frustrate the very purpose for which this legislation is designed.