Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 11th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group, as do other noble Lords. I shall talk your Lordships’ House through why I felt we needed to put these amendments down.

First, let us look at my Amendments 25, 27 and 53. Our concerns are around the fact that the Government seem to view devolution settlements as evolutionary. Although we do not necessarily object to them refining these agreements over time, our concern is that, if they are going to refine them and the settlements are going to evolve, clearly they need to be changed both for the benefit of and with the consent of the local communities that will be affected by any changes. If we look at what is in this part of the Bill and what it does, we see that it adjusts the mechanisms affecting when changes to combined authorities can be made. With my amendments, I am trying to ensure that due process is applied at all times to such changes.

I want to look at one particular area of concern, which involves a change that could be immediate and will be able to be exercised through these powers if they are put into statute: the potential addition of Warwickshire to the West Midlands combined authority. This could be done shortly ahead of the next election for the mayor of the region in May next year. Our concern is that it could happen shortly ahead of an election without proper agreement with the community and wider authorities. Because of that, I have tabled Amendments 25, 27 and 53.

My Amendment 25 states:

“The Secretary of State must consult, and have regard to advice provided by, the Boundary Commission for England regarding the boundaries of a CCA when making regulations under subsection (1)”.


My Amendment 27 says the same—it is just placed in a further, appropriate part of the Bill—whereas, if noble Lords look at my Amendment 53, they will see that it looks at another part of the Bill and aims to ensure that

“the Secretary of State has consulted, and had regard to advice provided by, the Boundary Commission for England”.

I know that we have discussed this issue. I thanked the Minister for her time either last week or the week before—I cannot remember when—when we discussed it previously. However, because the Boundary Commission has a responsibility to review parliamentary constituencies —I know that the argument from officials was that my amendment does not necessarily apply in this case because it looks just at county or district boundaries that already exist and are already agreed, for example— we feel that, because of the potential implications of boundaries being expanded by a mayor to suit their next election, this is something that should be supplemented. There should be this additional role for the Boundary Commission in such cases so that there cannot be any questions, concerns or even accusations of gerrymandering where that may not be the case; we just think that it would add an extra layer of security and transparency to any changes in this area.

My Amendment 35, which is also in this group, would insert a new clause:

“Mayors for CCA Areas: boundaries”.


The amendment says:

“Within one year of the day on which this Act is passed, a Minister … must publish a report of a consultation on the boundaries of each Mayor for a CCA Area … The report must also include a criteria which must be fulfilled for any future expansions of boundaries”.


Also, and this comes back to the point I have just made:

“The criteria must include that the extension is not being made for political advantage”.


This is something that we are concerned about.

We are trying to really stress the point here that any additions and changes to boundaries should not be motivated or be able to be motivated by any political purpose. We know that concerns have been raised that this may be the case in the West Midlands, for example. It is extremely important that the Government heed these concerns in order that people can have the greatest confidence possible in any changes to boundaries and powers that will be brought in with the proposed legislation.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has Amendments 37 to 39 in this group. They all look to do a similar thing: to remove Clauses 40 to 42 to avoid confusion about the number of different mayoral titles that are possible. I genuinely think he has a bit of a point here. I find that many members of the general public get confused about what councillors do and what we all do. When I was a Member of Parliament—other noble Lords may have had the same experience—I was told to go and sort my councillors out. There is not necessarily a huge amount of understanding about local government and government structures. I have some sympathy with what the noble Lord is trying to do here to make it as simple as possible.

I now want to look at Amendment 52 in the name of my noble friend Lord Hunt, my Amendment 53, as I mentioned earlier, and Amendment 53A, the new amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Hunt to which I have added my name. I will leave my noble friend to go into the detail of this, but we strongly support what he is trying to achieve with this amendment and strongly support his concerns here.

I hope that I have been clear to the Minister about exactly what our concerns are. I think that they could be resolved with discussion, but these are genuine concerns about the way the boundaries may potentially be manipulated and we think that the Government should take them very seriously. I beg to move.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, as my noble friend said, I have two amendments. Amendment 52

“would prevent the Secretary of State making amendments to the membership of a combined authority in a 12 month period running up to a mayoral election, which could have the effect of altering the prospects of a sitting or proposed mayor being elected or re-elected”.

Amendment 53A puts some

“additional requirements which must be satisfied before local government areas are added to an existing Combined Authority within nine months of Royal Assent”.

Obviously, it is late and noble Lords wish to prepare for tomorrow, so I am not going to speak at length, as I could do on this. I just want to make two or three points. This is all about the Government’s deplorable efforts basically to gerrymander the boundary of the West Midlands Combined Authority. So much does the current Tory incumbent, Andy Street, suspect defeat in ten months’ time that he has conspired with Michael Gove to shoehorn Warwickshire, a shire county, into the metropolitan combined authority. If this happened to Wiltshire, for instance, I know exactly what the noble Baroness would be thinking. The sole purpose, of course, is to try to improve his fortunes at the 2024 election. He has similar designs on some of the other shire counties in the West Midlands. He will not be stopping there; he wants to be police commissioner as well, and we will come on to that later.

This is being done over the next 12 weeks, so there is scant time for consultation, and no time for full consideration of the impact on the district council and certainly not on the public, who I doubt wish to have their lives run from Birmingham. Nor do I think it will be successful, because the most likely outcome is a Labour mayor running Warwickshire and the West Midlands. Noble Lords might think that I would welcome that, but I have principled objections to using legislation in this way—basically, to protect a sole political incumbent. I particularly object to this happening without the agreement of the existing constituent members of the combined authority. For me, such power vested in one person damages our democracy, undermines the trust on which the combined authority was established and surely risks threatening its future success.

One of the things I find the most objectionable is the haste in which this is being done. A paper going to Warwickshire County Council’s cabinet meeting tomorrow indicates this. The council has to rush into a governance review, followed by publication of a scheme that would contain details of the proposed expanded area of the West Midlands Combined Authority; its proposed membership, voting and other constitutional arrangements; its proposed functions; the way it will be funded; and any property, rights and liabilities that would be transferred to the extended combined authority.

A public consultation has to be undertaken. If the Secretary of State then decides to proceed, an order will have to be made which would expand the area of the combined authority and provide for the election of a mayor. This all has to be done incredibly quickly. Ministers have told the county council that it must be in a position to do all that and submit an application in early October. Allowing for August and the summer break, what sort of consultation is likely by early October? I suggest, a very scanty one.

In this paper, the council openly admits that it may require consideration of urgent decisions being made during the process; in other words, the consultation is a sham, because the decision has already been made. So much is unknown, not least the financial consequences; so the cabinet paper airily says that what this means financially for Warwickshire in the context of the current West Midlands devolution deal and the being-discussed West Midlands deeper devolution deal would need to be worked up in negotiation with the Government. So that will not be sorted out any time soon, and the public in Warwickshire will have no idea at all about the financial implications; nor will the non-metropolitan district councils in Warwickshire have any idea what it means for them, or of the financial consequences.

The paper that I have read is mistaken. It says in paragraph 2.7:

“A change in membership status to ‘constituent member’ for Warwickshire County Council”


—in other words, Warwickshire coming in means it becomes a constituent member of the combined authority—

“would also have implications for the five District and Borough Councils in the County who would automatically be admitted as constituent members”

of the combined authority. The paper goes on to say:

“It is recognised that the level of financial contribution as a constituent member could be challenging for the District and Borough Councils and if levied at the current ‘constituent member’ level would mean Warwickshire Councils as a whole contributing a disproportionate amount compared to other members”.


Well, that would be a matter of concern. I am sure that this, if successful, would have financial consequences for the non-metropolitan district councils. But the paper is wrong. Again, in paragraph 4.16, it says that district councils will be constituent members of the combined authority.

I take the Minister back to our debates on district councils. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, made it clear that

“the combined county authority is a new institutional model made up of upper-tier local authorities only. Only two-tier county councils and unitary councils can be constituent members of a CCA”.—[Official Report, 27/2/23; col. 111.]

I suspect that this error was made in the rush to produce all this paper, but a district council in Warwickshire would be left very uncertain about what all this means.

We can see a proud, independent and delightful county, Warwickshire—I am a member of Warwickshire County Cricket Club—being more and more absorbed into the West Midlands Combined Authority, where urban interests are bound to dominate. Do the people of Warwickshire really want this? Do other shire counties and the people in them want it? I very much doubt it.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I have learned a lot in the last 10 minutes. I did not know all of that detail.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

There is more.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

Well, I just hope the Minister might be able to put our minds at rest. The word “gerrymandering” springs to mind. I sincerely hope the Minister can allay any concerns we might have about that. I think the words “sham consultation” were used. I hope the Minister will be able to put our minds at rest on that. It might be helpful if she just said that there was no truth in these rumours at all and that there will not be any overfast consultation on this matter.

That leads me to say that, although I am not a signatory to Amendment 53A, I very much support it. I hope the Minister will be able to explain a little more what the Government’s thinking is on that. However, I am a signatory to Amendment 52. This is all related; there is a serious issue to address. Had I realised that this was going on when I signed Amendment 52, I would have signed Amendment 53A as well.

I have three amendments in this group, Amendments 37 to 39, which would all do the same thing. I will keep this very short because I have no intention of pressing anything to a vote, but I am still surprised that the Government have these clauses in the Bill. I have never understood them. Those of us who have been in combined authorities or have worked in or around them, sometimes with mayors, know that the public have got used to the title “mayor”. I want to eliminate these clauses because the titles that the Government propose as options are confusing to the general public. The reason given comes at line 25 of page 35 of the Bill, which says that the CCA can consider having a title that it feels is more appropriate than other titles that are offered as options,

“having regard to the title of other public office holders in the area of the CCA”.

I recall the Minister explaining in Committee that that was because there were other public officeholders called “mayor”: the mayor of a county, or a lord mayor. Those areas that have been working with the mayoral model for a combined authority for some time have got used to it.

I find the alternative titles offered in Clause 40 confusing. The mayor could become a “county commissioner”, which is used in other countries but is not part of British constitutional thinking. They could be a “county governor”. Of course, if these are combined counties, presumably they would be the governor of two counties. Equally, you could have a “governor” without their being a “county governor”. I find this very confusing.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps Mr Street could be called the Governor-General?

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

Governor-General of the West Midlands—there, my Lords, is a thought. We are now starting to laugh, and I think there is a danger here that the general public will just not understand what all these titles are for. I would immediately say a school governor, a prison governor or the governor of a US state. We can think of various possibilities, but a governor of a combined county? I really do not think that fits with the structure of local and subregional government that we are talking about.

Under Clause 40(2)(c) the title could be “elected leader”. This is very strange, because councils have leaders and those leaders are elected—so I am not clear what the difference is between the “elected leader” of a CCA and the leader of a council. The constituency may be different: that is, it is the whole electorate for the mayor, but for the leader it is the councillors of that council who have to vote to elect that person as the leader of the council as well as leader of the group. This is getting too confusing.

The next thing could well be that if a mayoral CCA is entitled to call its mayor something else, can other combined authorities that have been in existence for a number of years change the title of their mayor? I just do not know why we are going down this road at all. I just say all that to the Minister. There may be something that I have not thought of that she can alleviate my concerns with, but I just wish that this clause and the associated clauses would just go away. It is not something that I want a vote on; I just hope that I will not have to stand up when the statutory instrument comes through for the creation of a CCA and ask why it is that the name has altered to something like a “county commissioner”, which the general public do not comprehend.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

It is more complex than that. It is not a referendum but a consultation. Therefore, there will be many views for, against, in the middle and all over the place, but he will obviously have to take account of views. If everyone said they did not want something, I am sure the Secretary of State would take note of that; it is part of those tests.

The main focus of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England, which the noble Baroness brought up, is a rolling programme of electoral reviews of local authorities; this is where its skills and experience mainly lie. It would not be appropriate to consult it on the proposed boundaries of CCAs and CAs. The requirement for public consultation and statutory tests for regulations provide, we believe, sufficient protection that further consultation is unnecessary. For these reasons, I hope the noble Baroness will not press her amendments.

Amendments 37 to 39 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, seek to remove Clauses 40 to 42, which set out the process to allow the mayor of a CCA to change to a locally appropriate title that resonates with local stakeholders. Some areas are reluctant to adopt a mayor governance model as they feel the word “mayor” would be confusing and inappropriate for their area, preventing access to a strong devolution deal.

We had this discussion in Committee. There are many areas in this country where every town in a county, or even a district, will have a local mayor. That has been an issue for some authorities when they look into a CCA for the future. The noble Lord talked about directly elected leaders. Some authorities have said to us that they would prefer to call the person who leads—doing the same job as a mayor in a county authority—a “directly elected leader”. It is just a name; the job itself is the same.

To minimise confusion, the clauses include the protection of a shortlist of possible titles—it does not have to be used; it just gives some ideas—as well as a mechanism for areas to use any other title they choose, providing they have regard to other public officeholders’ titles in the area of that authority. We are trying to give as much local flexibility as possible to allow for local circumstances, so that the name of the directly elected person to lead that combined authority is the best name to use in that area.

Amendment 52, also in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, regarding the timing of an order changing a combined authority’s area, would add further inflexibility to the process. An MCA can be expanded only at the time of a mayoral election, for reasons of democratic accountability; those affected by the mayor’s decisions will have had the opportunity to take part in that mayor’s election. Consequently, it can already be several years between an area expressing an interest in joining an MCA and such expansion coming into force. Introducing additional inflexibility would impede and potentially further delay—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not delay the House for long but, with the greatest respect, this was a twinkle in the eye of Mayor Street a few months ago when the Wolverhampton Express & Star reported it. People in Warwickshire were innocently going about their own business, then along came Mr Gove to put pressure on them to make this application. The Minister is indulging in a fantasy that this is somehow driven by Warwickshire people desperate to join the West Midlands.

I joke about Wiltshire but the Minister will know about the sensitivities of shire counties and their relationship with urban metropolitan districts, which I well understand. My noble friend Lady Anderson’s Staffordshire would be another case in point; it would not wish to be ruled, in a sense, from Birmingham. It really is too much: the rules are being changed to allow for one gerrymander, in a foolish attempt to save Mr Street’s political career. That really will not do.

I am not going to go on because we have two other groups. In the next—

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

We are finishing at the end of this group.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

Sorry, I know that, but we are going to have further debates on this because the amendments have been split between groups eight, nine and 10. That is why I will sit down.