English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Jamieson Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Mohammed of Tinsley for speaking. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in particular. I strongly support the stand part notices on Clause 59 and Schedule 27. The reason has been explained. This is a devolution Bill about community empowerment, but the Government are removing the right of local people to decide for themselves what system of governance they want.

We have this devolution Bill, but the Government decide the form of local governance and say that there will not be a committee system. Where are we now? We are in Parliament, operating as a Committee. I have spoken on this issue many times in recent years. The reason why I believe that we should encourage committee systems is that they decentralise power but, more importantly, they enable scrutiny to take place at the point of decision-making. All too often, scrutiny in local government takes place after the decision. We will debate this further on our eighth day in Committee but I think that this is a fundamental right. I just want to keep the right of a community to create the structure that it wants. That right lies in the Localism Act 2011.

I very much hope that we will come back to this issue on Report. However, there are rumours that we may not get a Report stage and may end up in wash-up prior to Prorogation, because there are not many weeks left. We have a further day in Committee on 5 March and we have to leave an interval to reach Report. Can the Minister tell us whether we are going to have a Report stage? Also, if we are going to have a Report stage, I hope very much that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, will bring this back, because that would give us the power to say to the Government, “You have to think again on this issue. Do not tell local people in all local authorities what model they are required to adopt”.

In the Explanatory Notes, there are explanations for why the Government are undertaking this, but, frankly, they are spurious. They claim that there is evidence, but I do not know what the evidence is. In the end, why do we not just trust local people to make decisions? Otherwise, 56 million people in England will continue to be run out of London and Whitehall.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to continue what seems to be an emerging consensus and a Sheffield love-in. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, was the leader in Sheffield when I was at Sheffield University and I will always be grateful for the 10p bus rides that I was able to take.

As we have discussed, these amendments concern the committee system. Let us be frank: this is a devolution Bill. I reiterate yet again that this side of the Committee and these Benches believe in democracy and in devolution. If you believe in those two things, this is about allowing and empowering local communities to decide what is best for them.

I was leader of Central Bedfordshire and operated under the strong-leader model, which worked well for Central Bedfordshire. I am sure it will work well in many other places but, if local communities believe that the committee system is best for them, they should be given that opportunity. Does the Minister believe in devolution and local democracy and will she allow local communities to decide the governance model that best meets their needs?

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the other noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. I turn first to my noble friend’s intention to oppose the clause and Schedule 27 standing part of the Bill.

This clause and the related schedule will bring further consistency to local authority governance arrangements across England. As your Lordships may know, the Government still have a strong preference for executive models of governance. We believe, and I believe because I have operated in both, that the leader-and-cabinet model, already operated by over 80% of councils, provides a clearer and more easily understood governance structure and can support more efficient decision-making.

To answer the question from the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, there are several individual examples that highlight the challenges of the committee system. When Cheshire East switched to the committee system in 2021, an LGA corporate peer challenge found that its structure was large and meeting-intensive, with six policy committees and nine sub-committees, involving 78 out of 82 councillors. Co-ordination across individual committees is a persistent challenge. The same peer challenge for Cheshire East flagged the siloed nature of the council, with poor joint working across departments, contributing towards challenges of service delivery and communication.

Several councils that have tried committees have later reverted to the leader-and-cabinet model, for example Brighton and Hove in 2024. This is wasteful of both time and resources. With collective decision-making spread across multiple committees, it is not always clear who is in charge. Councils that return to the leader-and-cabinet model, such as Newark and Sherwood District Council and Nottinghamshire County Council, have judged it to be more transparent, agile and accountable.

At the same time, we recognise the genuinely held concerns of those councils that have adopted the committee system following a public referendum or a council resolution. That is important and I take seriously the words of noble Lords who have raised that. The Government’s amendments made in the other place to these provisions were intended to allow some councils that have recently adopted the committee system, following either a council resolution or a public referendum, to continue operating that governance model until the end of their moratorium period. At that point, the local authority will be required to undertake and publish a review of whether it should move to the leader-and-cabinet executive model or retain its committee system. The Government believe that this approach strikes the right balance between encouraging a more consistent governance model for local authorities across England and respecting local democratic mandates and voter expectations where councils are currently operating a committee system and are within their current moratorium periods. With these points in mind, I invite my noble friend to support these measures.

I turn to the government amendments in this group. As I have set out, the Government introduced an amendment in the other place to allow certain councils operating the committee system to continue to do so where they were within their statutory moratorium periods. The Government are now bringing forward additional amendments to clarify the circumstances in which a local authority’s committee system may be protected from the requirement to adopt the leader-and-cabinet executive model. This will mean that the protection period applies only where the council has previously adopted the committee system following either a council resolution or a public referendum and is within its statutory moratorium period at the point this provision is commenced.

The amendments clarify that the prior resolution to change governance must be made under Part 1A of the 2000 Act. This will ensure that the Bill strikes the right balance between encouraging a more consistent local authority governance model across England and respecting more recent local democratic mandates and voter expectations. It will also reduce disruption where councils are operating a committee system within their statutory moratorium period.

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[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, like many others, I had a leading position as a councillor during Covid. The Minister and I corresponded on many calls. Remote working worked well during Covid, but there were some famous failures. Some councillors fell asleep live on YouTube—not in my council, I hasten to add. Others went to the toilet, got undressed or got out of the shower. Children bumbled in. There was that famous meeting where a woman had no authority but managed to cut the other chap out; I cannot remember her name, but we all know the one. So, yes, it can work, and there are safeguards.

I completely disagree with proxy voting, so I have no truck with Amendment 219. However, I am broadly sympathetic with Amendments 218 and 220, which are trying to ask how we can participate remotely, although I find it difficult to support them as they are currently constructed.

This is complicated. There are different types of meeting, and each has different consequences. There is the full council meeting, in which everyone gets together. It is important that everyone gets together to cast their vote as a council rather than as a set of individuals sitting at home—in their underpants, let us say. There are executive meetings and cabinet meetings. They are really important, and people want to see them; there are rights of attendance, and people will want to lobby. There are scrutiny meetings, but that is not an executive function. Then there are policy-formation committees, which are not for decision-making but are part of scrutiny. So we have the distinction between what are and are not decision-making committees. Then there are quasi-judicial meetings, such as those on planning or licensing; in-person attendance is really important for those. None of this fine-grained texture is in the amendments but, if they are to progress, it should be.

Local government is becoming more complicated. There is certainly a need to travel more, particularly in the larger authorities such as North Yorkshire. The answer to that is not to have something quite as big as North Yorkshire, but we are where we are. There are going to be more combined meetings under these combined county authorities. There are also more trading companies involved in local authorities now. They are at arm’s length from the council—they may be owned by the council but they are not of the council—and we have to take them into consideration, too. There are significantly more partnerships, some of which are joint committees of more than one council. We would have to work out, if two councils came together and one had the freedom to do online meetings and the other did not, how that would mesh in joint committees, of which we are seeing a lot more. We have development corporations as well. There is a lot of public money there, so will they be meeting in private or in public?

We have to sort out some of the ground rules. It is not quite as simple as the noble Lord, Lord Pack, and my noble friend Lady McIntosh said. I am interested in taking this forward, but it will need a lot more work before Report before any of it could really be considered a realistic proposal, rather than just a good idea for probing.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I have listened carefully to this debate and wish to speak briefly on this group of amendments. They address fundamental questions about how local democracy is conducted, how local councillors discharge their duties and how we maintain the integrity of local decision-making. These amendments are well intentioned—we have certainly heard about the difficulties that there can be in arriving at meetings, particularly where significant distances are involved—but I fear that they do not sit easily with the principles of genuine devolution and open, accountable, transparent government where you can see where the decision is being made.

Amendment 218 in the name of my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering and Amendment 220, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Pack, would allow for remote meetings or remote participation in meetings. A cornerstone of our democratic life is the principle that significant decisions should be taken in person and in public, where elected representatives can be directly observed, challenged and held to account, and where the debate is in the room. During the pandemic, remote arrangements became an unavoidable necessity, yet many of us witnessed—my noble friend Lord Fuller alluded to some of the issues we saw—how public engagement was diminished, the debate became thinner and the essential character of our democratic exchanges was damaged.

I do not believe that we should return to arrangements that bring back that distance, both literally and figuratively and in terms of participation, between elected representatives and the people they serve. The default expectation of democratic office ought to remain that in decision-making councillors come together, face to face, to deliberate in the public view. Any move to the contrary, even in limited circumstances, would, I fear, be a slippery slope.

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[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

My Lords, with my other hat on, as the Whip, I just want to say that the next group is pretty long. We may not finish it by 9.15 pm so we may end up having to split the group. We may get to the single amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Banner, but I cannot guarantee that. I am in noble Lords’ hands, but we have to stop at 9.15 pm.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

We are definitely finishing the debate.

[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

We are definitely finishing at that time. If we can get through this big group, we will, I hope, be able to do the eighth group, but we must finish at 9.15 pm.