English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I wish to speak in favour of the purpose clause tabled by my noble friends Lady Scott of Bybrook and Lord Jamieson.

From the outset, the Title of the Bill is quite wrong and misleading. The Bill is not about devolution; it is about centralisation. The number of directed powers it awards to the Secretary of State to instruct combined authorities is alarming. The purpose clause proposed by my noble friends reinvigorates the Bill to achieve what matters most to local government now and the issues most likely to be of concern in the future—namely, sustainable council finances and keeping the “local” in local government through locally led decision-making.

Putting aside the tax-raising powers for mayors enshrined in the Bill, it does nothing to address the serious concerns the sector has about putting the finances of our councils back on to a sustainable footing, or on the ever-increasing DSG deficits or the seismic pressures placed on upper-tier authorities in the delivery of their SEND responsibilities. However, what we had before Christmas was the Government’s unfair funding announcement, which left many councils worse off than before following the withdrawal of the remoteness adjustments metric, which in turn has left councils such as Buckinghamshire £44 million worse off.

We then come to the part of this purpose clause on local decision-making, which my noble friends are correct to underpin. At the start of my contribution, I referenced centralisation. It is astonishing that a devolution-facing Bill will essentially award mass powers to the Secretary of State to impose LGR and strategic authorities without any say from local authorities and groups in those areas. If devolution is to work, it needs to be locally led by local leaders and the community, not forced on communities by Whitehall. Over recent years, we have seen that local government reorganisation and the creation of combined authorities can be agreed by a consensus in local communities and without the imposition of Whitehall. Just look at Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire—two examples of unitarisation which have gone to plan. I welcome the addition in this purpose clause of ensuring that reorganisation and the creation of strategic authorities are locally led.

The Government’s approach to this has already been fairly shambolic. County council leaders who had elections postponed were of the clear understanding that mayoral elections, shadow unitary authority elections or a combination of both would happen in May 2026. Instead, we have had further delay as a result of Whitehall not working closely with local leaders. This is why the point in the proposed new clause about locally enshrined decision-making is worthy. I hope the Government will accept this amendment so that the purpose clause sits in the Bill.

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I have no interests to declare, other than that I want legislation to be as good as it can be. I very much welcome my noble friend’s amendment because it provides the foundation for my Amendment 251 that would provide for post-legislative scrutiny, which we will come to much later. Too often, Ministers see legislative success in terms of getting a measure on to the statute book. The real measure of success is when the Act delivers what Parliament intended to deliver. To check whether it has done that, post-legislative scrutiny is necessary some years after it has passed.

To assess whether the Act has achieved what it intended, one needs to know clearly what its purpose is—in other words, the basis on which you are undertaking the measurement. This amendment has the great virtue that it stipulates the five purposes that the Bill is intended to deliver. That would provide the measure against which a body set up to engage in post-legislative scrutiny could examine whether it has actually delivered. That is the great value of this amendment and, for that reason, the Government should have the confidence to accept it, as it would show they believe that the Act will deliver what it is designed to do. If they will not accept the amendment, will they bring forward a purpose clause of their own to demonstrate what they believe are the key purposes against which success can be measured?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have no interests to declare. Like the noble Lord, Lord Norton, I am an academic and am interested in clear language, among other things. I was horrified when I first read the Bill by the looseness of its language. Devolution has already been mentioned. The PACAC report some three years ago on the governance of England noted that

“we … refer to what is currently taking place in England as ‘decentralisation’”

rather than devolution, but it is not really effective devolution. This Bill carries on what its predecessor under the Conservative Government was doing in providing a mayoral strategic structure throughout England.

“Local”, “community” and “neighbourhood” are used extremely loosely throughout the Bill. The use of “strategic” implies something that is not local and has to be seen separately from it. Incidentally, in talking about strategic authorities, we enter into the structure of government in the United Kingdom and are talking about constitutional matters—although, with the odd absence of constitution that we have in this country, Governments can muck about with local government in a way that no other constitutional democracy that I am aware of can.

I regard community as very local. In France, the commune is the village, and each commune has a mayor. I think about the ward represented by my colleague the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton; she has five or six separate communities within the one ward. Neighbourhoods are parts of towns or cities, and a neighbourhood is somewhere you can walk around, but the Bill uses those terms to cover much larger areas. That raises questions about its relationship with central government, in setting up a network of strategic authorities.

I have submitted a later amendment that refers to a mayoral council for England; that indeed has been set up by prime ministerial fiat, but is only a pale shadow of the structure for the Council of the Nations and Regions and the mayoral council associated with it, which Gordon Brown usefully proposed some years ago. If we are to have real devolution, there will have to be some mechanism for negotiation between strategic authorities and central government. That is why the absence of any reference to the fiscal issue here also indicates that we are not really dealing with devolution.

The last thing I want to say is that, according to all the opinion polls, we are in a situation in which public trust in national government is remarkably—horrifyingly —low. Public opinion polls also say that public trust in local government is less bad than it is in central government. Strong local government, with councillors whom your average voter might actually know, is one of the ways that one holds democracy together. Colleagues like the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, find themselves trying to represent 15,000 people per ward in a district like Bradford; that is not really effective local democracy. It is very hard for the councillor to know all the electors, let alone for the electors to know the councillors. When we come to the question of town and parish councils, and devolution from strategic authorities to the levels below, we will wish to emphasise that.

I signal that, as we talk about the context of the Bill and strategic authorities, we must first be clear how those strategic authorities relate to central government and, on the other side, how they relate to the single tier of effective local government and to the town and parish councils in which we hope your ordinary voter will find some sense of identity and participation.