English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Pack Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 8th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, like my colleagues on these Benches, I am a strong supporter of devolution. I was therefore sadly disappointed to see in this Bill the number of areas where power is still to be with Whitehall and not local government, where opportunities for genuine devolution are missed, and where it risks adding to, rather than reducing, the legal complexity faced by local government. I will give brief examples of each and, in doing so, I hope to suggest some areas in which amendments may, in due course, help improve the Bill.

I start with the most fundamental of provisions: people’s right to elect those who govern them. We all recognise that in some exceptional circumstances it can be necessary to delay democracy. For example, I doubt few, if any, in this House would think it was a mistake to delay the general election during the Second World War. However, such delays should be the rare exceptions, at moments of major crisis when safety is at risk. Yet the Bill as it stands will continue the power of a central government, including any future Government of who knows what level of commitment to democracy, to cancel simply by order of the Minister elections that have been previously scheduled. That is far too low a bar. The postponing of democracy should require the full permission of Parliament, through primary legislation. I hope the Minister will say more about why the Government view local democracy as not being worthy of the protection that would come from requiring primary legislation to interfere with it.

I will give two examples of where powers could and should be devolved but are being kept within Whitehall’s grip. Here in this House, we let Members participate remotely. It is a carefully limited right but one that is used and works, whether or not we happen to agree with those remotely-contributed views. Personally, I would make the rules more permissive, but, even as they stand, they are more permissive than those Parliament allows local councils in England. If we think it is okay for us to decide these matters for ourselves, even though there is not the safeguard of elections for people to kick us out if we get it wrong, why should we withhold that right from democratic councils? Indeed, we have seen remote participation used successfully in local government around the UK, both during Covid and since, outside of England. To give credit where it is due, earlier this year the Government made positive noises about introducing new rights for remote participation in English local government, with the proviso of needing to find parliamentary time in due course. Well, here we are in Parliament and we have local government legislation in front of us, and a good chunk of time allocated. I hope the Minister can tell us more about why this opportunity to get on and act, and get this sorted, is not being taken.

Another example of how the Bill still holds so much power tightly at the centre is cattle-grids. For those of us who are collectors of examples of unusual centralisation, the grip of Whitehall on permission to install a new cattle-grid is, in its own way, a famous one. My hopes rose when I saw cattle-grids mentioned in the White Paper. However, looking through the Bill, I see that the decentralisation of those powers does not seem to have made it into the legislation. Indeed, the whole bundle of decentralisation mentioned alongside cattle-grids in the White Paper seems to have been watered down significantly. I hope this is not due to any change of mind by the Government, or to a sudden fear that, if the controlling, centralised hand of the Secretary of State is relaxed, we will have a sudden outbreak of mad cattle-grid disease sweeping the country. I look forward to hearing more from the Minister as to what has happened to those final two sentences in the section of the White Paper on local government taking back control.

On the third area I mentioned—the risks of adding to, rather than reducing, the legal burden on local government and the complexity in the Bill, as touched on earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—my point is that so much of the legislation passed by Parliament ends up never being commenced. We do all the work to legislate but the law then sits there, with different pieces buried in different places within it, never getting commenced. I appreciate that, for understandable and practical reasons, the commencement provisions in this Bill are not simple, stretching over three full pages. However, the way the commencement of different parts is left open, particularly in Clause 92(7), runs the risk of repeating what has happened to so much previous local government legislation, in that it never gets commenced. I hope the Minister will share where the Government’s thinking is on having a clear cut-off date, so that if parts of this legislation are not otherwise commenced sooner, there is a backstop that catches the remaining items and ensures that the Bill does not become just another addition to that huge sludge of bits and pieces of local government legislation that are passed but never enacted and hang around in limbo.

I hope that, as the Bill progresses, we will see from the Government more willingness to enact genuine devolution. I particularly look forward to hearing from the Minister the Government’s thinking on the right threshold for cancelling elections, why elected councillors should not have the same rights that we hold for ourselves in allowing remote participation in their proceedings, whether the Government are still committed to devolving power over cattle-grids, and what they will do to ensure that, whatever Parliament passes, it really does at some point come into force. If we can get those issues right, the Bill will be very much the better for it.