English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Ravensdale Excerpts

Thursday 26th March 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Ravensdale]

93: Clause 22, page 33, line 14, at end insert—
“103F Regional collaboration(1) Two or more elected mayors may collaborate across mayoral combined authorities and create convening bodies whose purpose, priorities and membership are decided at a regional level. (2) For the purposes of subsection (1), convening bodies must work with existing regional organisations, and may—(a) convene regional, public and private sector partners to promote a region internationally,(b) develop investable propositions in key sectors and align trade, investment, major infrastructure and land use issues,(c) coordinate arts, heritage, cultural and sporting activities, and(d) ensure coherence across transport, skills, energy, social mobility and other areas of competence.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment provides for partnerships at a pan-regional level (eg. the North or the Midlands) to enable broader collaboration between strategic authorities relating to economic growth, infrastructure and other areas of competence.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 93, 119 and 183. I thank all noble Lords who supported these amendments across Committee and now on Report, including the noble Lords, Lord Young of Cookham, Lord Shipley and Lord Blunkett, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. I thank the Minister for her engagement between Committee and Report. I hope she will be able to offer a substantive proposal in response to these amendments in her summing up, particularly Amendments 119 and 183.

Starting with those amendments, I will add to what I said in Committee. Social mobility is a long-standing problem in this country. The noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, said yesterday in the Chamber, around the Government’s aspirations, that where you come from should not determine where you are going. We know that relative income mobility—the strength of the link between a parent’s income and that of their child—is poor, when we look at that internationally, ranking near the USA as one of the least mobile developed nations.

That echoes my personal experience growing up in inner-city Nottingham. I saw too many young people who did not meet their potential because of where they were from. The tragedy of lost potential that that represents led me to put forward a proposal for a special inquiry committee to look into this, which has now delivered, although we await the Government’s response on that. One of the things that that committee report highlighted, along with lots of recent work by the Social Mobility Commission, is the regional nature of the problem. We know that in places such as London and the south-east, social mobility is relatively good, but in the regions, such as the north and the Midlands, it is relatively poor, which highlights the importance of specific place-based approaches to address this issue of social mobility.

We now have a Bill in front of us to do with getting more power into strategic authorities in the regions. We have a good opportunity here to make some progress on this long-standing issue of social mobility and youth unemployment. I look forward to the Minister’s response on these amendments.

My Amendment 93 on pan-regional partnerships, which I have brought back from Committee with some minor changes, is informed by the work I have done in many areas on pan-regional issues across the Midlands over the past four or five years, and seeing the benefits of working at scale on a pan-regional basis and taking advantage of that larger scale.

In Committee, the Minister said that strategic authorities were enabled to do this already. Indeed, there are some successful examples of pan-regional partnerships—for example, the Great North partnership. The issue here is fragmentation. If the Government do not push this approach more widely, it simply will not happen more broadly across the country. The reason this is so important touches on a point that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made in the last group on economic development—another long-standing problem of the concentration of wealth and economic activity in the south-east of the country, with the Midlands and the north being left behind. Getting the regions together at that larger scale is key to helping to increase the prosperity of the regions in areas such as inward investments, large-scale infrastructure and cultural events, and to linking up cross-cutting issues such as social mobility, energy, and many other areas.

The Government have already committed to this. In the devolution White Paper, they recognised the benefits of a pan-regional approach, and the Minister talked about enabling co-operation with neighbouring strategic authorities. This is about going beyond that, enabling wider collaboration between groups of strategic authorities at a pan-regional level across larger geographies. My question for the Government is this: how will they provide support for the formation of those pan-regional partnerships, which are so important for the regions to develop economically, to tackle cross-cutting issues and to enable broader economic growth across the country? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response when she comes to sum up.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I was delighted to add my name to Amendment 93 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. As we have heard, this Bill aims to put English devolution on to a stronger footing so that local leaders can drive economic growth and close the persistent and deep gaps between regions. But at the same time as we legislate to empower those places, the Government have decided to withdraw core support from the pan-regional partnerships that operate at the real economic scale of labour markets, transport corridors and investment decisions.

In my own region of the south-west, we saw partnerships such as the Western Gateway and Great South West show what can be done when local leaders come together across traditional boundaries. For example, Great South West set out a vision which would lift the region’s GVA by as much as £45 billion and create 190,000 additional jobs, if fully realised. The Government have chosen to end core funding for those pan-regional partnerships, and are offering only a short, time-limited extension in the case of the south-west, despite the scale of the prize. That risks hollowing out the strategic capacity that has been built up with relatively modest sums of public money but considerable voluntary effort from councils, businesses and universities across the peninsula.

As we have heard, this amendment does not seek to create a new tier of government or impose any kind of uniform model from the centre. It seeks simply to ensure that, where there is a clear economic geography, there is an enabling framework in statute so that collaboration can be sustained over the long term and is not vulnerable to short-term funding decisions or changes of ministerial fashion and that we at least have a fighting chance of delivering those tens of billions in extra output and hundreds and thousands of better jobs. I know that Ministers have said that they remain committed to pan-regional collaboration, they want it to be flexible and locally led, and that scarce resources must be concentrated on mayoral institutions. I agree absolutely with the Government that collaboration should be bottom up, and I recognise the fiscal pressures, but the sums involved in supporting these pan-regional partnerships are tiny compared with the potential returns of unlocking major investment in areas with so much underemployment.

As Jim O’Neill, the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, and others have argued in their work on regional growth, those returns depend critically on raising education and skills and giving every young person and adult access to training that matches the needs of the local economy. Pan-regional frameworks are precisely the scale at which universities, colleges, employers and mayors can align skills, from apprenticeships to advanced manufacturing to reskilling programmes in digital and creative industries and others, so the projected jobs in these fields become real opportunities for local people. If we are serious, as all of us in this House want, about spreading high-quality jobs beyond London and the south-east, our regions need both the strong leadership and the ability to act together at scale.

Our amendment is modest and permissive and is entirely consistent with the Government’s stated aims, but it would help to turn those headline ambitions into tangible outcomes for jobs and growth and for people across our country to benefit from.

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Finally, I stress that, thanks to an amendment in my name moved on Tuesday, under the Bill mayors will be able to appoint up to 10 commissioners and can choose, for example, to have a commissioner for social mobility. I therefore invite the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for that comprehensive response and for the collaborative approach she has taken in response to these amendments and in all the various letters that have been flying back and forth over the past couple of days on this matter. I appreciate the commitments she has made on the guidance on local growth plans; the socioeconomic duty statutory guidance, which will really help drive forward that approach on data; and the strategic authority guidance. There is a comprehensive response there which will help to meet the intent of my amendments on social mobility, and I appreciate that.

I listened carefully to what the Minister had to say on Amendment 93. She mentioned the collaboration clauses in the Bill, but we are of course talking about broader, pan-regional collaboration here, which is not yet adequately covered in the Bill. I ask her whether she would perhaps be willing to meet me and other stakeholders on this matter to look at that guidance and how we can move forward on this issue.

I can see the Minister nodding. With that assurance, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 93 withdrawn.