English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, uncharacteristically, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Bassam.

Clause 57 and Schedule 26 should play no part in the Bill because the claim that larger units of local government are more cost-effective has been thoroughly debunked. We will just end up with larger, more expensive units that deny the pattern of life that people live. The 500,000 argument was comprehensively debunked by the Blair Government in 2006 with a seminal document that is still available on their website. More recently, the claim that this current round of unitisation will save money was initially made by the County Councils Network, citing evidence dating from 2020. Last year, the people who wrote the report said, “Actually, we made a mistake and there are no more savings to be had”. The savings that were promulgated in 2020 had already been made.

Bigger is no longer better. A forced reorganisation across the entirety of this country is likely to crystallise at least £1 billion-worth of unaccounted for pension strain costs for those who would be entitled to retire on a full pension up to 10 years early, having been forced out on grounds of efficiency. There is special meaning to those words. However, those billion pounds or so have not been taken into account, and it is local people who will pick up the tab. Through the Bill, we will end up with more expensive additional layers to have mayors who can raise taxes on things for which they are not even responsible.

I do not intend to relitigate the arguments I made on Monday, but there is no clarity on where the new town and parish councils will sit. This is unfinished business that we will need to revisit on Report. We must ask: is there even capacity in national government, let alone local government, for this reorganisation at a time when councils should be in the van of building homes, growing the economy and picking up the pieces for those who have fallen on hard times?

I ought to alight for a moment on the consequences of council tax equalisation in a territory, none of which has been considered at all. I am a veteran of several rounds of local government reorganisation over many years. In the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, there were some statutory tests, including on value for money, equity between areas and consistency of electoral quotient. There needs to be a broad cross-section of support, but none of this is included in the Bill. The requirement for consent has been abandoned—this is something that is going to be done to people.

Last night I was at a dinner in London and people told me how, 20 years ago, they travelled from all parts of the country to go to Norwich to celebrate their octocentenary; it was 800 years. Among them were lord mayors, honorary aldermen, the sheriffs and the reeves. The Bill is silent on how this important civic part of our nation is to be treated. In an unthinking reorganisation, the civic life of our nation will be vandalised. In future, there will be no more trips to Norwich, or anywhere else for that matter, for those people who are part of the social grease of the way our nation works.

I have heard it said that this will make local government simpler and more straightforward. As we have learned over many days in Committee, however, it will cost more, there will be plenty more expensive layers and there will be more complication. Last week we discovered for the first time that, among the 40 fire authorities in this country, there will be 10 different structural arrangements. What a missed opportunity this is. Rather than reorganising the deckchairs in local government, perhaps we could do something about simplification. But no: there will be less accountability and it will be more impenetrable.

Ultimately, families, businesses and the economy outside the M25 will suffer while London and the mets get to sit this one out. There is no equity there at all. People will be paying more for less, having powers taken further away from them. Nobody wants it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I feel bound to remind the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, that the Bill is a Labour continuation of a local government reorganisation started under the Conservatives. This is very much the Michael Gove—now the noble Lord, Lord Gove—view of how England should be governed, with mayors as the key element and large units imposed regardless of place.

I have done my politics in Yorkshire over the years. I think the imposition of a single unitary council, against the preferences of almost all local authority members in North Yorkshire—except York, because York was, by and large, a contest between Liberal Democrats and Labour—was a crucial example of ignoring place-making in everything else.

When I do my politics in Bradford, I am conscious that it is a large unitary authority and I see good councillors struggling to represent their wards, and councillors who are not so good leaving their wards pretty much unrepresented. I support very strongly everything that the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, said about the importance of place, and of recognising that different areas require different patterns. I also regret the tendency of successive Governments to go in for restructuring when they are not sure what else to do, the unlikelihood that this will lead to better government and, sadly, the likelihood that it will leave more people across England feeling unrepresented and ignored.

I was very struck by a letter I saw this morning from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Fire Safety, Building and Democracy. That seems to me to place the importance given to democracy in the appropriate place according to the Bill. This is supposed to be a democratic Government and a democratic country. All politics is local. The figures on public trust that I see every year show that the public trust Westminster less than they trust local government. Weakening local government is a very bad idea but, unfortunately, that is what the Bill is all about.

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, size really does matter. Big is not necessarily beautiful. I am a practitioner, as many know, looking up the telescope from place-making projects we are working on across the country, I declare my interest as such. I am a voice, I suppose, from the charitable and voluntary sector and the social enterprise sector. As I said, I am looking up the telescope into these impenetrable large structures, trying to deliver place-making projects on the ground.

My experience over many years and today confirms what the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, is saying: he is correct and we need to be very careful about these matters. My colleagues and I have been working with one county council leader on place-making projects for the past eight years within a large structure. He is an excellent, capable leader, but it was virtually impossible, even with his support, to get this beast to dance to an innovation tune on place-making in his county. It was like swimming through treacle, even though all the politics was in the right place to do it. I found that this structure was too large to have any sense of place or to have any relationships with people on the ground, where it really matters. If future place-making is about bringing people together, people and relationships are crucial.

In practice, this restructuring is already halting many place-making projects in challenging communities in the north of England, as staff look for new jobs. My colleagues and I see and experience it every day. The Government have a right to restructure, but they need to listen very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, and those of us working on the ground: the practical details really matter.

The country is in danger of coming to a halt. We need to get interested in practice on the ground and what works in detail. At the moment, practitioners feel ignored. We want to help, but there needs to be a dialogue and real interest in what works on the ground in local communities.

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Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

205: Clause 60, page 61, line 27, at end insert—
“(2A) In making regulations under subsection (2), it is the general duty of the Secretary of State to ensure that such regulations promote the role, involvement, and authority of locally elected councils in the governance of neighbourhood areas.(2B) It is also the general duty of the Secretary of State, in making regulations under subsection (2), to encourage local decision-making as close as practicable to the neighbourhoods affected.”

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my amendment and the others in this group all stem from a degree of unease, in particular about Clause 60 but also generally about the ethos of this Bill towards local democracy, local representation and local participation. Clause 60 talks about

“appropriate arrangements to secure the effective governance of any area”.

It says nothing about elections or representation. Subsection (3)(d) talks about

“the purpose of ensuring local engagement with the neighbourhood”,

but there is nothing here about local councils. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I am uneasy about the whole Bill’s approach to democratic engagement and participation.

I know that many within our governing elite think that elections are a cost and we should reduce their number or frequency. I am very conscious that Dominic Cummings made his reputation by campaigning against regional government in the north-east because it would cost money and there would be more politicians—and the fewer politicians, the better. However, the fewer politicians you have, the more authoritarians you end up with.

Among my criticisms of the Bill are that it does not define its terms very clearly. “Local”, “neighbourhood” and “community” are used to cover a great variety of things. I recall that Norwich has been described as a “parish council”—a city as a parish council—but there are all sorts of confusions there. “Effective governance” itself needs a good deal more explanation than we have.

I am a liberal. I believe in democracy which has local, political and popular engagement, and I believe in active citizens. I support votes at 16, which the Government are about to produce in the elections Bill —I have just been told that it will be published within the next month—in order to encourage the engagement of young people in public life, starting with voting. However, if we are going to think that one through, they have to have some way of being engaged.

We know what has happened to our structures of local government over the last 70 years. I grew up in a country which had urban district councils, rural district councils, county boroughs and a great many more local authorities. Not surprisingly, political parties were all larger. The core of your local Conservative association was your local councillors and those who worked with them; it was similar with the core of your local Labour Party, and so on and so forth. No wonder political parties have shrunk in numbers and more and more citizens feel disengaged from politics, because less politics goes on at the local level. To repeat what I said earlier, the statement that all politics starts with local politics is a fundamental thing about democracy. City self-government is, after all, the basis of civilisation —that is what “civilisation” means—and if we are depriving Oxford, Cambridge, Harrogate and Norwich of self-government, we are really getting into trouble.

I think the Government think that local government is about delivery, delivery is best done by direction from the centre and you do not want too many local authorities to get in the way. I understand Clause 60 as saying that, in some cases, non-elected neighbourhood groups are better and easier to work with than elected representation. Perhaps the Minister will reassure us on that. I hope I have misunderstood, but I may not have done.

I am a democrat and a liberal, and I therefore want to see an active democracy from the local to the national level in the UK. This Bill seems, on the whole, to make democracy weaker, and Clause 60 is the most dubious clause of all. I beg to move.

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I am not aware that it was controversial or objected to at the time that we considered it under the levelling-up legislation; it is just that it has not been brought into force. So, the purpose of my amendment is to add town councils and these new neighbourhood structures the qualifying bodies, to add single foundation strategic authorities and development corporations with planning powers to the relevant authorities for the purpose. I should of course note that I do not live in greater Cambridge any more but it is the intention of the Government to create a development corporation with significant planning powers on all strategic sites in that area. It would be remiss not to ensure that development corporations also have regard to neighbourhood priority statements when undertaking their planning functions. The final part of Amendment 241D would require that new Section 15K neighbourhood priority statements added to the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act be brought into force within two months of the passage of this Act.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, might I ask the noble Lord a question about which areas are not parishes? My strong impression is that the unparished areas in Britain are, by and large, poorer inner-city areas —those areas that are most disengaged and disillusioned with politics. If that is the case, it ought to concern us, but I have not yet managed to get full evidence of it.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am sure the noble Lord is absolutely right about that. The interesting thing is that, just because an area is urban, it does not mean that it does not have parishes. London, one of the biggest cities in Europe, is very often called a city of villages. That they are called parishes is normal in urban areas as much as it is in country areas. “Parish” is not a rural concept; it is a well-established historical concept, wherever you happen to live. Extending parishes across the country would be an admirable way of extending neighbourhood governance.

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[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a really important debate because it has emphasised and demonstrated the muddle that is in the Bill: the vacuum that will be created following the local government reorganisation process. How is it that Clause 60 cannot even bring itself to mention the town and parish councils that have formed the bedrock of our society?

I know it is inconvenient to have those pesky politicians interfering in that administrative competence: why do we want delegates and deputies at that lowest level? I can understand why the dead hand of Marsham Street has written Clause 60 as it has, but it is not good enough, because it does not have the golden thread of legitimacy that comes only with elections or democratic accountability. We are not seeing authoritative governance, but authoritarian governance; we will be leaving it to local authorities to impose relationships in some smaller parts of their territory without any regard or requirement for democratic legitimacy.

We have had an interesting discussion. The number bandied around was that 20% of places are unparished. It is not equally spread throughout the nation but, by and large, the historic county boroughs have not been parished because they have been billing authorities and districts in their own right. Areas such as King’s Lynn —a proud Hanseatic town—are currently going through a consultation to form their own parish so that there is not a vacuum. I am very attracted to Amendments 207 and 210, and especially Amendment 209A from the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, because they would prevent a vacuum. Nature abhors a vacuum, but there will be one unless we have these absolute requirements here.

In our discussion about parishes, there was some confusion over what we might call ecclesiastical parishes —those parts of a town with a parish church—but we have not really got to constituted, incorporated parishes that are part of a parish council. It is important that our nomenclature is straightened out. I will talk about civil parishes as opposed to ecclesiastical ones.

There are already multiple arrangements. In my electoral ward, the two parishes of Alpington and Yelverton are inconveniently at both ends of the alphabet but have come together to form a community council—a joint parish council with warding for periodic elections. A minimum number of councillors from Alpington and a minimum number from Yelverton must come together as part of that. Put together, about 400 or 500 people live in those two parishes. Where is the equivalence between Alpington and Yelverton working together and Weston-super-Mare? We are trying to shoehorn this. The Bill should be clear.

In the previous session on the Bill on Monday, I ploughed a lonely furrow as I tried to make some sort of size distinction between these smaller parishes and the larger towns. I was on my own; had that debate been held today, I feel I might have got more support. Nevertheless, we must make sure that we end up with properly constituted, incorporated bodies to govern these smaller bits. Just establishing a joint committee or sub-committee of the new body that sits above it will not be any good, exactly because of the library point that was made so well.

The Bill is deficient because none of this texture is explained or laid out. There is just a muddle, with no legitimacy. This must be brought back on Report with significantly more flesh on the bones and I encourage the Minister to do so. I am not sure whether even Stevenage is parished; it was certainly a new town. That is a whole new class of authority that we may need to look at in this regard. We must try to bring together all those bits from my noble friend Lord Lansley, the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, and others to bring some order to this. Otherwise, it will be disorderly.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I apologise for intervening, but it is not just about legitimacy—it is also that local areas occasionally want to pay for local amenities that the large unitary does not want to pay for. Shipley, in which Saltaire is based, now has a town council because Bradford decided that it could not afford to pay for public toilets. Ilkley had its own town council so it could do it, and the other tourist destination, Haworth, has a Brontë museum, which pays for its own toilets. Saltaire is a world heritage site, but it had no money to pay for its toilets, so we had to form Shipley Town Council to reopen an absolutely essential part of our local community and economic area. That is a new tension that we have; for libraries and other things, we need some degree of fundraising power for local activities.

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[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

It is actually in Knebworth, north Hertfordshire, but I take the noble Lord’s point.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my unease has not been lessened by the Minister’s answers, and I suspect that others will feel the same way.

The Minister says that they do not want to impose a single model. I thought that this Bill was about imposing a single model on the governance of England. It was certainly made clear by the Conservative Government —let us accept that this is a Conservative model that which the Labour Government are introducing—that, unless east Yorkshire and North Yorkshire accepted the mayoral model, they would not get the deal for which they were asking. There is a large question there.

When I heard the Minister say that the role that town and parish councils play in neighbourhood governance is recognised, I want to know who else is playing a role and how important the town and parish councils’ role might be. Will it be marginal or major? We do not know what the other bits of neighbourhood governance are intended to do. I am happy to hear that the Government want town and parish councils to continue to play an important and valuable role, but I think more of us want to ensure that they play a significant and leading role in local democracy. At the moment, Clause 60 does not provide us with that reassurance. For the time being, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment, but this is something to which we will want to come back if and when we manage to reach Report.

Amendment 205 withdrawn.

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[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for not participating at Second Reading and speaking on this occasion, but the circumstances between Second Reading and now have changed very substantially. I intend to concentrate on the amendments relating to delayed elections.

Before I do so, may I make an observation? I shall go no further at this stage than making it clear to the noble Lord, Lord Pack, the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, and others that I do not support their proposals in relation to changing the voting systems. Although I know that they pursue this matter on a point of principle, I warn them that, under the current political circumstances, trying to change the electoral systems will be portrayed by one political party in particular as denying it the opportunity to be represented on councils. I make that observation in passing.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, I support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in principle. I have tried to make contact with the Association of Electoral Administrators to establish its view on this but, unfortunately, its excellent chief executive, Peter Stanyon, who is normally enormously helpful on such matters, is currently off in ill health. So I could not get any clarification, but I am sure that, in broad principle, it would want to follow what this amendment is pursuing.

I turn now to the nub of this whole issue, which is the delay in elections. I first spoke on electoral matters in the other House in 1984. I voted against the then Conservative Government on a three-line Whip—I was one of the first new boys to do so—because I believed that the Government were, in the process of abolishing the GLC via the paving Bill, interfering with democracy. Looking back on that proposed Bill, I still take that view and am pleased that I voted against the Government on that occasion. It is interesting that the Government dropped the specific proposal against which I voted after the House of Lords passed its opposition to that same clause by a majority.

Since that time, I have never given consideration to the possibility of deferring elections for up to seven years. If somebody had suggested to me that that was going to happen in this democratic country, I would have said that they were positively insane. The history of the last few weeks has really called into question my faith in the legislation that we have on our democratic process. On 18 November, the Minister’s response to me and others was that the intention of the Government was to hold the elections as identified in full. We received the same response on 8 December.

On 18 December, the day we went into recess, the Government issued a letter to 63 councils asking whether they wished to defer the elections. Please do not tell me, or other Members of this House or the other, that no consideration was given on 18 November or during the five weeks that followed—or even on the night of 17 December—to the fact that there might be delays in elections, because nobody will believe you, I am afraid. It is a question of competence and honesty in relation to the processes. I have come to the conclusion that, sadly, we are witnessing a serious erosion of our democratic principles in this country by silence at different stages.

I do not mind which amendment we adopt, in what form, but we have to ensure that, as a democratic country, which I believe the United Kingdom to be, we are never again in the position where a Government announce their actions in the way that they have, with the result—as the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, and others have said—that people who have a vested interest in not facing re-election are taking the decisions on those elections. I despair of what I have witnessed over the last few weeks. I ask the Government to be more honest and open throughout, because it is not acceptable that I find myself, for the first time in 40 years of reviewing elections, seriously questioning whether a Government can interfere with elections when they really should not.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak a little about the proposals to change to a supplementary vote. I have some memories of how this came to be, since I was involved between 1996 and 1998 in some of the discussions between the Liberal Democrats and the then Labour Government about voting systems. The Labour Cabinet was divided on the subject; Jack Straw was one of the strongest opponents of any change in the electoral system and the most he was prepared to accept was the sort of bastard form of half way towards an alternative vote, which is the supplementary vote. It is neither one thing nor the other.

Now that we are in a multiparty system, we have to face up to the implications of where we are. For most of the last year, we have had five parties in England getting between 10% and 30% of the vote and no party getting over 30% of the vote. The elected Mayor of the West of England received 25% of the vote to become mayor. I think the record for the lowest percentage of the vote won by a winning candidate happened in a Cornish local by-election, in which the Liberal candidate was victorious with 19.5% of the vote in a six-party contest.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

The noble Lord is correct.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

We need to recognise where we are. If we want mayors to have public acceptance and credibility, they had better not be elected on less than a quarter of the vote. If we have a five-party system, the opinion polls—my nerdy noble friend here does his best to educate me about public opinion polls and I therefore follow them in some detail—show that if you look at second preferences for Reform, Conservative or Liberal Democrat voters, they are very diverse, and one cannot guarantee that votes will easily transfer from one party to another definite party. Jack Straw was prepared to accept the supplementary vote in the belief that, in London elections, the Liberal Democrats were more likely on the whole to vote Labour as their second preference than the Conservatives, and therefore it was acceptable. The supplementary vote is half way to where we need to go but it is neither one nor the other.

I simply say to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, that the old argument that the English people would not understand something more complicated than first past the post is for the past. The Irish understand a more complicated voting system very well, as do the Scots. The idea that the English education system is so poor that our voters will not understand simply does not begin to stand up.

If mayors are going to be key elements in devolution, we need to face up to a system that will provide us with the assurance that mayors will be elected in such a way as to gain the acceptance and credibility they need to have their posts. The current first past the post system does not guarantee that nor does the supplementary vote system. The Government need to recognise that that is where we are.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, I will begin by addressing the amendments in this group concerning voting systems.

The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, opposes Clause 61 and Schedule 28 standing part of the Bill. These provisions will reinstate the supplementary vote system for the elections of mayors and police and crime commissioners. This was the voting system in place when these roles were first introduced. The Government recognise that the voting system used to elect our representatives sits at the heart of our democracy and is of fundamental importance, which has been reflected in today’s debates.

Given the large population that each regional mayor represents—far exceeding that of Members of Parliament —and that they act individually rather than collectively as part of a council or parliament, the Government believe that mayors should have a broad base of support among their electors. We believe that the supplementary vote system, which is a preferential voting system, will achieve this and is appropriate for electing candidates to single-person executive positions, such as mayors. The supplementary vote helps to increase the local electorate’s voice, as voters may choose a first and second choice candidate. It requires the winning candidate to receive the majority of votes counted, which ensures a broader mandate from the people they are representing.

Currently, mayors are elected using the first past the post system. We recognise that that system, while not perfect, has its merits: it is a well-understood system that provides a direct relationship between a Member of Parliament or a councillor and the local constituency or ward. Therefore, we believe that first past the post is appropriate for elections where there are a number of seats to be filled, such as in councils and parliaments, as the likelihood is that candidates representing a range of views and parties will be elected. However, this clearly does not apply when electing someone to a single-person executive position, as is the case for mayors and police and crime commissioners. Therefore, we believe that the supplementary vote is the right system for electing mayors, which is why the Bill reverts the voting system back to the supplementary vote.

Amendment 213, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Pack, seeks to introduce the alternative vote system for the election of mayors. While I agree that mayors should be elected using a preferential voting system, the Government believe that the supplementary vote system is the right preferential voting system for electing mayors. The supplementary vote was the voting system implemented on the introduction of mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections, which was in place until 2022, when the voting system changed to first past the post. We are reinstating the voting system that was originally used for these elections, which will be familiar to many voters. I note that, when the public were asked for their view on the alternative vote system, albeit in relation to UK parliamentary elections, they did not support the move to the alternative vote system. In the referendum held in 2011, 67.9% of voters rejected this proposal. The alternative vote system is not in use in any polls in the UK.

Amendments 214 and 215, tabled by the noble Baronesses, Lady Pinnock and Lady Bennett, would allow for the introduction of a proportional representation voting system for local authority elections. The Government have no plans to change the electoral system for local council elections in England. As I have already laid out, the first past the post system is a clear way of electing representatives to a council and provides for a direct relationship between a councillor and their ward. Therefore, for local council elections, the Government believe that first past the post remains the most appropriate system.

I turn now to the amendments that concern the timings of elections. We will of course have a debate on this on 23 February, the first day back after the Recess—I hope we all come back refreshed. Before I speak to the specific amendments, I remind your Lordships that the Government have embarked on the most significant programme of council reorganisation in England in 50 years. We are determined to streamline local government for the remaining one-third of people who still live under the two-tier system. It is in this unprecedented context that the decisions to postpone certain council elections for one year have been taken.

Our view is that it is time for bold action on both local government reorganisation and devolution, but we recognise that reorganisation is resource intensive at all levels, political and administrative, within a council. We have listened to those councils that have told us that postponing their elections this May will release vital capacity to deliver reorganisation effectively. It will also avoid the cost and distraction of elections to councils which are likely to be abolished shortly.

I reiterate that the Government’s position is that elections should go ahead unless there is strong justification otherwise. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, that is the sentence I have always used when I have talked about elections. The Secretary of State recently announced that the high bar we set for taking a decision to postpone has been reached in a number of councils. The legislation to implement these decisions was laid in Parliament on 5 February.