Local Government: Reinvigorating Local Democracy

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate, who has brought a new and valuable perspective to our debate. I agree with him about citizens’ assemblies, the potential of which has yet to be realised.

It is over 55 years since I was first elected as a local councillor, at a time when we still had town clerks—aldermen—with no hint of expenses or salaries. My time at Lambeth Town Hall was long before that of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and even before that of Ted Knight. My years there and at County Hall gave me an insight into and a respect for local government, which has stayed with me ever since. Indeed, when I became a Member of Parliament, that time as a councillor was invaluable, as nearly all the casework that came across my desk was the responsibility of one or two tiers of local government.

Local democracy will not take off until local people have the knowledge and confidence to contact their local councillor about a problem rather than the local MP. At the moment, it is a one-sided battle. You have a full-time, high-profile, publicity-hungry Member of Parliament with four full-time members of staff, against a councillor who is less well-known, probably with other commitments and with a fraction of the resources behind them. However, that is a debate for another time.

I agree with those who say we are an overcentralised country. The PACAC report from the other place, published last October, said it all:

“The governance arrangements for England (and the United Kingdom as a whole) are some of the most centralised among democratic countries in the world. The key question this raises is whether decisions are being made in the right place to provide effective government for the people of England. The evidence we received clearly demonstrated that, both practically and democratically, the overly centralised governance arrangements in England are problematic. The balance of decisions is weighted too much to the centre and this leads to suboptimal decisions being made. We found that the dominant reason for continued overcentralisation is a prevalent culture in Whitehall that is unwilling to let go of its existing levers of power”.


More of that in a moment.

I then sat on the Public Services Committee of your Lordship’s House, which looked at lessons learned from the pandemic. We concluded as follows:

“COVID-19 has demonstrated that certain key public service functions are best delivered locally. These include the pandemic response of public health systems, the recruitment of volunteers and contact-tracing. To increase the resilience of public services in any future health crises, the Government must give more decision-making responsibility to its partners at the local level”.


I think that is likely to be reinforced by the Covid inquiry.

I can give no better evidence of the culture that PACAC described than the Government’s response to a modest amendment of mine to allow local planning authorities to set their own fees for planning applications, in order to cover costs. Against the background of the commitment in the levelling up White Paper to

“usher in a revolution in local democracy”,

I hoped that the Government would be able to accept it. After all, why should the council tax, with all the pressing demands on it, be obliged to subsidise to the tune of several hundred million pounds a year the cost of running planning departments? It is worth quoting the two sentences used to dismiss the amendment:

“having different fees creates inconsistency, more complexity and unfairness for applicants, who could be required to pay different fee levels for the same type of development. Planning fees provide clarity and consistency for local authorities, developers and home owners”.—[Official Report, 23/4/23; col. 1003.]

As far as local authorities are concerned, they were actually the ones who sponsored my amendment. As far as developers are concerned, they already have to cope with myriad different local plans and can manage different fees. What they really want are well-resourced planning departments that can process efficiently and quickly the planning applications. One of the reasons for the disappointing housebuilding performance is planning delays, and my amendment would have addressed that.

As for home owners, I do not think they know that planning fees are set centrally, and they are used to local authorities having different charges for libraries, parking, allotments and the rest. I do not think they would mind if fees were set locally, as long as they got a good service. I give that as an example of the reluctance to let go, which we need to address if we are genuinely to decentralise.

I believe that, at the beginning of this Parliament, the Government were interested in devolving more power to local government. We were promised a White Paper on English devolution, but that was subjected to a reverse takeover by the levelling-up agenda and, when it came out, it was not the White Paper on devolution but the White Paper on levelling up. As I have mentioned before, there is an innate tension between devolution and levelling up. Devolution involves delegating decisions down to a low level and disengagement from the centre; levelling up implies more central control to remove inequalities between regions. I am in favour of this as a political objective but I have doubts about it as a slogan—which is possibly why levelling up does not get a mention in the Prime Minister’s five oft-repeated commitments.

There is an element of levelling up which successive Governments have ducked for 30 years which would at the same time help give more autonomy to local government by increasing the resilience and relevance of its tax base. Council tax bands are based on property values in 1991. Since then, relative prices have changed significantly: they have gone up six times in London and three times in the north-east. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, the council tax is currently regressive, both between individuals and between local authorities.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, whom I do not quote often, made this point well in an Oral Question:

“My Lords, how is it possible for a £54 million luxury house in London’s Mayfair to have a lower council tax than a former council house on Windebrowe Avenue in Keswick in Cumbria”?—[Official Report, 22/7/21; col. 345.]


Revaluing would be the right thing to do, would lead to average bills falling by more than 20% across most of the north and the Midlands, and would be of greater benefit to those on lower incomes.

Next Tuesday, we are to debate Second Reading of the Non-Domestic Rating Bill, which will introduce more regular revaluations for business premises: three years instead of five. Explaining the need for this, the Local Government Minister, Lee Rowley, said:

“We are bringing the administration of the tax up to date, and making the system more responsive to changes in the economy”.


The Financial Secretary to the Treasury echoed the case, saying that

“we are acting, including with more frequent revaluations to make the system fairer and more responsive.”

Does that not beg the question: if three yearly rather than five yearly reviews are right for non-domestic rates, what conceivable reason can there be for leaving domestic rates unrevalued for more than 30 years? The longer a decision is postponed, the more difficult it becomes to defend the council tax and put more weight on it. If revaluation is a step too far, the tax could be made more progressive by introducing two upper bands on top of band H, which would avoid the wholesale revaluation that was implied by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.

That leads me to my next point. Local authorities need more economic freedom if they are to be genuinely accountable. Council tax increases are constrained, as we have heard. There is little freedom from non-domestic rates and most central government grants are ring-fenced. So here is a proposal to give local authorities more freedom, to complement the menu produced by my noble friend Lady Eaton. At the moment, the Government get some £30 billion in fuel duty revenue. That source of income will dry up over the next decade as we move to electric vehicles. The obvious way to recoup the lost revenue from drivers is through road pricing.

Back in 1996, when I was the Secretary of State for Transport, I proposed a pilot scheme whereby the Transport Research Laboratory would test the feasibility of a charge of 1p per mile for motorway use. Clearly, I was a little ahead of my time. Although road pricing featured in a Labour Government White Paper, no progress was made. The 2010 Labour manifesto, probably drafted by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said:

“We rule out the introduction of national road pricing in the next Parliament”.


Since then, much has changed. We have in-car telematics and a commitment to phase out fossil fuels, and many drivers are already familiar with congestion charges. Road pricing, making more intelligent use of our roads, is the logical answer. Here is the relevance to today’s debate: local authorities already collect parking charges and congestion charges, which are being introduced by more and more cities. The revenue from road pricing, apart from for motorways, should go to local authorities, complementing the existing schemes. This would give them something they have always lacked—a buoyant, independent source of revenue, making them less dependent on government grants.

It would be churlish in this debate on local democracy to end by criticising the Government for the one decision they have taken to give more power to local government. Last Christmas, in an attempt to head off a Back-Bench rebellion on planning, the Government proposed to make housing targets advisory, not mandatory. It was not part of a considered plan but a response to business managers’ plea to avoid a row. If you want to, you can leave local authorities free to decide how many homes to plan for—no Government have ever done this—but you cannot do that and at the same time have a manifesto commitment to build 300,000 homes a year. As I have repeatedly said in this Chamber, you cannot rely on the good will of local government to deliver the homes the country needs.

As a former MP, I am well aware of the powers of the anti-development lobby, but that is to miss the bigger picture. The bigger threat to my party is that it risks being seen as insensitive to the needs of those who desperately need the country to increase the number of new homes—those renting and sharing with parents—a vulnerability which Keir Starmer is being quick to exploit.

I will support amendments to the LUR Bill to give the other place a chance to think again and reverse that deeply unwise decision.