English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Second sitting)

Manuela Perteghella Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Manuela Perteghella (Stratford-on-Avon) (LD)]

Q What examples can the panel provide of effective relationships between retailers, hospitality businesses and local government? Can you also let us know whether those relationships work better at a local level, or can they be managed and led regionally?

Andrew Goodacre: I am really lucky in the role that I do. I get to visit places around the country. I have become involved with initiatives. Recently, there was an initiative from Visa, which sponsored the “Let’s Celebrate Towns” awards. I was judge for one section of the awards, which was about high streets that had been regenerated. Local areas had to put themselves forward, and we considered elements of the regeneration—partly digital, and partly how they have integrated transformation into their world and understood their target market. I have visited three of those places since in the last two months.

In fact, last month, I was in a place called Oakengates in Shropshire, near Telford. I visited Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, and I visited New Malden, a suburb in south London. Those are three different areas—three different socioeconomic places with different background foundations. What they all have in common is local pride, local involvement and local people making decisions. Not all of them are councillors or politicians, or sit on a local authority. New Malden was about a focus group looking at ways they could improve their status, being between Wimbledon and Richmond—often the forgotten part. They have created a fantastic cultural experience, because they have a large Korean population that is integrated very well into it.

If you go to Oakengates, it has a very simple local high street. It has a huge retail park near it, but it works well. The local council and local people work well with the local authority, and they receive funding. It has free car parking as a policy—no wonder there is a 94% occupancy rate on the high street against an average of 86%. Enniskillen has a business improvement district, which is funded by rate payers, although it is slightly different in Northern Ireland. Again, local people are proud of their high street. When I walked up and down, I saw only one empty unit.

It is about local people with pride in their area who really understand what they are trying to achieve. Each one has a different mission. New Malden wants to become a food centre and a tourist attraction in that respect. Enniskillen wants to build on the fact that it is the only island town in Northern Ireland and is worth visiting; it has so many fantastic local features. Oakengates wants to be a local place for local people, and not forgotten about despite the huge retail park next to it.

I see plenty examples of local people, if they are given a chance and the right involvement and engagement, being able to make the right decisions for their areas, because they really understand what they need. Sometimes they need help and guidance, and it is not always perfect. I am sure that if I really thought about it, I could think of some bad examples, but just recently I have had the privilege of seeing three where it works.

Allen Simpson: Great examples. I mentioned Folkestone as an example of somewhere that has regenerated incredibly strongly. That is, to some degree, non-replicable because one thing that has driven Folkestone’s success is a wealthy local man who has ploughed a lot of his personal wealth into regenerating his community—largely, from what I can see, for social purposes. Bootle is an interesting case study of a specific national Government grant being used locally to drive high street regeneration, with the intention of bringing in other sorts of business behind it. That has been quite successful. There is another example up in Aberdeen around the dock area, where a mixture of local businesses and—I think I am right in saying—council grants have reduced the cost of access.

A universal trend seems to be peppercorn renting, to the extent that an ex-industrial, brownfield site will be brought online. This was true in Peckham when the cocktail bar, Frank’s, opened above the Peckhamplex. I was young at the time, so it was 15 or 20 years ago. Low rents have two benefits. First, they allow businesses to take a risk on opening in an area where it is unclear whether there is live spend available to them. Secondly, those opportunities are open to local people. That is an important point, because the wealth generated tends to be returned to the community in quite a powerful way. I come back to the point that if you can get that right—and there are lots of examples of where it has been less successful—you get other sorts of economic activity crowding in. If it goes well, you have to manage questions of gentrification and how you keep the character of the local area, but that is a second-order concern for a lot of areas.

[The Chair]

Can I just ask you to keep your answers fairly short? We have two very important questioners coming up. I call the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Simmonds]

Q The previous panel addressed some of the complexities of the local government finance landscape, with the different accounts and so on. I am interested in your perspective as someone from the audit sector that receives many of these contracts, first on the challenges involved in skilling up the sector with the necessary knowledge and training. I am also interested in your perspective on the standardisation question. I think we all understand that audit is sometimes more of an art than a science—sometimes the other way round. How do you end up with something where everybody understands what is expected of them, in the context of a high degree of transparency that often is not really there in the commercial sector? How do decisions to deviate from that standard impact on the wider perception of the state of that organisation?

Mark Stocks: Local government accounts are complex. These are highly complex sorts of businesses, if I can use that phrase, that deal with any number of services. What we see now are local finance teams who are stretched, to be candid. There has been a lack of investment in them over the years. Gareth talked about trainees going from the Audit Commission into local government, but that does not happen now. There is a bunch of people who are around 50, who may be disappearing in the short term, so we have to sort out the strength of local government finance teams. As I said, we also need to sort out the complexity of the accounts.

In terms of the standards, all local government accounts are under international financial reporting standards, and that will not change. That is a Treasury requirement. How that is interpreted and what is important in those accounts is open to judgment. The emphasis from the LAO on whether it is more important for us to audit income or to audit property will make a difference to what local auditors do. I would always argue that it is more important to audit income.

It is very difficult to standardise anything that we do, because local government is not standardised. I can take you from a district authority that spends £60 million, most of which is housing benefit, to an authority that spends £4 billion and has significant regeneration schemes and companies. The skillsets that you need and the ability to standardise is very difficult. You have to have the right skills to do the work.

[Manuela Perteghella]

Q Do you anticipate any issues in the working relationships between the new Local Audit Office and the local authorities it will audit?

Mark Stocks: The Local Audit Office cannot look like the Audit Commission. The Audit Commission took a particular tack in terms of what it did and the level of scrutiny that it put on local government. If the Local Audit Office follows suit, which this Bill does not allow it to, I am sure there will be problems. But the way the Local Audit Office is configured in the Bill is to make local audit stronger. As long as the Local Audit Office sticks to that, I do not think there will be too much of a problem.

[The Chair]

Order. I will suspend the Committee for 10 minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Bullet points would be great.

Richard Hebditch: This is not a good way to start an answer, but it is a massive challenge, and I very much recognise that. One of the things is around democratic legitimacy. As Naomi was saying, it is not about entirely removing local planning authorities’ say in how they deal with applications. It is important to ensure there is a community voice in the development of local plans as well. There is a challenge, as previously mentioned, if local government reorganisation is going on at the same time.

It is also about having a level of democratic accountability within the strategic layer. I mentioned the lack of structures for these new strategic authorities beyond the indirectly elected constituent authorities. The previous panel was discussing ideas that might improve engagement. There are risks in relying on elections every four years as the entire democratic legitimacy, particularly in a time when you have five parties all quite close together in polling, and you are seeing that in local authority elections at the moment.

There are risks in relying on that to justify your decisions without necessarily having a structure for what happens in the gap between those four years to ensure democratic voice and community engagement. It is not necessarily for the Bill, but maybe there is something around ensuring that there are adequate reviews of how this will operate, drawing on the ideas that the previous panel was discussing. We also now have the national covenant between civil society and national Government, so it is about whether we can look at similar things at a strategic layer and at a local layer.

Naomi Luhde-Thompson: Let me add just one example. I do not know whether anyone knows about the Salt Cross area action plan. It is West Oxfordshire district council: 2,000 homes on a greenfield site, and they want it to be zero carbon. It is going to have business on it and affordable housing. The community is really supportive, because that development is bringing things for them. The only problem is that those developing it want to strip out some of the things about zero carbon, for example, so there is a conflict there. I think that is all about—this is a whole different conversation—land values and land value capture, and how you get the public benefit out of development.

[Manuela Perteghella]

Q At the moment, we have a lot of expertise at district council level as the local planning authority. My own district council, Stratford-on-Avon district council, is now shaping the South Warwickshire local plan, so it has experience in plan making, planning policy and so on. With the demise of district councils, how can we be reassured that this expertise will be represented at the strategic authority level? Do you think that specific training should be introduced to support decision makers to make effective judgments on planning?

Richard Hebditch: The Planning and Infrastructure Bill has the requirements on training for councillors when they make decisions. That is something we have welcomed, at that level. I think this goes back to the point on resourcing as well. The funding that has gone in to pay for planners to help develop at the SDS level is welcome. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill changes on being able to retain fee income from planning, and to vary fee income, are also welcome.

There is still an ongoing issue, and there are particular issues that the Royal Town Planning Institute has raised around apprenticeships and being able to have new entrants into planning. Changes in the rules around apprenticeships might threaten that input for planners.

Naomi Luhde-Thompson: We should be applying the subsidiarity principle. We should be making the decision at the closest level at which it is relevant to make that decision.