English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (First sitting)

Perran Moon Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

Q Councillor Craig, obviously Greater Manchester has been at the forefront of devolution and the development of mayoral strategic authorities; I had the pleasure of being there at the outset a decade and a half ago. I am interested in your take on the impact the difference and it has made on your communities and, critically, on the collaboration between constituent authorities and the mayor and the strategic authority. During the last panel, the concern was about the power, onus and importance of constituent authorities. I am interested in how it has worked in practice and what we can learn from that.

Bev Craig: That is an important question. The difference for Greater Manchester was that we asked for devolution. That started the journey across the north of England initially, but it went out across the whole country. It has come off the back of a generation of co-operation in Greater Manchester, so it was built into a system. When the Greater Manchester authority was disestablished in the 1980s, my predecessors carried on with the meetings and kept that model alive.

I will come on to accountability, but what helps is that people do not identify with local authority boundaries. We represent people who, in their normal lives, say that they are from a place. A colleague might say that they are from Middleton and they are proud to be from Middleton, but when they are on holiday and people ask where they are from, they say “Near Manchester.” There is something about creating a place that people can identify with; that has been really strong. When you look at models where mayors have been successful, it is because they have tapped into a place identity. That links to my point that rural areas can still have place identity.

On accountability, in the Greater Manchester model of combined authorities, which moved to strategic authorities, we all have a role to play. Think about the role of the city. It is a major economic driver for not just Greater Manchester but the north of England as a whole. The whole region needs Manchester city centre to do well, in the same way that Manchester city centre needs the rest of Greater Manchester to do well if it is to have people with skills, good education, homes to live in and places to celebrate that they enjoy spending time in. That is why, through our model, we all hold portfolios. I am just as interested in getting Atom Valley in the north of the conurbation to be a success as I am in growing my life sciences sector in the city centre. There is something about getting people to take responsibility.

When we look at the competencies, that is why the LGA argues for clarity in the Bill that local authorities will still have a stake in some of the areas that we might think mayoral strategic authorities lead on. I say this with kindness, and I often say it to my Mayor’s face: he can give the parameters of the homes that we build and he can help fund them, and I will put on his logo and picture if we need to, but fundamentally it is Manchester city council that is out there building council homes. That is why we built more council and social homes last year than at any point over the last decade and a half. It works when we work together.

To clarify the role of commissioners in the context of the Bill, where they have been useful in Greater Manchester has been in an advisory capacity. We have been able to draw in people like Dame Sarah Storey as an active travel commissioner. She does not need to be a deputy mayor or take away my authority as a leader of a place, but she brings something that is additional. We must not lose sight of the fact that devolution models work with systems and Bills in place to deliver them, but actually it is about collaboration. There will need to be investment in the time that leaders of a place spend together if you are to get that relationship with the mayor to work.

Kevin Bentley: The identity question was raised before and it is important that we say political boundaries might change but communities do not. Identity of communities will always remain strong, whether you are in a district or county council. I represent 1.5 million people. That could be a disparate place. If you want to say, “Which is the most important to your leader?” they are all important, because they all have their own identities.

[Perran Moon (Camborne and Redruth) (Lab)]

Q A quick question to Councillor Hicks. In your role as chair of the County Council Network, have you had any discussions with or representations from Konsel Kernow, Cornwall Council? If you have, what is the nature of those discussions in relation to mayoral combined authorities?

Matthew Hicks: I have only been in post a week, so I cannot give you an answer as to whether those discussions have taken place in the past. Certainly I know we have looked at the Cornwall business case and Cornwall has always been well represented and a strong voice at the CCN, putting its case very strongly, and I am sure that will continue in the future. However, I cannot answer that question today.

[Vikki Slade]

Q This is a big question, but I know you need to give a quick answer. I think everyone is agreed, or most of us are agreed, that local government needs to reform urgently. Is this it? What is not in the Bill that should have been if we are going to do this properly? There is still an opportunity for us to do that.

Bev Craig: As we touched on earlier, sometimes a conflation of resource and organisation. It is important to draw the distinction that we are not here today to put forward the LGA’s position around the resourcing component, but it is important that we still see that outside the Bill. From an LGA perspective, we would be looking for more clarity on competencies as people move into strategic authorities, and really important is thought around what capacity and support is given to councils as they move through their transition. There are other things that we will continue to push for—for example, thinking about the role of civic and cultural competencies in strategic authorities and how they play into place. Fundamentally, in the Bill we want recognition that local authorities play a key role in delivering all of this, and without collaboration there will not be success.

Kevin Bentley: If I can leave you with one word, it is implementation. Although it does not feel like it, drawing lines on a map and putting the evidence forward is the easy part. Doing it is something very different. We learn from the experience of others and we look at others. This round of devolution is very different from what has happened before. We are creating new large authorities and devolving and disaggregating services upward to those authorities, so we must resource implementation properly. I would like to see a much firmer line on resourcing—not telling us how to do it, because I think we know locally how to do it, but making sure there is resourcing for us to do it. We have to remember that while we are doing that, with shadow elections for us in 2027, we still have to deliver the day job. That is about people and certainly in upper tier authorities, it is about some vulnerable people.

My only concern throughout all of this, and I am and always have been a great devolutionist, is that we do something or miss something and somebody falls through a crack and is left behind. None of us must allow that to happen. I know we will not and we will work very hard, but we need the proper resourcing to make that happen. This is fundamental change and is very unlikely to happen again for the next 50, 60 or even more years in the future. We have to get it right. Our successors will not thank us if we do not.