English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Ninth sitting)

Perran Moon Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 23rd October 2025 Public Bill Committees

[Paul Holmes]

Well, the Minister should speak to the many council leaders across the country who do not agree that it is enough.

If the Minister is seriously saying that abolishing 90% of elected councillors in rural areas across this country will somehow be the miracle cure for local government, and that is what is driving these measures, then I am sorry but this Government need to go back to the drawing board.

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

It is great to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. Cornwall reorganised in 2009 and is now the third largest unitary council in the UK. There is no question of any sort of democratic deficit across the whole of Cornwall. Why does the hon. Member think that is?

[Paul Holmes]

I think it was reorganised under a Labour Government. When people in this country went to the polls in July 2024, and we accept that we lost the election—[Interruption.]—and lost it pretty badly, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield says. I absolutely accept that, and I do not think there is any disagreement on why or how that happened, but can the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth point me to where his party’s then local government spokesperson, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), said to councillors in her party that they were about to be abolished, or where she said to local government leaders or the general public that Labour would carry out a huge reorganisation of local government? If he can, I will eat my words. I challenge him to show me where his party said at the general election that it was going to do that. Can he do that?

[Perran Moon]

When I was knocking on doors in Cornwall, people were worried not about a democratic deficit but about waste and bureaucracy in local government. They wanted a more streamlined local government structure, focused on delivering services. That is what the Bill aims to do.

[Paul Holmes]

Councillors across this country aim and strive to do that day in and day out, within the current structures. Any suggestion otherwise is an insult to elected councillors across the UK, and I am not saying that he said that—I am saying that every councillor in this country is elected to serve and to deliver services in the best way they can. My fundamental disagreement is that, as the Minister has said, reorganisation in a pure attempt to save money and deliver more efficient services is not provable. Many unitary councils across the country—a single tier of local government established in the last reorganisation in 1997—are now in huge financial trouble. That is not just because of the allocations that were put forward by the previous Government. It is because a single tier of local authority of that size does not necessarily deliver for an area. This Government’s aim of ensuring that that goes on across the whole country will not tackle some of the fundamental financial issues that our local authorities suffer from.