Draft Combined Authorities (Borrowing) Regulations 2022

Richard Bacon Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 General Committees

[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich, who is my parliamentary neighbour, I was struck by the comments of the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Weaver Vale. It is now 50 years since Tony Crosland, a Labour Environment Secretary—as it was in those days, but the position covered local government—used the famous words, “the party is over” in relation to local government borrowing.

The regulations provide for an extension of borrowing powers by local government. As has been said, a variety of councils from across the country undertook investments that they thought were sound. In my constituency, a neighbouring council bought a golf club, which it was pleased by and thought was excellent; I was told that it was going to produce a 7.5% return. I may have commented in the local media at the time that councils owning golf clubs was not necessarily what council tax payers expected. I do not think that anybody assumed that a Government of the future would at some point make the playing of golf a criminal act, but that is of course exactly what happened.

Colleagues’ question about what kind of scrutiny is in place is a first order question, and I hope that the Minister will take it to heart and undertake to write to Committee members with more detail than we have heard today about the scrutiny measures that will be in place.

Section 1 of the Localism Act 2011 is entitled,

“Local authority’s general power of competence”,

and subsection (1) states:

“A local authority has power to do anything that individuals generally may do.”

Section 1 (4) reads:

“Where subsection (1) confers power on the authority to do something, it confers power (subject to sections 2 to 4) to do it in any way whatever, including…power to do it anywhere in the United Kingdom or elsewhere…power to do it for a commercial purpose or otherwise for a charge, or without charge, and…power to do it for, or otherwise than for, the benefit of the authority, its area or persons resident or present in its area.”

There are therefore already very wide powers.

I was particularly interested that the Minister said that the extra powers will apply not only to the existing combined authority, but to the bespoke deals available locally. Will he confirm or refute—now or later in writing—whether the regulations go beyond the bespoke powers of the combined authority and extend to the broad powers in section 1 of the Localism Act 2011 to which I referred? Although we all want, at least on paper and in theory, for local government to be accountable to local citizens, we have seen this process go wrong repeatedly in the past, and the framework—the failure regime—that the Government put in place when the extra powers become law will be very important.