English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Sam Carling and John McDonnell

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sam Carling (North West Cambridgeshire) (Lab)]

I strongly support this Bill and was proud to serve on the Committee. The Bill will deliver an enormous transfer of power out of this place and into our local communities. As a former councillor, I know that trusting local representatives to make decisions about local services and issues leads to much stronger outcomes.

I want to speak strongly in favour of the Government’s new clauses 49 to 57, which provide for the introduction of national minimum standards for taxi licensing. I am delighted to see the Government bringing forward those measures, which I and others, many of whom have spoken today, have proposed to tackle the huge problem with cross-border licensing, which is an issue for both taxi drivers and passengers. Right now, local councils have significant flexibility around taxi licensing policy, without a baseline, which means there is huge variance between councils. Yet drivers can operate anywhere once licensed. Unsurprisingly, that creates huge demand for licensing from councils with laxer standards.

Wolverhampton has become the UK’s taxi licensing hub. In the first five months of last year, as my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb) mentioned, the council issued over 8,500 licences, which is more than 30 times any other council in the midlands. From April 2023 to March 2024, 96% of licences went to people living elsewhere. Wolverhampton-licensed taxis now operate nationwide, and a third of taxis in Manchester are registered in Wolverhampton, 80 miles away. That is not the drivers’ fault, as seeking out the best deal possible is understandable, particularly if it is cheaper or if processing times are faster. However, there are several problems.

First, drivers who do the right thing and register locally are undercut by those going to councils with weaker standards, creating a race to the bottom that harms both drivers and passengers. We must emphasise that drivers want this to be fixed too, so that rogue operators can be dealt with. There is a real democratic deficit: local authorities cannot regulate their own standards effectively and they lose control, as seen in Peterborough in my area, where plans for CCTV in taxis had to be dropped because locally licensed drivers would pay more while others would avoid the cost by licensing elsewhere.

Secondly, climate and emissions aims are undermined too. Peterborough city council will not license a vehicle that is over nine years old, but Wolverhampton allows cars up to 12 years old. There is a lot of variance on that.

[John McDonnell]

We have all had a go at giving Wolverhampton a bashing. The council has not advertised this licensing; it just deals with it efficiently, so drivers have gone there—but it was not the council’s fault.

[Sam Carling]

I recognise what my right hon. Friend has said. In fact, I carefully drafted this speech to avoid attacking Wolverhampton in any way, because I recognise that the reasons for this situation are complex. That goes to my next point: overstretched councils cannot monitor conditions, let alone enforce them, for drivers operating hundreds of miles away. If there is an incident in my constituency of North West Cambridgeshire involving a driver who is licensed halfway across the country, there is no way that their licensing council can properly investigate and do something about it. It would be like asking Police Scotland to investigate something in Cornwall; it just does not make sense.

Thirdly, there is a huge safety issue. Some councils have less stringent Disclosure and Barring Service checking requirements, they are cheaper, or they have no requirement for CCTV or emission-compliant vehicles, so both passengers and drivers are left without adequate protection when there are incidents. That was a key point of the recent Casey audit on child sexual exploitation and abuse, which identified that some councils go beyond statutory guidance as a means of tackling sexual exploitation, but were hindered by a lack of stringency from other authorities.

That problem was also raised in the 2014 Jay inquiry into child sexual abuse in Rotherham. That rings true with calls from all sectors, including from trade unions such as Unite and the GMB—I declare that I am a GMB member—in their long-running campaigns around this matter, to which I pay tribute. I am delighted that the Government have listened to me and others and adopted the proposals that were brought forward in Committee. I look forward to seeing the detail of what the Government propose for national minimum standards, and I will continue to engage closely.

At this point, I was going to talk about the importance of considering raising the licensing authority level to strategic authorities and transport authorities, so it was brilliant to hear the Minister say just now that we will be consulting on that, because that is the other key part of this story. Together, those two measures could have a profound impact on dealing with the issues in this sector.

Turning briefly to other amendments, I wholeheartedly welcome the Government’s new clause 45, which will remove the requirement for local councillors’ home addresses to be published. Given the security environment, this is excellent news. I am aware of more than one incident in my region over the past few years of councillors’ home addresses being publicised maliciously online by bad faith actors, encouraging people to intimidate councillors in their homes. Indeed, that has happened in my region on several occasions, so this provision will have a tangible impact on keeping safe those dedicated volunteers from our communities who are trying to do what is best.

New clause 79, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard (Alex Mayer), talks about establishing local accounting officers and public accounts committees in each mayoral strategic area. The Government have been talking about this for some time, and there is a lot of support for these committees to hold local spending to account and provide some real oversight, so I would appreciate some thoughts from the Minister on why the Government are not bringing that forward at this time, and whether they are considering doing so more broadly.

To conclude, I really welcome the Bill. We went through it line by line in Committee, so I know what a difference it will make, transforming local government, pushing power out of this place and empowering communities to make decisions that make sense for their areas. As with the last Labour Government, we are spearheading the devolution we need to unlock the growth and opportunities that have for too long been overlooked.