English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Siân Berry Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Olivia Blake (Sheffield Hallam) (Lab)]

I place on record my sincere thanks to the Secretary of State and Ministers for the constructive, open and thoughtful way in which they have engaged with me and my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed), as well as local leaders from the council in Sheffield, throughout the passage of the Bill, to solve an issue of great importance to my constituents.

More broadly, the Bill and the amendment before us today mark a significant step forward for local democracy in Sheffield and beyond. The Bill strengthens community voice, empowers local leaders and brings decisions closer to the people that they affect. We can all celebrate its commitment to clearer, more responsive pathways for devolution. It also tackles big issues, such as the national standards that we need in taxi licensing. I declare an interest as a member of the GMB, which has been campaigning on the issue for many years. I am glad that the Minister has grasped the nettle on the tricky issues relating to local government audit, which those of us who have served on the Public Accounts Committee know has been an issue for many years.

I am especially pleased that the Government have tabled amendments 152 and 153, which will allow Sheffield to retain its committee system, and not just for a protected period but beyond that. The amendments reflect a core principle of effective devolution: to enable local areas to shape the governance structures that best suit their needs and democratic traditions, especially when there has been a referendum, as in Sheffield. I pay tribute to the residents who tirelessly advocated for that and worked alongside us to find the best possible outcome.

For Sheffield, the committee system, agreed to by referendum, is rooted in transparency, co-operation and collective decision making, and embodies the values that our residents strongly support. This is a particularly important moment as it highlights the positive partnership that can be built between central Government and local people. It shows what meaningful devolution can achieve, focusing on shared goals and delivering the best outcomes for communities, and that the Government have listened and Sheffield’s voice has been heard.

The Bill is transformational and I am confident that it will help local leaders to deliver our values and priorities, and the aspirations of the people that they serve. I thank all the campaigners, including those involved in It’s Our City, for campaigning on the issue for many years, including in response to the Bill.

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I want to talk first about public engagement. Fellow members of the Bill Committee know that I am not convinced that the Bill delivers the public involvement and community empowerment stated in its title, as that is not properly facilitated by the proposed measures set out in the Bill.

In Committee, I gave the Government many options to consider, including citizens assemblies, community wealth building strategies and a national public engagement commission. France has had its “Commission nationale du débat public” for 30 years, which makes real its citizens’ rights to be involved in decisions that affect their environment. It links together the environment and human rights, as set out in the excellent Aarhus convention. At this stage, I am happy to support the new option put forward by the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) in relation to community empowerment. It asks the Government to undertake a review and come up with a better plan of the Government’s own choosing, which is quite reasonable and I support it.

I do not have time to go through the many other amendments that I support, but I feel like consensus around many issues is breaking out in the Chamber, as it sometimes did in Committee. However, I want to single out new clause 10, in the name of the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), which proposes a community ownership fund, and new clause 19, which asks for the alternative vote system to be used for mayoral elections, not the supplementary vote. In single member elections, the alternative vote gives real choice: people simply choose their candidate and rank them, so there is no second guessing about who might be in the second round. It means a guaranteed consensus-driven majority for the winning candidate, so the Government should consider that.

More broadly, as some Members have noted, I have talked many times about being a member of the London Assembly and holding the Mayor of London to account with a dedicated, funded scrutiny body. The Government should pay much more attention to scrutiny in this Bill at the next stage.

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

Hear, hear!

[Siân Berry]

I thank my former colleague for his “Hear, hear!”

Let me talk about governance systems and the committee system. My No. 1 goal in all this has been to try to keep the committee systems, as the Conservatives’ amendment 4 would do. My amendments 94 to 102 mirror amendments that I tabled in Committee and seek to protect existing committee systems, particularly those chosen by people in a petition and referendum process, as happened in Sheffield. That was driven by people power.

--- Later in debate ---

As with local elections, where what the Government actually did is quite different from what they promised, on the issue of the tourist tax—where the Minister at the time said that he did not support it because he felt that the sector was already over taxed—the Government are now implementing it without even having the courtesy to tell the House it was coming. It is a policy that is even supported by Reform Members, and businesses in the hospitality and tourism sector will doubtless be looking to see which if any party in this Chamber is willing to stand up for their businesses.

[Siân Berry]

The Minister failed to tell us how the tourist tax would be brought forward in legislation. With the announcement coming yesterday, and after all the opportunities they had in Committee and in debates on the Floor of the House, does the hon. Gentleman think that this was merely a case of failing to get the Chancellor’s attention?

[David Simmonds]

The hon. Member puts to me whether it was simply a failure to get the Chancellor’s attention, but clearly the Chancellor has been busy at every possible opportunity briefing the press about things that may or may not be in the upcoming Budget. We have seen the impact that that has had: driving up Government borrowing costs; driving down business confidence; and driving unemployment up, every single month since this Government took office. Those political briefings have real-world consequences for our constituents’ livelihoods.

For all of those businessowners in the hospitality and tourism sector who have been seeking to make decisions, relying on what they have heard Minsters tell the House, to discover in a press release that this new tax is due to be imposed on them despite the previous assurances of the Tourism Minister, is just one of the many nails in the coffin of the British economy represented by the Bill and this Government’s actions.

In conclusion, when we look at the Bill, we see legislation that makes a complete mess of local democracy: elections cancelled and then deferred; announcements of new mayors that do not make it through to the final announcements about new structures. The Bill takes powers away from communities and gives them to mayors who, as we heard earlier in the case of Surrey, may not materialise at all. It devolves nothing of any significance closer to our constituents and seeks to make our elected local councillor brethren simply the hosts of talking shops, rather than decision makers for their local community. Worst of all, despite the Government’s occasionally lofty rhetoric, the Bill abolishes 90% of the representation of shire England at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. Where is the voice for our constituents in local government under this centralising Labour Government?