Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Eighth sitting)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 30th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Tim Farron]

I will not speak for long, Mr Paisley, but I want to reemphasise some things we have talked about today and build on the wise comments made by the hon. Member for Nottingham North.

Equality is hugely important and not to be taken for granted. The issue is that a movement towards a form of local government that is by definition more removed from the public than a district council, for example, will undoubtedly affect those with protected characteristics. We must prevent the tendency we discussed earlier to have people on the board and the committees—running the CCAs, in this case—who are much more likely to be older, male and white. That tendency will naturally occur because, while devolution is happening in one sense, it is also a centralisation locally, away from district councils. That will inevitably happen unless we work hard to prevent it. That is why these equality impact assessments are very important—not just in terms of the representative nature of the people who are on the CCA, but on the kind of policies that they pursue.

I am bound also to remind Members of the Rural Services Network’s report, published this week, which pointed out that if rural England was a separate region, it would be poorer than all the other regions. It would be the poorest region and the region most in need of levelling up. Pretty much every CCA in the country will have a rural element to it, but the chances are that it will not be the central part or the part where most of the members come from.

I want us to think very carefully about the impact of our decisions, particularly on rural communities. I spent part of the break between this morning’s sitting and this one on the phone to a local GP surgery in Cumbria that has lost something like £70,000 of its income in recent years. It has a patient roll of 5,000 to 6,000 people, but it sees on average 2,000 to 2,500 patients every year who are not registered with the surgery—they are visitors coming to the Lake district. The surgery gets not a penny for that.

Earlier, the hon. Member for York Central rightly mentioned the interaction between the integrated care systems, which will come into force this week, and the new CCAs. It is vital that we consider the differences in access to services between rural areas and urban areas, and consider disadvantage as being different. There are much higher levels of unemployment in the Barrow part of the Westmorland and Furness Council area, for example, and much lower unemployment in the part of the area that I represent; however, the gap between average incomes and average house prices is bigger than anywhere outside the south-east of England. The consequence in terms of poverty is therefore much greater, and the need for us to pay attention to those differential metrics—and, more importantly, the impact on individuals’ lives—is that much greater.

That is why it is important that equality is built into this legislation. Accountability would come out of the fact that impact assessments would be provided on a regular basis and there would be scrutiny as a consequence. It would force members who are either from demographic profiles that are not a minority or under-represented or from non-rural parts of the geographical community represented by a CCA to be held to account on behalf of those people and those communities who are.

[Neil O'Brien]

The public sector equality duty under the Equality Act 2010 ensures that public bodies play their part in making society fairer by tackling discrimination and providing equality of opportunity for all. As public bodies, CCAs must integrate equality considerations into decision-making processes from the outset, including in the development, implementation and review of policies. However, the equality duty does not require public bodies to follow a prescribed process and leaves it to their local discretion as to when it is appropriate to carry out an equality impact assessment to ensure compliance with the duty that binds them. The amendment would place an additional unnecessary duty on combined county authorities that does not apply to other public authorities, including existing combined authorities, which relates to the point made by Opposition Members about ensuring there is equal treatment and similar legal bases between MCAs and CCAs.

It is the Government’s intention that CCAs will be expressly subject to the public sector equality duty, which we will do by consequential amendments to the Equality Act, meaning that CCAs have to integrate equality considerations into their decision-making processes as soon as they are established. There is therefore no need to place a further burden on CCAs by requiring them to produce a separate equalities impact assessment. In fact, equalities considerations will already be at the very heart of what they do. With those assurances, I hope that the hon. Member for Nottingham North will withdraw his amendment.

[Alex Norris]

I beg to move amendment 22, in schedule 1, page 198, line 18, at end insert—

“(2A) The arrangements must ensure that the Chairs of the overview and scrutiny committees of the District Councils contained within the CCA’s boundaries are members of the CCA’s overview and scrutiny committee.”

This amendment would require that the Chairs of overview and scrutiny committees of the District Councils within the CCA are represented on the CCA’s overview and scrutiny committee.

Schedule 1, which is introduced by clause 13, relates to the overview and scrutiny functions of the CCAs, which are important. The amendment gives us the opportunity to add districts so that they are seen as a key part of the process that have an important say. If the Minister is not minded to accept the amendment, I hope that he acknowledges the key role of districts.

According to the District Councils Network, its members deliver 86 out of 137 essential local government services to 22 million people—40% of the population—covering 70% of the country by area. The Minister was perfectly candid—that is the best way to be—that part of the reason for having CCAs as distinct from the combined authorities created under the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 is to give Ministers the chance to work around district councils where those councils do not want to be involved in greater devolution.

I think we have to find a way to get the district councils into the proposed process more fully. We have seen combined authorities use non-constituent members to deliver, and that is a good way to operate, and I think that the amendment would enhance that opportunity. Amendment 22 seeks to do so by ensuring that among the members of the CCA’s overview and scrutiny committee are the chairs of the overview and scrutiny committees of the district councils within the CCA. I hope that is a proportionate way of trying to get districts involved. They have so much expertise about the area they serve that it would be foolish to discount them. They have a track record of delivery, and they know what people want because of their really close engagement with their constituents.

When we debate clause 16, will talk a little more about the fundamental role of districts, but we know that they are not likely to be formal or founder members of CCAs. Instead, the amendment effectively says that we have a very skilled group of people who lead overview and scrutiny in their local authority, who have high levels of experience, training and ability. They do it day in and day out. They are familiar with the issues, they know how to scrutinise an executive, and they know what information to read and what questions to ask. To pull them together is almost like convening an international team from the best players in the league and I have no doubt that it would be a significant success.

Amendment 22 would be a really good way of enhancing the overview and scrutiny provision while getting better engagement with the district councils. In that sense, I hope it is a bit of a two-for-one for the Minister.

[Tim Farron]

This seems to be a really sensible and proportionate proposal. The Conservative leader of the District Councils Network talked to us in the evidence session on Tuesday 21 June. He speaks very clearly on behalf of members of all political parties who are on district councils: Liberal Democrat, Labour, independent, Green and, of course, the leading Conservative group among district council members.

There is a concern about district councils being slowly but surely erased—and they are. In Cumbria, we are living proof of that, because some good district councils are being dismantled this year, hopefully with very good unitary authorities taking over their responsibilities and being reflective of what the local communities desire. However, if we are to move forward in this direction and if CCAs are to be the building blocks by which these decisions and the delivery of levelling up will take place, it is surely right to demonstrate to district councils that we and the Government value them—not only that we value them as district councils but, as the hon. Member for Nottingham North rightly said, that we value their expertise.

In this amendment, the Government are being asked to consider picking the people who already do this job in their home patch, so to speak, and to bring the skills, expertise and experience that they have from providing scrutiny of their own councils’ business and the operation of democracy internally within their district councils to the sub-regional level.

The amendment seems to be not only a very effective and sensible practical proposal but one that would allow the Government to demonstrate to district councils that they are not being erased and that they are a very important part of our future. We talked earlier about whether symmetry mattered. If we believe that local communities are best at designing their own destiny and if they choose to maintain two-tier authorities, as many do, then reflecting that autonomy and its outcome—not begrudging it, but welcoming it—seems to me a wise thing to do. Let us have the chairs of the overview and scrutiny committees from the constituent district councils within a CCA on the overview and scrutiny committee of that CCA.

[Neil O’Brien]

I would say that the amendment is well-intentioned, but that would not really do it justice; I actually completely agree with the broad thrust of what Opposition Members are trying to achieve. However, I think that we should do it in a slightly different way.

Schedule 1 places a requirement on all combined county authorities to establish one or more overview and scrutiny committees, and provides for the Secretary of State to make regulations for such committees. That mirrors the provisions for combined authorities; regulations were made in 2017 that already apply to all the combined authorities.

As for the majority of the CCA model, it is our intention that the overview and scrutiny arrangements for CCAs will adopt the same broad principles as those for combined authorities. Regulations made under schedule 1 must ensure that the majority of members of overview and scrutiny committees are drawn from the CCA’s constituent councils. Furthermore, an overview and scrutiny committee cannot include a member of the CCA, including the mayor.

The regulations and powers in schedule 1 enable scrutiny committees to be established with membership appropriate to the CCA, so that they are able to effectively challenge, advise and make recommendations to the decision takers. To do this, each CCA’s overview and scrutiny committee needs to be flexible enough to reflect the bespoke role of the CCA, as agreed in individual devolution deals—how they are constituted, the powers they are responsible for delivering, and so on. That will affect the background and interests of the members that it would be appropriate to appoint.

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[The Chair]

What’s in a name? I call the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale.

[Tim Farron]

Indeed, as we established earlier, my county is an amalgamation of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland and Westmorland. What’s in a name? It may not be the most important thing in the world, but it sums up the identity of a community or series of communities. The new authority that will serve my constituency is Westmorland and Furness Council. The northern part of the area, around Penrith, was always part of England, so folks there rightly feel aggrieved that their identity has been somewhat stolen from them.

I will reflect on the very early part of my life. I was not following politics in those days at all, but was probably watching the noble Baroness Floella Benjamin on “Play School”—that was about as close as I got to any kind of involvement in politics at that age. I recall with some bitterness that when the reorganisation happened in the early 1970s, Yorkshire did better than Lancashire out of it because of the name. Nearly every part of Yorkshire that was turned into either a shire or metropolitan authority kept the name—for example, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire. Part of Humberside did not have that blessing, but it was the only bit of Yorkshire that did not.

Let us think about what happened to Lancashire: it became part of Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. It lost that identity, and a whole generation of people have grown up as Lancastrians without realising that they are. I am sure the Government will seek to establish a CCA in a meticulous and proper way, but errors will be made and there will be things about the genesis of the new bodies that we would have perhaps wished to have done differently a year or two later.

A whole bunch of different politicians might get elected to districts that form part of the CCA after three or four years—perhaps on the basis of people being concerned about their identity—yet we are told that nothing can be changed without a two-thirds majority. We changed the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 with a simple majority, so we have proved that it does not really matter. No Parliament can bind its successors, and rightly so, but apparently the Government can bind the successors of local authorities. That is not democratic, and it does not allow local authorities to establish their own identity, which might morph over time.

[The Chair]

We were on to the war of the roses there.

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[Alex Norris]

I beg to move amendment 26, clause 18, page 14, line 35, at end insert—

“(1A) But notwithstanding subsection (1)(b), if a CCA prepares and submits a proposal for conferred powers under section 17(1) and the Secretary of State has already made provision for another CCA to be granted identical powers, the Secretary of State must consent to that proposal.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to accept an application for conferred powers from a CCA where they have already accepted an identical application from another CCA.

At the end of the previous sitting, the Minister started the debate on this issue, which is a point of distinction, so I think the amendment will be an interesting one to discuss. Notwithstanding the sorts of functions that the Minister has in mind, which he will follow up with, the clause sets the rules by which county combined authorities can receive more powers from central Government. We are supportive of that: we want to move powers from Whitehall to our town halls, but in doing so the Bill can be improved.

I touched a little on the asymmetry of the devolution of power in England, and it is worth covering something of that. Metro Mayors hold powers over spatial planning, regional transport, the provision of skills training, business support services and economic development. The detail of the powers and budgets devolved, however, varies massively between areas.

For example, in Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire the powers of the police and crime commissioner have been merged into the mayoral role, but not in other mayoralties. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority oversees devolved health and welfare budgets, working in partnership with the lead Whitehall Departments, but other combined authorities do not have such powers. All Mayors can establish mayoral development corporations, except for the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. All Mayors can raise a council tax precept, except in the West of England.

That is an odd hotchpotch. If we were to sit down and plan a devolved settlement, which we are doing quite a bit of, we would never pick a model that is quite as uneven and such a mishmash. That is what happens when settlements are negotiated case by case behind closed doors, on the basis of what Ministers judge communities are ready to have. Furthermore—this is part of what we are addressing today—those disparities in power do not even account for the fact that vast swathes of the country do not even have combined authorities; they just have their council.

We are in the odd situation where Manchester gets to elect a Mayor with a PCC, but in Nottingham we cannot vote for a Mayor—we don’t have one; we do not have a combined authority in the county terms yet—but we vote for councils and a PCC. That gets very hard to explain to constituents, and means that different parts of the country get access to different powers. I think we should do better there.

The Minister characterised that position as being for either a one-size-fits-all model or moving at the pace of the slowest. I am not saying that. My dissatisfaction with asymmetry aside, I live in the real world; we have an asymmetric settlement and it would not be practical or desirable to change that. Where those combined authorities are motoring along, they must keep doing so; they are doing crucial and impressive work, and of course we would not want to change that. However, we have the power to ensure that the combined county authorities, which cover big parts of the country, and will hopefully bring devolution to the bulk of the country, have some sense of commonality in the powers that they are able to access, but not have to access—not a floor but a ceiling.

I do not think that I am actually asking the Minister to do anything more than has already been set out by the Government. The White Paper itself sets out those three tiers of powers. We will get to the point about the governance structures at a later date, and as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale said earlier, I also completely dispute the point that we should have to accept a Mayor in order to get tier 3 powers.

Nevertheless, the Government have established a common framework—a common menu, as it were—from which to pick. This is the significant point of difference: I believe that should be a local choice. It should be the local leaders and local public deciding what powers they want. I must say that I think the bulk will want something towards the upper end, because they will understand that decisions will be made better locally and that they will have a better understanding than the centre about what they want for their communities and how to get it. The Government’s approach—the approach of the past 12 years—is to pick and choose, depending on the qualifications, or otherwise, they think the local leaders have. I think that is a significant mistake.

Amendment 26 seeks to improve that. Essentially, it would prevent the Secretary of State from doing a blizzard of different side deals with different communities, based on the powers they confer on a CCA by saying that, if they confer a certain power on the CCA, then an identical application from another CCA must also be accepted. That is saying that, if new ceilings are set, then everyone should have access to that. As I said, that will not result in perfect symmetry—anything but—that is not the intention of the amendment. However, it will mean that all communities have access to the same powers.

I am interested in what the Minister says to that and will listen carefully. If, in practice, the way in which the amendment is worded does not deliver that effect but, in the Minister’s view, there is a better way of doing it, then I would accept that heartily—it is the substance, rather than the amendment itself, that means something to me. However, it is a very important point.

This is the moment, on county combined authorities, to say that we are going to break free from this individual deal-by-deal way of devolution, and say that we just think the powers are better exercised locally—we should be explicit about that because it is a good thing to say—and that in doing so, everybody gets access to them, not just the ones that are deemed to be good enough. I think that would be a significant step forward for this legislation.

[Tim Farron]

I think this is where we get to find out who devolution is for. Is it for the benefit of Whitehall or communities? I have no desire to see—in fact, I have a revulsion to the idea—contrived symmetry from the centre. I am very happy for there to be asymmetrical devolution, so long as that is the choice of the people within those communities. This is where we get the opportunity to see whether this grassroots taking back control from the centre or the centre, in a rather patronising way, throwing a few crumbs to the local community.

People living in Cornwall, Northumberland, Devon and Cumbria have the same rights and the same expectations about the quality of services as people in Manchester, the west midlands and London—no more, but definitely no less. It would therefore seem very wrong if services and powers that are devolved to London and Greater Manchester are not devolved to Cumbria, or at least are not offered to it so that the community can choose whether to take them.

This is about not just the powers that should be devolved, but the preconditions that the Government choose to impose. Obviously, we are talking about Mayors, or Mayors by any other name. I have absolutely no problem with communities that want a Mayor having one as part of their devolution deal, but I have an enormous problem with the Government saying, “You can have these powers, but only if you have the form of local government that we tell you to have.” That is not devolution. It is certainly not what people in my part of the far north-west of England want, and I suspect it is not what people want in other parts of the country. This is an opportunity for the Government to declare that devolution is for the people and not for their own convenience.

[Rachael Maskell]

I wholly concur with the previous two speeches on amendment 26. We have to think about the people in our communities, and if we ask any of them who currently does what in governance terms— whether it is Parliament or local councils—they will often struggle to identify exactly where those powers rest. When we introduce another tier of government, people need clarity about it. Particularly if they are living on the borders of the new CCAs, they will be looking one way and saying, “Well, they have powers that we haven’t got here.” We have to be careful that we do not introduce confusion into our governance and accountability systems.

I therefore think that the point about having a more à la carte approach is right, as devolution grows and we get used to new functions of government, so that we can see what can be achieved. If the Government dictate limitations on the ability of authorities to exercise their powers in one area, and a neighbouring authority has those extensive powers, undertaking partnerships between two CCAs could be quite challenging, and it could also limit the opportunities.

We have to look further ahead. We are in this process of development and evolution, which is fantastic, but we do not want to end up with patchwork Britain. We do not want Parliament to be left legislating over a small number of authorities because not every devolved area and CCA has those powers. We could end up with two or three CCAs without the powers that all the others have, and the national Parliament will then have to legislate over certain functions. That seems ludicrous in itself. We would not see fairness in patchwork Britain. We will talk again about the postcode lottery that we see emerging. The areas of greatest deprivation are probably those that would see the fewest powers. We have to think more strategically about how we apply that. That is why the amendment does justice to the issue. It enables the CCAs to take on these additional powers, but it does not mandate that.

It was clear from the presentations from the Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, and the Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, that the M10 Mayors are working incredibly closely together. They are inspiring one another to address the challenges of where they can take devolved powers, and that presents opportunities to the people they represent. That will of course be an evolving picture as more people come into the M10. I guess we are heading towards the M20, or wherever it may end—not the M25, as Members are suggesting, because it would simply go round in circles.

We need to make sure we are not seeing a denial in the differentiation of the powers that emerge. Ultimately, this is about the impact that they have on locality and local areas. It is really important that we think about where it could travel to. It clearly has implications for this place—its future and what it does—but we also want local decision making. I think there is a consensus across the House that we want decisions to be made closer to people, and if we devolve certain opportunities to some areas, the intersection of those powers can create more than the sum of their parts, which is something that really stood out from the evidence we heard. There could be a real benefit in devolving those powers, because we do not want a metro Mayor or a CCA coming back to Parliament every few years, saying, “I need more powers. We need more primary legislation looking at this issue.” We want a deal that is underpinned by the flexibility to drive change, and we will see that change come about through shared practice.

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[Tim Farron]

I, too, support this wise and important amendment. I am thinking again about my community in Cumbria. Many bus routes that serve the county cross boundaries including, indeed, regional boundaries, because many of Cumbria’s routes are through to: Northumberland and Durham, a different region; into North Yorkshire, a different region; and to Scotland, a different nation—not necessarily a matter for this Committee, I am afraid. We are bounded on one side by the sea and then at the bottom there is Lancashire—the same region, but very likely to be in a different CCA, if that is the direction in which the Government and the community seek to move.

Bus services cross boundaries, and of course people work in different communities. People in the south end of Cumbria will look to work in Lancaster and further south. Towards the eastern end, the dales part of my community will look towards Leeds or Skipton. Further north, people will work in Carlisle and Penrith, and so on. Bus services rightly do not respect artificial boundaries, and it is important that we regulate fairly.

It is also worth bearing in mind, though, that there are far too few bus services to regulate and they are far too expensive. In a rural community like mine—in fact in most communities, urban or rural—bus services do not make much money, if they make money at all. Rather than thinking about the burden on the taxpayer of a subsidy that we might ask for, we need to consider public transport as a crucial investment in the oiling of a community, and of an economy.

As we move towards CCAs, part of the ambition that I would like them to have, as they are integrated with transport authorities, is to be able to bring more services. It seems odd that we are in a country where most local authorities are forbidden from being operators themselves. We should allow authorities to become bus operators and make their own luck, and indeed to compete properly in order to provide services to their communities.

For people living in a rural community such as mine—living off the A6, the A591, or the A590—on those arterial routes there will be a very expensive bus service. Often, there will not even be an expensive bus service; there might be one a week if people are lucky. Giving power to local communities, and putting in a provision and an expectation that they will co-ordinate, regulate and make sure that there is fairness and continuity across boundaries, should also go hand in hand with ensuring that there is sufficient investment, so that we have more buses and indeed more light rail serving our communities, particularly in rural areas that are so remote and where the distances to travel are that much greater.

[Neil O’Brien]

I agree with so much of what has been said by Members on the Opposition Benches. I agree about the importance of co-operation across boundaries. I have been very pleased to see the way that the West Midlands Combined Authority has improved transport even beyond its boundaries. Places that are negotiating devolution deals with us at the moment, from the south-west to the north-east, are thinking about that very actively.

I agree with what the hon. Members for Westmorland and Lonsdale and for York Central said about the importance of integration. It is one of the reasons that we have been keen to support bus franchising where people want that. I remember it being advocated to me nearly 22 years ago by the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), who is a former leader of Manchester City Council. He spoke about the advantages of integration through having that London-style bus franchising, which we would be able to approach in different ways through devolution.

Our approach is to achieve voluntary co-operation, rather than setting a requirement or duty to co-operate. We always try to encourage co-operation wherever we can—indeed, to the point of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale revealing that he had encouraged it across the England-Scotland border, through the wonderful borderlands growth deal.

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[Alex Norris]

The amendments are about two shared interests. One is a belief that devolution and the exercise of integrated transport powers are crucial to the effective operation of county combined authorities. The second is a strong belief that all county combined authorities should have access to the same powers as those who have the greatest. Given that those points are the topics of the two previous debates, I do not think there is an awful lot to add.

The case for the importance of transport connectivity has been ably made by my hon. Friend the Member for York Central. The debate has been had on access to powers, and I do not think it needs repeating. The only thing I would say is that the amendments put a limited obligation on the Secretary of State. If we are in a situation where—the Minister says this is likely, and I would concede that—some areas would be more ready, some geographies would be more natural or the leaders would be keener to receive these powers than others, there should be some account of that publicly.

Rather than saying, “These are just the two the Government have chosen and decided are good enough to receive these powers”, these amendments would mean the Secretary of State would provide another reason. That could be the geography or simply that the local leaders do not wish to receive the powers, in which case it would be a simple statement for the Secretary of State to make, but it would be an important statement and would demonstrate that the decision is being made public and is not happening behind closed doors.

[Tim Farron]

I will be brief. As the hon. Gentleman has said, these issues have been discussed previously. It is worth bearing in mind that some of the infrastructure—highways infrastructure in particular—might seem to be of local consideration only, but they are of national strategic importance. I am bound to pick on my own area.

Things that are under the aegis of Highways England, which are national roads, so to speak, and supported directly by the Department for Transport, are one matter. Some of the strategic road network, the layer down from that, which is looked after by local authorities, is clearly of national strategic significance. The A591 in my constituency links the motorway from junction 36 right up to Keswick and back to the north lakes. It is not part of the national strategic network belonging to the English highways agency.

That is absolutely fine, but we need to recognise that if a local authority or a collection of local authorities is going to have responsibility for such an important road—the main arterial route through the middle of the Lake district, which is the biggest visitor destination in the country after London—it needs to be adequately resourced. It may need to be resourced across more than one CCA, depending on what boundaries are considered. This is important because I want to make sure the Government are held to account for the resource that they do—or do not—provide CCAs, so that communities such as mine are not basically providing and maintaining a road for 20 million visitors on whose behalf the Government contribute nothing.

[Rachael Maskell]

This is an important amendment. Having served as a shadow Transport Minister, I know the importance of getting a system in place to ensure connectivity and reliability, as well as modal shift. These amendments would hold the Secretary of State to account through the requirement to set out the reasons for any inequality in the transport functions conferred on CCAs. Ultimately, the public have a right to understand the Secretary of State’s thinking on such matters, particularly as it could well have an impact on them.

As we will debate further as the Bill progresses, the national development management policies will be making particular demands around transport infrastructure in our country. I am sure that will be a major area of contentious debate, but if we are looking at some authorities having the means to address their local transport system and other local authorities not having equal means, that will create even more discontent and inequality.

Ultimately, our transport system is a national system because our connectivity across the country has to connect—that might seem an obvious point. My fear is that this inequality could mean a more stop-start approach to transport planning, as opposed to the smoothing that we know the road and bus industries—and indeed the transport sector as a whole—are calling for. Accountability for any differentiation of powers is important, and that is what these amendments call for. It is also important to understand the Secretary of State’s thinking about how they are putting the transport system together across our country.

I appreciate the Minister’s role, but what happens in what I described earlier as the capillary routes, as opposed to arterial routes, is of equal importance, because people will not maximise the opportunity of those routes if they cannot reach them. There has to be joined-up thinking that stretches beyond the remit of the Minister, but which is crucial to the Bill.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Seventh sitting)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 30th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Alex Norris]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mrs Murray. We had a very good first day of line-by-line consideration on Tuesday. We had interesting debates, held in good spirits, and where we differed, we were able to do so well. I am sure that we will do similarly today. I hope that we may have a little more luck moving the Minister, and even if we do not in substance, we may at least establish some agreements in principle.

Today we start our consideration of part 2, the final half of the levelling-up provisions in the levelling-up Bill. There is a certain oddness to the fact that we will be considering the Bill well into September but will finish the levelling-up bits shortly. That pushes me back to the point I made at the beginning on Tuesday: this is not wholly a levelling-up Bill anymore. Nevertheless, the bits that we have in front of us are very important.

Clauses 7 to 70 establish combined county authorities, which will be the essential building blocks of sub-regional devolution. If done well, they will be the foundations of local place-shaping architecture that will drive forward levelling-up across our nations and regions. We do not have an issue with the establishment of CCAs—indeed, we support their development—but we think there are various ways of improving them, and those are covered by these amendments and amendments to come.

Some basic principles govern the amendments. First, we want to see greater public involvement. Secondly, we want to see strengthened local leadership. Thirdly, we want to see access for all communities to the highest level of powers. Fourthly, we want the Government to be non-prescriptive on the governance model. I might add as an addendum that I hope to hear from the Minister that the Government really intend to let go; they do not want to devolve powers but then still keep their hand in to guide communities when they do not get from them the answers they want. Where the Government can meet those tests, we will support them, and when they do not, we will seek to enhance the provisions.

Clause 7 establishes new bodies corporate, the combined county authorities. I will say a little on the distinction between CCAs and their sister organisations, combined authorities—as established by part 6 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009—when we debate amendment 15. At this stage, it is important to understand our amendments by understanding what these new regional, or presumably sub-regional, structures will do. They will be at the heart of the levelling-up agenda when it comes to leadership. These bodies will receive power and money from the centre and use them to drive forward the development of their communities. If it turns out that levelling-up has succeeded, as we all hope it will, it will be because these bodies have succeeded. We have already seen the success of those rather similar, although in law distinct, bodies in parts of the country. Examples are the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the West Midlands Combined Authority. We could list them all, but I will not do so. However, we can see that success across the country.

That said, we have to be clear that these bodies must be structures that work for communities. They are not conveniences for central Government or regional leaders. They must be bodies that drive collaboration across the public, private and voluntary sectors and, critically—this is the spirit of our amendments—that connect the public to the process of levelling up and improving their communities, getting the public involved in the decisions that shape their communities and lives. Amendments 46, 48 and 49 would start that process. If we fail to connect the public to the process then, despite the promises made in the White Paper on communities shaping their own futures, that just will not happen. We will be stuck in the progress paradox, whereby things get better but people feel worse, because change in their community happened to them rather than in partnership with them.

I put it to the Minister that one of the biggest risks of this entire programme is that, the Government having told local communities that levelling up will mean a shift of power from the centre to communities—from Whitehall to town hall—some power moves instead from the centre to the sub-region. That sub-region, which is currently an alien concept to most people, will be a new tier of politicians and public figures who are at a level even further away from people than their local council and who are harder for them to engage with, and certainly harder for them to remove. I do not think that will meet the public expectation test. It is really important that we demonstrate that the public are equal partners in the process and that it is done with their consent and commitment; otherwise, the new bodies will sit in isolation and will not deliver what they are supposed to deliver.

Amendment 46 makes a simple but important point. If the Minister wishes to secure for the Secretary of State, as in clause 7(1), the power to establish the new bodies, we really ought to establish whether the public want them, understand their value and understand their role in them. Currently, clause 7 allows for the formation of combined county authorities should two tests be met: condition A is that the area consists of

“the whole of the area of a two-tier county council”

combined with either

“a unitary county council, or…a unitary district council”;

and condition B is that the area is not already part of another CCA, an integrated transport area or a combined authority. The amendment would add condition C, which is that

“the public in the area have been consulted.”

That is a low bar—indeed, I have lightly prescribed it and would recommend then tightening the mechanisms in the guidance that follows the legislation—but it is nevertheless a crucial test to ensure that the body is set up in the public interest and is actually what people want.

My own local community is a pertinent example. It is no secret—it is in the White Paper—that the Minister and the Secretary of State hope to form county deals that lead to CCAs for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire and for Derby and Derbyshire. From all the coverage, I understand that those two deals are likely to come together. As a Nottinghamian I have doubts about that as a natural geography, but it is not necessarily about my views, or indeed the view of my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for Broxtowe, who I am sure has his own views, or indeed the views of the Minister, as the initiator from the centre; it is about the views of the million-plus people who live in our community and whose future will be shaped by such deals. It is important that it happens with their consent and understanding, that the case is made for that geography, and that their views are properly and meaningfully tested and given due prominence in the discussion. That is a reasonable thing to ask and, if we are to get the bodies off on a good footing, a good idea and a good place to start.

Amendment 48 is a counterpart to amendment 46 and would amend clause 22, under which the area of a CCA might be amended in future. It mandates public consultation on a non-prescribed basis. It is even easier than the requirement for public consultation under amendment 46, because currently that would mean talking to people in the abstract: “You currently have a central Government, a local government, and you may have town and parish councils, a county council, two-tier local government or a unitary authority, as in the city of Nottingham. We are going to create this new body about which you do not know yet because you do not have a combined authority yet.” That will involve a certain amount of explanation and high-quality information. With amendment 48 it would be a bit easier, because at the relevant stage CCAs will already be established so it will be easier to ask the public whether they wish to enter or leave an established one.

Similarly, amendment 49 would amend clause 23, under which a CCA might be dissolved. Again, that is rather easy to explain to the public or for them to understand: “You have a CCA; do you wish to still have one? Here might be the reasons either way.” I have a lot of confidence that the public are more than capable of properly engaging in those decisions. In fact, I think there is significant public expectation of that engagement. As leaders in this place, we should look with some concern at the polling every couple of months on public trust and confidence in Parliament as a whole, and in our ability to enact the changes that they want. There is a high degree of scepticism. People are actually more confident in local government.

The strand that comes through all that polling is that people want to have a say. If we establish such important bodies, which will have a significant say on levelling up, we need to ensure that the public have been engaged at the earliest point.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is great pleasure, Mrs Murray, to serve under your guidance. I will say a brief few words, broadly in support of what the hon. Gentleman said about consultation.

Devolution is not devolution if it is done on the terms of central Government, by definition; nor is it really devolution if it involves hoovering up the functions of lower-tier councils. It is not devolution if it is done for the convenience of people in Whitehall and does not involve listening to the people in the communities directly affected. Setting up combined council authorities may indeed be an important building block in delivering what the Government see as levelling up, and I can see the merits in it, but although consultation needs to happen—it is right that it is written into the Bill—it also needs to be meaningful.

Twelve months ago, the Government had not settled on any kind of reorganisation for Cumbria—I speak from not bitter, but rich, personal experience—and we are now two months into a new authority, which was elected at the beginning of May and on which, I am pleased to say, the Liberal Democrats have a majority. Westmorland and Furness Council was but a twinkle in the Secretary of State’s eye only a year ago, however. There was a consultation, but less than 1% of the population of Cumbria responded to it. Generally, most people were of the view that the proposals were meddling top-down reorganisation for national, rather than local, purposes.

Remember that Cumbria itself was established in the early 1970s, when the historic counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, Lancashire over the sands, and the West Riding of Yorkshire were put together. That county kind of worked, but someone who went to Sedbergh would have to talk about cricket in a very different way from if they went to Grange. The reality of local identity is hugely significant. A consultation in which a few engaged people fill in a form on the internet is not consultation. It is a consultation in name, but the majority of people are not actually listened to.

If consultation is to be formally included in the Bill, that is fine, but I want it to be deeply embedded so that communities actually get a say about the boundaries that may be formed by any new combined council authorities. I am fortunate that every single blade of grass in my constituency is parished, but not every part of the Westmorland and Furness Council area is parished. It is important that voices in each part of the new authorities are able to express the views of those communities.

Consultation is vital, but it should be more than just a word. Arguably, as a society, we have never been more consulted but less listened to. Let us make sure not just that consultation is included in the Bill, but that it is ingrained in the practice of developing the new authorities, so that communities’ cultural identities are reflected and the wishes of the people on the ground go towards building those authorities, which should be built not for the convenience of Whitehall, but for the empowerment of communities in Cumbria and across the rest of the country.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, will speak in favour of the amendments. Consultation is so fundamental to the Bill because it is important that the power of our communities and the public be on a level with that of Government. The public bring the expertise and know the nuances of their communities so well that they can advise Government on what is best for them. That expertise can be overlooked in a top-down approach. It is essential that there is proper consultation—not just information—because being able to participate will give people agency in the democratic structures that will be developed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron]

This is important because the suspicion of many people is that this is a back-door way of circumventing district councils. We have been through reorganisations in much of the country, and for those places that have escaped somehow, such as Lancashire for instance, the Bill is a way of making sure that they all behave themselves and come under an aegis of an organisation set up by the Government.

In many cases, there is great value in two-tier authorities. If we believe in devolution, it should be knitted together and initiated from the grass roots and not from Whitehall down. If the CCAs are the building blocks through which levelling up is to be delivered, that must be done on the basis of an accurate analysis of the respective needs and desires of the communities involved. Independence in this context applies to the assessment of the value of the boundaries and the nature of the CCA. That is vital, particularly to put at rest those who may fear that CCAs represent a back-door way of scrubbing out the powers and relevance of district councils, even parish councils. I hope that the Government appreciate that fear and seek to address it.

[Neil O'Brien]

In my earlier comments, I set out the CCA model and talked about the rationale for it. Some areas that we are discussing a devolution deal with are considering adopting that CCA model. But even with those first areas, it is highly unlikely that the deals will be negotiated, announced and implemented via secondary legislation, and CCAs established and up and running within the 12-month period of this Bill receiving Royal Assent. That would render the report’s evaluation no different in 12 months’ time from today.

Opposition Members rightly want to have a debate in Committee about the CCA model. I have said a bit in our previous sessions about why we are doing it, but let us take the discussion a bit further. The purpose of the CCA model is to make devolution practically possible in two-tier areas without requiring unitarisation. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale talked about districts coming under the aegis of a CCA, but that is not quite right. It could easily be that only top-tier authority powers are devolved to the top-tier authorities in a CCA. If they do not want to, the districts may choose not to take part. They are not having their powers or responsibilities changed, but the difference is that they are not able to veto their neighbours from getting devolution or making progress.

I am perfectly happy to stand here and make an argument about fairness, because I do not think it is fair that one district can veto progress for a large number of neighbouring districts and boroughs for top-tier authorities, particularly if it is not being forced to do anything, as is the case under the Bill. It is simply unfair for such a district to be able to stop their neighbours going ahead.

The Opposition sort of alluded to the practical reality in that although I would not rule further mayoral combined authorities in the future, in a lot of a country that currently does not have a devolution deal, the CCA model will be the practical way of delivering that. In practice, if we do not have that model, we will just not make progress. I can think of one area that we currently discussing that has a very, very large number of district councils, and it is exceedingly unlikely that we would be able to agree a sensible agreement if every single one of them were given a veto.

In a sense, the amendment is to push us, not unreasonably, to talk about the whether the CCA model is the right one. The proposed evaluation is in one sense called for so that we can now discuss whether this is the right thing or not. I think we have been clear. There is no back door. I am standing here telling Members why we are doing it right now and what it does and does not mean. We will discuss some of the nuances when we consider further clauses, and we absolutely have to get that right. However, the amendment and the evaluation proposed would essentially not add anything to our conversation this morning, whether one believes that the CCA model and the removal of that veto is right or not. That is why I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron]

This is the third sitting of line-by-line scrutiny and the Minister is yet to accept an amendment, but I have noticed that his tone has been positive and he has engaged with everything that has been put forward, which is very welcome. The tone of debate on all sides has been really positive and constructive. The Government Front Bench has not been dismissive—I am grateful for that; I have been impressed. This amendment seems to be one that he could accept, so I wish he would.

I have a few observations, a couple of which are key. First, it is very important that CCAs, indeed all local authorities, should be engaged and listen to chambers of commerce, trade unions and other community groups. It is vital that they do. There is a slight worry that all this looks a little bit like what happened post the abolition of metropolitan counties in the 1980s, when counties were effectively stitched together afterwards, partly by people who were not elected at all.

The people on the CCAs as non-constituent and associate members may be wonderful people whom we should be listening to, but there is a mechanism for them to become full voting members of the authorities if the elected members choose to give them that right. We are therefore looking at the possibility of having not a version of democratically elected local government, but in essence a quango. I am not sure that we need more quangos; we need more democracy. If devolution is to take place, it needs to take place on the terms of the community to which power has been devolved.

That is part and parcel of the Bill, however, and the Government are quite explicit about this: it is part and parcel of a movement towards devolution and a change in the relationship between Whitehall and the regions, sub-regions and nations of the United Kingdom. It is therefore worth bearing in mind that what we have seen already—the combined authorities, the unitary authorities and potentially now the CCAs—is in effect a scaling up of local government. It might be argued that it is the professionalisation of local government—there are all sorts of ways in which it could be advocated as a positive thing. I have my doubts.

One of the areas I have doubts about is diversity. That is why I think the amendments are important. For example, Cumbria—the centre of the universe, or the centre of the United Kingdom actually: if we draw a line from the Scilly Isles to Shetland, the middle point is at Selside, just north of Kendal, and it is important to say that—had something in the region of 300 to 350 elected members on the two-tier local authorities pre-reorganisation, and roughly 100 post reorganisation. Some people might say, “Good; that’s saving money” or, “Fewer politicians; that’s a good thing,” but what it actually means is that those people who are part-time politicians—most have other lives and other responsibilities—have to do three times more work.

The observation from across the country, not just in Cumbria, is that when we do that, we push out certain groups of people—we limit the number of people who are able to take part in local government. It therefore tends to be older people, with time on their hands, and the men who stay behind. Anecdotally, looking at the people who have chosen not to put themselves forward to the new unitary authority, they are principally people with caring and childcare responsibilities, people in full-time work, and more women than men. They are the ones choosing not to go to the new world of the unitary authority.

That scaling up of local government, making local government less local, in itself has a tendency to be bad for diversity. That is not the Government’s intention—I am 100% sure that it is not—but it will happen, I am certain. That is why the amendment is important and an easy one for the Government to accept.

[Neil O'Brien]

Let me start by gently taking issue with something the hon. Gentleman said: that this measure is very much like the abolition of the metropolitan county councils. I argue that it is almost diametrically the opposite of that abolition; it is restoring a directly elected and directly sackable leadership for a strategic area.

[Tim Farron]

The reason it reminds me of that is that once those county councils went, there had to be a stitching together of some kind—so Tyne and Wear went for the Passenger Transport Executive to run the Metro, the buses and all the rest of it. The people on that body were not directly elected, whereas the people who ran it when there was a county council were—that was the analogy, but I take the Minister’s point.

[Neil O'Brien]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for taking the point, because I agree with the tenor of the argument, that we do not want to have major strategic decisions made by a quango. That is what we spent the past eight years fixing—starting in the coalition years, in fairness. We are on the case with his concerns.

Let me take a step back for a moment and set out what the clauses are doing. Clause 9 provides a flexible framework for combined county authorities to appoint non-constituent members, who are representatives of a local organisation or body, such as a district council, a local enterprise partnership or health body. Clause 10 provides for CCAs to appoint associate members, who are individual persons with expertise, such as a local business leader or an expert in a particular policy area.

Combined authorities have appointed commissioners with specific expertise to focus on a challenging local policy area and drive change—for example, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority appointed Dame Sarah Storey as a commissioner on active travel. It is a way of bringing in experts and other institutional stakeholders locally to complement the core of, ideally, directly elected local leadership so that everyone works together as well as possible.

It is only right that those nominations, or appointments, are the decisions of local leaders, who best know their areas. The clauses set out transparent processes for the nomination and appointment of both types of members. For a non-constituent member, the CCA designates the local organisation or body as the “nominating body”, which then selects a person to represent it at the CCA. It is for that nominating body to make that decision. For example, the CCA might designate the district council as a nominating body and then the district council selects its leader, for example, as its non-constituent member representative at CCA meetings—ex officio, as it were.

The clauses provide a way for local experts and key stakeholders to have a seat at the table of a CCA, bringing their local expertise and knowledge to facilitate better action to tackle local challenges. Those are vital public roles and transparency on them is equally vital. That is why clause 11 enables the Secretary of State to make regulations about the process of designating nominating bodies, the nomination of non-constituent members and the process of appointing associate members. We expect that all appointments of associate members will be undertaken through an open and transparent process, of course.

By their very nature those roles will be public roles—for example, a public body such as a district council nominating its leader to a role in another public body. In the Bill’s spirit of localism—a key word—this is a matter to be decided locally by the CCA and nominating bodies. They are independent of central Government and it is right that they make the decisions about how and with whom to collaborate.

The amendments seek annual reporting regarding the persons selected by the nominating bodies to be non-constituent and associate members. The Government do not believe that they should prescribe to CCAs that they should be informing Government of the specific make-up of their non-constituent and associate members. As with all good public bodies, a CCA should promote equality and diversity in the organisation. What is more, non-constituent and associate members are only one part of the membership of the CCA. The amendment calls for a report on one group of members of a CCA and does not reflect the CCA as a whole, including its constituent members, which is slightly odd. It is also slightly concerning that, as the hon. Member for York Central mentioned, the amendment mentions only some but not all of the protected characteristics. That would open up some potential legal questions that I am not really qualified to opine on.

The core point is that non-constituent and associate members of CCAs have an important role to play, but the amendment is unnecessary. It fails to consider the independence of CCAs and nominating bodies and does not reflect the fact that the positions of associate members and non-constituent members will, by their very nature, be public; these are not secret roles. I hope that the hon. Member for Nottingham North will agree to withdraw the amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

I beg to move amendment 20, in clause 11, page 10, line 37, at end insert—

“(2A) Where provisions made under subsection (2) vary between CCAs, the Secretary of State must publish the reasons for this variation.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to explain their reasoning for making regulations about CCA membership that differs between CCAs.

Clause 11 permits the Secretary of State to make regulations relating to constituent members of a CCA, a Mayor’s role in a CCA, the nominating bodies of a CCA, and non-constituent and associate members of a CCA. Furthermore, it allows the Secretary of State to decide all sorts of ways in which a CCA operates: votes, numbers and types of nominating bodies, the appointment and removal of members, maximum numbers of certain types of members, and so on.

That broad range of provisions might lead to a risk of micro-management. I have doubts about how desirable it is to be so involved in the detail; it feels a little as though central Government are not quite willing to let go. The Minister said that there is a risk of divergence, certainly at the outset. Although we have taken that interesting point on board, it seems a little odd that the Government are willing to devolve transport functions—and, presumably, no little sum of money—to a group of people, but are unwilling to let them choose whether to have substitute members in the place of associate members. I hope that amendment 20 will help in that regard.

The clauses we have debated so far have established county combined authorities, and given them constitutions, as a uniform class of organisation with a uniform set of rules to play by—or, at least, a uniform set of circumstances under which regulations will set those rules. I will probe the Minister on how he thinks that will work for individual CCAs. Ten new devolution deals were mooted in the White Paper—happily, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire were in one of them. Will those deals be set up with the same constitution? I cannot see why they would not be.

Amendment 20 would give the process some teeth, so that should the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire deal, for example, be different from the others, the Secretary of State would have to explain why those deals have been set up with different constitutional arrangements. That would not stop any differences, but it would be a recognition that the default position should be alignment and that any divergence should be explained.

The reasoning behind the amendment—I think this is a theme that we will cover in later amendments—lies in the history of combined authorities. I have a real personal discomfort with the idea of asymmetric devolution. I lived the first half of my life in Manchester, where my family still live, and I have lived the second half of my life in Nottingham. At some point during the last decade, a judgment was made in the Department that Greater Manchester could have a greater say over its future than Nottingham could over its own. Of course, that might have formally ended in proposals being submitted and deals being struck, but in reality, there were an awful lot of conversations about Nottingham’s readiness and Greater Manchester’s readiness. Ministers—not this Minister, but his predecessors—made the judgment that we in Nottingham would be unable to wield such powers. Of course, local circumstances can make that challenging, but I think our common personhood means that we ought all to have access to the same powers. We will pursue that theme in our amendments.

That is the basic principle, and although it can look different in different places, it holds firm. Instead, we have been left with a mishmash of different devolution settlements and deals. If we sought to explain to someone from outside the country our 10 current devolution deals—never mind the areas that do not have anything at all—we would struggle to explain them with any kind of criteria other than evolution over time. I do not think that CCAs should perpetuate that. The welcome direction of travel that the Minister and Secretary of State set out in the White Paper was that they did not want it to be that way in future, but that instead there were tiers of power to which everyone had access and that communities sought to take on, so that is a start.

The amendment would provide a check, so that if the governing document that drives the CCA—its constitution —does not start on the same basis, there must be really good reasons why not and a public account of those reasons, whereas what we have now is this rather inexplicable variance.

[Tim Farron]

I will be brief, given the time. Personally, I have no problem with asymmetrical devolution. A contrived central devolution is perhaps why Lord Prescott’s proposals in the ’90s and noughties did not work and were not popular. I have no problem with asymmetrical outcomes, but I have a serious problem with asymmetrical autonomy. Each community should have the same access to powers, even if gained in a different way. This is an important probing amendment, and I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say. For example, a rural community such as Cornwall, Northumberland or Cumbria should not have a Mayor forced on it if it does not want one, yet it should still have the same access to the same levels of power that the Government are offering through devolutions to those communities that do have a Mayor.

[Neil O’Brien]

The amendment brings us to a series of other amendments bound together by a particular philosophy encapsulated in the statement by the hon. Member for Nottingham North that the default should be alignment. The amendment is a particular and bleak way into this philosophical debate, and amendments to some later clauses—in particular amendment 26—make the Opposition’s position much clearer: that things should move in lockstep and that there should be more one-size-fits-all.

Fundamentally, we pretty profoundly disagree with that philosophy for a number of reasons. Devolution agreements should be different in multiple different ways, because there are different local wants. Simply, the point of devolution is that different people in different places want different things, and devolution makes that possible. Pragmatically, there are also different readiness levels. In some places, a process has been going on— for example, the Healthier Together work in Greater Manchester, which had been going on for a decade before health devolution in Greater Manchester. Also, different places are set up with various partners that they work with at different readiness levels.

On a pragmatic point, my great fear about adopting the one-size-fits-all, lockstep approach of the convoy moving at the speed of the slowest is that we will just not make significant progress. Were the hon. Gentleman to find himself in my place and I in his, he would discover that he could not make much progress in getting Whitehall to devolve powers. That is no small thing—to ask the elected Government of the day to give up control of the things for which they will be held accountable by the electorate to local politicians, who in many cases may be of a different political party. That is no small thing to agree. If it were said that a power could not be offered to a particular place unless it was offered to all—like the most-favoured-nation principle—I promise that devolution would grind to a halt extremely swiftly.

There is a framework. The basics are set out in the levelling-up White Paper, but variation is intended. Variation is a feature, not a bug of our devolution agenda. We believe in localism, in particularism, and in adapting things to the particular needs and particular local politics of different places—I agreed at least partly with what the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale said, which in some ways chimed with our view of this.

The hon. Member for Nottingham North asked us to explain why that might be so, in particular in relation to the amendment, which is about membership. Simply put, there might well be different numbers of members in different CCAs. We could have one with two members or one with a lot of members. Or we could have ones where the members were relatively similar authorities, or one where one member had radically different characteristics from the others—we might imagine a load of urban authorities and one that was more rural, or something like that. However, this amendment is the start of a series of amendments, so I will not labour the point at this stage.

Something else that the hon. Member for Nottingham North said that chimed with me and stuck out was that the centre should let go. That statement is very much our intention, in practice, with the desire for uniform devolution. We do have to let different places do different things because, fundamentally, they have different priorities. One place might care a lot about housing issues, but another might care about its innovation strategy. These things should be different, reflecting different wants.

To recap why we still want voting arrangements, for example, to be in secondary legislation, it is not primarily us in central Government that that arrangement is protecting; it is protecting local leadership from someone joining something only to find that they have been stitched up and then have their powers taken away due to a particular alignment of local leaders. Some things must be certain for local leaders and should be locked down and made safe for them in order for them to make progress, but in other ways there should be diversity, variation and localism.

This amendment represents just one aspect of that philosophy in practice, and we will talk about it again under other amendments, but the Opposition spokesman called on me to be direct, and I will be. There is just a difference in philosophy here about how we should approach devolution.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Fifth sitting)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Mr Paisley. I want to stress the importance of the legislation before us. In particular, I want to speak to amendments 3 and 5, and to new clause 1.

Clause 1 deals with the levelling-up missions, the foundation to the Bill and to building a stronger and more equal society. Representing a constituency in the north, I cannot stress enough the importance of this agenda in addressing the regional disparities that we see, and the inequality that my constituents experience. Across the House, we recognise the intergenerational lack of investment and the cost that has caused, biting particularly hard through the past decade of austerity, covid and now the cost of living crisis.

Clause 1(2) deals with levelling-up missions: what, when and how. However, the “who” is omitted. In taking evidence last week, the Committee heard leading experts repeatedly highlight the need for independent evaluation. In the very last evidence session, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North said, Mr Tanner drew attention to the importance of independence in the scrutiny of the levelling-up missions. That was a consistent theme throughout the week, with good reason.

First, no Government should mark their own homework. The Government clearly want to succeed, and therefore the matrices through which the comprehensive auditing process is undertaken could skew, or even conceal, the extent to which progress has been made. I am sure that if Government Ministers were sitting where we are, they would make the exact same argument about wanting rigour and independence through the scrutiny process of the levelling-up agenda. If the agenda is of such importance, the Government should welcome independent scrutiny of it.

Secondly, objective, independent scrutiny for such complex examination would provide Government with better insight into the progress made, and set out the path forward to address emerging inequalities or struggling areas that need concentrated focus to address those inequalities. It would give the Government the opportunity to step aside and then to invest in those areas. With the Government being so close to wanting levelling-up to succeed, there is risk of skewing the objectives.

Thirdly, I will make the comparison, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North did, to the Treasury establishing the Office for Budget Responsibility. That organisation has enabled independent scrutiny of Treasury assessments and has enabled Parliament and the public to hold the Government to account and to scrutinise the workings of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and wider Government respectively. In addition, the Climate Change Committee now has such authority that the nation looks to it: we know that academia particularly focuses on it, the Government certainly focus on and adhere to its calls, but so does industry. Having that rigour across industry enables us to see the seismic change that is necessary to meet our climate objectives. Seeing such scrutiny at work demonstrates the importance of independence. We can look at the power of COP26: had the Climate Change Committee not undertaken its vital work, we might not have seen the outcome that we did.

It is crucial that we see independent scrutiny not just of climate issues but across other national agendas. It does not matter who the Government of the day are; we want to bring about this change in order to apply that scrutiny to them. In order to tackle the inequality and injustices that we see across our communities, we must ensure that we set the right foundations for long-term measurement, and that the methodology is robust and independent, can attract cross-party support and is useful for all—not only in this place, which is often where the focus is, but across the country.

When we are dealing with such issues as those relating to criminal justice, housing and health, there are of course huge communities looking for robust measurement in order to understand how to advance those agendas. As we see more devolution in areas such as health, with the new integrated care systems, there needs to be a collective understanding of the mission that we are going on, not only through setting out the levelling-up missions but in scrutinising and measuring them as they advance. This is not just of use to the Government, or to the Opposition in scrutinising the Government; it is useful to all those parts of our society that move our levelling-up agenda forward.

In the light of the complexities of measuring levelling-up missions, it is of course necessary for measurement not just to be placed on the Government. There needs to be inclusion of, for instance, ICSs, local government, mayoralties and so on, so that there can be robust determination of how they feed into the levelling-up missions and how their work is scrutinised, given their arm’s length role in delivering many of these functions and the missions and aspirations of Government. As my hon. Friends on the Front Bench have set out in amendment 4, with proposed new subsection (4A), the Government must also publish an action plan to enable objective scrutiny of the missions’ impact. This is about not just looking backwards but projecting forwards, which helps to set the rhythm of Government but also of our nation.

The regeneration community—the professionals who will implement many elements of the Bill—talk about those golden threads where analysis is required not just in the silos of individual missions or Departments, but across them, to determine how they will intersect and work together so that, together, they are more than the sum of their parts. I am talking about drawing in multiple Departments to address inequality. We know that many of these issues are intersectional, so we need a body that can hold everything together and highlight the opportunities, because the Government are often too close to them to identify them.

It might be worth noting that the Hackitt report in relation to Grenfell takes that approach. It looks at intersectionality, which is so important for a robust response. Clearly, with such complexity as levelling up presents, having a space for independent scrutiny is all the more important. The independence will then, of course, build confidence across the country. This will not just be seen as a headline, a tweet or the next moment to talk about levelling up; it will gain public recognition and will bring focus across Government and beyond. Independence will take away suggestion of unconscious bias in Government decisions, and will give delivery partners greater confidence in the process and in Government. It will restore trust, which the Government are seeking and we all want to see. It will thus reduce conflict and increase motivation.

We have independent scrutiny across most functions in society. We have heard about the OBR and the Climate Change Committee, but I draw the Minister’s attention to Ofsted, Ofcom, Ofgem and the Care Quality Commission—independence is absolutely at the heart of all they deliver, so why not have it for something as fundamental as levelling-up missions? This is now recognised as the mechanism by which performance can be judged nationally, regionally and locally. A mature Government therefore have to understand the rigour of independence.

I move on to proposed new subsection (2)(c). We have had the what, the when, the how and the who, and we now need to talk about how much. It is vital that the Government quantify the resources available for investment in the nation’s regions, sub-regions and local areas. The entrenched disparities we see across the country are not due to a lack of aspiration or ability but are in large part down to a failure to invest in more than a generation. The Resolution Foundation has spoken in the past 24 hours about the importance of the scale of investment. When resources are concentrated, their impact is multiplied and we see decades of inequality being addressed.

As we know, London and the south-east suck in the lion’s share of resources. We have seen the evolution of the booming south at the cost of the north; that is what this agenda is all about. In the evidence sessions, Professor Leyser and the Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, highlighted how to build a cluster economy to invest and create wider opportunities. Although the mission of levelling up is to address regional disparities, reviewing the impact it has on local inequity is so important, which is why independent scrutiny is vital.

If all that is achieved in the most affluent areas, then clearly, in order to extend opportunities for wealth, health and education, levelling up will need to be translated across the board. I truly recommend that we focus on opportunities to level up under the purview of an independent body, as opposed to the internal scrutiny systems of Government.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I will not say very much, except to express my support for the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Nottingham North.

It seems to me that it is entirely appropriate to push much of what is in the Bill through legislation—that would be normal for any Government—but for certain aspects, particularly those in part 1, it is quite unusual for a Government to choose this means to achieve their aim. If they want to level up, invest in regions and improve the quality of life in rural and urban communities in the north, the south-west and other areas where we feel that there has been a disparity of opportunity, they could simply do it. It does not take a Bill for us to invest and choose to act differently. The Government could just do something very novel: govern. They could invest and choose priorities to get behind.

Given that the Government have chosen this route, it seems odd that they should want to have their cake and eat it. They want to go down the legislative route but then not do anything commensurate with it—in other words, they do not want to allow themselves to be scrutinised and held to account. It seems entirely appropriate to me that there should be an independent body that is able to judge the success—or otherwise—of the levelling-up missions. It would see whether, for example, we are tackling the huge disparity, in every region of this country, between different age groups’ and income groups’ access to affordable housing, to allow them access to all other parts of society—that is what a decent, affordable, secure home does.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron]

This is an important amendment because it allows the Government to be up front about the level of resource that they seek to deploy region by region. It is also important because it refers to areas below the level of region. As the hon. Member for York Central has set out, there is a danger that the Government might sound somewhat patronising when they talk about levelling up, thinking from their London seat that the provinces are all terribly deprived and they should throw some money at them and level them up. Of course, the reality is that inequalities within regions are greater than inequalities between them.

Members will not be surprised by my focus on rural communities. The Minister might be aware of research that has come out in the past couple of days from the Rural Services Network. It has looked at the Government’s own levelling-up metrics and on that basis it reckons that, were rural England to be a separate region, it would perform more poorly than every other geographical region of England. Not only would it perform more poorly, but it is disadvantaged for different reasons. The metrics that the Government are seeking to deploy in order to understand deprivation and inequality do not do the business when it comes to understanding the issues that face rural communities.

In my constituency there will be fewer than 500 people unemployed. We have got very close to full employment. We also have average house prices that are between 10 and 15 times average incomes. We have people in work and in poverty. The clear, huge majority of people on universal credit in my constituency and in other parts of Cumbria are in work, and not just in work but in multiple jobs, seeking to make ends meet. Potentially, they will not tick boxes when the Government’s metrics are being considered and they may not be recipients of the resources that the hon. Member for Nottingham North seeks to get the Government to be explicit about.

Let us think about some of the needs that are present in that rural region of England, which is more needy than every other geographical region of England by some distance. We are talking about incomes. We are talking about house prices. We are talking about the fact that in the south lakes alone—a community with nearly full employment—5,500 people are on a council house list, waiting for their first home. By the way, an educated guess is that there are about 10,000 second homes in the same district. It is important to understand that the discrepancies and inequalities are of that order.

It seems very black and white to say, “These are the homes of people who already have one and these are the people who haven’t even got the one,” but if we care about inequality we are going to care about that. In a property-owning democracy, we might champion people’s liberty and their right to own more than one home, but when there is a conflict between someone’s right to a second home and someone else’s right just to have any home, we know whose side we should be taking, don’t we? If we do not, this Bill means nothing at all, and nothing to rural communities in particular.

Let us look at some other issues in respect of which rural communities are disadvantaged. The vast proportion of people in Cumbria are not on the mains for their heating; they are on oil—liquid fuel—and there is no price cap for that. There is no way of taking into account inflation beyond that which most of us are experiencing when it comes to energy prices. There is nothing to assess that, nothing to allow for it, nothing to ensure that resources are available to help communities so that they can be protected from the cost-of-living crisis that is particularly hard in rural communities.

In cities such as London, Manchester and Newcastle—wonderful places—it is possible to live without a car, and many people do. That is probably good for the environment and for people’s pockets as well. Mobility is more straightforward in a community like the one we are standing and sitting in now, but in a community like mine, people need cars. The chances are that people do not live in the village in which they work, and they need to get from one place to another. Fuel prices are higher and the distances are longer, and the bus journey from Kendal to Ambleside is the second most expensive in the country, so it is very expensive to travel whether via private car or public transport.

Let us also think about access to services. For people living in Sedbergh, for instance, the nearest FE college is 10 miles away and there is no bus, so their access to services is restricted in a way that the access of people in other parts of the country is not. What about health services? What about the one in two of us who at some point in our lives will end up with a cancer diagnosis, and the one in two of those who will need radiotherapy? In a community such as Cumbria they have to make a three or four-hour round trip to Preston every day to get life-saving treatment, for weeks and weeks on end.

The things I have outlined will not be taken into account if we are not honest about what regions actually are, about the categories of places within regions—sub-regions—and about how parts of the country, even though they might be in Northumberland, Cornwall, Cumbria or Kent, have commonalities despite geographical disparity. Without being clear about the resources, we are not going to tackle that need. We are not going to tackle the lack of connectivity that puts people at risk in rural communities, where we do not have the broadband roll-out the Government have promised. We do not have the commitment to bring health services and education close to home or to address transport costs. Above all, a massive flaw throughout the Bill is inadequacy when it comes to tackling the biggest driver of inequality in this country: lack of access to affordable and available housing.

I urge the Minister to look at the Rural Services Network report and to take into account the fact that rural England counts as the most deprived region of England, compared with the geographical regions. I urge him to accept the amendment, and in doing so to ensure that resources are allocated appropriately to every part of every region of this country.

[Patricia Gibson]

Amendment 13 would place

“a responsibility on the Government to publish the resources made available to communities in order to level-up”.

Who could argue with that? In not arguing with it, I cannot help reminding the Minister that Scotland was promised a £1.5-billion-a-year bonanza as part of the Brexit windfall. Of course, the reality is that Scotland has received 40% less funding than it did under the EU funding agenda, and it has suffered a 5.2% cut in its resource budget and a 9.7% cut in its capital budget. Perhaps the Minister can tell us how that supports the levelling-up agenda, because I certainly cannot understand. It is quite galling that as this Government show disrespect to devolved Parliaments—democratically elected Parliaments—by impinging on devolved powers and bypassing the democratic will of the Scottish people in devolved areas, they simultaneously cut their budget in the context of levelling up.

Despite the stated goals of the legislation, the Minister has been unable to say—perhaps he will do so when he gets to his feet—whether the levelling-up missions would result in a reduction in inequality to the point where we would see a reduction in child poverty. What kind of levelling-up commitment would not address the basic social scourge of child poverty? I cannot think what the point of any of this is if we are not committed to tackling that most basic and serious ill.

Of course, as we have heard, we do not need a fanfare to tackle inequality; we just need to get on and do it. We can exalt in our success if indeed we have it, but we do not need a Bill that runs to hundreds of pages but cannot even commit to transparency or to publishing details of the resources that it is willing to use.

In Scotland, the Scottish Government have tried, with their limited powers, to instigate levelling up—for example, with the Scottish child payment of £20 per child per week. That is real levelling up, and these are the kinds of measures that the Bill really ought to tackle to build a more inclusive society. As food bank use rises, we have a real opportunity if we are serious about levelling up, but it takes targeted political will and a determination to tackle the causes of inequality. That is not an easy thing to do—we have to put in a real shift—but a Bill that runs to a few hundred pages with vague missions that objectively cannot be held to account will not convince anybody.

It is clear to see that the resources for true levelling up will not be made available, certainly from the Scottish perspective with the figures I have cited. For all the warm words, and there have been many, it is difficult to have confidence that our communities will see any tangible difference as a result of this fanfare—sorry, this Bill. The Government should have no problem with amendment 13, because they know that no levelling up can happen without resources. Presumably, if they are serious about levelling up, those resources will be committed, so why not publish them? Why do the Government not exalt in their success and the resources they are willing to expend? If this levelling-up Bill and agenda do not reduce inequality or tackle poverty, child poverty or child hunger, I honestly cannot see the point of them.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (Second sitting)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Welcome back. We are in public session and the proceedings are being broadcast. I encourage you to switch any mobile or electronic devices to silent. I welcome the fourth panel of witnesses. We will now hear oral evidence from Eamonn Boylan, chief executive of Greater Manchester Combined Authority; Laura Shoaf, chief executive of West Midlands Combined Authority; and Joanne Roney OBE, president of SOLACE and also chief executive of Manchester City Council. They are all joining us via Zoom.

Before calling the first Members to ask questions, I remind you all that questions should be limited to matters that are in scope of the Bill and that we must stick to the timings in the programme motion that the Committee agreed this morning. This session will last until 2.40 pm. I find that with larger panels we should try to direct our questions to a specific member of the panel, otherwise one questioner could end up taking all of the session. I also encourage our panellists to be pithy in their answers, but if one of your colleagues has had a question directed to them and you think there is something really important that you need to say, please do indicate and say it because it will add to the evidential value.

I have already introduced the panel. For the sake of time, I will call our first questioner, Tim Farron.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Q43 First, it is great to see you all here. I am not sure who to put the first question to. The levelling-up Bill has provisions for communities that go through devolution settlements and local government reorganisation to have a Mayor, but for that to be called something else and for the title to be amended. Do you think that that is sufficient in terms of respecting the desires of a local community? Is it possible for a community that has not yet got a devolution settlement to construct their own governance arrangements without having a Mayor or anything like it, yet still be able to access the full devolution deal that the Government might offer? I will pick Laura.

Laura Shoaf: I can probably speak only from our perspective as an area that has a Mayor. I will reflect on what we have seen so far in the first and second term. The elected Mayor model has worked really well in our area and has been a success for accountability, which is critical. As devolution continues and more powers are devolved, the mechanisms need to be in place to ensure accountability. In our experience, that works quite well by having an elected Mayor.

[Tim Farron]

Q Looking close to home in my neck of the woods, we have just gone through a local government reorganisation and we have two unitary authorities. Cumbria’s six districts are being abolished. The county council will be abolished and there will be two new authorities from next April: Westmoreland and Furness, and Cumberland. In both cases, those councils are now run by majority by parties that opposed the notion of a Mayor. Do you think it would be respecting the will of the people of those two parts of Cumbria to impose on them a Mayor, or to tell them that they could not have a devolution deal if they did not accept a Mayor?

Laura Shoaf: I think one of the principles of devolution is that they should be unique to each place. I would not necessarily suggest that one model would work absolutely everywhere. If devolution is to work, in our experience it must be meaningful to the place, and it must be something that reflects democracy and accountability in that place. I do not think there is a one size fits all answer to that, but I would reiterate that in our experience, with our Mayor, that has been a very powerful role to rally around and it has yielded great results.

[The Chair]

I call the Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

Q Thank you. Graeme, we spoke a little in this morning’s sitting about the missions. As you know, whether the missions should be set out in the Bill, or whether the Bill should say instead that there should be some missions, is something of a politically contested space. We also talked a little about how we will understand progress. From your research in your unit at the university, how best can we as decision makers and legislators monitor levelling up and understand the impact of the various levelling-up missions and programmes?

Professor Atherton: One of the first things is that the missions differ significantly in precisely how they can be measured. For some missions, you see targets that one could see progress against in a quantitative way; for others, that is less so. Consistency across the missions would seem a good starting point. Then, if we are indeed to look for progress, there need to be quantitative and possibly other measures alongside each mission.

Inevitably, one of the challenges with levelling up is that the White Paper is so broad and encompasses so many different policy areas. We found over 120 different policy targets or policies mentioned in the White Paper, alongside £250 billion-worth of spend. Refining that down to a number of missions will be difficult. First, you need to make the missions consistent, and there needs to be a rationale for why certain things are included as missions and others are not. For instance, we consistently have things on skills, but not on other aspects of education—we have things for younger groups, at primary level, but not for those at a level between the two.

The important point is: what is and is not the mission? In defining it and looking for progress, we need to be as precise as we can be for each mission. We should possibly go beyond the time scale in the White Paper, and look at what happened prior to that, because although the medium term is good, you need to consider the short, medium and long-term progress you are looking to make on the missions.

[Tim Farron]

Q Thank you to all the panellists; it is brilliant to see you here. My first question is to Dr Patel. Rural communities face inequality in accessing health services, given the geographical distances that people need to travel to receive healthcare. Thinking about cancer treatment, A&E and GP access, what evidence can you call on to indicate whether those large geographical distances have an impact on health outcomes?

Dr Patel: It is an excellent question. I cannot call on a precise study that will give me an exact scientific answer to what you are asking. The thing about health outcomes is that they are a point of convergence for a whole array of economic, social, cultural and political factors, including access to public services of all kinds, not just health services. That is why health outcomes are quite a good thing to look at. Within the 12 missions, it is sort of the mission of the missions. The other 11 all basically feed into whether or not we achieve the health mission, so it is a good thing to look at. There are no two ways about it: public services are a key determinant of health distributions and health patterns, and they make a massive difference to cancer outcomes, for example. At the same time, they are not the be-all and end-all. The local economy matters, and things like pride in place and social relations also matter.

Zooming out a little bit, do I think this Bill and the proposed funding pots around it will achieve the health mission? The evidence tells me I should be sceptical. A really good example is if we look at east and west Germany in 1990, when there was a four-year life expectancy difference between east and west Germany. Two decades later, that had closed to three months. In those two decades, we saw radical constitutional reform, sweeping political change, €2 trillion of investment and a massive upgrade in public services and access to the services you described. In relation to that, what this Bill proposes is certainly more symbolic than substantial, and that is where my scepticism originates.

[Tim Farron]

Q On using this Bill to provide rights to access, or giving local communities the powers of definition and delivery, so that GP practices are protected in rural communities or cancer treatment is brought closer to where people live, what provisions could be put into the Bill to make sure those things are delivered?

Dr Patel: That is another brilliant question. There is a huge cut-across here with what has been going on with NHS reforms over the past two or three decades. It is almost as though we have had some of the issues again—the problem with top-down structural reform and how, ultimately, it does not really make a difference. Structures are important, but people really care about outcomes.

I would encourage people to compare what has being going on with the integrated care system reforms, and to think about the priorities, legislative and non-legislative, between those new institutions; the ICS boards operate at the same sort of size as a mayoral combined authority. I for one have definitely encouraged the ICSs to have a much stronger conversation with combined authorities about how they can work together to ensure that services can be delivered to the hardest-to-reach populations. There are certainly places that are doing that quite well. Often, it comes back not just to governance, but to resourcing. By that, I do not just mean money; I mean personnel. The public sector is anaemic in a lot of places, and that is a huge barrier beyond a legislative one.

[Tim Farron]

Q Thank you. I have a quick one for Rich and/or Sacha about planning. How much do you think the campaign to increase communities’ power over their destiny depends on the level of planning control and the kinds of powers communities have?

Rich Bell: I think the destiny of communities is significantly shaped by their level of control over planning decisions. One thing we are at once encouraged by and slightly disappointed by in this Bill is the proposal regarding the neighbourhood share. This is the idea that 25% of the infrastructure levy could be controlled by either a parish council or a neighbourhood planning forum. That currently applies in the case of the community infrastructure levy, but not in the case of section 106. I think it is a very positive step on the Government’s part to extend that neighbourhood-level control over the investment of developer-generated public money—to devolve that directly to neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, parish councils are predominantly found in wealthy and rural areas. A report produced for the Department then known as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government by academics at the University of Reading concluded something very similar on neighbourhood planning forums just a few years ago.

We would suggest that members of the Committee should consider whether the Bill could be amended to expand the definition of a “qualifying body” on page 264. We would ask Members to introduce a clause amending the Localism Act 2011 that expands the range of organisations to whom that neighbourhood share could be passed. It should be possible for local authorities to designate community anchor organisations, such as the Wharton Trust in Hartlepool, as local trusted partners who could work with that local authority to spend that not insignificant amount of public money.

[Neil O'Brien]

Q This question is mainly for Sacha and Rich. It is about high street rental auctions, which the Bill introduces. As well as being an opportunity to improve our high streets and regenerate the local economy, do you think they are an opportunity for voluntary groups, small businesses and social enterprises to get themselves a place on the high street? How would you like to see community involvement in that high street rental auction process work?

Rich Bell: We were very encouraged by the detail of this proposal. We were very pleased to see that the Bill defines high street use in a way that recognises the use of high street premises as a communal meeting space. It is incredibly important that the legislation recognises that high streets are not just drivers of local economies; they are the sites of the bumping spaces and the meeting places that stitch together our social fabric. It is similarly positive that the Bill’s local benefit condition recognises the social and environmental benefits of high street premises as well as their economic benefits.

We encourage the Government to consider how they can shape accompanying regulations to ensure that local authorities feel that they have permission to work with social enterprises and local community organisations, and to shape their own criteria for high street auctions, so that those community organisations can gain access to high street sites. As I say, we were encouraged by the detail.

Sacha Bedding: High streets are absolutely about pride. There is nothing worse than seeing boarded-up places. The opportunity for local ownership and activity will help. People are full of ideas on how to do that. I will not go on too long; we absolutely agree with what Rich said, and there will be any amount of ideas, not just focused around retail, on how people can help make their high streets thriving places again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matthew Pennycook]

Q Great. Tim, anything to add?

Cllr Oliver: Yes, I agree with both James and Sam. Obviously, planning is largely in the remit of the district and borough councils. In an ideal world, I would hope to see some sort of spatial development strategy, or the ability to create that. The duty to co-operate has not worked particularly well, and, where we are creating CCAs and county deals, it would be very helpful for there to be some input, at least, from a county-wide perspective. In terms of the digitalisation, I would leave that to the other two and I agree with what they said.

[Tim Farron]

Q Hello to all three of you; it is really nice to see you. Thank you very much for your time. My question is on housing and planning, so it is probably for Sam, but with a little bit of James, and we would be perfectly interested to hear what Tim has to say as well.

If we take it as a given that, particularly in the rural communities that many district councils serve, there is a collapse of the private rented sector into the Airbnb sector and a massive growth in second home ownership at the expense of permanent occupied dwellings, do you think that this Bill gives you any additional powers that help you to push back against that? What additional powers would you like?

Cllr Chapman-Allen: The relaxation for local authorities to tax second homes for council tax purposes had a really positive impact. We are seeing that across those communities in which second home ownership is immensely high. For communities such as yours, Tim, that Airbnb community is a challenge. First, it removes those rental properties from the market for long-term tenants. Secondly, it creates a really fluid community, and sometimes there are risks of antisocial behaviour related to that. There could be more strengthening for those local authorities to place conditions on new builds and new properties to ensure that the type of mix and tenure, and/or usage around holiday homes and/or Airbnbs, could be strengthened.

That said, we have the existing legacy problems for coastal communities, market towns and cathedral cities already. I would not necessarily want to suggest that we change that through this Bill now. We need to ensure that we are working with those landlords positively, as with housing providers and housing legislators, to ensure that they understand the challenges they face, but more importantly, the challenges that the communities face.

We have a long way to go. Over the last 12 months, there has been a lot of change for landlords. Sadly some of those have now vacated the market because of the changes in regulations, and policies required of them. We must ensure that we have a suitable housing mix across the country, and those who want to and do rent have an important part to play. Therefore, landlords have an important part to play in that process. I would not necessarily want to over-regulate so that landlords no longer want to operate in that market. However, there is a challenge around Airbnb and there is further work we can do to support the Government in implementing some legislation on that.

[Tim Farron]

Thanks. James?

Cllr Jamieson: I agree with Sam on the issue of second home owners—I think that is a helpful move. Airbnb is a slightly separate issue that needs to be thought through because there is a whole range of issues associated with it. It is not just about taking it out of the market. As Sam alluded to, it is a potentially antisocial issue; it is a transient nature; and it potentially puts more pressure on local authorities. It is more about how we manage that type of property, which is something we are very keen to have a conversation about—on enforcement, on ensuring that the accommodation is suitable, and on things like a potential tourist tax. I am not quite sure the solution to Airbnb is part of the levelling-up White Paper. It is potentially a separate issue that we need to look into quite carefully.

However, you were right when you alluded to the fact that housing just costs far too much in far too many parts of the community. In your area, Tim, and in the south-west and coastal communities, housing is being soaked up by holidaymakers and second home owners, with not enough homes available for people who want to work there. There are manifest stories of people wanting to go on holiday—to, say, Cornwall—but the pub has to shut because it cannot get any staff, because they cannot afford to live there.

[Tim Farron]

Q Yes. I have one totally separate question—hopefully it will be of interest to all of you. The Government state that having an elected Mayor is essential to providing strong leadership. Do you agree? Are there exceptions?

[The Chair]

Could you answer quickly? We have one more question—possibly two—and we are running very short on time.

Cllr Jamieson: Our view is that we have excellent local government leaders. There is a role for Mayors, but it should not be essential to have a Mayor everywhere. There are plenty of powers that could be devolved to the existing structure without the need for a Mayor. As I said, there is nothing against Mayors; they are absolutely appropriate in certain places. We think it should be the choice of the local area as to the best governance arrangement for them.

[Tim Farron]

Q I think Tim might want to come in.

Cllr Oliver: I support that. I understand and agree with the Government’s desire to have a single accountable leader. However, I think that in the case of a county council leader, that person already exists. I know that my residents know exactly who to write to if they have any issues, particularly on potholes. We do not necessarily need to have a directly elected Mayor or leader to deliver the devolved aspects and benefits that will come with the Bill. We respect the Government’s position, but we do not see that as an absolute prerequisite.

[The Chair]

Okay. A couple of words, Sam?

Cllr Chapman-Allen: Thank you. In response to Tim’s question, I would say that, once again, it comes back to the bottom-up position. We are sovereign bodies in our own right. We work in partnership across our localities, whether through public sector leaders’ boards or leaders’ forums, and we can already operate in that structure. The past two years, with the pandemic, have proven that collaboration.

In direct response to Tim’s question, the risk is that, as we move forward, there are powers being devolved, and actions and functions—particularly around local enterprise partnerships—that are moving away to a single person who is not elected for that role directly. We should be using existing structures, arrangements and collaboration to deliver on behalf of Government. Coming back to James’s point, we do not actually quite know what is being devolved from Government yet.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (First sitting)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I call Tim Farron. Will you bear in mind I have another question after you? Thank you.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Q Professor Leyser, thank you for being with us. The Bill states its commitment to widening opportunity and tackling disparities between regions. Obviously, economic disparities and opportunity disparities exist within regions and communities. The biggest driver of that must be access to housing that people can afford. In the last two years, there has been a 50% drop in the number of long-term lets available and an 11% rise in rents, which are clearly linked. If we are to tackle disparities, surely we will want to tackle the lack of affordable housing for so many people. What in the Bill enables that to happen, through either the missions or the powers that local authorities might be given to tackle that disparity?

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: As I said previously, I completely agree that this is a multifaceted problem that has to be thought of in a joined-up way, which is why the overall approach set out in the Bill is good. My role is CEO of UKRI, so I am not in a position to provide any expertise or advice on how to solve the housing problems, but I would hope that you would have the opportunity to ask those who are able to address that question to give evidence to the Committee.

[Tim Farron]

Q Thank you. I represent a rural community in Cumbria. The problems there are specific. As a member of the advisory board, do you think there is room for different rules to apply in different parts of the United Kingdom, so that certain local authorities might have different powers from others to, for example, control the number of holiday lets and second homes, so that there is a decent number of affordable and available properties for a permanent population?

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: Again, the specifics of that question are well outside my area of my expertise. From an R&D point of view, I hope I have been stressing all along that the key to success is specificity—it is understanding local regions and therefore understanding what the bottlenecks are to their growth and targeting investment very specifically in the context of those bottlenecks. That obviously requires really deep local knowledge and local empowerment.

I am absolutely in favour of careful consideration of local needs in the investments that are made. That is very much how UKRI is going about thinking about our R&D investments. I would hope that that approach is considered more widely, because I do not see how one can tackle these problems unless it is through putting in place specific, targeted, well thought-through locally aligned interventions.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Professor Leyser, given that economic cluster development grows exponentially, what risks do you foresee of the legislation choking off development space for the growth of economic clusters, particularly inward investment on key strategic sites? Housing developers getting a quick return and receipt, for example, could choke off the opportunity to grow a cluster outwards.

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: As I have said, this careful alignment of multiple interventions is crucial precisely because if one rushes in with a particular input, its knock-on consequences are not always foreseen, and we need to be able to respond to them and adjust accordingly. It is critical to think hard upstream about the aligned series of investments being made, and to monitor and feed back, so that where the evidence begins to grow and the chosen interventions have some of those knock-on and unforeseen consequences, they are identified and rectified before things get dug in too deeply. Exactly as you say, growing those clusters is very much about creating the right ecosystem and the right sets of interactions between the different parts. That drives positive feedback and sucks in additional investment in the virtuous cycle that we are all seeking to build. That is critical.

The answers are very specific and depend on the particular element of the overall system that you are looking at. From our point of view, we are really keen to ensure that our investments build synergy between local specialisations and growth, and national capability and capacity. It is important that our investments outside the greater south-east do not in any way undermine the extraordinary powerhouse that the greater south-east is for our R&D activity, and that, rather, those two things are synergistic with one another and that the skills and specialist areas developed in particular parts of the UK work in synergy with activity in other parts of the UK. That local-national map is critical to ensure that we do not drive the negative consequences of interventions, which, as you have highlighted, are a risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O’Brien]

Q I have one last quick question. West Yorkshire has what some people describe as a strong Mayor model, whereby the Mayor needs to be on the side of the majority for various decisions to be taken. There is a diversity of decision-making structures in the existing MCAs. What would you say are some of the advantages of having a strong mayoral model or strong decision making for particular subjects?

Tracy Brabin: It is helpful that we have real strength in our leaderships, because they are really experienced leaders. We are all focused on delivering for the people of West Yorkshire, and it has not come to a point where it has been down to my vote. We get a consensus before we go to a vote, and the opposition members on the CA are very helpful, because they provide the check and challenge to get us to a point of compromise so that we can bring everybody with us in delivering for the people of West Yorkshire.

[Tim Farron]

Q Thank you, Tracy; it is nice to see you again. Your region is significantly diverse, with both rural and urban areas. Like every other part of the UK, you will have seen a worsening housing crisis in the last couple of years, particularly in the private rented sector, which appears to be evaporating into short-term lets, especially in your rural communities. What powers does the Bill give you to ensure the availability of affordable for the people you represent?

Tracy Brabin: Affordable and sustainable homes are a priority for me, because it is personal—I grew up in social housing. My commitment to the people of West Yorkshire was to deliver 5,000 affordable and sustainable homes. Over the years, we have seen the number diminish, partly due to right to buy and partly due to the lack of funding. I am able to work with the councils and push them to get to further building target, which has been really helpful. The brownfield fund for housing has enabled us to really focus on the spots that blight our communities, and to work with developers.

For the first time, the West Yorkshire housing associations have all come together under one umbrella to deliver on my housing pledge and to help us get there, but it is still a challenge. Although the £22 million extra in the Bill for brownfield housing is welcome, it comes with the same strings attached and the same expectations from the Government, but with less time to deliver. There is an expectation that we have more freedom, but we need to get away from the strings that hold us back from delivering.

Let us not forget that we have areas in West Yorkshire where the housing stock is really low cost, and we are trying to square the circle of how we build more when we have the Government’s expectations about market failure. We have met Homes England since I became Mayor. I am very interested to see how that relationship develops and how we can work more closely on affordable housing, because the need in our region is growing exponentially. The lists of people waiting for a secure and affordable home are far too long. Ben, I do not know whether you want to talk more technically.

Ben Still: Thank you, Mayor. There is a lot in the Bill that could potentially be helpful to local authorities in unlocking and developing land. The issue that we face in West Yorkshire is much more about the viability of housing sites than about pressure on land and so forth. This is a good example of where the Mayor working in partnership with the local authorities is not just about the legislative provisions, but about the strength of the partnership. The Bill does not change the fundamental relationship between local authorities and Mayors with regards to who is responsible for the delivery of housing.

[Tim Farron]

Q A quick follow-up: which powers relating to housing stock would you like in the Bill so that you can ensure sufficient affordable and available homes for people in every part of your region?

Tracy Brabin: What may help more is the strategic planning, which I understand has not been agreed because the planning was going to be changed from Government, so we do not have clarity on our strategic planning powers. It would be incredibly helpful if we got some conclusion on that.

Ben Still: I might add that the common theme in many of our answers is that what is needed is not necessarily additional powers, but the freedom to work with local authorities to deliver the right solutions in the right areas. That is what we will be looking for in the Bill as it progresses, namely the ability to take local decisions within a guiding framework.

Tracy Brabin: May I add a supplementary point? The city region sustainable transport scheme—the big transport fund of nearly £900 million—has felt as if it is really heading in the right direction. It is really progressive that it is multi-year. It is money that we can really deliver; it is long term, and it is about local freedoms. However, in implementing it, we are getting check and challenge from Government about, for example, whether we can have silver bins in a particular project or a grass roof on a train station.

It is really important when the Committee is looking through the Bill to identify how Government can enable Mayors to make those decisions and trust them to deliver, because if we focus on outcomes rather than processes, then I think we can deliver for Government and be challenged as to whether we have delivered against the 12 missions once those schemes have been approved.

[Rachael Maskell]

Q Tracy, it is nice to see you again. This Bill is about levelling up, yet the different mayoralties have different powers and cover different geographical spaces, and therefore have different economic inequality between them. How do you think that real levelling up can come across all regions and indeed all nations through this legislation?

Tracy Brabin: Thank you, Rachel. I would say that poverty is everywhere. It is not one region over another; it is everywhere. And poverty is expensive. Our mission in West Yorkshire—I know that other Mayors share this mission—is to close that disadvantage gap, to close the wage gap between the highest earners and the lowest, and to close the health inequalities that blight some of our communities. Some of our communities were extremely badly hit by covid, particularly in West Yorkshire, because of various circumstances, and it will take us a long time to recover.

However, Rachel, in direct response to your point, I would say that transport really preoccupies most of the Mayors—how can we make sure that we can get our talented people to opportunity? We have seen the HS2 Bill being laid before Parliament, and how frustrating it is for the people of West Yorkshire to see so much investment going into one side of the country, when we know that levelling up and tackling poverty are both absolutely about making sure that people can get to good jobs, and to colleges and to skills training, and so on.

As the M10, we work together to try to improve transport. Collectively, for example, Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram and I work on buses, which is the transport system that the majority of people in West Yorkshire use. We are reducing bus fares, capping single trips to £2 and making it £4.50 for a daily pass. We are doing what we can to make sure there is more money in people’s pockets and that transport works. However, it is more than a structural problem, Rachel, in that transport has to work, and Government must invest. I know that it is one of the mission statements, and I know that Government want to do it, and we can help them to do it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

Q That is a very handy caution for us with regard to using these statistics for allocation purposes. When it comes to measuring progress, would it be a little easier if we were not seeking to aggregate and to weight them but instead to use them as some sort of dashboard such that we would be able to form some sort of consensus on what indicators would show whether we were levelling up across the UK? Would we be able to reach a kind of breadth there, certainly in your community?

Mairi Spowage: Yes, I think that is possible. In terms of the sorts of metrics that we could use, it will be important that the metrics used capture the outcomes of what we are trying to achieve and not just inputs or outputs, but I do think it will be possible, and I agree with you that it makes much more sense, when we are thinking about whether the interventions that we are pursuing are making progress on the outcomes that we are interested in, to look at those as a suite or a dashboard of indicators, rather than trying to come up with some index overall. Yes, absolutely, it should be possible to come up with a suite of indicators that are broadly agreed upon. However, there are things like the Scottish national performance framework, trying to measure the 11 national outcomes that the Scottish Government have set out through consultation with Scottish public life and communities about what is important. Just be aware: 81 indicators are used to capture that, and having 81 indicators makes it quite difficult to say overall whether we feel we are progressing to the sort of Scotland that we want to see. It can be difficult to come up with something that is comprehensive enough and that does not become unwieldy.

[Tim Farron]

Q Hi, Professor; good to see you with us. You mentioned earlier the situation regarding a tight labour market. Thinking about rural communities in Scotland and England in particular and elsewhere in the UK, to what extent you think an absence or a lack of workforce is hampering those economies. In the Lake district, 63% of hospitality businesses last year reported that they were working below capacity, because of the lack of workforce. To what extent do you think that workforce problems—or lack of workforce—are hampering economic growth in certain areas? What is the cause? Does the Bill do anything to solve those problems?

Mairi Spowage: It is a massive problem. For all the businesses we talk to on a regular basis right now, it is their No. 1 issue. They are very concerned about their energy, fuel and input costs going up hugely, but their biggest problem is sourcing staff, particularly businesses in rural areas. It means that they do not open as much in many cases, particularly when we talk to hospitality businesses—they are not serving non-residents for dinner, or they are not opening on all days of the week. That seems to be quite common across the Scottish businesses we talk to on a regular basis, so it is an absolutely huge problem.

What is causing it? Well, for many years, there has been a movement—within Scotland at least, which I am more familiar with—from rural to more urban areas. In Scotland, there has been movement from most areas to Edinburgh and its surrounds, to be honest. That is projected to continue. If it does, that has some pretty huge consequences for rural areas. Obviously, housing plays into it as well, with young people in an area being attracted away, perhaps to study, but also for employment, and not being able to afford to buy houses in the local area. Certain parts, particularly the highlands, have huge issues with second-home ownership dominating particular settlements.

Those are all issues. With some of the pressure valves that we used to use a lot in rural areas in Scotland around EU labour, it is not quite the same situation any more, so we are not seeing the same supply of labour from that sort of source that we did in the past. That definitely seems to be causing issues, particularly in hospitality and social care.

[Tim Farron]

Q What might the Government do in the levelling-up Bill to help that situation? You talked in particular about the impact on rural communities—what might make it more affordable or attractive for people of all ages in the working-age population either to move to or to remain in rural communities?

Mairi Spowage: I suppose some of things we have talked about—improved digital connectivity, improving transport connectivity—are likely to make some areas seem more accessible than they were before, particularly when that might connect people to employment centres. Investing in connectivity, both digital and transport infrastructure, is likely to improve the situation for rural areas. However, we also have an issue with labour supply, and the outlook for population overall for areas like Scotland is not good in the aggregate, as well as having to think about the issues of digital and transport connectivity.

[Tim Farron]

Q Are there any metrics at all on what impact that is having on regional growth?

Mairi Spowage: It is difficult, because we have had a very strange couple of years, and the data tend to be very lagged at the sub-UK level for us when understanding what the impacts might be on regional growth. The leading indicators we have, on payroll employment, wages and things like that, suggest that lots of areas of Scotland seem to be lagging behind other areas of the UK, but some of that is in relation to the oil and gas industry in the north-east, which right now is the poorest area of the UK in wage growth, since pre-pandemic. There are interesting things going on in the north-east, because of the oil and gas industry. The highlands and islands of Scotland also seem to be lagging behind a bit in wage growth and payroll employment growth. So, not yet, I think, is the answer. This is one of the challenges with sub-UK statistics, which I hope that any investment in statistics might deal with—we have to wait so long to find out what is happening in economies across the UK.

[Tim Farron]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Any further questions, colleagues? No. Professor Spowage, I thank you for your evidence. It is much appreciated. Thank you for giving us your time and expertise today.

That brings to a conclusion our morning sitting.

Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Miss Dines.)

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Tim Farron Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I had looked forward to this Bill, so it is disappointing that the opportunity seems to have been missed. This feels like not a levelling-up Bill but an unambitious planning Bill. There are huge environmental, housing and planning control crises to be solved, but the Bill has not done so.

I will focus on some of the issues affecting rural communities such as mine in Cumbria and in Northumberland, Devon and Cornwall. These areas are under huge pressure. We have seen a housing crisis become a housing catastrophe over the last couple of years. I saw a story in last week’s Sunday Times about Langdale in my constituency, where 90% of houses are second homes. Up to 80% of houses that changed hands during the pandemic went into the second home market. We have seen the collapse of the private rented sector into the holiday let sector and Airbnb. And we have seen individuals forced out of their community because there is nowhere else to go. People with jobs, and with places at the local school for their children, are having to uproot and go to places where they have none of those things because they have been kicked out.

This is having an impact across the country. Fifty per cent. fewer rentals are available across the country, but there is a 6% increase in demand. Average rents outside London are going up by more than 10%. In the last generation, buying a home was a pipe dream for most people in rural communities and elsewhere. It now appears that even renting a property is a pipe dream for many. Such properties are not available, and they are certainly not affordable. Meanwhile, planning permission is being given for buildings that do not meet net zero and without a compulsion for them to be sustainable and to meet the climate emergency.

What could and should this Bill do? It should give new powers to local authorities, national parks and local councils to prevent family homes from becoming second homes and holiday lets. We could create a separate category of planning use for second home ownership and holiday lets, as distinct from full-time, permanent dwellings. Local communities would then have the power to control what happens to their housing stock.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman asks an important question. At the very least, the Bill should match what the European structural funds were doing. Those funds dwarf the paltry levelling-up fund. Some people would call this Bill a subsidy from less well off areas to better off areas.

[Tim Farron]

I agree. Rural communities such as mine are being completely overlooked, in terms of both funding and the powers we are demanding to tackle these huge problems.

In planning, enforcing affordability in perpetuity is crucial. In this country, we seem to give planning permission and to build for demand, not need. In places such as the lakes, the dales, Cumbria, Cornwall and Devon, any house that is built will sell, but will it meet local need? No, it will not. This Bill does not give us the powers to enforce affordability in perpetuity. It does so little to build in nature recovery, which is vital to our communities and to any new developments.

The Bill also does nothing to give planning authorities, national parks and local authorities the power to enforce planning conditions. If a developer starts work on a field for which it has been given planning permission to build houses—they may have been told to build 25% or 30% affordable housing, which is not enough in the first place—and finds a few more rocks than it says it expected, it can use a viability assessment to go back to the drawing board. The developer can then say, “We don’t need to provide you with any affordable homes at all, and the Government will back us up.” That has happened in Allithwaite in my constituency and elsewhere. Let us give communities real power.

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tim Farron]

I will continue. I am aware of the time, and other people want to speak.

The enforcement of conditions is vital, and we need to stop developers getting away with using viability assessments to take the mickey out of local communities, which is totally and utterly unacceptable, as is the fact that planning departments are denuded of staff and resources. Even the conditions we have are therefore not enforceable.

The Bill also lacks any support for public transport in rural communities. Cumbria got nothing from Bus Back Better, despite making a perfectly good bid. Why? Apparently because there is an emphasis on bus lanes. The country roads of Cumbria have only one lane, so there is no room for a bus lane. That shows the bias against rural communities such as Cumbria, Northumberland, Devon and Cornwall in the distribution of funding. There is also a lack of investment in internet connectivity. In areas such as ours, small business is king, so we need to support internet connectivity.

Listening to the Secretary of State, the Bill sounded like Roosevelt’s new deal. Instead, it is more like Major’s cones hotline. It is a massive disappointment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stuart Andrew]

In fact, I had a meeting just this morning to talk about that very issue. I will report back in due course, if that is okay.

[Tim Farron]

The Minister is being very generous in giving way. I concur with the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), but will he also carefully consider introducing an amendment in Committee that would make second home ownership a separate category of plan and use? That is obviously the clearest way in which we could control second home ownership in communities such as mine and in other parts of the country. Will he at least consider that in the coming weeks?

[Stuart Andrew]

I am keen to ensure that we get it right. Of course I will consider it, because I want to ensure that we consider all aspects. There could, however, be unintended consequences in other parts of the country. We will want to ensure that we get it right, but I will look at all options. I have made that commitment to numerous colleagues who have raised the issue with me.

I turn to infrastructure. I want to mention in particular my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) , who seems to secure a Westminster Hall debate on this issue every other week. I congratulate him on that. Many have asked what the Bill means for our infrastructure: our roads, bridges, schools, GP surgeries and so on. This is where I believe communities stand to really benefit from our reforms. All of us know that, without new infrastructure, when people see new homes going up in their community, too often they fear the worst. They fear that it will result in more congested roads, busier trains and fewer services to go around.

I hope that the proposals that we have set out in the Bill will go a long way towards allaying those fears for good. I am determined to continue working with hon. Members on both sides of the House to do so. That starts with sweeping away the old, opaque section 106 agreements and replacing them with one simple infrastructure levy that is set and raised by local authorities. The new levy will be fairer, simpler and more transparent, and it will be imposed on the final value of a development. It is important to stress that, with the housing market as buoyant as it is, the levy will easily be able to respond to market conditions. Put simply, when prices go up, so will the levy.

Crucially, our Bill also requires councils to prepare an infrastructure delivery strategy, setting out how and when the levy receipts will be used. That means new development will always bring with it the new schools, nurseries and GP surgeries that communities want and need. I have listened, in particular to the debates secured by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire. He knows that I will be meeting my colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care next week to see what more we can do to ensure that local health services are more involved with the planning process.

We will run a test and learn approach. We are holding a series of roundtables with stakeholders because we want to get it right. It is important to remember that councils can borrow against the levy, so they can bring the infrastructure in as soon as the development is happening.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Andrew]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Councils, health bodies and everybody else need to get much better at this. Local planning authorities and CCGs should work together to provide the planned provision. Under our new levy, councils will be able to borrow against future levy receipts to forward-fund the infrastructure that is needed. I am arranging meetings with colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care to discuss the very issue that he brings to our attention.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is vital that infrastructure is provided before development is allowed. It is also vital that houses that are given planning permission are then used for the purposes agreed on when the permission was granted. I am talking about second home ownership. Homes that are built for local families become second homes, and that leads to communities being hollowed out. Will the Minister look again at bringing in new change of use rules through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, so that second homes and holiday lets fall under a separate category of planning use, and homes in Cumbria can remain for local families, and do not become part of ghost towns?

[Stuart Andrew]

I seem to be dealing with the issue of second homes daily; colleagues from around the country are raising it with me and highlighting their concerns for their communities. The Bill allows local councils to increase council tax on second homes, but there is more that we need to explore. That is why I am holding a series of roundtables across the country. Perhaps I could come up to the Lake district and hold one there.

Affordable Housing (Devon and Cornwall)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and I offer massive congratulations to the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) on securing a really important debate. I apologise to colleagues, but I am a Member of Parliament for a western county—[Laughter.]

More seriously, I think we need to hunt as a pack because the issues that affect Devon and Cornwall affect Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Somerset, Wiltshire, Cumbria, Shropshire and other places as well. The hon. Member for North Devon was right to say that we should be sparing in our use of the word “crisis”, but she was right to use it in this case, because there is no doubt that rural communities like ours are under huge pressure. They were before the pandemic, but the pandemic has turbocharged a problem that already existed.

I want to echo something that the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) said earlier. The word “affordable” has become almost meaningless in how it is applied. In Devon, Cornwall or Cumbria, a house for sale at £200,000 is not affordable. The reality is that when average household incomes are in the £20,000s and average house prices are at least £250,000, that is a broken system and a broken market. I believe in a free market but I would intervene and referee to try to make it fairer. We are all trying to encourage the Government to take that seriously.

We represent desirable and beautiful places, with great, welcoming communities. We must get the tone spot-on, as we are not saying to people who visit or make their homes in our communities, or even have second homes in our communities, that they are not welcome. We are welcoming, British people—that is what we are. Our communities and economies thrive because of the tourism that underpins them, but we cannot ignore the fact that excessive second home ownership and holiday lets, excessive house prices in general, and a lack of availability of affordable homes for families who are either local or want to become local, are serious problems. We have a broken market, and we have to intervene to fix that.

The impact of excessive second home ownership is the death of communities. When a village or a town lacks the number of permanent residents needed to allow it to support a school, a pub, a post office or a bus route, its community becomes sad and dies as it no longer has any functional existence. No one wants to come on holiday to a dead community. We want to protect those communities so that they are alive and living.

I talked about the pandemic turbocharging an existing problem, but during the pandemic estate agents in my patch reported that anything between 50% and 80% of all house sales in the lakes were in the second home sector, showing a steady attrition of the already reducing permanent housing stock.

Holiday lets are vital and underpin any tourism economy, but if there are too many, where do they come from? In one year during the pandemic, there was a 32% rise in the number of holiday lets in my district council area. They are not being magicked from nowhere, but, as the hon. Member for North Devon rightly pointed out, arise from long-term lets where the landlord has ejected tenants using a section 21 eviction, and they then typically end up on Airbnb and similar places.

In my area, and I imagine Devon and Cornwall are very similar, we have high levels of employment and low levels of unemployment. Typically, we see couples, both of whom have jobs, with children at local schools, having to leave those jobs and take the children out of their schools in order to move to somewhere urban that is just about affordable, perhaps 50 miles away. That kills local communities, is tragic for the individuals and families concerned, and is a massive blow to the life of that community.

That point is worth bearing in mind when we look at new-build homes, wherever we live. There is a danger that we have got into the mindset that fewer planning regulations are better for creating more homes; that is not true. Planning authorities, whether they be national parks or local authorities, have to have the power to direct what kind of homes are built, in order to make them more likely to happen. In this country, we are constantly building to meet demand, but not building to meet need, which is what creates opposition to new development.

In most communities like mine, the people are the opposite of nimbys. They are desperate for new homes, but for homes that people need. Of course, a nice new-build four or five-bedroom property in Cornwall, Devon or Cumbria will sell and someone will buy it, but it is not what that community needs. We need planning laws that make sure that the homes that are built are green, sustainable, affordable and underpin the local community and economy.

[Anthony Mangnall]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise what the Secretary of State is trying to do through his BIDEN acronym, which means build beautifully, make sure there is infrastructure, hold developers to account, take into account the environment and make sure neighbourhood plans are fully weighted?

[Tim Farron]

Yes. That is massively important, because if a community supports a development, it is more likely to happen. I regret that we do not enforce zero carbon homes and that we still permit the inflation of the value of land through the massively outdated and hugely damaging Land Compensation Act 1961, which inflates the price of houses. Those issues could be tackled by giving local authorities and communities more power, and if better, more beautiful and greener houses are built.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, with which I wholeheartedly agree. When a planning Bill is introduced, will he support the measures set out in the Planning (Enforcement) Bill, the ten-minute rule Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) a few months ago? Those measures were specifically designed to ensure that plans presented to a community or a local council are not altered when the site is developed, driving down the affordability, greenness or environmentally friendly nature of the original proposal.

[Tim Farron]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point, and risks my going off on one about viability assessments and so on, and the fact that when conditions are made, they should be applied. We need the Government to back national parks and local authorities, who impose conditions, get through the planning game and put affordability in there, and then developers say, “We have found some rocks in the field. It will cost too much money to do that now.” We need to ensure that communities get what they were promised and not otherwise. He makes an excellent point.

I will be quick in my final remarks. The impact on communities is huge and the impact on the economy is massive. We had a vote the other night on the amendment on health and social care workforces. In communities such as ours, as has been mentioned by right hon. and hon. Members, we have a serious problem. On the whole, these are older communities. My community is about 10 years above the national average age. That means smaller working-age populations. If those people are squeezed out even further, there is no one to run the health service. People will take jobs in the local hospital or care home, check the housing market and then give back word. That happens all the time, as has already been mentioned.

Cumbria Tourism carried out a survey of members a few months ago and discovered that last year 63% of Lake District hospitality businesses worked below capacity, despite demand being there. Why was that? Because they did not have the staff to meet that demand. That is in part due to the issues that we have raised today. What can we do? Change planning law to make first homes, second homes and holiday lets separate categories of planning use, so that planning authorities and councils can enforce affordability and availability, and ensure there is a limit on the number of second homes and holiday lets in a community. We could allow, as the Welsh Senedd has decided, local authorities to increase council tax above 100% on second homes. Councils would have the choice to do that; they would not have to. As the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) mentioned, quite rightly, we should ensure that council tax is paid on every property that is built as a residence.

The simple fact is that a wealthy person, with a second home on the Lizard peninsula or in the Lake District, is subsidised by somebody on the breadline and going to the food bank in the same community because they have let their second home for 70 days a year. That means they pay no council tax and, as a small business, pay no business rate. That is an outrage from the Exchequer’s point of view. It is also morally outrageous, that people barely getting by are subsidising wealthy people who can afford two, three, four or more homes.

We also need to ensure that section 21 evictions are abolished, as the Government promised in their manifesto. We need to decide the point at which a second home has become a holiday let, and raise the bar from 70 nights to more than 100 nights. It could be made consistent with the HMRC requirement of 105 nights a year to qualify as a holiday let.

My final point is this. I agree with pretty much everything everyone has said in the debate so far. We have been raising the matter for years. I remember raising it with the junior planning Minister a few years ago, a gentleman who is now Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am concerned that we make these points, which are obviously an issue, showing the need to tackle the lack of affordable housing in rural communities, yet the Government still refuse to take the action needed to deliver for those communities.

I hope that in a spirit of solidarity and hunting as a pack, we might persuade the Minister to listen and take the action that rural communities need.

Rural Communities in Cumbria: Levelling Up

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Hudson]

I thank my hon. Friend, the Chair of the Select Committee on which I am privileged to sit. He makes a fantastic point. It is about connectivity across our great country, and rural Devon is the same as rural Cornwall and the same as rural Cumbria, and we need to get it right. We have to ensure that everyone gets good broadband and a good mobile phone signal. It is a point well made.

The Government aim to have gigabit-capable broadband to 85% of the United Kingdom by 2025. I hope that we can still move that way, but in my constituency, gigabit availability unfortunately languishes at a low 7.2% and the download speed is just over half the national average, so we are well behind. My plea is that we can have some help with that. In our part of the world, the mobile signal is poor. Sadly, there are many notspots in my part of the world.

The Government have taken some positive steps. I welcome Project Gigabit. The shared rural network will have a key impact, too, as will the voucher schemes. Communities are partnering with fantastic companies, such as Broadband for the Rural North. I have seen that first hand in communities such as Kirkoswald, Mallerstang and Ravenstonedale. I pay tribute to companies such as B4RN, its chief executive Michael Lee, the teams and the volunteers who do fantastic work to connect people in isolated communities. I make a plea to the Minister for more help from his Department, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and indeed the Home Office in terms of shared mobile phone masts for emergencies.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, my neighbour, for securing this important debate and I congratulate him on a good speech. Does he agree that the communities of which he rightly speaks are at huge risk as affordable and family homes collapse into the Airbnb and second homes sector? There cannot really be levelling up for rural Cumbria if the Government will not take action to ensure that those communities are protected and that a limit is put on the number of Airbnbs and second homes that there can be in our communities.

[Dr Hudson]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which I note. If he can temper his patience, I will get on to that topic shortly. I am surprised to see him here; I expected to see him in my constituency perhaps where he has been a frequent and regular visitor in recent weeks. Anyone might wonder whether boundary changes were imminent. I gently and respectfully remind him that we share similar issues in our two constituencies, but we do not share the same constituency.

I put it to the Government that we need to be cautious about future changes to things such as the BBC. In rural parts of the world, terrestrial TV is ever important and the BBC and public service broadcasters are a treasured national asset that deliver news, education and drama. Again, that came into sharp relief in the pandemic when kids at home were delivered a fantastic education through it. For rural areas, where we depend on terrestrial TV and where many homes do not have the internet at all, we cannot be thinking at a Government level about moving to a subscription-based model. I caution the Government that we need to be careful when we are making decisions about the treasured asset that is the BBC.

I turn now to interactions and local democracy. In the pandemic, our vital parish councils, which do such wonderful things for our communities, could meet in virtual or hybrid formats. Sadly, that modality is not now available. That is important and I have raised it with the Secretary of State on a number of occasions. I urge the Government to allow parish councils to continue to meet in virtual or hybrid formats. There are issues with rural isolation and the weather, with people’s jobs or caring responsibilities and with farmers. If we can empower local people to contribute to local democracy through that, we can learn the positive lessons of the pandemic.

In Cumbria, we are facing significant reform at a local government level with the changes to unitary councils. I am on public record as being against that, as I do not think now is the time for us to be doing it, and the groupings go against the natural geography and the community bonds. That said, we are where we are and we have to make the best of it and make it work. I make a plea to the Department, however, that ongoing projects should not be paralysed by that reshuffling and that we should certainly ensure that local democratic changes do not compromise local communities.

I turn now to the farming and agricultural sector, which is an important aspect of my constituency economically, as came into sharp relief during the pandemic because of food security. I pay tribute to our fantastic UK farmers and Cumbria farmers who deliver food to us and put food on our tables. Anyone in the food processing and marketing sectors needs to be thanked for what they have done. They are key workers.

The farming community faces many challenges, such as the changes to the funding system with the new environmental land management schemes. We also face challenges from trade deals. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, on which I sit, is now looking at the Israel trade deal. There are significant challenges to our farming communities and we have to ensure that the Government get it right and do not undermine or undercut our farmers so that we can stand up for our values on high environmental and animal welfare standards and can be a beacon for the rest of the world. I ask the Levelling Up Department to work with DEFRA to support that sector.

That sector has also been significantly challenged by seasonal labour issues—we have been looking at that on the EFRA Committee as well—and there are serious issues in the food processing sector. Again, the farming community now has a crisis that has been ongoing in the pig sector. Currently, in excess of 40,000 pigs have been slaughtered on farm that have not subsequently gone into the food supply chain, and I really urge the Government to work cross-Government to mitigate and avert this crisis.

Another huge part of the rural economy in Cumbria is tourism and hospitality. Again, they are facing similar labour issues. That has been exacerbated by covid, but Brexit has certainly been a factor, and we need to make sure that we can supply the labour that our vital businesses need locally. This sector needs ongoing support, and I urge the Minister to work with the Treasury to make sure that we can keep some of the measures in place, such as the VAT cut for tourism and hospitality businesses, that will make things better for them. We need to think about tax relief for small rural businesses as well.

The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) talked about the pressure on housing in local communities. We are a fantastic tourism part of the world up in Cumbria, and we have seen huge numbers of people come during the pandemic and when we started to open up. The pressure on local people to find local affordable housing has again come into sharp relief. With the increasing number of second homes in the area, locals are basically being priced out of their own local community. I really urge the Government to look at and address that with affordable housing, sensible planning and sensible measures, so that people can get on the housing ladder and it is not to their detriment when people come in and take second homes. I really urge the Government to look at that. Housing in our part of the world is very different from that in London. Again, when the Government are making changes and talking about changing boilers and such things, we have to bear in mind that many people in rural parts of the world have oil boilers, and we have to make sure we adapt. It is horses for courses.

Schools, pubs, shops and churches are the lifeblood of our local communities, and they need support. Many local communities are stepping up and acting together, such as the Kirkoswald community shop, and Bampton Valley community pub has now put together a shared programme to set up the pub again. However, we should not have to rely on the community stepping forward. We must get central Government working with local government and local communities, so I really urge the local government Department to offer more small grants so that we can put the life back into local communities.

Education is so important, and it plays a huge role in levelling up, with opportunities for young and old. We have had a very difficult time in Cumbria, and we have lost Newton Rigg College, the only land-based college in Cumbria. We worked very hard to try to save the college, but unfortunately that was unsuccessful. We now have pieces of the jigsaw coming together to try to rebuild land-based education in our community. I pay tribute to Newton Rigg Ltd, Newton Rigg Equestrian, Ullswater Community College and Myerscough College, which are working together with the Ernest Cook Trust and local stakeholders to see if we can get pieces of the jigsaw together. It is important that we rebuild land-based education in Cumbria.

To give an example, Ullswater Community College is a local high school with over 1,500 pupils, led brilliantly by headteacher Stephen Gilby, with a 600 square mile catchment area. I have raised this with the Prime Minister and the Education Secretary, but it urgently needs a rebuild, and I really press that message home to the Government. Outdoor education in Cumbria is a blessing for us, and that sector also needs to be supported. We have fantastic outdoor education centres, such as Blencathra outward bound centre. This is part of the recovery, it is about the life chances of young folk and it is very important for mental health.

Health underpins levelling up, so I really urge the Government to support rural healthcare. We welcome the fact that we have a new cancer centre that has opened up in Carlisle and a new diagnostic centre in Penrith, but on mental health we need to make sure that the message of parity with physical health comes through loud and clear. In the EFRA Committee, we have triggered an inquiry on rural mental health looking at the key issues and the key stressors. We have significant risk factors in our rural communities. We get shock events; we get floods, we get storms. Professions such as my own—the veterinary profession, but farmers as well—are over-represented with a risk of mental health and suicide, and there are the pressures of running businesses in our isolated communities. I urge the Government to try to address many of those issues at cross-Government level, and to support the communities that we live in and we love. We want to ensure that the people’s voice is heard down here in Westminster and in Whitehall.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Neil O'Brien)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) on securing this important debate. He is a relentless champion for his community, and the many different issues that he touched on this evening are a small selection of the matters he has raised with us. He always makes important and serious contributions to driving forward the different policy agendas he has raised.

Let me address some of the specific points raised by my hon. Friend. One of the themes of his speech—appropriately enough for a vet, horses for courses—was about how the levelling-up agenda must be shaped to the needs of rural communities such as the one he represents in Cumbria. He raised the issue of second homes, and I am acutely conscious of the strong feelings held by him and his constituents about that. He will know that we recently closed the second homes tax loophole, which was being abused. That was a serious part of the problem, and a serious contribution to tackling it. Partly as a result of my hon. Friend’s work on this issue, we are considering what further steps we can take to address it. Many local people have a sense of their children not being able to live where they grew up, or of not being able to stay in their own community because it is a wonderfully attractive place. We all love those places, but we must not kill the thing we love by local people not being able to live there. My hon. Friend is completely correct, and it is something we are actively looking at.

[Tim Farron]

Given the urgency of this, I cannot stress how important it is that action is taken, well, yesterday really. In the South Lakeland District, there has been a 32% rise in the number of holiday lets in one single year. That is the private rented sector collapsing into the “not lived in” market. We need action now. Let us please not have another inquiry.

[Neil O'Brien]

I completely agree with that, and we have the same sense of urgency about this issue.

My hon. Friend raised a point about the need for small grants in the kind of community he represents. That is exactly why we have set up the new £150 million community ownership fund, which is helping people across the country take control of assets that are of importance to the local community, from pubs to sports pitches to important cultural locations. We are at the start of allocating that fund, and I am sure my hon. Friend will be assiduous in helping us to identify fantastic projects in his constituency that are deserving of such support.

My hon. Friend raised the issue of how things work in the kind of area he represents, and about parish councils sitting virtually. He has made numerous representations to us on that point, and again today he made a powerful argument. The Government launched a call for evidence last year to gather views and inform our longer term decision about whether to make express provision for councils to meet remotely on a permanent basis. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is considering the responses to that consultation, and will respond shortly. I know that many local councillors found it extremely useful to have a wider range of voices able to attend, particularly in areas where the geography is large and the community is somewhat older. A decision has not been made, although once again my hon. Friend made a powerful case on behalf of his constituents.

Likewise, as part of my hon. Friend’s theme of how Cumbria is not London and has different challenges and different sorts of issues, he made important points about mental health. It is really a crusade for this Government to have true parity between the treatment of mental and physical diseases, of exactly the kind my hon. Friend called for. As part of that, one of the most exciting things that the Government are doing as part of the anti-loneliness agenda is rolling out social prescribing across the country. There is a target to have 900,000 people referred through the NHS to social prescribing by 2023-24. My hon. Friend is a vet, and a long time ago I was a medical student, and when I met patients I was struck how often both their medical needs in the traditional sense and many mental health issues were not being grappled with. Through the social prescribing agenda, we can start to have a proper plan to connect those people to the help that they need. He was right to raise that.

My hon. Friend was also right to raise terrestrial TV. There are places where people cannot just get on to an ultrafast fibre broadband connection, so that terrestrial TV signal will remain extremely important.

I will touch on some of the wider things that the Government are doing across the whole of Cumbria—of course, there are huge economic connections between all the parts of the county. Our levelling-up funds are making a big difference. Barrow, Carlisle, Cleator Moor, Millom and Workington are all getting a share of £110 million of investment through the towns fund to improve town centres and public services, which will also benefit my hon. Friend’s constituents. Through the first round of the levelling-up fund, £16 million is being invested, and there is much more of that £4.8 billion fund to come.

My hon. Friend will be acutely aware that the landmark and historic borderlands growth deal is helping both sides of the border—those in Cumbria and in southern Scotland. It is helping with projects such as the upgrade to Carlisle railway station and creating 5,000 new well-paying jobs. In total, I think it is bringing £452 million of fresh investment into Cumbria, Northumberland and southern Scotland.

The different funds are doing a lot, but there are also national programmes recognising the central importance of the connectivity issues that my hon. Friend raised—they have the potential to transform the economy of some rural areas—and addressing them. That is exactly why we did the £1 billion deal with mobile network operators. He talked about sharing masts, and that is exactly what we will be doing through the shared rural network. In Cumbria, the deal will mean that 4G coverage from all mobile network operators will rise to a minimum of 88%, up from 73%, and coverage from at least one network will go up from 94% to 98%. We are starting to close off those notspots that he correctly identified. Through Project Gigabit and our £5 billion investment, we will also be connecting broadband across Cumbria and driving up high-quality coverage.

My hon. Friend has been a brilliant champion on all these issues—he raised so many of them—but I am conscious of time and the need to bring my remarks to a close. He raised devolution and the future of local government in Cumbria. In the levelling-up White Paper we alluded to the prospect of a devolution deal for Cumbria, which is an exciting prospect that we can use to address many of the specific issues that he raised in this important debate.

My hon. Friend’s fundamental thesis is completely correct: we must have a levelling-up agenda that works with the grain of what is going on locally. When we go to Cumbria, we see its beauty, all the things that are fantastic about it and the new investment, but we are also conscious that, for many people, it is an area of low pay and one with a need for more high-quality jobs and new opportunities to learn and progress. He has been the most fantastic champion across all those issues and I look forward to working together with him as we drive them forward.

Question put and agreed to.

Local Government Finance (England)

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

I pay tribute to all those who work in local government, particularly for the immense efforts that they have made over the past two years to meet the needs of their local communities, and to the elected members in all parties who serve their communities for not much recompense. It is a noble calling and something I enjoy doing; we should pay tribute to them. I must also throw in a mention of those who serve on parish and town councils, most of whom do so without any recompense whatever and have stepped up to the plate.

Over the past few years, as we have effectively seen caps on public spending in the principal authorities, the ability to raise a precept without going through the process of a local referendum has meant that many parish and town councils have really stepped into the breach. For their sake as much as for principal authorities, we should regret that we are still on one-year budgets. To have a single-year settlement for a fourth year disrespects all local government authorities—the parish and town councils that are not in direct receipt of grant support, as well as the principal authorities that are—and makes it very hard for them or the organisations that depend on them to plan. That is not an argument about the amount of money; it is about levelling with authorities and ensuring that they can plan ahead and serve their communities efficiently and with ambition.

There is an awful lot that we could talk about, but I do not want to take too long or tick every box, so I will make just a few observations. Like other hon. Members, I regret very much the failure to keep public health spending in line with inflation, or anything like it, as we learn more and more about the importance of preventive healthcare, both physical and mental. I pay tribute to Colin Cox and all those in Cumbria’s public health team who have worked utterly tirelessly through the pandemic, keeping us safe and giving us the advice, confidence and reassurance that we all desperately need. They have been responsible for excellent systems throughout this very difficult time.

It is worth bearing in mind just what this means—not funding public health well. While tiers 2, 3 and 4 of the mental health support framework for young people are provided through contracted services, through the NHS and through child and adolescent mental health services, tier 1 is the responsibility of public health services run at county level. The poor funding for public health in our county means that the amount we spend on young people’s preventive mental health care in Cumbria equates to 75p per child per year.

Let us ignore for a moment the moral wrong of that small amount of funding. What does it mean in terms of the consequences in later life? I carried out a survey last year and found that 28% of young people referred to CAMHS were waiting over six months to be seen. Unless we invest in tier 1 preventive mental health care, we will increasingly see people cropping up further down the line with conditions that are much more tragic and much more difficult and expensive to treat. I ask the Secretary of State to think again about investment in public health throughout the country, not just in mental health and not just in Cumbria.

We have seen no real-terms increase in the rural element of the grant, and the lower-tier services grant has not been increased. District councils, which are much more likely to be in rural areas, are not receiving the support that they need. I do not want to see a push-and-pull and a fight between rural and urban communities—such activities are often misplaced—but it is worth pointing out that those who operate services in rural communities do so relatively inefficiently, because they are dealing with the same sort of issues but with much smaller numbers. There may be only 30 children at a school in the south lakes, for example, not because it is of poor quality and unable to recruit pupils but because only about 14 kids live in the catchment area, and 30 pupils mean that it is over-performing. In my constituency there are two high schools—secondary schools—with fewer than 200 pupils, and probably about a dozen primary schools with fewer than 60. I can think of two with fewer than 30. They have small school rolls not because they are not good schools, but because they represent vast areas of land in the Lake district and the dales. The lack of an understanding of rural needs means that the needs of those schools become greater and greater.

When it comes to funding formulas, one issue in particular concerns me. It depends on which metric we look at and whom we believe, but I do believe that Cumbria may have the worst pothole problem in the country, for one reason in particular. Ours is, I think, the second biggest county in England, and I think that therefore we have the second biggest number of roads. We have one of the smallest populations in any county—we certainly have the smallest concentrations of population anywhere in the country—and yet we have colossal numbers of visitors, 38 times more each year than the number of people who live in the county. The tourists who are so welcome in the lakes and the dales and elsewhere in Cumbria are helping to contribute to the wear and tear of our roads, but they are not contributing to the upkeep. I should like the Secretary of State to think carefully about how he can compensate rural communities like mine—particularly tourist-heavy communities—bearing it in mind that although, after London, the Lake district is the most visited place in Britain, it does not receive any compensation to help it to fund the services that are used by those visitors, which is a terrible shame.

We should bear it in mind that over a third of the increased funds available to local authorities this year is money that councils have to raise, with a £1.4 billion increase in council tax. Council tax is an unfair form of taxation: it is disproportionately paid by those on lower incomes, and it puts a greater burden on household outgoings. Combined with the national insurance rise that is coming in a few weeks’ time, this puts an additional burden on people with low and middle incomes which they cannot afford.

The increase in council tax is, broadly speaking, for social care, and no sensible council will miss the opportunity to find that money to protect its social care provision. The national insurance rise is being sold as a measure that will help social care provision, but it is not really going to do that. It will not lead to what we really need, which is an upgrade in the terms and conditions and pay for people working in social care. Without that, we will neither recruit nor retain the people we need. In Cumbria, we have seen a 32% reduction in social care beds in just six and a half years. It is deeply troubling for people to have a rise in taxation outgoings both to the local authority and nationally but to see nothing for it, and nothing that will help retain those people whom we clearly need working in social care.

One reason why we have great difficulty in meeting social care needs in Cumbria is our inability to provide places for the workforce to live, which is a major responsibility of unitary and lower-tier authorities. As the Secretary of State knows—I think he has agreed to meet me to discuss this issue—rural Britain in particular faces a massive housing crisis, which is costing us in so many different ways, and while we have had this crisis for many years, through the pandemic it has become a catastrophe.

Two things have happened. First, roughly speaking, 80% of house sales in Cumbria during the pandemic have been to the second-home market, weakening communities and leaving them with an ever smaller permanent population. That means that we lose the services. If we lose a number of kids at a school, we may lose the school as well as the bus service, the post office and what it is to have a life in a community. The other thing that has happened, since the end of the eviction ban last year, is a massive increase in people evicted from relatively affordable private rents to turn those houses into Airbnbs instead.

Hon. Members can imagine the existing number of holiday let properties in a place such as the Lake district, and in my district alone in a 12-month period last year they increased by 32%. Where did those properties come from? Ordinary families in my community have been evicted—kicked out. They may have been there for years. I think of one family who raised their kids there for 16 years and were kicked out with little notice. They had to leave the community and move their children because the Government did not scrap section 21 evictions having promised to do so. That leaves us with no staff available for care homes or all the other provision that we need. It is a moral outrage, and it practically undermines our economy.

As we look to support local government, I would love the Secretary of State to look at the ways in which he can affect that by, for instance, changing planning law so that a family home cannot be turned into a second home or a holiday let without asking the planning authorities for permission. That would keep a lid on the problem and maintain and protect the communities represented by me and others in other beautiful parts of the country. That would not cost anything—perhaps a bit more resource for planning departments for enforcement —so there is a way of adding value to our communities without necessarily spending any more money.

I have one final ask via the Secretary of State to the Chancellor of the Exchequer: why do we not consider following the Welsh Government’s lead in providing local authorities with permission to double council tax on second homes? That would be a disincentive for second homes and protect communities from too many of them. It would also create a revenue stream, which those communities could invest in supporting new affordable homes and protecting local schools that would otherwise have too few kids to be viable. I would love him to look at and think about those things. As we suffer through many other challenges such as the cost of living crisis and recovery from the pandemic, I want him to focus in particular on the housing catastrophe that affects the economy and community in so many rural areas such as mine.