English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Viscount Colville of Culross Excerpts

Tuesday 20th January 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to support Amendment 6, to which I have added my name, and to express my full agreement with the case made by the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. I also support Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar. Both amendments address a clear omission in the Bill by placing the arts, culture and creative industries, cultural services and heritage explicitly within the areas of competence of strategic authorities, precisely where local government, the Local Government Association and the sector itself understand them to sit. Amendment 51, also in the noble Earl’s name, provides the necessary consequential provision to ensure that this competence can operate coherently in practice. Together, these amendments bring clarity, not complication, and I strongly support them.

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendments 6 in the name of my noble friend Lord Clancarty and Amendment 10 in the name of my noble friend Lady Prashar. I have spoken to a number of people in local government and become convinced that the new strategic authorities could benefit their regions if they had competence over the heritage and cultural sector.

Noble Lords have only to look at the catastrophic situation in the arts and cultural sector in the West Midlands to understand their importance. Birmingham has reduced the funding of arts in the city from £10 million in 2010 to a mere £1.1 million in 2024-26. In 2015, when the first big cuts were announced, they were in part because the political dysfunction of the city council persuaded the Arts Council to redirect funds, with a terrible effect on the city’s cultural and heritage life. Since then, the crisis has continued. The result of this long decline in funding was that in 2024 the city council signed off 100% reductions to funding for some of the most internationally recognised city institutions—the CBSO, Birmingham Rep, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Ikon Gallery, Fabric dance and dozens of community cultural organisations; the list goes on.

Some of these cuts have led to entrepreneurial responses by the city’s cultural sector. For instance, John Crabtree at the Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre has put on a more commercial and popular offer that has helped to stabilise the Birmingham Royal Ballet, which is also housed there. The Mayor of the West Midlands, who has strategic authority over the region but does not have legal competence for the cultural sector, has been able to direct some financial support through the regional authority’s cultural leadership board. It has managed to use money left over from the underspend on the Commonwealth Games and wider devolution funding to channel money to at least some of the most important cultural bodies in the city.

However, all these payments are one-off and do not replace longer-term core funding. They are not able to reach many smaller community cultural bodies, which have subsequently closed. In a city where there is huge concern about youth crime, that seems to be a retrograde and regrettable step. Imagine how much more effective the authority could have been if it had a statutory board to oversee and direct more extensive funds to the cultural sector across the region. I would hope that the establishment of a statutory heritage board in the West Midlands Combined Authority, with constituent authorities as members, would bring stability and greater funding to the sector across the region. In the process, that would allow local and national funding bodies to release money to the region and attract private philanthropy.

The acceptance of Amendment 6 would allow this competence and support for the cultural sector and the creative industries. As many other noble Lords have said, the heritage sector is so important for bringing together communities in a region, for giving them a sense of identity and for attracting tourism into the area. I ask the Minister, with her impressive career in local government, to appreciate how important such an additional competency could be in boosting regional development and cohesion.

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am very supportive of Amendments 6 and 10. I would have added my name to them, but the slots were already gone on Amendment 6. I am agnostic about the difference in wording between Amendments 6 and 10. Like the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, I am keen to use this opportunity to discuss the best form of wording, but it is important that these areas of life are added to the competences for the strategic authorities, simply because they are the things that make life worth living. I had the privilege of being the Arts Minister as we were bouncing back from the pandemic—a time when people were cut off from the arts, creativity and heritage—and saw the natural yearning in us all to enjoy these things. As we have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and others, they are also the things that forge communities, bring people together across all their differences and help boost a sense of pride in place and a sense of belonging.

It is tempting often to think of them as a drain on resources but, as Amendment 6 does, that mixes things that might be parts of the subsidised creative sector and the creative industries, which are huge engines of growth, with massive employers, often some of the biggest employers in the strategic authority areas that we are talking about. That is one of the reasons why the creative industries were one of five priority areas for the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer and are one of the eight priority areas for the Government now. We all agree about the huge importance of these industries to our economy overall.

The arts, whether subsidised or run commercially, are vital for the skills pipeline that drives all this, and heritage is the infrastructure that underpins them. Our historic houses, churches, heritage railways and more are not just the filming locations for so many of our brilliant TV and film productions; they are places where people can gain skills that they take into other areas of the economy. The Minister knows well Knebworth, which has been the site of many rock concerts from the time of the Rolling Stones to Robbie Williams. These locations are places for literary festivals that draw people in for so much more.

In discussions with local authority leaders when I was in government, I also saw how enlightened local authority leaders could see that, if they invested in the arts, they could save in other areas. If you could get people engaged in arts and creativity, you could save money in your education budget or health budget. They saw the boost in well-being. In so many of the other strategic competences that have been set out, it is important that we think about the arts, heritage and creativity.

It was also clear for me in my time in government that some local authorities get it more than others. I had the privilege of meeting all four shortlisted places for the most recent UK City of Culture competition. It was clear that the four had excellent chief executives and often the local authority leader had previously held the culture portfolio and could see the power of this to galvanise local businesses, employers, universities and more to leverage the opportunities and investments. We have seen from Hull, Coventry and most recently the brilliant Year of Culture in Bradford the inward investment to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds. I see my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth—Hull University carried out a good study into the economic impact of Hull’s year as City of Culture, which continues to bring great benefit to that city and wider region.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, in the previous group mentioned his role in One North East. I have seen throughout my life the power of the arts and arts-led regeneration across Tyneside, from the Baltic Gallery to what is now the Glasshouse International Centre for Music, rippling up the Tyne to the Mouth of the Tyne Festival and regeneration in Whitley Bay.

But it is also clear that some local authorities do not get it. We have heard about those that have sadly not invested as much. I found myself as a Minister critical of a number of local authorities, including some controlled by my own party. It was not a party-political issue. I found myself criticising Suffolk County Council, the Conservative council, when it slashed its arts budget, the Greens in Bristol City Council and Labour in Nottingham City Council. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, pointed out, I followed closely the travails of Birmingham City Council after that city, the largest local authority in Europe, was bankrupted. There were frantic discussions between DCMS and the commissioners who were appointed. They were tempted to sell off some of what they could see as assets, the art collection and the historic buildings in that city. We are not going for those easy wins. These are collections that have taken generations to build up but can be lost in an instant.

If there is not this statutory message, the issue is not always viewed as a priority and certainly not the priority that it ought to be. Even with devolution and trusting strong local leaders, it is important that we give that encouragement and that nudge, particularly if the authorities are to have the powers that we have heard of in relation to the tourism levy. There is a mixture of opinions out in the country about what that will mean for heritage, tourism and local arts. Some are enthusiastic, while some are more sceptical about whether they will see the benefits or whether they will be diverted into some of the other areas that are already set out in the Bill.