Member

Motions C and C1, relating to Lords Amendments 36, 90 and 155, would remove from the Bill provisions relating to local authority governance and executive arrangements. The Government retain a strong preference for executive models and believe that the leader and cabinet model provides a more effective framework for decision-making in local government. I will not repeat the examples and arguments that have been debated extensively in this House and the other place. However, we continue to believe that our approach strikes the right balance by encouraging a more consistent model of governance across England’s local authorities while respecting recent local democratic mandates and decisions where a committee-run council has adopted its governance model more recently. I have set out previously the flexibility that the leader and cabinet model provides, allowing councils to adopt an approach to decision-making that best suits their needs within the overall leader and cabinet model.