Lord Shipley (LD)

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for co-signing this amendment, which covers a fundamental issue. It would simply allow a strategic authority to devolve a competency or function to a lower tier of local government. This Bill is called the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. Devolution should be at the heart of the Bill. What we actually have is decentralisation to mayors from Whitehall, but there is to be no decentralisation or devolution of power from mayors to lower levels. If this is a serious devolution Bill, it should devolve powers and responsibilities to the lowest level possible. It is very difficult to see where the community empowerment that the Government talk about actually is. Some things in the Bill are relevant but, for the main, there is no money for councillors elected in existing local authorities to deliver the community empowerment that the Bill sets out. This is crucial, because we now face centralisation around the mayoral structure. The set of competences that we have been talking about will suck power out of existing local authorities, whereas I want to see people empowered in their neighbourhoods to take greater responsibility for what happens in those neighbourhoods. By that I mean that we need to enhance town and parish councillors, who are currently missing from the Bill. So, this Bill is about decentralisation from Whitehall to mayors. I want it to go further and to be about devolving powers from mayors to local authorities and then from existing local authorities to lower levels: the town and the parish council structure. My amendment simply says this: I am trying to prevent upwards mission creep. I want a strategic authority to “devolve to any local authority within its area any power which it holds”, through an annual review system.