Devon and Torbay Combined County Authority Regulations 2024

Considered in Grand Committee

Moved by

That the Grand Committee do consider the Devon and Torbay Combined County Authority Regulations 2024.

My Lords, I shall also speak to the Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority Order, the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority Regulations and the Lancashire Combined County Authority Regulations.

Regulations were laid before Parliament on 26 November 2024 for Lancashire, as well as for Devon and Torbay. The Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority Order was laid on 4 December and the Greater Lincolnshire regulations on 11 December. The other place debated these instruments on 21 January 2025. Knowing how much noble Lords appreciate brevity, I hope they agree—while recognising that combined authorities and combined county authorities are distinct legal bodies with different types of enabling statutory instruments—with me simply using “combined authorities”, unless there is a reason to be specific, over the course of our debate. I hope that that is okay with everybody.

In December 2024, the Government published the English devolution White Paper. At its core, the White Paper sets out how the Government will widen and deepen devolution across England as part of our central mission to drive economic growth and improve living standards. These instruments deliver on that ambition and are significant steps in the devolution journeys for these four areas. The instruments provide for the implementation of the devolution agreements confirmed on 19 September 2024 between the Government and the upper-tier councils in each of the areas concerned. On 18 November 2024, all the respective constituent councils consented to the making of these instruments.

The three sets of combined county authority regulations will be made, if Parliament approves, under the enabling provision in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. If approved, the combined authority order will be made under the enabling provision in the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. The combined authorities will be established on the day after the day on which the instruments are made.

The Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority and the Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority have chosen to adopt a mayor for their combined authorities, with the inaugural elections to take place on 1 May 2025. The elected mayors will take up office on 6 May with a four-year term. The instruments make provision for the governance arrangements of the combined authorities. In each case, the constituent councils nominate one or more of their members to form the combined authority, alongside the elected mayor where a mayor is being adopted. Each place has specific arrangements, enabled by either the 2023 Act or the 2009 Act, as set out in these establishing instruments.

For the three combined county authorities, district councils will play a key role in ensuring the success of devolution in these areas. District representation and input to the combined county authorities is determined locally within the framework provided by the 2023 Act. The instruments confer public authority and local authority functions on the respective combined authorities, as agreed in their devolution agreements and set out in each area’s proposals.

I turn to consultation. As provided for in the enabling Acts, the constituent councils consulted on proposals to establish the combined authorities based on their devolution agreements. These consultations took place between December 2023 and March 2024 for periods of either six or eight weeks. The councils promoted the consultations using dedicated websites, social media, online and in-person events with the public and communications campaigns. The councils also undertook targeted stakeholder engagement with businesses, the voluntary sector and key institutions within their areas. Responses could be made online via their website or email, or on paper via post, or at dedicated events or collection points such as libraries. As required by the 2023 and 2009 Acts, the councils preparing the proposals provided the Secretary of State with a summary of consultation responses when submitting their proposals to the then Government in spring 2024.

In laying these instruments before Parliament, the Secretary of State is satisfied that the statutory tests in the 2023 and 2009 Acts are met. Namely, the constituent councils have consented to the establishment of the combined authorities, no further consultation is necessary and making the instruments would: first, be likely to improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of some or all of the people who live or work in the area; secondly, be appropriate, having regard to the need to reflect the identities of local communities and to secure effective and convenient local government; and, thirdly, establish the combined authority, achieving the purposes specified in the constituent councils’ proposals. Making these instruments will unlock funding for the areas as set out in their devolution agreements, including capital funding for each area and mayoral investment funds for the areas choosing to adopt a mayor.

I pay tribute to the local leaders, councils and officers for their hard work and the significant part they play in making the Government’s ambitious agenda to widen and deepen devolution a reality in their areas. I also thank all those who took part in the consultation process. It is great when we get a good response from the public, local businesses and voluntary organisations to these consultations. It is vital that they have their say. I look forward to answering any questions noble Lords may have and to participating in our discussion of these four instruments. I beg to move.

My Lords, I remind the Committee of my relevant interests as a councillor on Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire and as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

These four statutory instruments are politically and historically interesting. First, they recreate in whole or in part the historic counties of Devon, Lancashire, Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire. That is a positive change. It is another reversal of Thatcherite policy, which, in this instance, abolished county councils. Strategic planning and provision of such key local services as public transport, housing and economic development can be much better made across a larger geography. That change is therefore welcome. However, I am not letting the Minister off the hook that easily. I have a number of questions applicable to each of the relevant instruments.

First, on governance, can the Minister confirm that meetings of either the mayoral or the combined county authorities will be held in public and that scrutiny committees are a requirement, with powers for pre-decision scrutiny and to call any decision that is challenged under the relevant procedural rules?

The Devon and Torbay Combined County Authority combines two very unequal—in both population and geography—partners. Can the Minister say whether that disparity has been considered and whether any issues have been raised in the wider county on this point in the consultation, the details of which I obviously have not seen? I ask this because there will be inequality of representation on the authority from these very unequal parts, and I wonder whether that will result in a bit of friction when it comes to making difficult decisions.

I note at this point that, because of the efforts made during the passage of the then levelling-up Bill by the Minister, her team and me, district councils will have representation on the combined authorities by law. That was a very important change to the Bill.

My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s exposition of these SIs. I completely understand why we are moving in this direction: greater efficiency and effectiveness. I very much hope that the Government can, as this process moves on, increase the level of effective devolution and perhaps even give some real independence over revenue to these authorities so that they can develop their full potential.

In addition, when we reach Committee on the hereditary Peers Bill, I will propose that, rather than hereditary Peers being the eligible candidates in by-elections, it should be people nominated by these new authorities and their mayors. We can use the existing mechanisms that we have to start to introduce a measure of regional representation into the House. I hope that the Government will have their imaginative hat on when we come to that. The mechanism is in place; let us use it to move in a direction that many of us would like to go in and to take at least a small step.

I am a resident of East Sussex, which is one of the candidates for the next round of this measure. I note that the local proposals involve a mayor for the whole of Sussex, thereby recreating not the original county council but the original kingdom of Sussex—perhaps we might have a prince rather than a mayor. What concerns me most is how the towns and communities in these new unitaries will come to cherish, assert and grow their own identities. I very much hope that I can persuade the Minister to circulate widely to all the councils that are candidates for this, as well as their constituent parts, examples of how communities flourish in unitaries, including what structures and relationships make that happen well.

The process of transition from “a county plus districts” to a unitary system will be hugely time-absorbing for the councils involved. They will have no space in their heads to do anything other than make that work well. The constituent communities underneath that need to understand how to play their part and how best to organise themselves so that they have a real role to play in what comes afterwards.

Also, I think that Hastings and Eastbourne have no council that will survive, because they have been their own unitaries outside their districts. They will be abolished; there is no town council to live on after them. So, in my town of Eastbourne, we will have to create that whole structure. Should it be one or several? What do we do about the boundaries? We have been added to willy-nilly by Wealden, which has stuck lots of housing and developments around the outside of the borough boundaries. It is all now, sensibly, to become a linked community—but how? What will this look like? As I say, the existing structures and councils do not have the time to work this out. It must be decided at the community level. What has been done before? The problems in some of the reorganisations that we are doing must have turned up before. How do they get dealt with?

What do we do with particular cherished assets that are held at a district level? In our case, in 1929, we purchased by Act of Parliament a large chunk of downlands next to the town. They will now supposedly become the property of an East Sussex unitary, I guess. East Sussex has been selling off all these assets. How can we have a voice in saying, “Actually, no. This is part of our history and part of our town. We’d like to carry this on”? Do we have the opportunity to influence the transfer of these assets to other stable structures such as a national park, the National Trust or a local trust? What is open to us in dealing with assets that really ought to be held locally?

I should note that I am a member of a structure called an independent panel; it was set up by the previous Government to keep an eye on Eastbourne Borough Council in reducing its debts. I am the least prestigious member of that panel: the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, is a member, as is Stephen Baker, a long-time chief executive of councils in East Anglia. We would like to come into the ministry, once the decision about reorganisation is known, and ask, “What have we to contribute here? How do we make this work?” Everything is hanging fire at the moment.

There is a CIPFA report that has existed for nigh on half a year but has not yet been published because we are waiting to know whether there is a council to which it applies. There is stuff to be done to make the whole process of transition work well. We are keen to know how the Government would like us to contribute to that—indeed, whether the Government would like us to contribute to that. One way or another, we want to put our shoulders to the wheel, and hope that there will be an opportunity to do it.

Lastly, I note that the Government have launched a big artificial intelligence project, part of which is a new engine for consultations. I would very much like to know whether this consultation engine will be adopted for future local government reorganisations, and, if so, whether it will truly embrace conversation as well as submissions so that ideas can develop locally and there can be local conversations—that is, not just submitting something to a central pool then being told what that contains but having an actively interactive, artificial intelligence-promoted consultation. This would really allow people locally to have a say on how they want their local government to look.

My Lords, I have spoken on many subjects in Grand Committee in this Room, and this is the first time that I have spoken on local government. In fact, there is a much better qualified inhabitant of Lincolnshire to speak on this subject—the noble Lord, Lord Porter of Spalding—but he must be away because I phoned him up at the weekend to check whether he was able to do this. However, I feel I should speak on this order because local government is, to my mind, perhaps the most important institution that affects people’s day-to-day lives. Governments talk about the big issues, but delivery of much of the Government’s policy is through local authorities, and it is very important that we get the balance of this right.

I speak as somebody who lives in an area of the countryside that is part of a small market town. I was born in Holbeach and I live in Holbeach—I live in the house that I was brought up in—so I have not moved very far, and the world has sort of moved around me, if noble Lords see what I mean. But I can see the change in local government from even when I was a boy in Holland County Council. Lincolnshire was divided into three parts, with the city, and it seemed to work because there was local interaction between citizens and the local authority. I am not talking about the councillors, but the staff of those councils were responsive to people making contact with them and telling them that there was a pothole in the road. Sure enough, somebody would come along and fix it. It was much more immediate.

There is an interesting thing in Peterborough station. An electrical board has been out of action since Christmas. The central heating in the waiting room has been out of action since that time, and there is a door that was working well before Christmas but is now closed. Fortunately, the door that was not working well before Christmas is now open. When I mention this to people, they all say, “Oh, well, it’s been reported”. How often that happens in life. If we can make local authorities really responsive to people’s convenience, we will do so much better.

My Lords, I am a Central Bedfordshire councillor and therefore have some interest in this, although not in these particular SIs. I echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, about the importance of local government. Most residents see local government services on a daily basis, not central government services. I also echo his comments and those of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about the unique nature of all our local areas and, therefore, how much better it is for them to be run locally, in so far as is possible, rather than centrally. In that spirit, these regulations build on the work of the previous Conservative Government; we support this important devolutionary shift, but it is also important to go further.

However, before that, I want to assess some of the proposed changes. First, on the Devon and Torbay Combined County Authority Regulations—I shall say “combined authority” for brevity—that deal was signed in January 2024 by the previous Conservative Government, Devon County Council and Torbay Council to provide powers and funding to the new combined authority to

“improve the economic, social and environmental well-being”

of people in the community, as well as to devolve further powers locally and provide wider flexibility for local action.

The Greater Lincolnshire Combined County Authority, formed by Lincolnshire County Council, North Lincolnshire Council and North East Lincolnshire Council, will have authority over transport, housing and regeneration functions in the region. It will be tasked with transport planning, local transport services and highways maintenance, with a mayor due to be elected in May 2025.

I turn to the Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority, which comprises Hull City Council and the East Riding of Yorkshire Council and, again, will be overseen by a directly elected mayor. The mayor will govern and drive strategic development across the region, including in areas such as transport, housing and regeneration. Additionally, the mayor will have the authority to levy taxes, such as a precept or business rate supplement, to fund those projects.