Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Commons Reason and Amendment

Motion A

That this House do not insist on its Amendment 22B, to which the Commons have disagreed for their Reason 22C.

22C: Because local authorities should continue to meet in person to ensure good governance.

My Lords, with the leave of the House, in moving Motion A I shall also speak to Motion B. Your Lordships will remember that, during our consideration of Commons amendments on Monday this week, two amendments were carried by the House for further consideration by the other place. The first, tabled by my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering, was on virtual attendance at local authority meetings, and the second, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, related to consideration of climate change within the planning system. I will take each of these in turn.

Amendment 22B, tabled by my noble friend, has been decisively rejected by the other place. I well appreciate that this issue has elicited a range of differing views among your Lordships. However, I have to tell my noble friend, whom I greatly respect, that the Government’s position on the matter has not changed. Throughout the passage of the Bill, the Government have not wavered from their clear, strong and principled view that preserving in-person debate is important for maintaining the integrity of local democracy. My noble friend’s amendment is quite clearly at odds with that position, as it provides the power to any future Government to potentially make regulations that go so far as allowing all local authorities to always meet remotely, without any limitations.

Local authorities need councillors to be physically present, to actively take part in democratic decision-making affecting the citizens they represent, and to interact with their fellow councillors at every opportunity to develop a sound understanding of local needs and priorities. That understanding is clearly vital for ensuring the strong local leadership that councils depend on to deliver for the electorate. Perhaps most importantly, councillors need to be physically present to interact with citizens in a way that builds meaningful relationships with their community and ensures that they are, in the fullest sense, accountable to their electorate.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for coming to the Dispatch Box in his charming and inimitable way to consider my humble little amendment once again. It is almost 20 years to the day since I joined a shadow team of which he was an eminent member; I hope that our co-operation will continue long into the future.

I think that any primary school pupil who has been watching our proceedings will be confused by our exhausting not just every letter of the alphabet except the letter O but additional letters of the alphabet. I am inclined to agree to disagree with the House of Commons’s disagreement with Amendment 22B, and will rehearse a couple of reasons why. The revised Amendment 22B was very modest in its remit. I accept my noble friend’s premise that local councils should primarily meet physically, but we went on to state that limited circumstances specified in regulations passed by the Government would permit a normally wholly physical meeting to be attended virtually. I am a little baffled and bewildered by the Government’s unwillingness to move a little more along these lines.

The reason I say this is that we experienced during Covid the situation whereby all council meetings were virtual to permit local government business to continue. That was deemed to work extremely well and kept the wheels of local government moving at a particularly challenging time. To move from completely virtual attendance during Covid to a situation where no virtual or remote attendance is allowed seems baffling. Also, I think it is fair to say that, if we in the Lords are permitted to serve on a committee and to meet either in hybrid form, which is what we are seeking in this amendment, or remotely, it seems incumbent on us to extend the same ability to local councils to meet in these circumstances.

I shall repeat the words of my honourable friend in the other place, the Minister, Rachel Maclean, who said in responding to an intervention from a Conservative Back-Bencher:

“He will know that, with this Bill, we are pushing power down to local people, local areas and local councillors, who are elected to represent their communities … the Government have a very clear view that local democracy should take place face to face”.

Where I agree with my honourable friend is when she went on to say:

“Through our levelling-up work, we are in the midst of a once-in-a-generation devolution of power to allow local areas, such as the one he represents, to make the best decisions for their local communities, notwithstanding this particular point, on which the Government have strong views”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/10/23; col. 787.]

There is a slight irony that the Government are devolving powers in this Bill to local authorities but not the power to decide to permit certain councillors to attend when they have certain difficulties.

We rehearsed at length what those circumstances might be, and I will repeat them briefly here. It seems to me a sensible, common-sense approach, for all the reasons my noble friend said, to permit local government to meet primarily physically and to permit virtual attendance in case of, for example, short-notice difficulties in obtaining childcare provision—which does happen and has led a number of councillors to leave local government—or because of the distance to travel and the lack of public transport, especially in the evening when councils normally meet, and on those occasions, which we have seen in the past two weeks, of inclement weather such as snowstorms, floods and high winds.

In the constituency where I was the MP for my last five years, one of the local councillors put to me that permitting virtual attendance to allow hybrid meetings in those circumstances would be a sensible way of working, it having worked so successfully. She said that because, at the time, Ryedale council covered a wide area. Take the example of Filey, in North Yorkshire, where to reach council meetings in Northallerton it is a 1.5 hour one-way journey and a total round-trip of between 60 and 80 miles. We are asking a lot of these councillors to achieve physical presence on every single occasion.

I acknowledge almost universal support—90% to 95% of councillors—for the amendment in lieu, Amendment 22B, which we debated previously. I realise that this is late in the day on this occasion, but I promise my noble friend that I will revert to this; if there is any possibility in any of the legislation in the King’s Speech, I will latch on to it. I give him early warning of that.

I thank all in the House who supported the amendment in its original and revised forms, and my colleagues in the other place, including my honourable friend Peter Aldous, my right honourable friend Theresa Villiers, and others who spoke in support of this. That this humble, modest amendment is the thin end of the wedge, where all meetings would go from being totally physical to totally virtual, is a little of an exaggeration. While not wanting to test the patience of the House further by pressing this to a vote, I express a little disappointment and sadness that the Government have not seen fit to move on this occasion.