NALC briefing on the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

The government has today published the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, legislation which will take forward aspects of the English Devolution White Paper from December 2024.

The Bill aims to establish a more consistent and simpler model of devolution which can be delivered more quickly than current legislation allows, establishing a standardised framework of devolved powers, duties and functions, reforming the local government sector, and empowering communities.

Ahead of the introduction of the Bill to the House of Commons, we were pleased to meet with Baroness Taylor of Stevenage, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, for a briefing and discussion on the key provisions of the Bill.

We appreciated the minister's continued positive engagement with us and the opportunity to be briefed on the Bill. We welcomed the recognition of the role of parish and town councils, particularly the acknowledgement of their effectiveness in delivering local services, and confirmation that the government did not intend for any neighbourhood government structures to replace parish and town councils.

There was also a commitment to forge an even stronger relationship with NALC, including further work to support and encourage good partnerships between parish and town councils and principal authorities through neighbourhood governance structures, as well as addressing issues not covered in the Bill, such as hybrid meetings and reform of the standards regime.

Provisions in the Bill include:

• Creating the new category of Strategic Authority to make it quicker and easier for the government to devolve powers to local leaders in future, alongside the ambition to fill the map with strategic authorities.
• Giving mayors of strategic authorities wide ranging new competencies and the ability to take on new powers and functions over time, establishing in law a defined set of areas where mayors have the competency to act, such as on transport, local infrastructure, housing and strategic planning, skills and employment support, economic development and regeneration and the environment, climate change, health and wellbeing, reform of public services and public safety.
• Extending the general power of competence to mayors and mayoral strategic authorities.
• Establishing a new ambitious devolution framework so that a standard set of functions is conferred on strategic authorities. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, also contains powers for strategic planning, which sits alongside this bill.
• Alignment of public service boundaries to support public service reform.
• Reverting the voting system for mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners to the supplementary vote from the first past the post system.
• Delivering on the fit, legal and decent commitment to local government and manifesto commitment to overhaul the audit system, bringing all audit functions under a single organisation, the Local Audit Office (LAO), which will set assurance and audit regimes which are proportionate and risk-based. In the short term, the LAO would not appoint auditors for smaller authorities.
• Lifting the smaller authority threshold from £6.5 million to £15 million to improve the proportionality of the way the audit is currently done.
• Ensuring the government has the appropriate tools to enable the delivery of local government reorganisation by streamlining the interactions between reorganisation and devolution.
• Streamline local authority governance functions, including by requiring all councils which operate the committee system to transition to the leader and cabinet model, and preventing the establishment of any new council-based mayoralties.
• Strengthening the voice of communities by introducing a duty on local authorities to make appropriate arrangements for effective governance of any neighbourhood area, providing the secretary of state with the power, by way of regulations, to define a neighbourhood area and to specify the parameters of what arrangements will be appropriate to meet the duty.
• Supporting High Street businesses with a new ban on upwards only rent reviews.
• Empowering communities to play a much stronger role in local decision making through a new right to buy for community assets, including special protections for local sporting assets, recognising that community spaces have such a significant role to play in developing social networks and encouraging community participation and in promoting civic pride.

We will be considering the Bill in more detail and will provide further information in due course, as well as briefing parliamentarians ahead of the second reading in September.