I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am going to make some brief comments because I spoke in the debate last week. I reiterate the concerns about this legislation, which has been poorly drafted. Lords amendment 22B would allow councillors to attend meetings virtually or hybrid-style meetings. The amendment is a good opportunity to increase participation in local politics and I think that we should be encouraging it.
For many councillors, the reality of fulfilling their role means working around another full-time job, working late into the evening as well as at weekends, or balancing their parenting commitments, so councillors’ time is under great pressure. Most councillors are in their post purely because of their commitment to their local community, and we should be helping them out by allowing the occasional virtual attendance at a meeting if that reduces the time burden on them. I have heard the argument that our constituents rightly expect us to attend Parliament in person and that elected members of the local council should therefore be expected to do the same, but that argument misses the incredibly important point that, for most people, being a councillor is not a full-time salaried job. To expect them to sacrifice yet more of their time to travel to meetings to offer contributions that could otherwise be made online is simply unfair.
Travel brings me to a particularly pertinent point at the moment. In my constituency and other rural parts of Britain, it is not uncommon for council meetings to be held many miles away from the ward or division that a councillor represents or from where they live. In some cases, that will mean travelling 20 to 50 miles one way to attend a council meeting. Clearly this is a problem in poor weather, as we only have to look at the damage and chaos of the last week to see. It also means that councillors usually have to have their own car, not least because an evening meeting will be held when most bus services have stopped running for the day. That means that people are being excluded from becoming involved in local democracy simply because they do not have access to a car. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill was supposed to put greater devolution at its heart and encourage more people into the democratic process. If we really want to engage people in politics and widen representation and access, we should be making it easier for people to represent their communities, not more difficult.
I move briefly on to Lords amendment 45. It is the Liberal Democrats’ view that the original amendment is superior to the Government’s amendment in lieu. It
would place duties on the Secretary of State to mitigate and adapt planning policy to reflect climate change. Planning is an integral part of achieving net zero, and as such it is only right that it puts climate considerations at its heart. At the moment, net zero goals are inconsistently applied to planning applications. Local development plans consider climate complications, whereas individual planning applications do not and, without the Government’s amendment in lieu, national development management policies—NDMPs—will not either.
The Lords amendment would extend environmental duties to all aspects of the planning system with a sharpened focus, ensuring that new plans would contribute to specific climate and nature targets. A dual approach is particularly important because climate and ecological decline are closely intertwined, and unfortunately both are accelerating. I do not think that this amendment should be controversial. It is publicly backed by environment businesses, local government and environmental NGOs. The time has run out for looking at climate change simply as an add-on or an afterthought, and given the Government’s recent back-pedalling on their net zero commitments, this should be an easy opportunity to put climate change at the core of the planning process.
Without these Lords amendments, the Bill will miss two key opportunities to encourage local democratic participation and consider climate complications to planning applications. Both these factors are surely at the core of what levelling up should be about.