All right—I have knocked on nearly as many doors as all the noble Lords in this Chamber. I have never met anyone who said, “George, what I really want is to be levelled up.” They want better schools, shorter waiting lists, crucially with priorities differing from place to place. My noble friend Lord Lucas wants a sixth-form college in Eastbourne, while the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, wants better rail services in the West Midlands. I believe the Government can achieve their objective through a different route: by giving local authorities much more autonomy to reflect those varying priorities than what is proposed, and by making this a much more decentralised country.
This Bill was never meant to be called the levelling up Bill. At the beginning of this Parliament we were promised a White Paper on devolution. That commitment was abandoned in May 2021, when we were told that a new levelling up White Paper would be published later, which would supersede it. The White Paper said:
“We’ll usher in a revolution in local democracy.”
It later made the point that local leaders in other countries have
“much greater revenue-raising powers.”
But there is absolutely nothing about that in the Bill. Devolving greater ability to spend central government money with strings attached is not a revolution in local democracy; it is a step change in local administration.
Let me make a radical suggestion to decentralise and to turbocharge levelling up by empowering local democracy. Over the next 10 years, revenue from fuel duty, some £25 billion, will disappear as we buy electric vehicles. The revenue foregone will be met by road pricing, now made possible by in-car technology—a transition that the Government will no longer be able to duck. However, that revenue should not go to central government but should complement the existing revenue from parking and congestion charges and go to the larger units of local government encouraged by the Bill. This would give local government greater autonomy and a sounder basis of local taxation than the increasingly discredited and out of date council tax, which raises the same amount from a mansion in Belgrave Square as a terraced house in Oakham, in Leicestershire. I would expect this proposal to be welcomed by my noble friend the Minister, as I came across a statement released by the County Councils Network calling for
“Full fiscal devolution to counties to create an extra £26bn in GVA”,
signed by the leader of Wiltshire Council, my noble friend Lady Scott.
In conclusion, rather than rigidly following the targets in 12 centrally derived missions, I honestly believe that more people will believe that they have been levelled up if we go down this route of local democratic empowerment.
9.27 pm