My Lords, I want to make a brief contribution to this debate, because it goes to the heart of the discussion about whether we believe in decentralisation and about the role of local government in a decentralised country.
The levelling up White Paper says:
“We’ll usher in a revolution in local democracy.”
Later on, it states that local leaders in other countries have
“much greater revenue-raising powers”,
a point that the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, has just made. As I said at Second Reading, there is nothing about greater revenue-raising powers in the Bill, and the probing amendment that we have just heard moved puts that right by initiating a broader discussion.
I welcome some of the announcements in the Budget about devolving more powers to mayoral authorities and allowing local authorities to retain more of the business rates, but devolving greater ability to spend central government money and keeping more of their own money is not actually the move towards a more self-sufficient, independent and confident local government that many of us would like to see.
I take this opportunity to briefly restate a suggestion that I made in January. Over the next 10 years, some £25 billion in fuel duty will disappear as we all buy electric vehicles, and the revenue foregone will be met by road pricing, now made possible by in-car technology —a transition that successive Governments have ducked but, I suspect, will not be able to duck much longer. However, that revenue from road pricing should not go to the Treasury or central government; it should complement the existing revenue from parking and congestion charges, where it would logically sit, and go to the larger units of local government which we have been debating today. That would give local government greater autonomy and a sounder basis for local taxation than the increasingly discredited and out-of-date council tax.
There are other ways of raising local revenue, and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, touched on a few. However, in replying to this debate, I wonder whether my noble friend can show just a little bit of ankle on the Government’s thinking—whether they are really interested in empowering genuine local democracy by giving the sort of powers implied in this amendment.