My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lord Scriven and Lord Shipley for raising this important part of the levelling-up agenda. I of course also thank the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for linking it to the estimable White Paper on levelling up which, in many ways, has pointed to the importance of full devolution being equated with autonomy over local funding.
At the moment—I have probably said this before in the Chamber—we have the delegation of powers and funding from the centre to local government, be it
combined authorities or local councils. This is therefore an important debate because, if we really want to be on the path to devolution, we have to address the issue of more autonomy and fiscal powers for local government.
The Minister may wish to pause at this point and take time over the weekend to refer to a House of Commons report that called for more autonomy and fiscal powers for local government. To be fair, it is 10 years old but sometimes, these big changes take a long time. It was published by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which was of course all-party. I draw the Minister’s attention to two elements of the conclusion, and I hope she will then have time to read more of it:
“Power and finance must go together if local government is to become an equal partner… any attempt to make the relationship between central and local government more balanced would be meaningless without giving local government its own source of revenue… to achieve fully the potential of localism, a key plank of the Government’s policy platform, local government requires financial freedoms.”
The report stated that the Government, under the same political colours as now, should consider giving local authorities in England a share of the existing income tax for England. The committee did not propose a change in income tax rates, but:
“The concept of tax transparency would allow local people to see more clearly what their taxes pay for locally and encourage them to hold local councils to account for their expenditure.”
I agree. There is obviously much more in that report.
The debate here is about having real devolution. If Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can have it, why not Yorkshire, the population of which is bigger than each of them?