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English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

My Lords, I echo the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, that this has been a very thoughtful and interesting debate. I am grateful to all contributors and for the amendments to Schedule 20 on local growth plans.

I will start with the amendment in the name of my noble friend Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, which draws our attention to the important role of mayors in addressing health inequalities in their areas. Through Clause 44, we are introducing a new legal requirement for combined and combined county authorities to have regard to the need to improve the health of people in their areas, and to reduce health inequalities between people living in their areas. This will reinforce our ambition to ensure that health is considered in all policies and will support our health mission in England.

I add that the mayoral competencies set out in the Bill specifically include health, well-being and public service reform, so that means that that should be taken into consideration in all the work that the mayor and the strategic authority do. It is the Government’s intention that mayors should sit on ICBs, which I hope will start to address some of the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and my noble friend Lady Royall about how we get that linkage between what is going on in the national health and what is going on at local level.

There are some great examples across the country of what is happening—obviously, Manchester is the best known because it has specific powers to tackle health, and I really welcome that, but in a district council like my own, we took great interest in tackling some of the key health challenges in our area to help the economy, such as tackling obesity, smoking and some of the big, long-standing mental health challenges that we faced, and we worked closely with partners in doing that. Of course, there is no better example of the contribution that local authorities can make to public health than the response of local authorities to the Covid pandemic, in those very unique circumstances, so we know it can be done.

Although I recognise that it is not explicitly stated in relation to local growth plans, I can reassure the Committee that this new duty will apply to all functions, including developing a local growth plan. Indeed, as I said, many places are already demonstrating this awareness.

I know that many of my noble friends will be very sympathetic to the benefits of co-operative and mutual models in addressing these challenges—I know they are aware of my history in the co-operative movement. I hope they will also recognise that a key principle behind local growth plans is that they must be locally owned, in line with the fundamental principles of devolution.

I recognise the community wealth-building principles so clearly articulated by my noble friend Lady Royall, and the example that she gave of Preston, which has been a leading proponent of using the power of public procurement and provision of infrastructure and services to tackle inequalities in its local area. That has been very important, and Matthew Brown and his colleagues have done a very significant piece of work on that. However, while we may commend those local examples, we must afford local growth plans the flexibility for local challenges to be addressed in response to the local context.

I hope my noble friend feels reassured that mayoral combined authorities and combined county authorities are already considering health as part of their plans,

and that the new health improvement and health inequalities duty will achieve the desired effect. On that basis, I hope my noble friend feels able to withdraw her amendment.

Amendment 141B is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman of Steventon, and I thank her for all the discussions we have had around her environmental issues, during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Act and recently. The amendment would provide the Secretary of State with the opportunity to set out in guidance how mayoral combined authorities should align growth measures in their local growth plan with considerations of nature, wildlife and the environment.

I want to reassure the Committee on two points. First, this is already possible. We have set out that the guidance on local growth plans can cover a range of matters. That includes the information to be included in a plan—that is to say, its content—and the ways in which the authority may have regard to the plan when exercising other functions. But the guidance is not limited to just these matters; it can cover additional matters not explicitly set out in the primary legislation. I reassure the Committee that this enables us to set out the matters included in this amendment, should that be needed.

Secondly, mayoral combined authorities and mayoral combined county authorities are already subject to several requirements linked to this amendment. This includes the recently strengthened biodiversity duty, which supports the delivery of legally binding biodiversity targets, as well as statutory duties related to air quality. Local growth plans will provide an important framework for economic growth, but they will sit alongside a range of other statutory plans, strategies and duties. Decisions that impact protected species, nature recovery and the environment will still need to consider relevant policy frameworks—for example, local nature recovery strategies, about which we had much discussion during the passage of the Planning and Infrastructure Act.

I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Hunt for setting out so clearly how important it is to ensure that in our planning process, whether it is local growth plans or spatial planning, we aim to create that win- win for development and the environment. We made some significant steps with that in the Planning and Infrastructure Act, and I hope that local growth plans will contribute to that as well.

That said, I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Freeman, will feel reassured that the matters in her amendment must already be considered by mayoral combined authorities and mayoral combined county authorities. I hope she will feel reassured that, should further guidance be necessary, it remains possible to set this out in the guidance on local growth plans. I therefore ask that her amendment be withdrawn.