Siân Berry MP: speeches

Speeches

• 27 Nov 2025 · Solar Power: Churches · Hansard source

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  10. To ask the hon. Member for Battersea, representing the Church Commissioners, what steps the Church of England is taking to install solar power for churches.

• 27 Nov 2025 · Solar Power: Churches · Hansard source

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  Brighton and Hove has excellent energy co-ops and many church roofs, so what is the Church doing to bring together clergy, congregations and co-ops to make more solar projects viable? Can the commissioners reduce planning risks for listed churches by adding more weight, perhaps through guidance or strategies, to their visible leadership role in communities?

• 27 Nov 2025 · Right to Trial by Jury · Hansard source

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  With the Government’s attitude to migrants now expanding the political space for the racist far right, is the Minister not concerned that building a toolkit for authoritarians out of digital ID, police facial recognition, and now cutting jury trials for all charges that might be associated with dissent, is incredibly dangerous and something that we would not expect of a Labour Government, which should be protecting our rights instead?

• 25 Nov 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill · Hansard source

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  The Minister failed to tell us how the tourist tax would be brought forward in legislation. With the announcement coming yesterday, and after all the opportunities they had in Committee and in debates on the Floor of the House, does the hon. Gentleman think that this was merely a case of failing to get the Chancellor’s attention?

• 25 Nov 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my former colleague for his “Hear, hear!” Let me talk about governance systems and the committee system. My No. 1 goal in all this has been to try to keep the committee systems, as the Conservatives’ amendment 4 would do. My amendments 94 to 102 mirror amendments that I tabled in Committee and seek to protect existing committee systems, particularly those chosen by people in a petition and referendum process, as happened in Sheffield. That was driven by people power.

• 25 Nov 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill · Hansard source

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  I want to talk first about public engagement. Fellow members of the Bill Committee know that I am not convinced that the Bill delivers the public involvement and community empowerment stated in its title, as that is not properly facilitated by the proposed measures set out in the Bill. In Committee, I gave the Government many options to consider, including citizens assemblies, community wealth building strategies and a national public engagement commission. France has had its “Commission nationale du débat public” for 30 years, which makes real its citizens’ rights to be involved in decisions that affect their environment. It links together the environment and human rights, as set out in the excellent Aarhus convention. At this stage, I am happy to support the new option put forward by the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) in relation to community empowerment. It asks the Government to undertake a review and come up with a better plan of the Government’s own choosing, which is quite reasonable and I support it. I do not have time to go through the many other amendments that I support, but I feel like consensus around many issues is breaking out in the Chamber, as it sometimes did in Committee. However, I want to single out new clause 10, in the name of the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), which proposes a community ownership fund, and new clause 19, which asks for the alternative vote system to be used for mayoral elections, not the supplementary vote. In single member elections, the alternative vote gives real choice: people simply choose their candidate and rank them, so there is no second guessing about who might be in the second round. It means a guaranteed consensus-driven majority for the winning candidate, so the Government should consider that. More broadly, as some Members have noted, I have talked many times about being a member of the London Assembly and holding the Mayor of London to account with a dedicated, funded scrutiny body. The Government should pay much more attention to scrutiny in this Bill at the next stage.

• 24 Nov 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill · Hansard source

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  I, too, was pleased to sit on the Public Bill Committee, but sadly I cannot spare the time to review everyone’s performance, so I will get straight to the point. My amendments for new combined authorities in parts 1 and 2 of the Bill include amendments 91 to 93, which add action on poverty and socioeconomic inequality to the areas of competence of new mayors in clause 2. The Government have promised again and again to enact part 1 of the Equality Act 2010 in respect of a socioeconomic duty for England. If that were done, these duties would need to be created in the Bill. To leave them out for brand new authorities is such a gap, and I find it hard to understand why the Government are resisting. I hope that either this will be taken up in the other place and debated again or the section will be enacted for England imminently, such that it has to be done through Government amendments there. I would like to hear that promised by Ministers today. I mainly want to focus on and propose my new clause 29. This would help every new mayor support the principles in the Climate Change Act 2008 in a fair way. The Climate Change Committee has noted the yawning gap between national ambition and local action, and the Local Government Association has called for that gap to be closed through the Bill. We need every mayor agreeing on the action they will take—their fair contribution to national targets—and being empowered to deliver for our crucial carbon budgets and lifesaving climate resilience. My new clause would also help every new mayor to support the principles in the Environment Act 2021 for nature protection and restoration, and action on pollution, wildlife and the ecosystem that is our only home. It would also help every new mayor to support the principles in Ella’s law, the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill. The Bill awaits Second Reading and comes from cross-party work with campaigners from the Healthy Air Coalition and Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, the mother of Ella, whose death from asthma was the first to be recorded as due to air pollution. New clause 29 is supported by the UK100 group of local authorities, the Climate Emergency campaign, the Better Planning Coalition, Wildlife and Countryside Link, the Healthy Air Coalition, Friends of the Earth and a host of others. An open letter has been signed by over 450 local councillors from all parties and by council leaders. Hundreds of businesses have written in more than once to Ministers and many of our constituents have been contacting MPs, too. I am very grateful to every hon. Member, cross party, who has signed it. The case is clear. I intend to press new clause 29 to a Division, so that we can, on all sides of the House, vote for the climate, nature and clean air duties that are so vital. I hope that the Government will pledge clearly today to introduce them all as full duties at the next stage in the other place. In Committee, I also worked with campaigners to fill a big gap in health determinants set out in the Bill, to which new mayors would have to plan action under clause 43, the health improvement and health inequalities duty. The Government left out of the Bill any environmental impacts on health. I argued strongly for that in Committee and have again tabled amendments 87 to 90 to fix that. I am pleased and grateful to see that Ministers have listened to the evidence and added their own Government amendments 116 to 118 naming environmental factors, including air quality and access to green space and bodies of water as the health determinants they are. However, my original amendments have not been withdrawn, as they spelled out that environmental factors should also specifically include water pollution and land pollution. This would have brought the goals of Zane’s law into the work done by new mayors to document and plan strategically to avoid horrific problems with contaminated land of the kind that led to the sudden death of Zane Gbangbola, when floods brought poisoned gas from contaminated landfill into his home in Chertsey in Surrey. I would like to hear explicitly from the Minister today that the phrase “environmental factors” in the new Government amendments includes that kind of contamination, and that the amendments therefore bring parts of Zane’s law into the Bill. Finally, I want the Minister—and the Lords in the other place—to look seriously at the need for amendments 159 and 160, which aim to ensure that the local growth plans from new mayors will help protect culture in a strategic way. I have worked with the Music Venue Trust on the amendments, and its annual report each year makes awful reading, as our grassroots music venues suffer and close due to business pressures, unfair business rates valuations and planning and licensing issues. Those issues could be tackled effectively using the new strategies and powers of combined authorities and mayors. The amendments cover not just music but cultural and community spaces of all kinds, including theatres and other performance venues. I believe that all areas of the country will benefit from the amendments being added at a future stage of the Bill.

• 24 Nov 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 24 Nov 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill · Hansard source

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  May I invite the hon. Member to move new clause 29? I do not know if that is possible at this stage.

• 13 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Ella’s law—the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill—will now not get its Second Reading on 21 November, despite wide cross-party support. Will the Leader of the House ensure that the Government make time on Fridays or at other times for more of the most vital private Members’ Bills, such as Ella’s law, or could they adopt the measures into their own Bills—for example the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill?

• 13 Nov 2025 · Police Reform · Hansard source

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  As was I.

• 13 Nov 2025 · Police Reform · Hansard source

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  The Government are creating new boards from council leaders, but abolishing, not restocking, the police and crime scrutiny panels. Does the Minister recognise that this risks creating a chasm of scrutiny right when police reform is most urgent on issues like racism, misogyny, police conduct and the ill-governed use of AI? Does she not see a role in better scrutiny for elected local opposition leaders?

• 11 Nov 2025 · BBC Leadership · Hansard source

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  The BBC employs thousands of tremendous journalists who are diligent, truth-seeking and impartial. It is not perfect, but we must defend this national asset. We cannot be left to the wolves of the kind of channels that Trump prefers, which have values of propaganda, not of ethics and integrity. Will the Secretary of State protect our BBC from all further political interference, listen to the cross-party voices here, put an end to all political appointments and remove those already in place, like Robbie Gibb—if not immediately, then in that process?

• 4 Nov 2025 · Business Rates: Affordability for SMEs · Hansard source

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  8. What assessment she has made of the adequacy of the affordability of business rates for small and medium-sized enterprises.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Business Rates: Affordability for SMEs · Hansard source

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  Grassroots music venues are a vital part of the heart, soul and economy of Brighton Pavilion. Treasury Ministers have admitted that fairer business rates valuation methods are not currently used for many of these businesses—my local venues are calling the burdens punitive and a threat to viability. Will the Chancellor assure me that she will not forget grassroots music venues in her Budget?

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I will cover some of those issues, but yes, I am not completely happy with how many local councils work. Some carry out the bare minimum. I think we need more minimum guarantees built into this new process, and the Bill is the right place to introduce them. As I said, the current model is basically an expanded local authority model, based on the idea, I think, that a combined authority is a collection of local authorities so the underlying scrutiny arrangements are sufficient. However, that has already been stretched by the more powerful mayors, and it will be stretched further when the new authorities are set up. The new powers in particular need more scrutiny. For example, public bodies in every area will need to have regard to the growth plan. Growth plan objectives will be decided by the central authority, but how will they be developed and scrutinised? A strategic authority will be the local transport authority for its region, so it will gain a key route network of roads and can instruct the traffic authorities in its area on the management of the network. These are additional powers, so there is a role for additional scrutiny. Local plans and planning decisions will need to conform to the strategic authority’s plan—that is set out in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill—but how the powers are used deserves scrutiny, challenge, questions and accountability. These authorities are also taking on land assembly and housing powers. They can make mayoral development orders, and set up many huge budgets within mayoral development corporations. I do not think the local authority scrutiny model can cover the questions that might need to be asked in those circumstances. There is a process for giving the new strategic authorities even greater powers in the future, but there is no associated process in the Bill for reviewing the scrutiny arrangements as those powers increase. New clause 15 would require a review of the scrutiny arrangements to match the new powers given to strategic authorities, which they may request as the Government devolve further. A safety net for scrutiny is needed somewhere in the Bill. I am aiming to fix a genuine problem. Many existing strategic authorities have struggled to establish a truly collaborative approach between the local authorities and the members of the committees that exist to scrutinise those authorities. Quite often, the members feel that they should represent their own local authority and do not necessarily take a collective approach to scrutiny in the committee. I believe that problem will increase, particularly where we establish authorities that may lack a strong collective identity like that Greater London or Greater Manchester, where people automatically feel that they will be standing up for that area. In these new invented areas, we need legislation to ensure that scrutiny will reflect a common identity and collective approach. This issue is a reflection of quite a lot of existing problems with scrutiny in councils. I will cite some of the conclusions in the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee’s 2017 report. It looked at the effectiveness of local authority scrutiny committees and concluded that scrutiny was marginalised in too many authorities, which could contribute to service failures. The Committee also found evidence that scrutiny committee chairs often did not challenge their leaders, picking instead safe, less controversial topics, and that the fact that the committee chairs are appointed meant that they were more likely to keep quiet and use their role as a way to prepare for a future cabinet position. In the local authority model, the leaders can choose their cabinet, and we have already discussed many times in this Committee how the new mayors will be able to choose their commissioners. I am sure that Members can see how the same dynamic might occur.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I implore the Minister to go away and look at this again. The courts have confirmed that transport schemes, such as the cycleway running along the Embankment, do not count as development. Therefore, the wider applicability that I think the Minister was asserting may not be in place without some kind of amendment to make sure that things such as the local economic plans, local growth plans, nature recovery strategies and local transport plans are fully covered by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act. It may need some changes that I think the Minister is unaware of at the moment. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion. Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to have you back in the Chair, Dame Siobhain. I will speak to my new clause 15, which proposes an independent review of the adequacy of scrutiny and accountability arrangements within six months of commencement. We have had plenty of debate in Committee about scrutiny and accountability of new strategic authorities and the larger new unitary authorities, but new clause 15 is solely about the mayoral combined authorities. Given the scale of the powers on offer, the Bill is relatively light on scrutiny and consultation requirements. There are duties carried over from existing legislation relating to strategic authorities taking on the functions of, for example, fire and rescue authorities, and to the appointment of commissioners to whom strategic mayors would delegate functions, but quite honestly, only one new measure in the Bill adds to scrutiny over the carried over measures. That is clause 9 and schedule 3, about the termination of the commissioner role and a role for the overview and scrutiny committee to recommend dismissal. In the rest of the Bill, the underpinning of the scrutiny arrangements for these powerful new combined authorities will be derived from local councils, as established by the Local Government Act 2000, but I am yet to be convinced that such an underpinning will provide enough scrutiny and challenge of these powerful new bodies.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. New clause 34 is about something that I do not think Ministers have yet considered, but it would be of real benefit to the efficiency and transparency of these new authorities. The Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 created a number of new powers to standardise planning data, including local plans, planning software and the ways in which we can get information about planning applications and policies. The new clause would make sure that other activities of the strategic authorities were, from the start, set up to provide a similar level of data. We are talking about spatial data, spending data, data for inward investments, and data for the jobs created in association with different parts of economic plans. It would be marvellous to put that level of digitalisation of public data into the Bill, for the same Department mandated the planning data reforms that are being taken up extremely well. We must do something about this either now or at the next stage of the Bill. We have seen provisions in the Bill—I have tabled other amendments on this—say things like, “Mayors must publish in such a manner as the mayor thinks appropriate.” That kind of wording is a recipe for PDFs inaccessible to organisations such as Natural England seeking to scrutinise or interact with these different strategic authorities around the country. Ministers themselves may want to know some data about what is going on in these local authorities, as well as the public at large—civil society. If we do not make things standardised, we will end up having to go through multiple inaccessible PDFs. Sometimes, those are Excel documents that have been turned into PDFs, and yet the Excel documents are not released. It would be tremendous for standardised, accessible data in API formats—searchable, integratable and comparable—to be produced as a matter of course through the Bill. The measure would also help to support the goals of the Aarhus convention, which is all about transparency and being able to find out information. It would also be a gift to people who want to create things like accessible apps, websites and maps for pamphlets about the services in a local area. Those are the kinds of benefits that the Government talked about at the time of introducing the requirements on planning. They need to look again at whether they want things published in multiple different ways that become hard to integrate later, or whether they want things to be organised a little better from the start. The new clause is tabled in a constructive way. I hope that Ministers will ask their teams to explore the idea and talk to the people working on planning. It would be of huge benefit not to have to unpick a mess of data for these new authorities later on.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  That is a great point—allotments are intergenerational space. They do have an effect on health for no reason; they are beneficial and great. They are a tradition in this country that we are losing. Let us get this action put into the duties on authorities. I urge the Minister to look favourably on how this extension to the proposed health function could be constructively included in what happens in the new strategic authorities.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. It is a pleasure to move the new clause in the name of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), who is a well-known enthusiast for allotments. I am a keen gardener in a space similar to an allotment, and my colleague Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb in the House of Lords is also a huge enthusiast. I hope that this issue and this kind of provision will continue to be discussed in the other place, whatever happens in the Commons. The Bill quite rightly puts health and wellbeing at the heart of a lot of the strategic functions of the new authorities. Sadly, however, it neglects the role that access to allotments and green spaces can play in boosting public health. The new clause would rectify that with some specific proposals for allotments. Across England, demand for allotments is huge. People have really embraced the health and social benefits that they can provide. There is much more awareness of the environmental benefits that they can deliver, supporting pollinators much better than other kinds of managed land. They can be part of green corridors, linking together nature-rich spaces. The demand has led to long waiting lists, while allotments are being taken away. In 1950, there were 1.5 million allotment plots, but we have only around 250,000 today. The biggest losses have been in urban areas, where people need them the most. There are now 108,000 people on waiting lists. For example, in Portsmouth, one in every 25 adults is waiting. That is one person on every bus sitting waiting for an allotment. At the moment we do not have many legal tools for councils to fix that. There are no reporting requirements on councils and there are no waiting time limits for councils to drive forward ambition on providing allotments, but the Bill provides an opportunity to fix that. The new clause would create a duty to increase allotment provision and boost public health, to report on allotment and nature-rich provision in areas, and to fund community organisers to widen public access to those resources. It would also require action if allotment provision falls below a certain threshold. The new clause takes inspiration from Scotland—we have not just invented it for England here. Under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, the Scottish Government have mandated a 50% or less waiting-list-to-allotment ratio, a maximum wait of five years or less, as well as annual reports. That has not been an insupportable burden on local authorities there; indeed, they have taken it up with some enthusiasm. It would be brilliant to have that in England. It would provide legal direction, but also practical levers for councils and real imperatives for them to act.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  To what everyone else has said, I want to add that, while I have spent a lot of time in the Committee complaining that scrutiny is not done well, we have done a really good job of scrutinising this Bill. My team has had the most amazing support from the Public Bill Office and the Clerks, and the Chairs have been fantastic, so thank you very much, everyone.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  A standing commission that offers regular advice to all the groups that are trying to innovate would be a boon to them, not a burden as the hon. Member for Hamble Valley said. I believe that reporting back from “time to time” is completely normal language in Bills that set up an independent agency or organisation and we want to receive reports back; it definitely does not mean anything in particular. I remind the Minister that there are risks if we do not do something to ensure that we stand by the important rights that people expect to be upheld. It is not just full of opportunity and excitement, as my previous speech implied; there is genuinely a risk that the new bodies—these unfamiliar, geographically drawn strategic authorities—will rejected by the public if the Government do not get this right. Trust is a crucial metric that we cannot measure ourselves—it just happens or not in other people. We need people to genuinely trust the new bodies. We cannot tell someone to trust them—they do or they do not. The Government must ensure that they are doing that right. I do not want the reforms to fall flat any more than Ministers do. I think this provision is an important thing that could be done to ensure that they succeed better than they otherwise would. However, I am not going to press it to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the clause. Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  May I add that this is a really interesting debate and one that we should continue to have under my new clause? To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, Conservative Members have argued repeatedly that there will be a loss of representation from the abolition of the lower-tier councils. Does he not agree that this a way to mitigate that?

• 28 Oct 2025 · English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time. I will, as briefly as I can, because this is an interesting concept, outline the proposals in new clause 30 for the establishment of a public engagement commission. I have been part of some rocky debates in Committee, and I commend the new clause as a less fraught way to consider deep public participation, to come to terms with the benefits of participatory processes in appropriate situations and to look at democratic innovation in other ways. The key issue here is that, as additional powers are gained, the choices and challenges facing public authorities in general—particularly these new ones—are becoming harder, along with the issues they are considering and the world situation. The need for citizen participation grows with that if we are to maintain trust and confidence in our public institutions. We need these new institutions to build trust and public confidence from the start. The new clause closely relates to our legal obligations under the Aarhus convention, of which I am quite a big fan, as conventions go. It was adopted in 1998, when the Rio process really started to bed in, in the period when I started to become very involved in politics. I am certain that some of the processes taking place within central and local government as a result of our signing up to the convention encouraged my interest in politics, and led to some of the people who I work with now becoming my colleagues, so I am a big fan. The Aarhus convention links environmental rights and human rights. It establishes that “sustainable development can be achieved only through the involvement of all stakeholders” and it focuses on interactions between the public and public authorities in a democratic context. It is absolutely wonderful, but we are miles behind other countries in how we do that. There are some really good examples of engagement in Britain. However, I see Ministers in the current Government not acting in the spirit of the convention, who are not keen to hear from the public, or who are certainly not keen to engage with them in new ways. I hear a lot about how engagement with the public slows down building—they put it less politely than that. We need to think more about how we undertake this kind of democratic innovation, not just in planning applications but in the wide range of powers and services that we are devolving. It should be part of the Bill’s DNA, and the new clause would do just that. The new clause would set up a national body to guide and spread best practice, and it would take on the task of engaging and involving the public in innovative ways on very big and difficult questions—it would be a really positive addition to the Bill. The proposed public engagement commission is modelled on the French National Commission for Public Debate, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary—we can feel the vintage this comes from. The French commission started out by looking at big schemes such as TGV lines, and it has organised consultations on 130 schemes and projects. Some of the projects have been modified, some have been significantly redesigned, and some have actually been abandoned as a result of the public engagement. It is a success story in France, and we could make use of it here. We had the National Infrastructure Commission, which governed planning applications, and that has recently been widened to the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, so it is intended to look at services as well. I think that a similar commission looking at strategic and national-level engagement would be a positive addition in helping us to fulfil some of our rights. Obviously, the commission would not intervene on every scheme, but it might intervene on schemes at a range of levels to establish best practice. It would be an ideal place to look at some of the knottier issues that we have come across. I will finish with a few examples. I can see that Members do not want to debate this and they are feeling a little confused about what it might actually do. We have talked about proportional representation and voting systems today. For subjects that can be difficult to discuss, such as planning issues, which can descend into name calling, we could try different methods of engagement. We could listen to how to modify projects—that is an obvious one. We could also look at local growth plans and think about how they could be scrutinised to involve the public more. There is also the neighbourhoods work that the Government are still proposing. All would benefit from the involvement of this commission. The commission could also try out and report back on new digital approaches. It could make sure that consultations work for younger people, while also ensuring that the digitally excluded can also join engagement exercises. Getting that kind of balance right is very hard, and establishing a commission to make sure that it works well would be a good thing. On things such as community infrastructure and mayoral levies, which are raised and spent in the local area, the commission should look at participatory budgeting and establish best practice. We know that mayoral development corporations are not really designed to be directly accountable or involve the public, but the commission could look at how those bodies could engage more effectively in local areas. It is interesting that in engagement connected with new towns, it is people in the local area who are consulted when new towns are intended mainly to attract new people to an area. How should people who might come to live in an area be consulted? Those are interesting challenges and I think that the commission would be a positive addition. More seriously, I hope that the Minister will recognise that there is a participation gap in relation to the Aarhus convention in this Bill. I hope that she will go away and look again at how that affects environmental rights and compliance and about how that might work at a national level. She should also think about how this challenge today might affect a wide range of different participation processes at the Government level. Apologies for again making a very long case for a new clause. I do not table them idly.