“(1) Within six months of this Bill receiving Royal Assent, the Secretary of State must establish a body to be known as the Public Engagement Commission.

(2) The purposes of the Public Engagement Commission are—

(a) improving public engagement at all levels of local government in England, including in relation to—

(i) drawing up plans and strategies, and

(ii) decision-making, including those with financial implications for local government and for the public;

(b) facilitating the sharing of best practice about engagement, and

(c) innovating with regard to deepening democracy enabling public engagement.

(3) The Public Engagement Commission must issue and maintain guidance about best practice in public engagement.

(4) The Public Engagement Commission has such membership as the Secretary of State may specify, provided that it includes representatives—

(a) from all strategic authority areas,

(b) from all tiers of local government, and

(c) from civil society and the charity sector.

in England.

(5) The Secretary of State must from time to time lay before Parliament a report on—

(a) the work of the Public Engagement Commission during the period since the laying of any previous report under this section, and

(b) progress towards improving public engagement at different levels of local government.”—

This new clause creates a Public Engagement Commission to innovate and improve public engagement with local government in England, including the sharing of best practice.

Brought up, and read the First time.

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.

I hope that the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion does not develop a complex because I speak on all of her new clauses. She is a doughty parliamentarian who has deeply held views, and I do not want her to think that I oppose them because of any personal vendetta. However, as I am sure many expected, I rise to speak against the new Clause because it lets politicians off the hook. It also does what I suggested many of the hon. Lady’s previous new clauses do.

The politicians, mayors and combined authorities we are talking about must have democratic legitimacy. They are accountable to their electorate in the traditional ways, which is an election at the current engagement levels that many mayors have. It is inherent within our system that if a mayor wants to be re-elected and build up incumbency so that people in the region say they are doing a good job, they will go out and show that they are working hard for those people.

The hon. Lady mentioned that we should follow France on this. These are not usually words that come out of my mouth, but I remind her that we are nearly at the end of the collapse of the Fifth Republic. I am not sure how much the commission helped, given how they have conducted their affairs over the last few months.

Much of the new clause adds a burden to an already overstretched and inadequately funded model. This is not to knock the Government, but establishing these authorities will be an incredibly long and complicated process, and there is going to be some disruption. The new clause would add a burden to many authorities for something that I do not think will deliver the outcomes that the hon. Lady expects.

I am a fan of Parliament and of the British Government, and I want them to do well—not that the Committee could see that from today—but I also believe in the position of the Secretary of State, and I think that asking the Secretary of State from “time to time” to lay a report before Parliament on the work of the public engagement commission during the period, and progress towards improving public engagement, is both setting up the Secretary of State for a fall—I am not sure how to measure public engagement—and letting the Secretary of State off the hook. The last Conservative Government and the Labour Government before them were in office for between 12 and 14 years. I could do it twice if I managed to survive as Secretary of State for 12 years—it may happen one day.

This is a poorly worded new clause that lays an additional burden on the Secretary of State—I am a fan on a personal level—as well as on the local authorities that are already going to have to establish something at a very early stage. I do not think it is going to deliver the increased engagement, I do not think it is measurable, and ultimately I do not think the new clause will lead to a better outcome, which is a better level of trust between a constituent and the mayoral combined authorities. That is why I do not support it.

We all agree that we need stronger community engagement, and a big strand of what we are trying to do through the Bill is to ensure that our communities across the country have greater powers and voice. A new commission is not the answer. The answer is in the doing—us doing the job of enabling all levels of Government, including our national Government, to engage the public and our communities better.

There is a role for the LGA, supported with funding, in building local authorities’ capability to do community engagement effectively. We have discussed the neighbourhood governance structure that we are trying to build, and creating an effective locus for communities to exercise their voice and power, and to be interlocutors with local government. We are building the network for neighbourhoods, which will bring together communities and partners to share best practice, as the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion is suggesting, and strengthen the capability of communities to exercise their voice and power.

Critically, we are already putting this into practice through pride in place. We are putting investment into communities, organising community leaders on to neighbourhood boards to make decisions about the things that matter. While I appreciate the need for greater community engagement, I think that rather than set up a long-winded commission, we should crack on with the doing. That is what the Government are committed to.

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.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

On resuming—