Henry Smith MP column, Crawley Observer, 14 October 2015
This week I’ll be helping introduce the Cities & Local Government Devolution Bill to the House of Commons.
This Bill will help change the way England is governed, and will see power taken from central government and given to local communities.
This is an area where political parties have shown they are working together in the local and national interest. One of the recent devolution schemes has seen co-operation between the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Labour Leader of Manchester City Council.
The Government are looking to build on this momentum, and 38 bids for further deals have been sent. Locally, this includes a bid from Surrey, West Sussex & East Sussex county councils.
As the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government I’m pleased to have a chance to play my own part in ensuring greater responsibilities for local authorities at Whitehall’s expense – ‘Sir Humphrey’ doesn’t know best!
On the subject of devolution, at last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the Government announced that local authorities will keep the rates they collect from business, and give councils the power to cut business rates to boost growth.
All £26 billion of business rates will be kept by local government, instead of being sent up to London.
While full details will be set out in next month’s Spending Review, I’m pleased the Government are taking a further step to ensure greater devolution to local communities.
There will also be reforms to the immigration system where the rules will be changed to make asylum claims from citizens of EU member countries inadmissible for consideration.
These reforms will not only save taxpayers money, but will ensure the system is able to better support genuinely vulnerable people who are in urgent need of protection.
Additional recent policies announced include the extension of Shared Parental Leave and Statutory Shared Parental Pay to working grandparents to better recognise and help the importance of families.
Since April 2015, parents are entitled to Shared Parental Leave and Pay. A working grandparent will be able to share the mother’s entitlement to 50 weeks’ parental leave and 37 weeks’ pay to help care for their grandchildren.