Essential reading for the devolution debate!
The report, The Future of Local Democracy – Devolution and the Need to Empower Town and Parish Councils, has been published by the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) and explores the roles and capacities of this smallest scale of government to deliver meaningful democratic action.
The authors build on the debates raised at NALC's Power Shift Conference in June 2025, where its members and local government experts came together to discuss how the current devolution measures might affect town and parish councils. NALC's Policy Committee fed back comments last autumn and NALC's Smaller Councils Committee hosted the authors at its session in November 2025. The report is the final output from that process and is useful for all sizes of parish and town council as the sector progresses through the Local Government Review (LGR) process.
The authors reflect on key issues related to the role of town and parish councils, and how this can be amplified in discussions on devolution under the current Labour government as The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Devolution Bill), which underpins the government’s reforms to devolve powers to local government, develops.
