Lords vote clears Devolution Bill for Royal Assent — Kent councils’ pre-Bill conduct remains subject to live legal challenge

The House of Lords completed its examination of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill on Thursday, the final parliamentary stage before Royal Assent. Once signed into law, the Bill gives the Secretary of State direction powers over local government reorganisation in England, with no meaningful requirement of local consent retained in the final text.

A second strand of the story runs parallel to the Westminster process.

The conduct of Kent’s 14 local authorities during the fourteen months between the Bill’s introduction and Royal Assent is now locked in the record — and is the subject of a live legal challenge that does not resolve on Royal Assent day.

What the Bill does — and what it does not do

Once in force, the Bill will provide statutory cover for reorganisation steps going forward. The Secretary of State will be able to direct local government restructuring in Kent and elsewhere in England, confirm the role of Strategic Authorities and combined-authority mayors, and formalise the policy architecture signalled in the government’s English Devolution White Paper.

What it will not do is apply retrospectively.

Royal Assent is prospective. The fourteen-month window — from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s statutory invitations on 5 February 2025 through to Thursday’s Lords vote — sits outside the Bill’s legal cover. Council decisions and expenditure in that period were taken under the law as it stood at the time: the voluntary framework of the 2007 Act, the general power of competence in the Localism Act 2011, and the ordinary public-law duties that bind all local authorities.

The Kent judicial-review threat

Four months before Thursday’s Lords vote, a Pre-Action Protocol letter for judicial review was served on all 14 Kent local authorities, with a copy to the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The proposed claimant is Sean Turner, Heritage Party Kent Coordinator and representative of the Kent Residents Forum. The letter sets out thirteen heads of complaint, spanning ultra vires expenditure, error of law, procedural unfairness, predetermination and suppression of evidence.

The letter’s central thesis is straightforward. Statutory invitations under section 7 of the 2007 Act are voluntary — a point confirmed in Ministry FOI response 2025/10611, in ministerial correspondence, and on the floor of the House of Commons by the relevant minister. Kent authorities, the letter argues, nevertheless treated reorganisation as mandatory, prepared structures that did not exist in law, and spent public funds on programmes — climate-emergency frameworks, Net Zero staffing, digital transformation aligned to a hypothetical unitary model, behavioural training for councillors, and policy templates authored by non-governmental organisations and developer-linked partners — that the claimant says fall outside the statutory functions authorised by the Localism Act and the Local Government Act 1972.

The relief sought is immediate suspension of all reorganisation activity and expenditure, a declaration that Kent authorities acted outside their powers, and mandatory disclosure within fourteen days.

The councils’ coordinated response

On 9 December 2025, Jan Guyler, Head of Legal and Monitoring Officer at Canterbury City Council, replied on behalf of all fourteen Kent authorities, each of which had seen and approved the draft. The response is not on behalf of the Secretary of State, to whom the letter had been copied.

The response is defensive in tone and procedural in structure. It contends that the letter is not “a proper pre-action letter”, that it bundles multiple complaints against multiple defendants in a way paragraph 16 of the Pre-Action Protocol for Judicial Review does not permit, and that it fails to identify specific actions, decisions or omissions by specific authorities with specific dates. It challenges the claimant’s standing under section 31(3) of the Senior Courts Act 1981 — noting that Mr Turner is a parish councillor in Bearsted, within Maidstone borough, with “no connection” to the other twelve districts. It argues most grounds are likely time-barred under the three-month limit in Civil Procedure Rule 54.5(1).

On the substance, the response is categorical. “I am not aware of any Authority having ‘acted as if reorganisation has already occurred’,” Ms Guyler writes, “nor of any Authority having proceeded on the basis that reorganisation is ‘inevitable’.” On the former Deputy Prime Minister’s “sledgehammer” speech cited in the letter, the response characterises the point as a complaint “about the conduct of the former Deputy Prime Minister, and not about any of the Authorities”, and in any event “about something which was said in public approximately 10 months ago, so any claim for judicial review based upon it must now be long out of time”.

The response invites the claimant, if minded to pursue matters further, to send separate letters to each Authority properly identifying what that Authority did, when, and why that conduct was unlawful.

Why this matters now

Three things change on the day Royal Assent is granted.

First, the legal cover the Bill provides applies from that moment forward. Kent councils acting after Royal Assent under the Secretary of State’s direction powers will be acting under new statutory authority. The fourteen-month window that preceded Royal Assent remains exposed to the legal arguments already set out in the Pre-Action Protocol letter.

Second, the Kent councils’ 9 December 2025 response has established the pattern of a coordinated legal defence through a single Monitoring Officer. If Mr Turner — or any other proposed claimant — revises the letter in line with Ms Guyler’s procedural guidance and issues individually tailored challenges to specific authorities, the joint-defence mechanism has been shown to be viable.

Third, the evidence base the PAP relies on — eighteen public-source items in the annex, from Hansard on the March 2025 Lords fatal-motion debate to Kent County Council’s published Digital Strategy 2024-27, to Kent Local News’s own reporting on Reform UK rescinding KCC’s 2019 Climate Emergency Declaration — was compiled while the Bill was still in progress. Royal Assent does not move or remove any of that material.

What the Heritage Party says happens next

Kent Local News understands from Heritage Party sources that a next phase is being prepared, moving from parliamentary scrutiny into what the party describes as direct accountability — coordinated, formal and simultaneous across multiple authorities. Pre-Action Protocol letters have been issued to most councils in the English Local Government Reorganisation programme since October 2025. Madeleine Hunt, General Secretary of Heritage Party UK, confirmed to Kent Local News that a separate Devon pack has now been submitted to the National Audit Office by National Residents for Civic Accountability (NRCA) — with the Heritage Party contributing evidence — as the first in a series of council-by-council submissions.

Sean Turner, the named Kent claimant and a signatory to the NRCA’s National Audit Office submission, has confirmed to Kent Local News that he is available for on-the-record interview on the substantive legal grounds. An interview has been scheduled.

Kent Local News editorial line

This publication’s earlier reporting established that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government holds no legal rationale, no consultation records and no impact assessment behind the claim that councils were required to submit reorganisation proposals. That remains the factual position today, Royal Assent or not. The Pre-Action Protocol letter and the councils’ joint response are now part of the public record at Kent Local News. We will continue to cover each successive stage.