Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

I support my noble friend Lord Liddle. He is much identified with the west of the north—if I may put it that way—whereas I am identified with the east coast, where we have rather a lot of snow at the moment as well as very particular problems.

I hope that the Minister will think a little more about the constitutional issues. In reality, the RDA in the north-east was not imposed from London. Way back in, I think, 1987 or 1988, my noble friend Lord Radice put forward in a Private Member’s Bill in the other place the idea of establishing a regional body in the north-east. There was much pressure at that time within the region for such a body to deal with economic matters and regeneration. At that stage, we were going through the end of ship-building in the north-east and—as I knew all too well—the closure of steelworks. We also knew that we were coming to the end of the coal-mining industry—thereby hangs a tale, but I shall not go there—so the body was created in the region but it also received the support of the then Conservative Government. The RDA in the north-east started in a totally different way from the other RDAs, as it was started through local enthusiasm and commitment to the region as a whole, which is a very small region in comparison to the rest of the country.

Amendment 16 deals with an important issue, given the fear in the north-east that some of the critical decisions will now go to the body that is to be chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine. The Government—and I shall make these arguments later as the Bill progresses—are making a huge mistake in the north-east. It is simply not true to say that people there want the RDA to be broken up. I listened carefully to the Minister last week when he said that the idea had come before the election from discussions that his party were involved in with business. In the north-east, that was not the message that business was giving. However, I shall say much more on that later.

In reality, the RDA in the north-east came from the locality, was acknowledged by the Minister’s party when it was previously in government and has continued and fitted into the structure and architecture that my party introduced after it came into government in 1997. There is great fear and anxiety about the new architecture but, whatever the architecture is, the north-east will work with it—even if we think it a mistake—because we want the best for the people and industry in the region. However, we wish to make sure that decisions—particularly on some of the bigger projects—stay local and are not taken into the national body that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, will chair. I hope that the Minister can give us that reassurance through these probing amendments.

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I, too, support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Liddle, and I associate myself with the remarks made by my noble friend Lady Armstrong. I, too, come from the east side of the region. Indeed, she spent the early part of her career in the ward that I now represent and she has obviously benefited greatly from that experience.

Today’s debate is quite significant in terms of the problems of the north-east. This morning, I read that Durham University Business School has produced a report for the soon-to-be-abolished One North East that suggests alarming implications for the region. The report refers to 50,000 jobs being lost in the near future, 20,000 of which will be in the private sector, with a loss of £2 billion to the regional economy over the next few years. The report has provoked the chairman of the development agency—a leading private sector businessman in the region who hails from Sunderland—to renew his criticism of the current trend of government policy. It is clear that he is very critical of the decision to abolish the agency and that the private sector in the region, for the most part, wishes the agency to continue. If the current policy is maintained, of course that will not happen.

In addition to those serious concerns, there is another issue that could be partly addressed by an amendment along the lines of Amendment 16, which seeks to require that,

“the ‘eligible person’ to which functions are transferred must be located within the region”.

I invite the Minister to agree that if Amendment 16 is accepted—and even if it is not—the same principle could be applied to the assets built up by the agency within the region. When I asked a Written Question about that recently, I received an answer that I would say was remarkable for its opacity if it were not, I am afraid, characteristic of most of the Written Answers that I and other noble Lords receive. Referring to the White Paper on local growth, the Written Answer stated:

“As set out in the White Paper … RDA assets and liabilities will be transferred or disposed of in line with a clear set of principles which include a key aim of achieving the best possible outcome for the region consistent with achieving value for the public purse”.—[Official Report, 22/11/10; col. WA 286.]

However, the White Paper states that the principal criteria will be,

“that a reasonable balance is reached as part of disposal/transfer between national deficit reduction, national policy aims and local ambitions/opportunity”.

In other words, the local element seems to be the back runner in that field of three considerations.

I hope that the Minister will give a clearer indication that the proceeds of any asset disposal—if assets are indeed to be disposed of, although they may well be better retained within the portfolio of agencies or other bodies that survive the abolition of the RDAs—should be directed to the region to which they have made a significant contribution over the years. The regions will be desperately in need of those, to judge by the report published by One North East today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for moving this amendment, because it has led to a really interesting debate, and it gives the Government an opportunity to explore and explain further the details of the policy initiative which is represented by the abolition of RDAs and their replacement by local enterprise partnerships.

I start from the position of being a provincial. I am a fen-man. I come from an area that is rather overlooked by almost everybody. I live within five miles of the eastern region, but I happen to be in the east Midlands; it is an example of where regionalism tends to draw quite arbitrary lines. Sometimes those lines can be much harsher than when a lot of smaller bodies integrate within a jigsaw of interests. The noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top, and the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, talked about the north-east. It is not an area that I know well but I know it well enough to know that it is not a monolithic area; indeed, it is very different and the interests of Tyneside are different from those of Teesside, Wearside, the Durham coal-field and all those different integrated parts. It has been a problem and a challenge to Government to develop a policy that is going to provide proper, sustained economic growth in the regions of the country. The noble Baroness referred to initiatives going back 20 years or so; I can remember—I am young enough, or old enough, to remember—Harold Macmillan, and Quintin Hailsham with his flat hat on. I will not talk about recently departed individuals in the north-east, but it shows that it is a long-standing issue.

The great advantage of this debate is that it gives me, as my noble friends Lord Eccles and Lord King of Bridgwater have said, an opportunity to explain the Government’s policy. We could have had an afternoon’s debate on this sole subject, could we not? Probably we will. At least I can give an outline of the background, and I hope that will inform our debate yet to come.

I would like to set out the Government’s rationale for abolishing RDAs and encouraging the establishment of local enterprise partnerships. The Government’s economic ambition is to create a fairer and more balanced economy. We wish to see business opportunities in a broad range of sectors balanced across the country and between businesses. Our local growth White Paper, which was published in October, sets out how we will put businesses and local communities in charge of their own futures, rather than having to rely on centrally imposed RDAs. We are encouraging businesses, local authorities—noble Lords questioned where local authorities fitted into this pattern—and their partners to develop local enterprise partnerships, based on real economic areas such as Greater Manchester. My noble friend Lord Greaves mentioned the slight unease he sometimes had in the north-west at the dominance of the big conurbations of Manchester and Merseyside, for example. Rather than these artificial, created regions—

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I hesitate to intervene; however, one of the points I am simply trying to make is that the architecture in the north-east was not imposed from the centre. It was something that came up within the region at the time, and had enormous support and continues to have that support.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

The Government are hoping that their proposals for local enterprise partnerships will be equally supported. Indeed, I hope through debate to be able to show the opportunities that exist; the thrust of the policy is exactly what I am sure the noble Baroness would seek to achieve also.

New partnerships are based on where people actually live and work. Businesses and civic leaders will work together to drive sustainable economic growth and create the conditions for private sector job growth in their communities; that is exactly the scenario that I hope the noble Baroness would agree to. The partnerships will be developed from the bottom up, rather than the top down.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I find this argument really quite strange. The LEPs are being dictated. That is the only thing that we are being offered, even though the Secretary of State said in one of his first statements on this, when he was newly appointed, that he saw the rationale for the north-east to retain a RDA. Indeed at the beginning of June, after the election, he appointed the new chair and it was only two or three weeks later that he then decided, no, he was going to impose a different structure. What the Government are saying may be true for the rest of the country—it is for others to argue that—but it really is not true for the north-east. I am trying to get the Minister to understand that very different positions come from the north-east, and that somehow, if the Government are looking for bottom-up proposals, they are going to have to accept that and go back to the drawing-board on the north-east.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I do not believe that that is the case, and having listened to my noble friend Lord Eccles talk about his experience in the north-east, I do not think that the Government have got this wrong. The north-east will discover that local enterprise partnerships will provide a vehicle that links with existing local councils, local communities and local businesses in a way that the RDAs never achieved. They will be a much more powerful driver for economic growth. I must argue that because that is the position that the Government take.