Devolution: English Cities

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, the report of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, is excellent, and if we were not wasting our time on Brexit, as a country we would be getting on with implementing a lot of the recommendations he has put forward. What stands out so strikingly from the noble Lord’s career is that he not only exhorts us with his great reports, but by his example. To my mind, the noble Lord is one of the two most effective Ministers that this country has produced in the last generation, the other being Roy Jenkins. It is very fitting that we are debating the noble Lord’s report in this Room this afternoon and, in the other Chamber, we are debating until a late hour the extension of rights in respect of abortion and equal marriage to Northern Ireland, which in many ways is the completion of Roy Jenkins’s work. His work will live on long after him, and nowhere more so than his own example in how to create a city; the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, substantially created modern London with the creation of Docklands, which was a phenomenal achievement. Docklands employs more people now than it did in the docks in the 1960s. It is the powerhouse not only of the London economy but in many ways of our national economy. As an exercise in both economic and infrastructure planning and sheer vision, it was a phenomenal achievement. Docklands is still a work in progress. Massive housing provision is now being added to the business communities there, and that will add to its success.

When I was Transport Secretary and planning HS2, I visited the Chinese Transport Minister in Beijing because China has more high-speed rail than the rest of the world put together. The Chinese were trying to persuade me to buy Chinese technology for the building of our high-speed line, which I said was a bit premature because we had this thing called Parliament, which had to agree to all the plans before we could do it. A senior British businessman in China said to me, “You have to understand, Andrew, that R&D in China stands for ‘rob and duplicate’”. I have always thought public policy is very straightforward: it is rob and duplicate, but you have to know what to rob and duplicate—what to copy. It is a very good rule of thumb that what one should do if one is looking at urban policy and the development of big infrastructure is to rob and duplicate as closely as possible from the schemes which the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, has developed over the years, and then one cannot go wrong.

For the leader of any city to look at and understand the story of Docklands is the best possible initiation in how to plan a great city—the noble Baroness just referred to Bristol. One could go through the big challenges of all the major cities in England, and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, has in many ways laid a path that others should follow.

On the recommendations of the report, which the noble Lord summarised in his speech, I agree with them all. I agree with a department for the regions, government offices outside London being brought together and Select Committees on devolution, whether they be joint or individual—I do not think it matters. I am very struck by the fact that the Select Committee efforts of your Lordships’ House are overwhelmingly focused on Europe. That is a very worthwhile thing for them to have focused on, but they should be much more engaged in the life of the domestic departments, and having a Select Committee on devolution would be a good step forward.

The annual report on cities, benchmarking them against their competitors abroad, is a great idea. Bringing police commissioners together with mayors is an absolute no-brainer. It is ridiculous to have these two great public services being managed in cities by two different elected public officials. Perhaps the Minister can tell us the Government’s thinking on that, because it would be a very simple and straightforward reform that could be transformational. Pressure on skills and strengthening the role of mayors is also important. Making business support equivalent to the best business support provided internationally, again, is a no-brainer. The remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, are very pertinent in this respect. Essentially we have reinvented our business support networks every 10 years, when what we should do is tie them very closely to our city institutions. I think chambers of commerce should be the basis—that is another of the noble Lord’s themes going back over many years. With respect to rob and duplicate, we should just have a chamber of commerce system like the Germans. It is not complicated—we could just get on and do it.

In all these respects, the noble Lord’s report is right. But always focusing on practical objectives is the big thing. One of the biggest crises that we face in most of our cities is communities, and in many of our cities, it is housing—the remarks by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, were extremely pertinent in this regard. We need the combination of strong leadership, which is where the mayors come in, and much greater powers. As the Minister knows, I am always constructive, even when dealing with the Government, most of whose work I profoundly disagree with. However, there is one thing that the Theresa May Administration have done in the field of local government which I strongly support: the lifting of the borrowing cap for social housing. My Government failed to do it, as did the Cameron Government, but it has happened now. Can the noble Lord give a progress report on what has happened since the borrowing cap was lifted? Has it unleashed a new wave of investment? What is happening on the ground? This is a huge opportunity for mayors and local authorities to get on with what needs to be a new generation of social home building after a generation where there has been practically none, dealing with the huge social crisis that we have in many of our cities.

I will quickly highlight three other points. On the “rob and duplicate” principle, urban policy in most of the rest of England is not too complicated if you look at what is required in city leadership. The “rob and duplicate” principle should be, to be very blunt, to copy London, the city where we have developed the most successful models and institutions of leadership and powers, certainly over the last generation and in many ways going back to the London County Council and the Greater London Council in the 1880s and 1890s.

London has been the leader. The strongest city in this country has also had the strongest and most credible institutions, and we need to extend the model of those institutions to other cities. The great problem with the mayors outside London, whom the noble Lord quite rightly champions, is that they have only a fraction of the powers of the Mayor of London. They have none of the powers of the Mayor of London in respect of public transport, such as the capacity to integrate transport or regulate buses. Buses are hugely important in cities up and down the country. Far more people travel on buses, particularly lower-paid people, than on trains. Twice as many people each year travel on buses as trains. The average bus fare outside of London is twice the level within London, although wages are much lower. Levels of regulation are much lower. My noble friend is nodding her head.

When I was in Newcastle recently—I travel on buses wherever I go because it is quite an important way of seeing what is going on—I noted that one-third of bus fares there are still cash fares, which takes ages to load buses. The average cash fare, from memory, is £2.50. In London, it is £1.50. London abolished cash fares, as it has electronic ticketing, five years ago. The big cities outside London are literally a generation apart in terms of technology, level of service and regulation. I cannot think of anything more important for mayors to get involved in than buses, houses and giving them the powers.

I had a lot more to say, but I have run out of time. In concluding, I want to make one remark about the mayors. It is hugely important that the mayors have a lot of clout in London. The Mayor of London has clout in London by definition, because he is located in London, but mayors from outside, by definition, will not have the same clout which comes from geographical proximity. However, when the time comes to reform your Lordships’ House—in the great constitutional crisis we are engaged in at the moment, it may be quite soon—it is high time we move towards a federal second Chamber. The big issue in creating a federal structure for the United Kingdom has always been how you deal with England. A key element in dealing with England, following on from the noble Lord’s report, is that the mayors of our great cities and city regions should play a part. As part of that, like the Bundesrat in Germany—the German second Chamber which represents the states—the senate should represent the cities, city regions and nations of the United Kingdom. Having the mayors as members would be a big step forward.