Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Beecham Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Howard of Lympne
It was the noble Lord who brought yesterday into the discussion in the first place. I did not introduce the subject of yesterday, he did. I just thought that I would point out the beginning of a discrepancy between the approach of the Liberal Democrats to what we were discussing yesterday and the approach of at least some of them to what we are discussing today.
Lord Beecham
I will not intrude on family grief on the government Benches, but the decision taken last week was a decision of the House. It involved Members from all sides of the House, including a significant number of Cross-Benchers. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, has singled out one group, or part of a group of Members, for his animadversions. I am also a lawyer although a much humbler one than either of the noble Lords who have just spoken—I am a journeyman solicitor, not an eminent silk. However, with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Howard, he slightly misreads the nature of the amendment, which is not at all about controlling chief constables. The amendment deals with the function of the panel. In many ways, it is an amendment for all seasons because, as other noble Lords have said, it would fit with any structure—an elected commissioner; a commissioner appointed in the way described by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig; or any structure as long as it has a panel. I think it is commonly accepted that that will be part of the final structure that emerges from all this.
The amendment is a paving amendment. It is to strengthen the role of the panel. In Committee, we had the benefit of the protocol, which spoke of checks and balances. There is a widespread view in the House that those checks and balances were insufficient. The amendment is directed at strengthening the checks and balances and the role of the panel. That is something that I hope the Government will take seriously. It seems to me and to others who spoke last week that the Bill does not achieve what the protocol purports: that there are sufficient checks and balances on either the commissioner or, for that matter, arguably, the chief constable—but particularly the commissioner.
Let us regard this as a helpful and constructive amendment to reinforce the Government’s intentions, which I accept at face value, of having substantial checks and balances in the system. In that context, I hope that it will be widely accepted in the House.
Lord Condon
My Lords, I declare my normal interests. I agree with the aspirations of the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Henig. I do so with some hesitation because I am not against the principle of elected police and crime commissioners. Last week I found myself in the position of saying yes or no, but I voted against the idea because I was concerned that, as drafted, the position of elected police and crime commissioners was a mission impossible. Today the amendment gives us a vision of how a more collaborative structure might reinforce, support and enable an elected police and crime commissioner, should that be the end result of the iterative process. It would give an idea of how that person might operate in a more collaborative environment.
My concern has always been not whether we should have elected police and crime commissioners but that he or she, when elected, should have a real chance of doing the job well and of tapping into the best of local democracy and working with it, rather than against it. The amendment gives us some aspirations and some background vision regarding how, when we think again today and subsequently about how an elected police and crime commissioner might operate, this might be helpful in that process.
I was concerned last week when we voted on the issue. I accept that the noble Baroness was very new to her post, but she gave no comfort whatever about how an elected police and crime commissioner might be drawn into a more collaborative endeavour locally, rather than being totally isolated. It seemed almost as if the notion of an elected police and crime commissioner working in a committee, commission or panel structure could somehow emasculate them, dilute their role or disable them in a way that committees, boards or panels do not emasculate people in other aspects of our society. Many successful companies work with an effective board structure; indeed, many effective organisations work with boards, commissions or panels. I hope that the amendment will at the very least tease out from the Minister some support on the need, in rethinking how elected police and crime commissioners might operate, to move towards a more collaborative endeavour which involves a board, panel or commission, rather than the very isolated and adversarial role which the Government currently propose for the elected police and crime commissioner.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Beecham Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Lord Beecham
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in extending a warm welcome to the Minister. I share entirely their confidence that she will listen very carefully to the views of all sides of the House on this extremely important matter.
I confess that I have what can be described only, in appropriate terms, as form in the reorganisation of policing. As vice-chairman of the Local Government Association and leader of its Labour group, I led an ultimately successful campaign within my own party and against the policies of the party in government when it sought to introduce the least bad of three bad propositions for the reorganisation of policing. The Labour Government’s proposal was that the majority of members of police authorities should be directly elected. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, pointed out, the Liberal Democrat policy was for the entire police authority to be directly elected. The present Government’s proposition is that all of that should be replaced by the election of a single person. The campaign was against the least bad of the three. It succeeded because the Government were persuaded that it was wrong to vest separate powers in the hands of bodies elected from other parts of local government.
It is instructive to look at the protocol, which has somewhat belatedly been circulated. I refer to the introduction to this document, in which the following words appear:
“The election of Police and Crime Commissioners is at the heart of the Government’s plan to cut crime”.
There is, as has already been pointed out, little evidence that such an appointment would have that effect but let that stand. It goes on:
“They will reconnect the public and the police, and allow us to replace bureaucratic accountability to Whitehall with democratic accountability to local communities”.
That is as classic a piece of gilding the lily as I have come across in a long time. I need hardly remind your Lordships that lilies are poisonous plants. The first part of the sentence is surprising: it implies that the police and public have been disconnected. As I have previously had occasion to point out to the House, I have served for 44 years as a councillor in Newcastle upon Tyne in quite a deprived community in which crime has always been an issue, although it has been reducing in recent years. The past few years have seen a much greater connection between the public and the police than at any time previously, certainly during my period of service. The police regularly attend meetings, communicate with the local community and report back on crime statistics. They are more accessible than most other public services, if truth be told.
As I said on Second Reading, the interest of the local community is very much focused on the immediate locality. In all the meetings that I have attended with the police and public present, never has anybody raised force level matters or even, frankly, matters concerning another part of the city in which they live, let alone Berwick, which is 56 miles to the north, or Sunderland, which is 15 miles to the south, all of which would be included in the area to be governed in this respect by the police commissioner. Therefore, there is already a connection between the public and the police. Having said that, accountability needs to be reinforced and there are ways in which the Bill could be improved to secure that, with or without the imposition of an elected police commissioner.
However, the second part of the relevant sentence in the protocol is a non-sequitur. I agree that the previous Government overdid the provision of targets and laying down what should be done in this and other areas. Occasionally, I used to say that the Government of the day had established more targets than the Pentagon had during the whole of the Cold War. Their setting of targets was excessive, including in this area of public policy. When I was chairing a review of local public services in Wales, I well recall a very charismatic, if somewhat idiosyncratic, chief constable of north Wales saying that he was not minded to follow the Home Office advice about giving priority to knife crime—I think that was the crime in question—because in his part of the world that was not a serious issue. I cannot remember whether sheep rustling was his preferred priority, but at all events he made a perfectly valid point which certainly needs to be borne in mind. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, pointed out, that does not require, nor does it necessarily flow from, the proposition to establish a directly elected police commissioner. The Home Office could relax its grip and its tendency to dictate priorities under the current system or, indeed, any other system for that matter. It is a question of a self-denying ordinance on the part of the Home Secretary and the Home Office of the day, and certainly that should be welcome, but the two issues are not connected in principle or in practice.
The protocol goes on to say in a further paragraph:
“The Police and Crime Panel within each force area is empowered to maintain a regular check and balance on the performance of the PCC”—
that is, the police and crime commissioner. If one looks at the proposals for the police and crime panels in the Bill, it is very difficult to see the substantial checks and balances that the protocol suggests are present; they are few and far between. For example, they would require a three-quarters vote to veto—they cannot amend—the budget of the police and crime commissioner or his crime plan. There is no provision for the police and crime panel to call in decisions of the commissioner before they are implemented, as can a scrutiny panel, for example, in an authority with an elected mayor or any other form of executive It seems to me that very few checks and balances are present, despite what the protocol claims.
Another part of the protocol states:
“The PCC has the legal power and duty to … provide the local link between the police and the public, working to translate the legitimate desires and aspirations of the public into action on the part of the Chief Constable to cut crime and antisocial behaviour”.
That raises a number of questions. To begin with, who determines the,
“legitimate desires and aspirations of the public”?
Apparently it will be the single person who is the elected police and crime commissioner. That suggests the very kind of populist flavour that is likely to characterise the campaigning for an election to that position, which many of us—I suspect on all sides of the House—fear will actually aggravate problems, rather than resolve them. It will lead to an increase in the fear of crime, and that in turn makes the job of the police more difficult.
The protocol also implies something very close to interference in the operational performance of the chief constable. I repeat:
“to translate the … aspirations of the public into action on the part of the Chief Constable”.
It might be argued that that is to be confined to the plan, rather than operational detail, but the terminology is suggestive of a rather greater role than many of your Lordships would like.
There are further responsibilities referred to in the protocol and in the Bill, one of which will again concern many of your Lordships. The protocol states:
“A PCC has wider responsibilities than those relating solely to the police force”,
including,
“a wider responsibility for the enhancement of the delivery of criminal justice in their area”.
The Bill refers to collaboration between the commissioner and a range of organisations, including the courts, the Prison Service, the probation service and youth offending teams. I would be concerned if anyone holding the position of a police commissioner or, indeed, the chair of a police authority under the present structure, engaged with the courts or any of those bodies. The police function in that sense is separate. Again, the notion that a single individual should have that responsibility strikes me as being inherently undesirable, and perhaps even dangerous. The powers of the commissioner are virtually untrammelled in the Bill, and that is a serious objection to the proposal as it stands.
The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, who is not now in his place, prefers the model of democratically elected police bodies. There are a number of arguments against that, one of which is that the existing police authorities, and even the Bill, propose the retention of some independent element within the police and crime panels. Police authorities at the moment have a significant number of independent members. That has contributed significantly to ensuring that there is geographical balance and a balance of gender and ethnicity in the composition of police authorities. The Bill provides for only two such members, and their number should be somewhat greater—perhaps a third of the total number—in whatever structure we end up with. However, as I understand it, the formulation of the noble Lord is that all members should be democratically elected, and one would thereby lose that important dimension.
However, councillor members of police authorities are democratically elected. Although they are not specifically elected to the police authority, they are accountable to their electorate in their ward or authority, and are accessible to the wider community. It is perfectly true that they may not be household names in every street or town in a country area, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, pointed out, authorities have done a great deal to extend information on and access to those who serve.
There is a further objection to the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. His formulation implies the creation of a separate elected body with a separate mandate. This represents a fragmentation of local governance, beyond what we already have. Of course, some police authorities are based on existing counties—there is effectively a county force. Thames Valley is not an example, because it links several counties, but Hampshire, for example, has its own police authority, which is effectively part of the county council with additional members.
The noble Lord's argument could be extended. If we are to have separate bodies separately elected with their own mandate—and, incidentally, responsible for a significant portion of council tax; 11 per cent in England and 15.5 per cent in Wales—why not have a separately elected body for passenger transport? Why not go back to the 19th century and have elected school boards? Why have local government at all? It is an infraction of that principle that the noble Lord appears to support. I do not think that his arguments are well founded. All of us want more accountability; all of us want a democratic element; the Bill as currently set up does not achieve those objectives. I hope that it can be substantially revised, and I certainly support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Lord Beecham Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Beecham
My Lords, I concur wholeheartedly with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, my fellow Newcastle city councillor; and I ask the rhetorical question, which was implicit in what he said, as to what the mischief is that the proposal for elected police commissioners purports to address. It appears to consist of an alleged lack of visibility and accountability on the part of police authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, who enthusiastically espoused police authorities and their chairmen when he was Home Secretary, today of course abandons them with equal enthusiasm and says that most people do not know the name of the chair of their police authority, which is probably true. Interestingly, the Northumbria force surveyed the population in 2005 and found at that point that only 55 per cent of the population were aware of the police authority. It addressed that issue and sought to promote public engagement; and in the last survey, last year, it recorded that 88 per cent of people in the force area were aware of the police authority. People may not know the name of the chairman, but they are certainly aware of the authority.
The question continues to be: what is it that this appointment would address? After all, the statutory framework currently provides for extensive consultation by police authorities. The very useful paper distributed by Liberty points out that:
“When discharging its functions, every Police Authority is under a statutory duty to take into account the views of the people in the Authority’s area about policing in their community. Police Authorities are also required by statute to make arrangements for obtaining the views of local people on matters concerning policing of their area and obtaining co-operation in preventing crime. The views obtained must encompass a wide range of people with particular focus on those aged under 21 or over 65 and from people from diverse backgrounds including marginalised groups and those of disadvantaged socio-economic status. The Authority must also ensure that it obtains a sufficient number and range of views so that it does not act on the basis of an unduly limited or unrepresentative sample. The Police Authority must also take into account whether the public in the area has confidence in the police force and whether the public considers that their views are being taken into account”.
These are significant statutory obligations currently laid on police authorities, which would no doubt be carried forward into the new framework.
It seems, with respect to the Minister, that she misinterprets the results of the survey that she quoted, which suggests that the interest of people logging on to the new crime maps is sufficient to drive the model that is now being proposed. However, that of course assumes that people are interested in statistics for the whole area. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has pointed out—it is certainly our experience as councillors in Newcastle, attending public meetings regularly with the police in our areas—the interest is very local indeed. It is not force-wide. It is not even citywide. It is very much area-based. I have been present at countless such meetings. I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has as well. Nobody has ever asked about policing in the city as a whole, let alone in the Northumbria force area, which is 70 miles in length and encompasses 1.6 million people. That is the kind of localism that the Bill apparently seeks to address, but that is not localism at all. Localism is very much at a lower level. It is certainly true that accountability at that level has improved over the years. It needs to be reinforced at the basic command unit level, at the divisional level, perhaps at the level of the city or part of the county area. However, to assume that a single individual can be responsible and accountable to an area as wide as that, where there is a population of that size, or greater in many parts of the country, seems wholly unrealistic.
Moreover, there is probably not a real risk of an extremist being elected to a position of police commissioner, as one Member of your Lordships’ House suggested, but it is at least likely, in the context of a campaign on a single issue, that fear of crime will certainly be ratcheted up by those seeking election. Fear of the fear of crime, I am afraid, rather dominated the policy-making of the previous Government to an unfortunate and unnecessary extent, and I suspect that elections of this kind will have that same effect again. Of course, the likely outcome is that there will be a further fragmentation of services, when in fact they need to be brought together, with an elected commissioner having a separate, possibly competing, mandate with the local authorities in the area that he or she would seek to serve and to work with, with their separate mandate and their relatively insignificant contribution to the problems of community safety, which of course transcend merely policing the area. It is arguable that, for the first election, there would be an element of accountability. After a commissioner is elected for the second and last time, there is no further degree of public accountability in again looking to the ballot box, so the accountability argument can certainly be overdone.
There is also the question of the substantial powers that accrue to the elected commissioner. The commissioners would be responsible for something like 11.5 per cent of the council tax levied in England and 15.5 per cent in Wales. That is a significant slice of local taxation levied by a separate authority. This is subject only to a three-quarters veto by the police and crime panel. That scrutinising body would have virtually no power. It would have no power to call in decisions or to play any significant part in the appointment of a chief constable or other officials appointed either by the commissioner or by the chief constable. It would not have the power to agree or amend the crime plans. Indeed, even the chief constable would not have the power to agree a commissioner’s plan, and what would happen if there is a disagreement is entirely unclear within the legislation. Therefore there are significant issues about the degree of power to be vested, in effect, in a single pair of hands without much real accountability at all.
As the Bill goes forward, there are other issues that we will have to address around appointments—around the role, for example, of Her Majesty’s inspectorate, which will no longer have to report to the Secretary of State. It is possible to improve this Bill if the Government are prepared to listen and to act on the genuine concerns expressed on all sides of this House and by other interested organisations, and to recognise that what is most important is to improve accountability at the very local level, and not to vest enormous powers in an individual with a wide geographical and population constituency without having that individual subjected to any significant scrutiny. I am afraid that that is the effect of the Bill as it stands.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Beecham Excerpts(13 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Beecham
My Lords, I very much endorse what my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours said. I remind him that Marx stated that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. I am not sure whether if it repeats itself in this Bill it will be tragedy or farce. It certainly poses considerable threat to the regions of this country.
On the day that the Chancellor of the Exchequer announces what he describes as a Budget for growth, it is paradoxical that we should be debating the abolition of business-led regional development agencies that have played a significant part in both safeguarding and creating jobs. It is true, as my noble friend Lady Royall reminded us, that in reflecting different regional economies and needs their performance has necessarily been somewhat variable. However, as the BIS Committee pointed out, there was strong support for RDAs and regional structures from the private sector, and especially, and significantly, the Engineering Employers’ Federation, particularly in the West Midlands and the north.
There are significant worries, expressed by the committee, about the loss of local knowledge and the risks of a “disorderly competitive scramble” within regions, as well as serious questions about the disposal of RDA assets which, in its view, are,
“potentially of massive importance to the success or failure of Local Enterprise Partnerships”—
the LEPs, which the Government apparently see as successor bodies to RDAs. Yet these LEPs will have neither power nor resources, nor a role in inward investment, innovation or access to finance, nor the European funds, including in particular the ERDF.
These are arguments of general application, like those over the severely truncated funding reflected in the Regional Growth Fund, just about one-third of which was invested annually via RDAs. However, I want particularly to concentrate on the north-east, the very region singled out by Vince Cable last year, before his halo slipped a little, as the one with the strongest case for retaining a regional agency.
One North East has invested £2.7 billion across the region, from the Tweed to the Tees, over the past 11 years, attracting or helping to create 19,000 companies and creating or saving 160,000 jobs. It has led the way in developing the green economy, from support for Nissan and its electric vehicles, to wind turbine production and offshore wind power and, in the past year, a £60 million investment in a low-carbon initiative in the Tees Valley, and much else besides. It has promoted engineering apprenticeships; established a £125 million fund, Finance for Business North East; and attracted £100 million from the European Investment Bank and £300 million from the ERDF for the period 2007-13. In the past year alone, it attracted 55 foreign and five UK companies to the region, creating 2,000 new jobs and safeguarding 5,000 more. Its record on tourism has been remarkable. Tourism is worth about £4 billion to the regional economy, and the north-east has had the biggest growth in tourism of anywhere in the country outside London. Yet all this is now at risk due to an unusual and unhealthy combination of fragmentation of the agencies and centralisation of some of the functions.
Today the Government have announced the creation of more enterprise zones, despite the doubts expressed about the previous round of such zones by, among others, the Work Foundation; Centre for Cities; again, and significantly, the Engineering Employers’ Federation; and, despite the less-than-glowing experience within the north-east region itself, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool. Too often, as at Canary Wharf, the Metro Centre in Gateshead and other out-of-town developments, zones created in the 1980s produced retail and office developments with little in the way of the manufacturing industry now recognised on all sides as essential to the future prosperity of the nation.
What, one might ask, will be different this time, especially in the absence of strong, strategic bodies with the skill and resources to secure the kind of development and workforce skills so desperately needed? It is interesting to note, too, that today the Chancellor announced the welcome investment of £100 million in four new science facilities—at Cambridge, Norwich, Harwell and Daresbury—but I contrast that with a cut of £8 million which should have gone to the Newcastle Science City development, started by the previous Government, which the RDA had pledged but which it is not now able to provide.
This brings me to the question of assets, which I raised in Committee and which my noble friends Lady Royall and Lord Campbell-Savours referred to. I received no satisfactory answer to those questions—perhaps, in fairness to the Minister, because, as so often proves to be the case, decisions are made these days long before any consideration is given to, let alone any conclusions reached about, their financial consequences. I understand that the North East Economic Partnership—an unofficial grouping, as yet, of local authorities and business leaders in the region—has submitted a bid in relation to the retention of the RDA’s assets for the benefit of the region. However, it seems that there is little likelihood of this bid succeeding, so the assets will not be transferred, thus denying the region a much needed resource.
This week the Newcastle Journal—a newspaper not, in the wonderful phrase of the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, a “town hall Pravda”—writes:
“The Journal has been told the message coming out of Government is that the assets will not be passed on. Vince Cable’s Department for Business is currently considering the future of the assets. If they are handed to the Partnership”—
that is, the North East Economic Partnership—
“it will fund their work in trying to bring in major new firms and lobby on behalf of the region in Whitehall. Also up for grabs is £62.5m worth of loan repayments handed out in public funding over the last decade. The North East Economic Partnership has told the Government it is vital this money is kept in the region, so as to be used for further job creation”.
That is the united voice of business and local government of all political colours in the north-east.
I ask the Minister to tell us the current position. What meetings have Ministers held with north-east councils and business leaders about the issue of assets? What criteria will be applied in coming to a decision, and when will such a decision be made? Will he give an assurance that there will not be, in the phrase that has been much used tonight, a fire sale of assets in what is, after all, a languishing market, to be applied to national deficit reduction?
Finally, I turn to the question of the actual decision about abolition. Most of us have taken it as read that since the Government announced the abolition of RDAs last year and included them in the Bill, this was settled government policy. I was therefore surprised to read in the letter to my noble friend Lady Royall—which has already been referred to; and signed, of course, by the Minister—that not only have the Government,
“not so far undertaken a formal consultation on the abolition of the RDAs”,
but that they would,
“consult before laying any order”.
Will he therefore assure the House that such a consultation will take place in every region and, most importantly, on the basis that the Government will be open to persuasion by business, local government and their social partners strictly on the merits of each individual case, such that they will not be in the position of either abolishing all RDAs or none?
We on this side recognise, as I am sure other noble Lords will, that that there are relatively stronger and relatively weaker cases for retention. Will the Minister give us an assurance that each will be considered on its merits on a case-by-case basis, assuming, as I fervently hope to be the case, that the amendment moved by my noble friend is not lost?
Lord Prescott
My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to talk about the RDAs; I played some part in their creation a number of years ago. I must apologise to the Committee because I am not as briefed as perhaps I should have been. I was in the Council of Europe today and I realised that the debate was on this afternoon. We need to understand what was inherited when the Regional Development Agencies were created. People have so easily forgotten. We were talking about 3 million unemployed, about massive disinvestment in public services, and about a growing disparity and growing inequalities between the north and south in jobs, education and investment. If anything was to be done about this, we felt that we had to do more than simply leave it to the market. What was the solution? The noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby, was the Chancellor in charge of a great deal of the economy at that time and the results that we were left with were quite disastrous, frankly. I will not repeat them, or go into detail, but it was totally unacceptable to us. We came to power doing something about employment.
The employment was not just in the north and south, although the disparities had grown. I recall, when I produced my alternative regional strategy, going to the northern region and saying that we were going to have a regional development agency for every part of the UK. It was suggested to me that as a northern politician I should just think of the north and not the south. It was a very complicated meeting, but I pointed out that with a million unemployed in the south, we could not be indifferent to that, whatever the growth rates and differentials between each of the regions. We needed to develop the expertise, the partnership and the public and private sector, and set a body up that could take a regional analysis to do something about it. This was welcomed by business. In fact, business today still has very warm words to say about the RDAs, particularly when compared with the organisations that the Government now propose to set up if they abolish the RDAs—and they are on the way to doing so.
It was important that business chaired every one of the RDAs. We thought that it was very important to have business chairmen who got the co-operation of the local authorities and the various bodies and developed, as their first priority, a regional strategy for the assets of a region to see how they could best develop them to the advantage of the region, and not to compete, as was often the case in regional policy before. Governments, including Labour Governments, went round offering bags of gold to industry to move the motor car industry from A to B. That was basically the strategy. In some cases, that brought jobs, but it did not deal with the most important thing: to develop the assets of the region and the economy.
If you look at the record, the judgment of the Audit Commission, parliamentary groups and businesses themselves looking impartially at each of the regions has been that the RDAs did a good job. They helped to reduce unemployment. A lot of the 2 million jobs that we produced at the time were public sector jobs, let us be honest. I do not think that a public sector job is wrong. When so many thousand jobs went in the north-east, it was stated that they were state jobs, as if something was wrong with someone who was employed as a public servant, whether they were in a hospital, a school, another public service or even just emptying bins, for God's sake. They were in a job and were an essential part of economic development. Yes, a lot of them were in public service, but that began to have its effect in the economy. It lifted demand. It had a consumer effect. It gave more confidence. The development agencies over that period were a success. You can always ask how much that cost. You might ask yourself how much it saved when mass unemployment gives you a heck of a cost, never mind what you might feel the excessive administrative cost is of what is called a quango. They were bodies that did their job. That was important.
What worries me now is what the strategy is. A noble Lord said that we should look at what happened in Scotland and Wales. I remember arguing about this in the other place. They said, “We are going to abolish the Scottish and Welsh development agencies”, and they did not. As soon as they came to power they realised their success and the demand from the local and regional area to keep their RDAs. Admittedly, the Government recognised that at the time and refused to abolish them. Why did they not abolish them? Because they were doing a good job. Why did we think the RDAs were needed in the English regions? Because they had done a good job in Scotland and in Wales. They had improved their economies while ours had gone down and down, and it seemed that a significant feature of that was the regional development agencies, so we wanted them in all our regions. Even if the growth in the south-east was always higher than in the north-east, there was still a need to develop the regional assets. Regional development bodies can do that, and they did.
The only time there was any move to make some change was after the Toxteth riots in 1981. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, was sent up with a busload of bankers to look at what they could do in Liverpool. One result was that they developed these garden centres—I cannot remember their name.
Lord Prescott
Garden centres, garden festivals, you can pick the word you want. I think that the one in Liverpool collapsed after its show and still nothing has been built on that ground. We have to develop in a more effective way, although to be fair to the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, I agreed with him that the development at Canary Wharf was significant. Transforming the docks into new industrial developments and commercial centres has been a success. That was intervention.
I recall, when we came to power in 1997, meeting Mr Walker—I am not sure whether he was a Lord or not—who was in charge of English Partnerships. He said, “We are not a body of intervention”. I said, “Well, we are on different tracks then”. He said, “I am telling you that we won’t do that”. I had to say to him, “Obviously you have not read the papers. We are now the Government. It is going to be a body of intervention”. English Partnerships did an excellent job, including in the coalfield communities that had been destroyed by the previous Government. It set up an active intervention partnership, public and private, in the coalfield communities. The Audit Commission reports show that it did an excellent job. More people are now employed in coalfield areas than when there were the previous jobs.
By the way, most coalfield areas are rural areas. Enterprise centres are now being talked about. That was all done before. I notice from the list here that very few of them are in rural areas; they are in the cities. Fine, but there is a lot of high unemployment in rural areas as well, and those enterprise zones are designed to help urban development. You do not get a balanced development. You might help the cities in a marginal way, but what you want from regional development agencies is balanced development. Only the RDAs can do that. They are also important for bringing in money from Europe. Before the RDAs in Britain, most of Europe did not bother. The recognition was of the county authorities. The county authorities were not big enough to deal with the actual decisions that had to be taken. You needed a body that was recognised at the regional level, because we were the only country in Europe that did not have a regional body. You needed to co-ordinate those resources, to bring the strengths together and to make it important.
Now it is basically proposed to abolish them. Frankly, I agree with our amendment. I am not against reform. RDAs came out of reform; we did not like what was there, we changed it, and that has been effective. Apparently, being successful is now a real problem; we abolish you. What worries me most of all is that they are being replaced with the old structures that we had before and that failed before. The Government seem to believe that it is just the market. I heard the Chancellor today talking about “growth, growth, growth”. The trouble is that he is not achieving it. We are creating the same kinds of problems that we had before. We do not maximise growth, but unemployment. That is what will come out of this.
A number of noble Lords have said in these debates that, looking at what will happen to some of these areas with RDAs, we are already beginning to witness confusion coming about due to the setting up of local enterprise partnerships. I have got them in my area. I notice the enterprise zones in these areas, and now there is talk about partnerships. Problems are already beginning to develop.
I finish on this point, because I have already seen it in Hull. Hull is an area of high unemployment. That reduced under Labour, but it is still an area of high unemployment. We now have a problem that was brought to my attention about a week ago, with a company in my former constituency that produces modular bathrooms. It has been highly successful. It is manufacturing. It employs hundreds of people. It wants to expand on an existing, empty, two-acre industrial estate where the road has been half done but not completed. The company said, “We could take on a hundred more people manufacturing in Hull, helping growth, if someone would let us expand and buy or lease that empty land and build the road to make the connection”. Well, that seems obvious. They gave me a ring, I spoke to them, and the local MP is of course involved in this. When I inquired of the regional development agency that owns the land, “Why aren’t you helping this company to expand?”, it said, “Sorry, all our assets are now being transferred to BIS”. Then they said that the local authorities cannot agree between themselves whether there should be one local body, which might be a trust, representing the north or one representing the south. Businessmen are disagreeing with what the council is coming up with. It causes delay. This company is being held up because of the problems in organised infrastructure that we are now inheriting.
I hope that the Minister will look at this. I am sure that he wants to see jobs. Certainly, the Chancellor says that he wants to see growth. Well, he could make a decision tomorrow that will bring that about, not all that waffle we have heard in the Commons today. I am sure that there are many other examples from around the country, but I would not have to come to Parliament for that. RDAs did that all the time. They made those decisions, created the jobs and co-ordinated the public and private investment. That is what the RDAs did. We had 10 years of them showing their success. Now the Government are coming along with these silly ideas to abolish them. The result will not be that waffle, it will be more on the dole and less growth. We will be back in the circumstances that we inherited many years ago, which led us to set up the RDAs.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
When we are in a position to make an announcement about that, we shall. I am not in a position to do so at this point in the debate.
The noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, raised a number of interesting questions based not only on the experience of his work with the Forestry Commission but on his location in Cumbria. On the issue of competition with Scotland for inward investment, UKTI co-ordinates the work on this, and one of its main aims is to avoid wasteful competition between different parts of the UK for inward investment. The noble Lord, quite appropriately, asked specifically about the trees and their liabilities. At present, the Northwest Regional Development Agency is discussing plans for its assets and liabilities with the Government. I cannot give a response on the future of these assets until these discussions are completed.
A number of noble Lords asked about the process of consultation. One of the lessons noble Lords will take from this Bill is that the Government are serious about consultation. The procedures laid down in the Bill require Ministers to come to Parliament with full details of the impacts of any policy change that they seek to bring in through statutory instruments. There will be full consultation. I shall be happy to keep the House informed on the nature of this consultation over the next few months while this process of change is going on.
From a standing start in September 2010, partnerships now cover 80 per cent of active businesses in the UK and 87 per cent of the population. We are looking forward to reaching 100 per cent. We believe that we have unleashed a wave of enthusiasm for economic development at local level. In many places there is no appetite to go back to the old arrangements. It was clear from our earlier debate that many noble Lords retain their attachment to RDAs as they were. However, we do not believe that a return to the circumstances of a few years ago is either appropriate or possible. We are now in a new situation and we need to ensure that economic activity is taken forward across the right geography by fully committed partnerships. RDAs do not fit in with that new approach and I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Beecham
Will the Government consult on the basis of all or nothing or will they approach each case in each region on its merits and listen with an open mind to the arguments of business as well as local government and its social partners? Will they take a decision on a case by case basis or, as I say, will it be all or nothing.
Public Bodies Bill [HL]
Lord Beecham Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I cannot guarantee that all the 450 proposals will find funding. However, I can be sure that the ones for which funding is found will be successful and provide opportunities for the people in those areas.
Lord Beecham
Can the Minister indicate in monetary terms the extent of the bids that have been made?
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
No, I do not have that information available, but we know the amount of money that is available for the fund, which I have stated.
Finally, noble Lords raised the question of what will happen to RDA assets and activities. There has been some concern that there might be a fire sale. That is not the case. These bodies will be run down, the relevant clauses of the Bill will become law, and the RDAs will finally be abolished. RDAs have been liaising with the relevant local authorities, local enterprise partnerships and other local partners. On 31 January, all RDAs submitted detailed plans for the disposal of their assets. They recognised that there will be a variety of destinations for these assets, depending on their nature and associated liabilities. These plans are currently being scrutinised by the Government. After scrutiny, each RDA management board will sign off its plan and begin implementation. RDA asset-disposal plans have been developed while taking into account the principles that we set out in the White Paper. These include maximising value for money from these assets, ensuring that liabilities follow assets and passing control down to local level where possible. Where this is not appropriate—where, for example, an asset is of national importance, such as that set up in the south-west and mentioned in the debate, and considerable resources are needed to run it—other options will be considered.
Similarly, co-ordination of some activities formerly undertaken by RDAs will be taken back to national level, and some activities, such as those of the England Rural Development Programme, will retain local accessible support. In some cases, such as managing the European Regional Development Fund and the England Rural Development Programme, we need to ensure compliance with our obligations to the European Union. In other cases, such as co-ordination of inward investment activity, we need to ensure that we can put over a coherent and effective message to potential investors. However, even in those cases, we are setting up mechanisms under which local partnerships have the opportunity to influence policy and help drive the decisions we make. For all these reasons, we do not believe that retaining all or any of the nine RDAs will help to achieve local growth. I therefore ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment, and for noble Lords not to move theirs.
Immigration: High Court Ruling
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Baroness Neville-Jones
My Lords, the Statement will deal with the changes in the rules. Perhaps I should take this opportunity to say that the rules will then change immediately—that is to say, the rule change will be commenced immediately to rectify tier 2. Also, as was contained in the Statement, the Government will be closing tier 1 on 23 December. As a result of these timetable changes, it will not be possible to meet the 21-day convention for laying rules, but we will write to the Merits Committee about that matter.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, if the object of the Government’s policy is to reduce net migration, is not her noble friend’s question about numbers of people leaving the country extremely relevant and should not that therefore be taken into consideration?
Baroness Neville-Jones
Hundreds of thousands of people leave the country. This is normal travel. Among that number are those who are here on some kind of immigration visa for the purposes of employment. As I said, very few of those who come here to work come without any kind of sponsorship. There is a small category of entrepreneurs and investors who are in that position. Otherwise, people who come here to work have sponsors. Sponsors are not able to replace them. There cannot be a net increase in the migration to this country in the absence of the person who sponsored the employment giving notification of the departure of the employee and the reinstatement of a new person, if they wish it. We can therefore keep control and knowledge of movement of people in this position.