Devolution: English Cities

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, not only on the content of his report but its presentation, which makes it a pleasure to read. I should not have been surprised about that latter aspect because he has access to a good firm of printers.

I take part in this debate with diffidence. Unlike my noble friend Lord Turnbull, I never served in a local government department, and I lack the local knowledge that so many of today’s speakers have shown, but there are some aspects of my experience in government which bear on the report by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine. First, from my experience, I confirm that you cannot make things happen in local areas from a desk in Whitehall. The second thing I am sure the noble Lord is right about is that the best way to get something done is to make an identified person on the ground accountable for making it happen and give that person the necessary powers and resources to do so.

When I became Head of the Civil Service, I inherited a programme of reform called “Next Steps”. Its essence was that the delivery of services—for example, issuing passports or driving licences—was set up in the form of an agency under a chief executive. The agency was responsible to a Minister—it was not a quango—but the chief executive was given a budget, which he or she was empowered to use with wide discretion to achieve objectives set by the Minister. Despite initial opposition by the Treasury, I believe that this structure not only raised the morale and the sense of responsibility of civil servants delivering services but produced a real improvement in the quality of the services they gave to the public. The same principle should be applied to decisions about local infrastructure. Local people will be the best judges of where infrastructure is needed.

The million-dollar question—as shown in the chapter by Tony Travers—is how one gets the balance right between local services controlled locally and local services controlled centrally. There have to be some locally delivered services that are controlled centrally. Social security is an obvious example. People think it unfair if the benefit received in one area differs from that received in another. A difficult current example is community care, where there are now complaints about a postcode lottery following central government’s devolution of responsibility to local authorities.

We should not disguise from ourselves the fact that centralising pressures are very strong, not least because when voters are dissatisfied with the quality of their life, it is on central government that they wreak their revenge, and then excessive centralisation demotivates local people. That is the essence of the problem. Moreover, when responsibility for services is centralised, it leads to silos. Those responsible for education policy become distant from those responsible for health policy, who are in turn distant from policing policy and so on. Yet on the ground, local problems—for example, drug dealing—often can be dealt with only by a combined effort from all these services.

What does this amount to in relation to the proposals in the report by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine? I support the proposal for more combined authority mayors with greater powers and resources delegated to them. I like the idea of delegating to them responsibility for affordable housing, schools’ performance, the skills budget and unemployment programmes. I also like the idea of the requirement for each of them to produce five-year strategic programmes for their regions. However, like my noble friend Lord Turnbull, I am sceptical about the proposal in the noble Lord’s report for a super -department of the regions on the lines of the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of the Environment in the 1970s. Such a department, combining responsibility for planning, local government, housing, transport and employment, would be too cumbersome for a single Secretary of State, as the experience of the 1970s showed.

However, like my noble friend Lord Turnbull, I strongly support the reinstatement of collocated regional offices led by a single official. In 1994, when my noble friends Lord Wilson and Lord Turnbull were successively Permanent Secretaries at the DoE and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, was President of the Board of Trade, a structure of regional offices was established, containing representatives of a wide range of Whitehall departments. The aim was that they should work together with local government in co-ordinating the central government responsibilities for which they were responsible to make the most effective impact on local problems. In my view, which my noble friend Lord Turnbull shared, it was a great mistake when in 2011, as part of the austerity programme, those local offices of central government were abolished.

I believe that the outgoing Prime Minister cares about the matters covered in this report. Sadly, preoccupation with Brexit and, I suspect, an innate caution have prevented anything effective being done in the past three years. The resolution of Brexit, which we all profoundly hope for—by which I mean resolution of the question of whether we go or stay—together with the arrival of a new Prime Minister, offer a fresh opportunity. The leading candidate for the post of Prime Minister, whatever his other characteristics, has the ability to enthuse and inspire. The noble Lord’s report provides the fertile field on which enthusiasm and inspiration can flower, together with a number of very useful practical proposals. It is important to the future of our country that the new Prime Minister takes advantage of it.