Queen’s Speech

Lord Heseltine Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Heseltine (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I hope that it will be some help to my noble friend if I say that I am not looking for any response from her tonight. I look forward to the promised White Paper on devolution, which I hope will contain the answers that so many of your Lordships have requested.

This has been an immensely wide-ranging debate, and a whole galaxy of contemporary problems have been paraded for the Minister to give us the benefit of her advice on in a flash of lightning. Well, the Government are going to get rid of the course of British history in the course of a week, so I suppose the Minister can be expected to deal with our complaints in an equally short timescale. We have had it all: housing, education, infrastructure, family breakdown, deprived children and crime. I put it to your Lordships that those are not separate issues, they are all part of a social and economic phenomenon for which we do not have in this country the local mechanisms and decision-making powers to see the interrelationship of all these issues and apply a common policy to their eradication. There is nothing new in any of this. I first came into active politics at a time when Redcliffe-Maud had looked at this issue, analysed the causes and the opportunities and said in the clearest possible language that we needed 60 unitary authorities with real devolved powers. All my life, Government after Government have edged their way in that direction. Every step of the journey has been a fudge.

I await the White Paper with such interest because I hope that the crisis of Brexit has highlighted the urgency of this matter. Brexit did not create the problem. Brexit merely highlights the scale of the challenge facing this country and indicates, as your Lordships have clearly done, that we need change to mobilise the country at local as well as national level to challenge these issues. We must find a way to make effective local communities reflecting real local economies and empowerment. So, first, I hope that the White Paper will include a Cabinet Minister responsible for devolution to English local authorities. Whitehall is its own power structure and is totally divided on all these issues; each Minister has his own pet scheme. We need a Minister to grip Whitehall and force it into the devolution agenda.

The second step is that the Government must create agencies close to the areas where people are now expected to design social and industrial policies. That is a process of widespread decision-making. The Government are quite incapable of responding to that sort of thinking because their thinking is compartmentalised in the baronies of Whitehall. The local representation of officials who are close to the communities that we are trying to enhance and empower is an important part of the process.

The next step, which is of course to be welcomed, is the Government levelling up the powers that have already been given to the elected mayors. That is much to be admired, but other powers must be added to the list. The first must concern education and skills. You cannot divorce housing and social policies from the education of the kids living in those circumstances. You cannot have an industrial policy that does not prepare children in local communities with the skills and aptitude that will make them appropriate recruits to those industrial strategies.

Fourthly, the boundaries of our existing mayoral authorities are a nonsense. They are the result of a fudge, a compromise: give a little, take a little. A boundary commission is an important means of putting that situation right. Next, there are four major conurbations without mayoral authorities. If we are to get national buy-in and balance, it is critical that Leeds, Nottingham, Derby, South Hampshire and, probably, Plymouth must come over the line.

Fifthly, we have heard echoed in the Chamber today reference to the countryside somehow being different—that, once you have done the big areas, you must not have the same system. I reject that concern continually. If you want really to empower the countryside and enrich it, it must be enjoined with the wealth-creating centres that it surrounds. So, I very much hope that we will see a drive to unitary counties with mayors, not just the present compromises in the local government structure.

Finally, I turn to money. The talk is of the prosperity fund. That fund is merely a recycling of the present European funds. It is totally inadequate for the job. The real lacuna in government policy is that George Osborne’s visionary idea of a single pot, in which money was distributed as a result of strategic bidding processes—with substantial additional funds coming from the third sector, academia and the private sector to enhance greatly what the taxpayer could afford—has more or less bitten the dust with the power-grabbing of central government departments getting their money back.

I have a phrase written down: “Get the job done”. I say this to the Minister: let us get the real job done.