Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Heseltine and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I support my noble friend’s amendment. I was not expecting to speak on this but, if I may, I want to challenge the view expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. As far as I can see, it is a view supported very strongly by former Secretaries of State, who think that basically local government should be led by people like them, ideally swishing round in cars and flying off to Japan to make contracts and so on. However, that is not what local government is about; it is about a sense of place.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, seemed to suggest that local government has declined since the 1960s—when I came into local government, and stayed with it right through to the 1990s—because of a lack of local leadership, but I say to the noble Lord that the primary reason local government has declined is that my Government to some extent but his Government notoriously have taken away our powers, our responsibility, our finance and our accountability. They have centralised us in field after field after field, and have tried their best to turn us into postboxes of central government decisions.
I respect the position taken by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in favour of devolution. However, if his answer is that leading local authorities should be strong people—mainly male, I guess, but not necessarily so—who are just like Secretaries of State so that in local government we get a mirror image of what is happening in central government, then I say as someone who has lived my life in and trained in local government that that is not the route that I want to follow. A sense of place means collaborative, consensual arrangements that local people want and support. If they choose to have a mayor, that is fine by me, but if that does not fit their sense of place then it should not be imposed on them by the swagger factor.
Lord Heseltine (Con)
I have listened to the noble Baroness with interest and I wonder whether she has not caught up with the news that both Alan Johnson, a former Cabinet Minister in the Labour Government, and Liam Byrne, the very perceptive Chief Secretary who noticed that there was no money left, have said that in the circumstances of there being mayors they would be interested in a nomination. The fact is that creating the job of mayor has attracted a degree of interest at the very highest level in government and opposition politics. To me, one of the attractive ideas of a mayor is that it will be a ladder up which budding national leaders will climb on their way to another place, or it will be the opportunity for people who have served at the highest levels of government to serve their local communities with all the experience that they have gained in government, having ceased to be members of a Cabinet. That is an interesting evolution of our constitutional practices that would enrich the political process. I very much hope that my noble friend will resist Amendments 3 and 4 because—let us be frank—they are wrecking amendments.
This Government were elected on the basis that there would be a deal—I quote the noble Lord, Lord Smith—of a sort “unimaginable” to local government in his experience. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said on this issue, we have taken power away from local government decade after decade after decade without a referendum and without any sort of consultation; we did it because we did not think local government was doing a good enough job. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, rightly said that it was done by both parties and admitted that her party played a part. But her party never did anything to restore any of the powers that my party had taken away; it loved it, shared in it and wallowed in it, as it exercised the powers that we had extricated from local government into the hands of central government.
Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Heseltine and Baroness Hollis of Heigham
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I support my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and agree with their comments. Although I am delighted by the flexibility and the responsiveness of the Minister, I am now unclear as to why an individual local authority should necessarily join other authorities to form a combined area if it could equally well receive powers. Obviously that would be a matter for negotiation. For example, it would be absurd to confine transport to one area, but for another power associated with economic development you might not necessarily need a combined authority to do so; you just need additional powers to be able to do X, Y or Z.
Therefore, given that at the lowest level we now have single local authorities, then combined authorities and, floating somewhere above them, metro authorities with metro mayors, which will be required, it would be very helpful if the Minister could give us some indication—not necessarily tonight, but as soon as possible—of what the Secretary of State might have in mind to be appropriately delegated to different tiers of authority, particularly for those of us who are in two-tier shire authorities. In that way, a lot of wasted effort will not be put into submissions that will go nowhere. We understand unitary authorities in metropolitan areas very clearly, but where there are district councils and county councils, and the district councils are often rural and urban and have different political views and attitudes towards economic growth, it will be quite complicated to find a way through to maximise our common agenda of economic growth for the prosperity of us all. Therefore anything the Minister can do to help clarify the routes we travel on this will be very welcome.
Lord Heseltine (Con)
My Lords, the more I have listened to the debate on Amendment 34, the more worried I have become about many of the interventions from the Benches opposite. Devolution is not something that government departments are longing to do. They are not sitting there asking, “How can we give up power? How can we transfer this back from where we have taken it?”. There is controversy between departments within government. It is a personal controversy and a power structure controversy. If we were to agree to this line of thinking, we would force the Government to find minimalist compromises within the existing structure. Why should the Government go further within the controversy? Why not simply give the least? That would broadly satisfy the consensus within the power structure of Whitehall.
The argument that I have used in my personal capacity with local authorities is: be adventurous. I have asked: do you have the capacity to see how to do something bigger, better and more imaginative than you will ever get if it is imposed on you from central government? Some authorities have that capacity. Manchester has been quoted many times but there are other examples—the noble Lord, Lord Low, in an interesting intervention talked about what has happened in Sheffield. However, in order to galvanise the momentum of local talent based on local strengths, you need men and women who can envisage how to do things better than will ever be achieved by what is imposed on them by the central machine. That is why Amendment 34 is at the heart of the worst way of dealing with things.
We want local people to rise up in indignation with their ideas, to argue for them and to put forward proposals which in many parts of government will not be acceptable so that a debate is forced on government. Then, those who believe in the devolution argument will, in the normal processes of government, have the chance to win the concessions that can meet the aspirations that are put forward. However, clamping down with prescriptive lists divided into tiers of local government and into functions, mirroring the Whitehall structure, is the way to stop devolution in its tracks.