Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Heseltine and Lord McKenzie of Luton
Lord Heseltine
The first point on Amendment 3 is that it removes the nature of the deal with government that there will be a mayor. It is designed to remove that condition. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has a different version, which has another delaying process, about consultation. But what does that mean? It means referenda. It means consultation of one sort or another. This is a delaying process.
I have no doubt that noble Lords all over this House are fully aware that from one end of England to another local councillors, leaders and industrial partners from the local enterprise partnerships are way past the debate that we are having today. They are actually designing the deals that will make this a reality. In his speech last week, the Chancellor listed Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and the possibility of the West Midlands as being already in the process of evolving the most detailed proposals to put to the Government. The condition behind all that is a directly elected mayor, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, said in this House not that long ago. It is a deal. He said: “We did not particularly like directly elected mayors but the offer was too good”. I therefore urge noble Lords to consider carefully whether we should be concentrating on whether there is a mayor, because there will be no deal in the circumstances we are talking about unless there is a mayor. What we should be talking about is how to ensure that the deal that is done is of the scale and level of imagination that meets the extraordinary offer that has been made.
I was surprised and disappointed when the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, asked: “How can one man, or woman, cope with such a situation?”. Look outside this country and show me one where there is any alternative form of local government except what the Bill is proposing. There are senators in America with huge power. Germany has the Länder and France the departments. They seem perfectly capable of handling this massive responsibility. Are the English so impoverished as people that we have no one in our country capable of being the equal of what every advanced economy seems perfectly happy to deal with?
Anyone who has looked at this legislation will know that this is not the creation of a dictator. The checks and balances that exist within the negotiation that has been concluded with Manchester, for example, are very clear. The existing councils that make up the combined authority retain very large powers. They are part of an arrangement with the elected mayor that provides very substantial checks and balances.
The heart of this matter is that the Chancellor, in arguing for his deals, is looking, as my noble friend Lord Deben said, for a range of men and women capable of exercising leadership and appealing to the local community across the board. That is what we hope to see. In doing that, there is an offer from government to transfer power in a way that is outside any experience that any of us have had, with the exception, partially, of London.
Those of us who care about this issue are very familiar with Leicester and Liverpool, both of which have Labour mayors. One is a former Member of another place and the other a council leader who persuaded his colleagues to allow him to become a mayor. In talking to those who hold this responsibility, I have learned that their experience of the change in stature that takes place when they are seen as being a mayor—an internationally understood and recognised position—is extraordinary.
I hope very much that we in this House can perhaps move on from the minutiae of the Bill to the implementation of the legislation at the greatest possible speed. I really hope that your Lordships will catch up with where local government and the local enterprise partnerships are already. They are making this happen now. It is an exciting prospect that I never thought to see happen.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Forgive me for interrupting, but before the noble Lord sits down will he clarify something? A statement was made at the other end that, if an area wants a deal that is not the size of Greater Manchester, it may not have to have an elected mayor. Can we have some clarity on what the lesser deal is that does not cause the imposition of an elected mayor?
Lord Heseltine
That is a very good question and rightly asked. Where the difficultly comes is that no one is imposing a deal. The Government are not saying that A, B, C and D must happen—the noble Lord shakes his head, but I had the privilege to sit in some of the negotiating discussions that have taken place and know that no Minister is saying that this is the prescription. That is what we would have done. All my life, that is what happened: it was not a question of whether an area wanted power over housing; it was a question of filling in 75 forms before building a council house. I had all those forms on my wall in the Department of the Environment—70 forms, about the slope of the roof and the pitch of the eaves. That is what we did. And here we are talking about trying to impose some sort of structure of deal in the detail, which the Government are not going to do.
Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Heseltine and Lord McKenzie of Luton
Lord Heseltine
My Lords, we are trying to create world-class prestigious authorities to negotiate on behalf of our major urban areas a massive range of opportunities. I ask the noble Baroness what she thinks about having a directly elected Bristol mayor in Tokyo negotiating a billion-pound investment for the city when, in the fortunes of life, the mayoralty is relatively politically unpopular—and they will be, as we all are. The Japanese negotiators will say, “It is all very well for you to come all this way, but you may not be the mayor in six months’ or a year’s time. We have seen someone from one of the German Länder where there is no question about their future. They all know where they will be. So I am sorry, Mr Mayor of Bristol, you go home and sort out your future and then come back to us”. That is a classic example of exactly what we are not trying to achieve in the new dynamism of localism.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Will the noble Lord help us out? The fact that a mayor has to be elected means that the individual’s circumstances are uncertain at certain times. The noble Lord is surely not suggesting that we should do away with elections for elected mayors.
Lord Heseltine
The mayor would be speaking in his position as an elected official and in normal circumstances he would be able to refer to his successor as representing a policy that was the Bristolian policy. If the issue is, as suggested, that the mayoralty may go and a completely new form and structure of government take its place, what is to say that the devolved responsibilities that had been associated with the mayor would be retained after the abolition of the mayoralty? It injects a degree of uncertainty that is wholly unrealistic in the competitive world in which this country is engaged.