Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]
Debate between Lord Heseltine and Lord Woolmer of Leeds
Lord Woolmer of Leeds
My Lords, the noble Lord spoke with great passion and is very well informed. For my own part of the country, West Yorkshire, I am very supportive of the proposal for elected mayors, but much of his argument was that there is no alternative to that wherever you are in the country; in other words, this model really ought to be adopted everywhere. If that is true, why does it not apply to individual local authorities? I am not advocating it, because I do not agree with it. For example, in my neck of the woods, you have Leeds, Bradford, Calderdale—which is Halifax—and Kirklees, which is Huddersfield and Wakefield. If the only way to run a local authority is to have an elected mayor, is the noble Lord saying that that applies to all major local authorities? As we know, this legislation relates not to all services and local authority activity but to certain strategic powers, where the case that he makes with great passion and history is persuasive. However, if his arguments are generalised to imply that you can run a significant-sized authority only by having a mayor and you cannot get the same thing with what we now call the leader and cabinet model, is he advocating mayors within combined authority mayoralties?
Lord Heseltine
The noble Lord asks me for my personal opinion on that matter and I give him my answer: yes. I think that we would have been incomparably better over 50 years if, instead of taking power away from those authorities, we had concentrated on their leadership and performance. Yes, that would have meant differentiating in the early stages about the financial support that one entrusted them with, but it would have left them with the potential of the power that we have taken away. I have no doubt that if we could rewrite the last 50 years we would have seen much stronger local government. Frankly, for those of us who remember Redcliffe-Maud: well, he was right, wasn’t he?