Devolution: English Cities

Lord Horam Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I was born in Preston—proud Preston, I say to my noble friend Lord Inglewood —in Lancashire, went to school in Wakefield in Yorkshire and in my first incarnation in the House of Commons was Member of Parliament for Gateshead, so I am a fully paid-up northerner and therefore inevitably, to some extent, a regional policy junkie. I even managed to persuade the good burghers of Orpington, who I later represented in Parliament, that it had some merits as an approach to policy.

I too pay my respects and send some gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, for his lifelong championing of regional policy. No one will ever forget his intervention in Liverpool after the Toxteth riots. I am sure, as he will understand, that he is not quite on a par in the Liverpool pantheon with Bill Shankly, but none the less there is still a great deal of respect and affection for him in Liverpool. Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, pointed out, there was also his work in the Docklands.

Collectively, I am afraid, for Governments over the years, Labour or Conservative, the results of regional policy are very mixed indeed. There are, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, pointed out, vast improvements in the city centres of our big cities, but too often there are long strands of dreary suburbs and sad small towns that have lost their purpose. There is still far too great a gulf between London and the extremities of the United Kingdom.

I go to Germany quite often and, remembering that it started from what it calls “Stunde Null”—ground zero —when it was a mountain of rubble, what it has done in the intervening period is remarkable. It also went through the refrigeration of East Germany for part of that time. Going from Stralsund in the north to Munich in the south, there is a much greater sense of modernity and equality between the various cities and towns.

I welcome the report from the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, which is another brave, considered stab at doing better next time. First, I totally agree with the need to have someone in charge. Historically, the model is Joe Chamberlain in 19th-century Birmingham, but now we have Andy Street, Andy Burnham, Ben Houchen in Teeside and so forth. I hope that they can become the model for a new period of dynamic mayors. As the noble Lord also said, we need drive at the centre to match up the drive at the regional and city level. He was such a person when he was in government. I served with him in the Cabinet Office and well understood the drive he put into it so successfully. That is essential.

The second thing is skills. We have lots of graduates with lots of skills but we do not have enough non-graduates with plenty of skills. As the noble Lord, Lord Layard, pointed out in a debate the other day on apprenticeships, secondary education and further education, we need a way through, an uncapping of the further education side of our educational system so that it is on a par with university education, which we have done so well in. Until further education becomes an equal and sensible course, we will not get the skills we need in our non-academic young people.

Infrastructure is the third thing. Of course we need the right things in transport, housing and so on, but we must not forget the value of cultural spending in our regional and city developments. Who can deny the impact of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao? It was transformative and an example of how sensible and frankly gigantic spending has reaped rewards on a massive scale. All this will cost money, but as Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out in a very good article in the Times the week before last, there is at the moment a particular space for more public spending. After seven or eight years, the deficit is now quite low, thank heavens, although the national debt is high. Interests rates are extraordinarily low and will remain low over the next two or three years as a result of the Bank of England’s term funding scheme. We can therefore increase public spending. We should do that much more than reducing taxation which, particularly for the rich, is a very bad idea at this time. The state needs every penny of income to finance the expenditure we need not only in this area but in other areas as well, not only on regional issues but on the police, social care and justice which have become underfunded. If we do that, and if at the same time we look to devolving more powers to our city regions and to our cities, we will be doing the right thing. If that shows that we are becoming more European, how ironic it is that on leaving Europe we should be becoming more European. I am afraid that whether we like it or not it is the right thing to do socially and economically as well as regionally.