Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Prescott and Lord Taylor of Holbeach

Wednesday 23rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Prescott]

Garden centres, garden festivals, you can pick the word you want. I think that the one in Liverpool collapsed after its show and still nothing has been built on that ground. We have to develop in a more effective way, although to be fair to the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, I agreed with him that the development at Canary Wharf was significant. Transforming the docks into new industrial developments and commercial centres has been a success. That was intervention.

I recall, when we came to power in 1997, meeting Mr Walker—I am not sure whether he was a Lord or not—who was in charge of English Partnerships. He said, “We are not a body of intervention”. I said, “Well, we are on different tracks then”. He said, “I am telling you that we won’t do that”. I had to say to him, “Obviously you have not read the papers. We are now the Government. It is going to be a body of intervention”. English Partnerships did an excellent job, including in the coalfield communities that had been destroyed by the previous Government. It set up an active intervention partnership, public and private, in the coalfield communities. The Audit Commission reports show that it did an excellent job. More people are now employed in coalfield areas than when there were the previous jobs.

By the way, most coalfield areas are rural areas. Enterprise centres are now being talked about. That was all done before. I notice from the list here that very few of them are in rural areas; they are in the cities. Fine, but there is a lot of high unemployment in rural areas as well, and those enterprise zones are designed to help urban development. You do not get a balanced development. You might help the cities in a marginal way, but what you want from regional development agencies is balanced development. Only the RDAs can do that. They are also important for bringing in money from Europe. Before the RDAs in Britain, most of Europe did not bother. The recognition was of the county authorities. The county authorities were not big enough to deal with the actual decisions that had to be taken. You needed a body that was recognised at the regional level, because we were the only country in Europe that did not have a regional body. You needed to co-ordinate those resources, to bring the strengths together and to make it important.

Now it is basically proposed to abolish them. Frankly, I agree with our amendment. I am not against reform. RDAs came out of reform; we did not like what was there, we changed it, and that has been effective. Apparently, being successful is now a real problem; we abolish you. What worries me most of all is that they are being replaced with the old structures that we had before and that failed before. The Government seem to believe that it is just the market. I heard the Chancellor today talking about “growth, growth, growth”. The trouble is that he is not achieving it. We are creating the same kinds of problems that we had before. We do not maximise growth, but unemployment. That is what will come out of this.

A number of noble Lords have said in these debates that, looking at what will happen to some of these areas with RDAs, we are already beginning to witness confusion coming about due to the setting up of local enterprise partnerships. I have got them in my area. I notice the enterprise zones in these areas, and now there is talk about partnerships. Problems are already beginning to develop.

I finish on this point, because I have already seen it in Hull. Hull is an area of high unemployment. That reduced under Labour, but it is still an area of high unemployment. We now have a problem that was brought to my attention about a week ago, with a company in my former constituency that produces modular bathrooms. It has been highly successful. It is manufacturing. It employs hundreds of people. It wants to expand on an existing, empty, two-acre industrial estate where the road has been half done but not completed. The company said, “We could take on a hundred more people manufacturing in Hull, helping growth, if someone would let us expand and buy or lease that empty land and build the road to make the connection”. Well, that seems obvious. They gave me a ring, I spoke to them, and the local MP is of course involved in this. When I inquired of the regional development agency that owns the land, “Why aren’t you helping this company to expand?”, it said, “Sorry, all our assets are now being transferred to BIS”. Then they said that the local authorities cannot agree between themselves whether there should be one local body, which might be a trust, representing the north or one representing the south. Businessmen are disagreeing with what the council is coming up with. It causes delay. This company is being held up because of the problems in organised infrastructure that we are now inheriting.

I hope that the Minister will look at this. I am sure that he wants to see jobs. Certainly, the Chancellor says that he wants to see growth. Well, he could make a decision tomorrow that will bring that about, not all that waffle we have heard in the Commons today. I am sure that there are many other examples from around the country, but I would not have to come to Parliament for that. RDAs did that all the time. They made those decisions, created the jobs and co-ordinated the public and private investment. That is what the RDAs did. We had 10 years of them showing their success. Now the Government are coming along with these silly ideas to abolish them. The result will not be that waffle, it will be more on the dole and less growth. We will be back in the circumstances that we inherited many years ago, which led us to set up the RDAs.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My Lords, there might be a change of tone with my contribution to this debate. This is a serious matter and I approach the topic with humility, but with a determination to demonstrate the reasons for the Government’s decision. It is a political decision; we make no apology for that. It is a political response to the economic situation in which this country finds itself. I hope that noble Lords will give me the opportunity to explain the origins of that decision and what the Government intend to do to maintain a programme of growth announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in circumstances in which the vast sums of money that were available to sustain the regional development agency structure are no longer available.

I am not at all surprised at the passion that has been vented this evening. I am a provincial myself. I come from the east Midlands and I am very proud of my background. I have to say that I rather share the experience of my noble friend Lord Cavendish when it comes to the impact of the regional development agency for the east Midlands in my part of the world, but perhaps that is because I live in a relatively remote rural area and our problems are not at the top of the agenda. We have learnt to rely on our own resources probably a good deal more than other communities can afford to do.