Devolution: English Cities

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to be able to support the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, in this debate on his latest report. I start by highlighting some key sentences that jumped off the page as I was reading it. On page 13, he writes:

“I now believe I was wrong”.


On page 15, as the right reverend Prelate said, he writes:

“The three weeks I walked the streets”—


of Liverpool—

“opened my political eyes … There was no one in charge”.

On page 18, he writes:

“Political philosophy must be tempered with common sense”.


On page 20, he writes:

“One lesson learned was simple. If the only route to success was voluntary, then there had to be a deal with prizes!”


On pages 25 to 27, there are lots of examples of leadership and partnership bringing about success.

I know first-hand the esteem in which the noble Lord’s work is held in Liverpool. Until his sad death five years ago, I had a 50-year friendship from our Aston University days with a Liverpool-based journalist, Ian Hamilton Fazey, who was at one time the managing director of the Liverpool Post and the Liverpool Echo, and then for many years was the northern correspondent of the Financial Times. He followed the forensic dedication shown by the noble Lord to Liverpool, both before and after the 1981 riots.

During some of those years, I was the shadow housing and environment Minister in the other place. I was really grateful to those appointed by the noble Lord who took me on visits to, for example, the former Cantril Farm, now renamed Stockbridge Village, and explained what was going on in considerable detail. This morning, I re-read his famous minute to the Prime Minister from August 1981: “it took a riot”. It is easy to see from re-reading it why he took the view he did then about the met counties, but in all other respects, the themes in his latest report are set out in that note, which is nearly 40 years old.

The noble Lord’s proposals are a package that I, for one, can support. Whitehall finds devolution very difficult, as I know from my experience as chair of the Food Standards Agency. It will therefore need a drive from the centre, with support from the top, to deliver the change needed to allow English cities to breathe. Like him, I do not support a wholesale reform of local government, but we need to learn the lessons from recent years and see where reform to the combined authority boundaries and some of the city boundaries is needed.

I support close and detailed parliamentary scrutiny in the form of Select Committees, but should it be committees in each House or a Joint Committee? I am not sure. There is more experience in this House, but accountability of course lies with the Commons. I do not have experience of a Joint Committee of both Houses and do not know whether it would work: would the Lords be the junior partners, or would we have a free-standing committee of both Houses? I am open on that. It is also true that now that we have a form of fixed elections—whatever might happen with the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act—it makes good sense to review the clash of dates in the electoral cycle. Good accountability requires a degree of stability. That is important in both the private and the public sector.

I have also come to the conclusion, to which I had been opposed, that the role of the mayor and the police and crime commissioners should be combined. I understand that that was the original plan. However, it would be a retrograde step if the 2017 Tory manifesto was followed and the elections returned to first past the post. That was the commitment, and it would be a disaster. The present electoral arrangements have given us a range of police commissioners that we would not otherwise have had.

We will return to a modern form of skills training only with enhanced further education. When I last counted, this House included 40 chancellors of universities but not one boss from further education—not one. I freely admit that I was a child of FE; for three years in the late 1950s, after I left school and before I entered higher education. It is a completely different world. If you have not been in FE, you do not know about it. If you went from school to higher education, you have no idea what was happening in the 1950s and 1960s with further education in this country and the opportunities it gave to a range of people that are simply not available today. We need not to turn the clock back but to have a more modern version.

Buried deep in proposal 14 is the plan for, among other things, a tourist tax. I will leave most of the detail to my noble friend Lord Hunt, but a good test bed would be the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. A pilot scheme could be set up. The Treasury will never like local taxes and charges, and so will wreck most good ideas. Therefore, we need a Chancellor with the confidence to change. If you have the confidence in what you are doing and the policy, you can embrace change and take a risk that might not work, but if you do not have the confidence, nothing will happen.

Having someone in charge is crucial, as the noble Lord said throughout his report. In my view, while not unfettered, the mayors should be able to explore different ways of working with the support of combined authorities, and the noble Lord gives examples of what could be done. It does not have to be the same in every combined authority; that is the beauty of it.

The report’s final key point is that the recommendations and observations strike at the heart of the way in which we run the country. That is pretty crucial, and it is a positive point rather than a negative one. We are where we are, and next week we will see a new Government formed. In my view, it would be a dereliction of duty to the country if this report were not used as a central tool of domestic policy while the Government continue to grapple with Brexit. I think it is a fantastic report