Devolution: English Cities

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great delight to take part in this debate and to have listened to the energy and passion that the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, still brings to this, decades after he first started his work. Of course, it is not just the reports; it is a record of success, not just in London but, in particular, in Liverpool. As somebody who represented a constituency in the north-west—in Greater Manchester—I am well aware of the breath of fresh air that he brought to the whole region by his work and the commitment he showed there.

When we look at the pattern of devolution activity in the United Kingdom, it is very much something that a new Government do for their first three years, and then it peters out. In 1997 the incoming Labour Government proceeded vigorously, with Liberal Democrat and other support enthusiastically given, with Scottish and Welsh devolution. However, their reforming rather sputtered out when it got to the north-east regional referendum, and not a lot happened on that for another 10 years. In 2010, there was a three-year burst of activity by the coalition Government. I must admit that after two and a half or three years, that petered out as well. I will say something about the Localism Act and its implications in a moment.

Time after time, after the initial burst of activity, Governments take fright. Avoidance of mistakes becomes more important than promotion of change and regimentation becomes more important than innovation. The simplicity of imposing national norms trumps the complexity of having local solutions for local challenges. The antithesis of the devolution of power is the one-size-fits-all event, which freezes the reform process.

I shall give an apparently irrelevant anecdotal example of exactly that. Running through my old constituency of Hazel Grove is the A6. At the time I am talking about, it was a trunk road with a terrible accident record, particularly at one junction controlled by traffic lights. The solution seemed obvious—to have a right-hand filter on the A6—but that was impossible because somebody in Whitehall had decided that the criteria were not met. Accident after accident occurred. Petitions, debates and all sorts of representations failed to produce an answer. An answer came eventually when the A6 was detrunked and became the responsibility of the local highways authority, which promptly installed a right-hand filter traffic, since when the accident record has been very good.

I hope to make the point by a simple anecdote that the idea that people behind desks 200 miles away have the solution to local problems is completely mistaken. That brings me to the Localism Act. I was one of two Ministers in the other place who steered the Localism Act on to the statute book. I will not speak a great deal about it, but I will pick out just two further snapshots. One is about neighbourhood plans. The planning system in this country consists far too much of a two-stage process where developers propose and the community opposes. Neighbourhood planning is designed to be the community proposing and the developer delivering. It has so far been surprisingly successful—surprising even to me, never mind the civil servants who thought it was preposterous. Neighbourhood planning areas are self-defining, a theme that I want to pick up in a second or two. Funnily enough, it has resulted in more homes being designated for planning, not fewer. When the community has the chance, it shows the responsibility necessary.

My second brief example is local enterprise partnerships. One very small flaw in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, is that he refers to LEPs as conforming to government boundaries. That is exactly not the case: they were self-identifying and have a wide variety of configurations, from the 10 unitary authorities of Greater Manchester as one LEP to Cornwall County Council and the Isles of Scilly as another. They are of all sizes and shapes. They are not limited to the then existing regional structures. On the Midlands and south-east England boundary, one LEP crosses three pre-existing regions. They have been bafflingly successful in many cases.

The idea of leaving it to local organisations to decide how to organise themselves stunned the bureaucratic mind. Devolution is about treating people as grown-ups, capable of making good choices, not treating them like three year-olds who cannot be trusted with a bag of sweets. Power must move down to localities because there are get better outcomes when it does: the A6 kills fewer people. When you have neighbourhood plans, you get more homes. I thoroughly applaud the report’s analysis and strongly support the many recommendations in it that can lead to stronger and more effective local democratic leadership and economic growth.

However, I have some queries. First, what use would a regional government office for the north-west be? It did not help with the A6 problem. We have to be clear about whether we are talking about devolution or decentralisation. An idle regional office will be very much more tempted to meddle in combined authorities and mayoral activities than the present fragmented structure in central government.

My second point is that I am puzzled by a wish to synchronise elections, thus maximising the risk of catastrophic discontinuities in taking local strategic decisions and direction. Maybe this May’s local elections are an illustration of what can happen when that happens.

My final point is that I detect a lingering hankering after the creation of a uniform system of equal powers and competencies. History and all the evidence and experience show that diversity and pluralism are more likely to produce better outcomes for local communities than a centralised system and structure. I wish the report well and I hope very much indeed that it is taken forward in large measure by whoever turns out to be the next Prime Minister but, bearing in mind that it is something that will happen only in the first three years of a fresh Government, perhaps we might not hold our breath.