Greater Manchester Combined Authority Order 2011

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

That the Grand Committee do report to the House that it has considered the Greater Manchester Combined Authority Order 2011.

Relevant document: 16th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

My Lords, the order would establish a combined authority covering the area of the 10 local authorities of Greater Manchester. The establishment of the new combined authority will leave Greater Manchester better placed to tackle its economic challenges and improve public service delivery.

Part 6 of the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 enables the creation of economic prosperity boards and combined authorities. These are designed for groups of local authorities that wish to work closely together to deliver improvements in economic development, regeneration and, in relation to combined authorities, transport. They are corporate bodies with their own governance structures. They can be given local authority functions relating to economic development and regeneration and the transport functions available to integrated transport authorities. I should stress that whether to establish a combined authority is a voluntary decision for the local authorities concerned and that Ministers cannot impose combined authorities on areas.

The 10 local authorities of Greater Manchester have a long history of collaboration. For more than 20 years, the voluntary partnership known as the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) has successfully co-ordinated cross-boundary collaboration between the 10 local authorities on a wide range of issues.

The previous Government consulted in March last year on AGMA’s proposal to establish a combined authority. The consultation showed strong support for the combined authority from a range of private sector and public sector partners across Greater Manchester. The combined authority has strong support within the business community and has the support of all 10 local authorities in Greater Manchester. In November, we confirmed our intention to support the establishment of the combined authority and to proceed with the order establishing the new authority.

Membership of the combined authority would consist of the 10 local authorities of Greater Manchester. Under the order, each constituent local authority is required to appoint one of its elected members as a member of the authority. The combined authority would be funded through appropriate contributions from each of the 10 local authorities and through the transport levy.

The order would transfer the functions of the integrated transport authority to the combined authority, which would also assume some existing transport functions held by the Greater Manchester local authorities. The order would also devolve to the combined authority certain local authority functions relating to economic development and regeneration. This should ensure more effective alignment between decision-making on transport and that on other areas of policy such as land use, economic development and wider regeneration. In particular, the same authority would determine Greater Manchester’s sustainable community strategy and its local transport plan.

The Greater Manchester Integrated Transport Authority has a good history of delivering and improving transport in Greater Manchester. For example, it manages a concessionary fares scheme for senior, blind, disabled, and young permit holders and organises about 7.5 million school journeys each year. It has masterminded the expansion of the Manchester Metrolink, including important extensions to East Didsbury, Ashton, Rochdale, Oldham and Manchester Airport. However, with the establishment of the combined authority we would see a greater concentration of transport functions across Greater Manchester within one authority. This would help to deliver transport benefits beyond those which the existing integrated transport authority structure can provide.

The new arrangements will allow the combined authority to have much greater influence over the full range of transport infrastructure and services across Greater Manchester. In view of their decision to establish a combined authority, the Government are committed to working with Manchester on a forward-looking programme to examine how Greater Manchester can assume greater responsibilities and influence, comparable to those enjoyed by Transport for London. This agenda will be taken forward through a protocol on heavy rail that facilitates closer working between Greater Manchester and the Department for Transport, and a similar protocol on highways which will facilitate closer working between Greater Manchester and the Highways Agency.

The protocols will provide the basis for the combined authority to plan and develop its transport strategy in full awareness of programmes on national rail networks and the strategic road network in and around Greater Manchester. They will also enable the combined authority to be able to have a real influence on those national programmes, bringing to bear the authority’s knowledge of what is needed from transport to facilitate the authority’s strategy for promoting economic growth in Greater Manchester.

In October last year, the civic and business leaders of Greater Manchester were invited to proceed with the establishment of their proposed local enterprise partnership. They hope to have their new local enterprise partnership up and running next month. The Greater Manchester combined authority will work in close partnership with the local enterprise partnership to drive economic growth across Greater Manchester. Under Greater Manchester’s proposals, the local enterprise partnership will provide strategic direction and leadership in delivering on Greater Manchester’s economic priorities. The combined authority will act as the primary accountable body for Greater Manchester and as a repository of certain statutory functions, including those of the integrated transport authority.

We do not anticipate that establishing the combined authority will involve increased costs for the 10 local authorities within Greater Manchester, as a lot of the infrastructure to support the authority is already in place. Indeed, our expectation is that the combined authority will lead to considerable efficiency savings through sharing and avoiding the duplication of services. This is important at a time when public resources are so stretched.

In conclusion, I believe that the new combined authority will leave the local authorities of Greater Manchester better placed to support the delivery of economic improvements across Greater Manchester and to support the ambitions of its local enterprise partnership.

[Lord Smith of Leigh]

My Lords, I should first declare a number of interests in this matter. I am leader of one of the 10 Greater Manchester authorities and chairman of the AGMA executive board. Last month, I was appointed chair of the shadow combined authority, because we anticipate the success of the order. We are well into planning for it.

I thank the Minister for the clear and thorough way in which he introduced the order and through him thank the Government for the way in which they reviewed the application for the combined authority for Greater Manchester and for agreeing to it.

There are some familiar faces here. We were in this very Room discussing the Committee stage of the wonderful Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill. That lasted a long time and, in one session, I rather surprised the Minister at the time by saying that, if you want this sort of thing to work, you have to give it some real teeth and real powers; otherwise, what is the point of going through all these processes? Fortunately, the Minister listened and, as a result, the combined authority is a more effective and more accountable form of government.

As the Minister described, with wonderful timing we entered the consultation phase in March last year, which of course straddled the general election. Therefore, there was an impasse before the election but, as I said, we were extremely pleased that the Government listened, and there was overwhelming support for the combined authority from partners in Greater Manchester. The authority shares with the Government the desire to improve the economy of Greater Manchester, and it does so in a number of innovative ways, particularly working with the private sector. We have no quarrels with that. We have a long history in Manchester of working with the private sector. We recently set up the Business Leadership Council, which is a fairly free-flying body. It can criticise AGMA if it does not think that it is responding to the needs of business across the conurbation.

As the Minister said, we have now been working together in AGMA since the abolition of the old met counties in 1986. That means that we have been working together for 25 years. I think that we have become more effective because we have realised that there is more to do. The tyranny of some local boundaries means that, when trying to achieve something locally, you need to think bigger, particularly on economic matters. With the support of the previous Government, there was an independent economic review for Manchester. A group of distinguished economists was able to come and say what was good about the Greater Manchester economy and, perhaps more importantly for all of us, what was not good and what we needed to do. One thing that the economists said we needed to do was to improve the governance, making it stronger, and integrate decisions on transport with other economic decisions. That is what the combined authority will allow us to do.

I want to comment on one thing that the Minister said which was not quite correct. In the wake of a very painful experience concerning the congestion charge, in which a referendum was broken, AGMA agreed to set up a Greater Manchester transport fund. It increased the levy from each local authority by 3 per cent above the demands of the service and put it into a transport fund, which was able to pay for the extensions to Metrolink, as the Minister evidenced. Therefore, although it went through the CA, the CA did not pay for it; the AGMA leaders agreed to do that. That is the kind of thing that we will do in the future. Despite the current pressures on local government, we are sustaining that going forward.

We also want to work with the Government on reforming public services, as the Minister said. In particular, we are a pilot for community budgets. We understand the need for work to be done regarding families with complex needs and the great costs that arise for local authorities and government. Often, we just manage a problem; we do not cure it. Therefore, we hope that we will be able to do better work on that.

The Minister is absolutely right: we have no intention of setting up a bureaucracy to run the combined authority. We see it as a way of saving in the long term by combining work. A lot of work is going from local authorities’ highways services into the new combined authority, and that will produce savings across the board, apart from the general work that we are doing in that regard.

Finally, again, I thank the Government for their foresight. We believe that we can work together with the Government and achieve a lot on this matter.

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[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I join the right reverend Prelate in paying tribute to my noble, and indeed personal, friend Lord Smith. George Orwell would recognise him as an exemplary Wigan Peer if he were to rewrite his book. I also congratulate the Minister and the Government on proceeding with reasonable alacrity to bring forward this order. I have not checked, so I am not sure whether it meets the requirement of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, of being printed on recycled paper. If not, that is the only defect one could possibly find with it. However, although this was the first order of this kind and there was a change of Government, it is nearly a year since the proposal was made. One would hope that on the basis of the experience of this order, if further applications are made—and I certainly hope that they are—the process will be a little swifter. Otherwise, particularly if there are a number of such applications, it will be quite a long time before they can be dealt with. However, presumably now that government departments have the experience of dealing with the process, it will be speedier.

I must also pay tribute not only to my noble friend but to his colleagues across the political divide in the authorities in Greater Manchester. They had their differences over the congestion charge, as he reminded us, but generally speaking they have worked very well together. I am sure that that will be the case after the pending local elections in May, although whether there will still be the same number of councillors of different political colours remains to be seen. In any event, it is clear that, not for the first time, Greater Manchester has blazed a trail for metropolitan governance in this country. The councils have, of course, a very strong municipal history. Now that they have come together and formed, in effect, a sub-region, those of us who are concerned with other areas of that kind need to watch carefully and learn from that.

I hope that the Minister will forgive me if I strike a slightly partisan note, but it is regrettable that the Secretary of State has seen fit to single out Manchester City Council for, in my view, excessive criticism—not in relation to this proposition but in more general terms. One hopes that the spirit animating the Government in reaching this satisfactory conclusion to the approach from Greater Manchester will be reflected in more measured language in looking at the problems encountered by all the authorities in that area. But of course they have worked successfully for many years, as the Minister and other noble Lords have said. There has been a very striking urban renaissance in Manchester itself and in Salford, which is welcoming hordes of reluctant BBC employees with open arms as the headquarters move there but also in other parts of the conurbation. As an LGA study some time ago demonstrated, the scale of sub-regional governance is a key factor in bringing together the requirements for the development of the local economy and some of the infrastructure that goes with that, although there are other issues which transcend those boundaries and which need to be considered on a regional basis. In that regard, the structures that have existed will unfortunately no longer exist, and that may slightly impede the success of a very promising venture. Of course, it has to be borne in mind that this takes place against a background of a very difficult financial situation for the authorities.

My noble friend referred to Community Budgeting, or Total Place, as it was known before it was rebranded after the election. There is certainly potential here to look at problems across the range of public services that might be tackled more effectively, given the fairly cohesive nature of the area, although each borough has its own distinctive character. In the local health economy, for example, the issues of skills and further and higher education are not confined by boundaries. Like my noble friend, I hope that the new organisation will be able to influence developments there. Equally, I hope the Minister will persuade the relevant government departments that they must look outside the traditional silos and co-operate fully in the development of such an approach.

I join all those who have spoken in warmly welcoming this critical development. I hope that others will seek to follow it. I have but one question for the Minister, which relates to the constitution. Manchester city is to be visited with the novel creation of a shadow mayor, assuming the proposal is accepted under the Localism Bill. It is an interesting concept: the shadow mayor has to be appointed and there then has to be confirmation of the position in a referendum, perhaps the following year. However, that applies only to the city of Manchester, which is extremely well led by Sir Richard Leese. He will not be the mayor of Greater Manchester—the surrounding boroughs will not quite accept that proposition, although I have no doubt that the press will try to portray him in that capacity—nor will anybody who might be elected to that position, if the referendum goes in favour of an elected mayor.

A question arises from the constitution, on which the noble Lord can perhaps help me. The membership is described as being based on each constituent council appointing one of its elected members to be a member of the new body. Maybe I am being even more pedantic than usual but it is not clear whether a mayor is an elected member of the council. The shadow mayor will be in place for the duration of that year; he is, by definition, a member of that council. If there is an elected mayor, the question then arises of whether he is to be regarded for the purposes of this order as an elected member of the council. He is not an elected member in the way that every other member is an elected member. It may be that this is a point with no substance to it but it might need to be considered. If it is not clear, perhaps some thought might be given to dealing with the situation. If it is clear, that is wonderful—we can all go away happy.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

It is quite clear that we all arrived happy. It is very nice, as a Minister standing in for a colleague, to get such a warm and congenial reception across the board for a statutory instrument. Perhaps I should volunteer to do this more often. It is a very pleasant experience. It has been interesting, too. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Leigh, for his involvement in Manchester and for the way in which he welcomed this measure. I acknowledge the work of AGMA in serving as a nursery for this. What is so useful about it is the way in which both AGMA and Whitehall have worked together to make a success of the opportunity that the GMCA represents. I hope that that can be built on. During the debate, various noble Lords have suggested ways in which it can be built on. In many ways, it forms a model and is very much the pioneer. Of course, Manchester would say that it is always the pioneer.

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[Noble Lords]

No, you do not.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I apologise if I have got it wrong. My briefing states that mayors would be elected members of the constituent councils and can sit on the combined authority. The mayor would be an elected member of the authority. However, I stand corrected if I am wrong.

[Lord Beecham]

My question was whether the mayor would count for the purposes of the instrument as an elected member of a council in order to serve on the GMCA. That appears to be position. If it is, I accept it, but the mayor is not for other purposes a councillor.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

I take that point. I am sorry to show my ignorance. I am grateful to the noble Lord. Paragraph 1(8) of Schedule 1 to the order states:

“For the purposes of this paragraph, an elected mayor of a constituent council is to be treated as a member of the constituent council”.

[Lord Beecham]

I apologise for not having spotted that.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach]

At least the noble Lord has taught me an interesting lesson. I am grateful to him, and I hope that he is grateful to me.

Motion agreed.