Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [Lords]

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

In my experience, one of the most persistent criticisms over many years coming from people living in shire areas is that the public are generally baffled about who runs their local services and who is responsible for what. I have to say that looking at the fine technical detail of this Bill with its combined authorities, its LEPs and its EPBs, its contiguous and non-contiguous doughnuts, I doubt whether anyone is going to be much the wiser afterwards, because we still live in a highly centralised state and it is clear that the Treasury in particular ceding any power, if at all, will be done through fiercely clenched teeth with an expression of agony at the prospect.

That is the problem with this Bill: it is all so complicated and difficult, and it is simply not up to the scale and immediacy of the challenge the country faces, because while we debate the minutiae, the world moves on, and we tie our hands. This is such a missed opportunity.

Last week in my city of Cambridge, Cambridge Ahead, a business-led organisation that really should have the full support of this Government if they cared to look at it, laid out the case for Cambridge. It is a unique partnership of local authorities, businesses and our world-leading universities, with cross-party support from our three local MPs. Cambridge Ahead last week explained the choice not just for the city, but for the sub-region and one of the key drivers of the UK economy.

The choice is very stark, because by any measure Cambridge is a hugely successful city, with 25 of the world’s largest corporations, but unless we can tackle the huge problems of housing, transport and skills that have to be tackled locally—that is why this Bill matters—that success cannot be maintained. Be in no doubt, future success is not inevitable, and if Cambridge stalls I suspect much of the UK stalls, too.

At last week’s event I was very struck by the comments of Antony Mattessich, managing director of Mundipharma International based at the Cambridge science park, employing hundreds of people. Like so many Cambridge companies, it is not a household name, but these companies are very important and he told a very familiar story about how he came to Cambridge, how he fell in love with the city, and how well the company does here. Yet, with housing so expensive and transport so difficult, it becomes increasingly hard to persuade key people to come here, so they choose other places such as San Francisco and other parts of the world that are our direct competitors—and where the key people go, so they build their teams, and so we gradually lose out. It is a story I hear time and again in Cambridge.

It was writ large a few years ago when AstraZeneca chose to move to Cambridge from the north-west, a move that I know was very disappointing for those representing that part of the country. But the key point is that if it had not come to Cambridge, it would not have stayed in the UK; it would have gone elsewhere in the world. It was a very fine decision, and unless we get ourselves sorted out soon there is no guarantee that we can achieve the same good result for the UK the next time a major company faces a similar choice.

So this is not about special pleading for one part of the country; it is about making sure the Government’s rhetoric about competing in the global race has any chance of actually being delivered. If the Government are serious—and given the political game-playing we will be having later tonight, that is open to question—Ministers should listen carefully to what serious people in Cambridge have to say about this. Their biggest single ask is to go beyond what is in this Bill and back to what was almost agreed in 2014 until the Treasury bottled it. A thriving city such as Cambridge can be trusted to make the major investments needed for transport and housing through a tax-increment financing approach. The research shows a three-to-one return on gross value added to investment.

If that was a business deal, we would do it. Business in Cambridge and around is crying out for it. Local people, unable to afford homes to buy and increasingly unable to afford homes to rent, are crying out for it. Workers stuck every day in hopeless traffic queues around Cambridge are crying out for it. The local newspaper demands it. There is just one major obstacle: the tired old thinking in the Treasury that always says, “No, you can’t.”

That is not how entrepreneurialism works, and that is not how Cambridge works. There really ought to be enough people on the Conservative Benches who understand that, and I suspect that the Secretary of State might just be one of them. My simple request is that the Government work with us to get the Bill into a state in which it will allow the Cambridge success story to continue, for the benefit not just of Cambridge but of the whole UK economy.