Elected Mayors and Local Government

Debate between Geoffrey Robinson and Mark Pawsey

Thursday 9th July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Brady, as always. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) on securing the debate, and I thank Mr Speaker for granting it. It is an important one and an opening for many more, although there will probably be more local than national debates. It is important for us to realise that elected mayors affect local, not national, government.

It would be far better to take a practical or bottom-up approach, as others have described it, to the problem than to go for the jugular, as recommended by one of the participants in the debate. Perhaps he should put his own jugular on the line first and see how it feels before he recommends that we collectively do the same, but that is for him to decide. It would be fatal to rush into this blindly. That suggestion shows no understanding of the reality of the complex organisation that we are about to create, or of what it is like in the private sector, let alone the public sector. In the private sector, the shareholders are seen once a year, which can be a pain or a pleasure, depending on how the organisation has done. With this type of organisation, however, there is regular accountability through newspapers and other means all the time, quite rightly, and through weekly party and council meetings. It is a completely different kettle of fish from a private sector organisation.

We learned a lesson from the 1970s that you may remember, Mr Brady—I don’t think you were in the House, but you may have studied it. I was not in the House either but I studied it from quite close up—from Smith Square, where I was at the time. The then Prime Minister, with great executive thinking, brought a private sector approach to things. He said, “We’re going to do this, and we’ll do it from the top down. We’ll impose it and have a nice blueprint.” The then Secretary of State, who had a very distinguished service record in the public sector and a very successful record in the private sector—rather like Lord Heseltine—thought, “We’ll do a proper merger, have a blueprint and make sure that we do it exactly as we have told them.” It was a theoretical blueprint that bore no relation to the different sets of circumstances, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) both said, within 10 years it broke down in the reality of the complicated democratic processes that Governments have to work with in the public sector.

We should forget all that. Let us deal with the situation as it is, and take a practical approach. I speak as one who is second to none in my admiration for Lord Heseltine, and indeed Lord Walker before him, who did the ill-fated 1970s reorganisation. Let us be practical people, with a depth of experience of the public sector and its needs, when we come to deal with this very difficult task.

Some of us in Coventry feel two things. It could well be that we have been slightly behind the game and have not joined in or been promoting this idea early enough or strongly enough, as a west midlands entity, but that is because we have never really felt the same identity of interest with Birmingham and the black country as we perhaps have with Warwickshire, which is our more natural—

[Mark Pawsey]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Robinson]

I would, but we are all limited by time, and the hon. Gentleman, whom I know very well and share many interests with, will have time to make his own speech in a moment.

Coventry is a proud city in its own right. I have told the House before how some decades ago, when I was first selected as a candidate, my party chairman took me to one side and said—I had just been selected, Mr Brady, and you know what local parties can be like—“Now Geoffrey, you have to understand one thing.” I was fairly new to Coventry at the time. He said, “The most important point you have to understand as a Coventry MP is that there is only one good thing that comes out of Birmingham. Do you know what that is?” I had no idea. I suggested cars, machine tools, motorbikes and so on. He said, “No, no. It’s the Coventry road.” That was a silly, parochial approach, and we are no longer— thank God—bound by those sorts of considerations. I would certainly never dream of giving that advice to anybody who might succeed me in decades to come. However, Coventry is a proud city and I believe that Wolverhampton, which has gained city status more recently, feels as Coventry does in many ways.