Draft Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018 Draft Tees Valley Combined Authority (Adult Education Functions) Order 2018

Gordon Marsden Excerpts

Tuesday 16th October 2018 General Committees

[Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson, and it is a particular pleasure to see the Minister in her place, after some of the logistical issues that she must have faced this morning.

I want to take my lead, slightly, from the Minister, but I will not detain the Committee long. The Minister reminded us both—and the Whips—that we were all sitting discussing a similar, but never the same, set of issues yesterday afternoon. The Minister has laid out her stall in that respect and she will be relieved to hear that I do not propose to repeat everything I said yesterday. However, I want to pick out two or three of the issues we raised in respect of the draft orders for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands that are equally pertinent this morning.

Yesterday, I pointed out three areas in which the Opposition would like to see the Government go further and faster. There was, I hope, a broad consensus between the Government and the Opposition on the need for devolution in these areas, but we believe, as I said yesterday, that

“if we want a proper economic plan across these areas…simply looking at devolving the adult skills budget and not considering the broader issue around apprenticeships is…pretty daft in the medium to long term.”—[Official Report, Fourth Delegated Legislation Committee, 15 October 2018; c. 5.]

I will leave it at that.

Importantly, we also talked about ESOL, and the Minister responded well. I shall be careful in what I say this morning about both combined authorities. I am going to say something about their differences in a moment, but I am particularly conscious of the fact—which I think is a good thing—that we have Members on the Committee from both combined authority areas: my hon. Friends the Members for Stockton North and for Liverpool, Riverside, and the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. Perish the thought that I should attempt to second-guess their thoughts in this area—and the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland will have to forgive me, as I do not have encyclopaedic knowledge of what the ESOL demands in the Tees Valley area might be—but having been born and brought up in the north-west, I have a strong knowledge of the situation in Liverpool. There, as in many of our big cities, there are major challenges in local communities. The Minister and I talked a little about that yesterday, and I was pleased that she confirmed that ESOL will be a significant part of the process of devolution.

The only other point that I touched on yesterday that bears repeating today is that as the orders—which, as I say, we wholeheartedly support—go forward, we must not be too optimistic about the time it will take to transit from the current situation to the future situation. We all sit in a Westminster bubble from time to time. We assume—no doubt this is as true of officials as it is of Members of Parliament—that the moment something is signed on the dotted line, that is the end of it, but of course it is not. The implementation process is as important as passing the orders that we are debating.

Having made those generic comments, I will make one or two comments about the impact in the two areas that we are looking at. The Liverpool City Region covers an area that is historically and geographically diverse. It contains areas that were once part of historic Lancashire and Cheshire. It is at the very cusp of identities, accents and origins in the north-west. It encompasses places like Sefton, where Anthony Gormley’s statues look out to sea; it encompasses the Beatles, and everything we owe to the rich culture of the city of Liverpool—

[The Chair]

Including your Chairman’s birthplace.

[Gordon Marsden]

Including the Chairman’s birthplace. It also encompasses the Wirral, and apart from other things, as a medievalist I have to make the observation that the Wirral is believed to have been the site of the adventures of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, an important Middle English story.

To touch on Liverpool for a moment, the mixture of origins among the people who live in that city—Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Afro-Caribbean, Somali—in itself makes the point about the importance of ESOL and those skills areas. The Mayor, Steve Rotheram, has been champing at the bit on this; I know that because I shared a platform with him at our party conference, where he spoke strongly about the need to take things further forward. I know also that he has, in recent weeks, brought forward measures that will involve taking into account the work of the smaller towns in the Liverpool City Region. We touched on this yesterday, and I am sure that it is also a pertinent point for the Tees Valley: the need to recognise the diversity within city regions or combined authority areas, in terms of both geography and local economics, is paramount. Therefore, it is extremely important that the Mayor is taking such issues further forward.

With regard to the Tees Valley, the Minister has already mentioned the higher levels of unemployment. There, too, we have a pretty diverse collection of boroughs; I think it is fair to say that the mayoral elections in Tees Valley were on a knife-edge. We have five boroughs—I always forget that Redcar and Cleveland are together—that have quite different, quite distinct, profiles. The area has a proud industrial history. It has involved seafaring, rural employment, chemicals—many different things. It is therefore very important that in this process of taking these measures forward, there is strong consultation. I did not mention this specifically in our discussions yesterday about Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, but I would apply it particularly in one sense. Here I take a leaf out of the Minister’s book yesterday, when she spoke, at the end of her peroration, about the need for the Department to keep close, but not be overbearing, with the combined authorities once the orders have been put into effect. I wholeheartedly agree with that. It will be particularly important, if I may say so to the Minister—I would like her to comment on this—in the context of the dread word “Brexit”.

I mention Brexit specifically, and in relation particularly to the Tees Valley, because I have been studying the Tees Valley’s 2016 to 2026 strategic plan for the combined authority, and that plan points particularly to the amount of money that the Tees Valley has received over a long period from the European structural funds. It says:

“Without this support it will be extremely challenging to achieve economic growth”.

That goes to the heart of the process of devolving skills, whether they are adult skills or broader skills, which we would want to see devolved in this process, because, to be blunt, if what is going to be devolved is a husk, without that funding, what will the benefit of it be?

The Government have been, in my view, singularly cavalier and remiss about putting any meat on the bone of the so-called shared prosperity fund, which is supposed to come forward to deliver some of the skills and some of the funding that we will lose if we leave the EU. I am asking the Minister very specifically today about that point. I have picked it up in the particular context of Tees Valley, but it could equally apply to many of the other combined authority and mayoral areas that are getting devolved funding, and to the other two statutory instruments that I understand we shall be considering—in this room or another one—shortly. Without some pressure from the Minister and her colleagues in the Department to get something on the table about just what substitution for the European regional funding and structural funding there will be, they will be handing over a useful process of devolution but one fraught with difficulty.

I understand the difficulties for the Minister and her Department. Brexit is absorbing all, and these issues will not immediately apply between 2018 and 2021, but my goodness, if the Government do not get their act together and put the money into the national prosperity fund or shared prosperity fund—or whatever Orwellian title they choose to give it—those areas that are having this useful amount of devolution delivered today will find that they have inherited a rather moth-eaten set of strategic funding to go with it.

Having said that, I repeat what I said at the start: we welcome this amount of devolution, we think it will be useful and we wish it were more. We would like the Government to do something in the area of strategic funding, particularly as that is at the heart of delivering the skills offer.