Graham Stringer
Main Page: Graham Stringer (Labour - Blackley and Middleton South)Devolution in England
Graham Stringer Excerpts
Mr Betts
Without going into the details of Greater Manchester, which I do not know all the aspects of, this seems to be a debate between the combined authority, and the collective of leaders there, and individual local councils about further localisation. In my view, devolution does not simply stop with the transfer of power from central Government to a local authority or combination of authorities; it is about how combined authorities enable devolution within their areas to existing local councils, and how those local councils ensure that devolution goes out of the town hall door and into local communities. We cannot be too prescriptive of those stages in this debate, but I understand the concern about losing national frameworks. The idea that everything in the national health service works similarly across the country is not true. Indeed, the words “postcode lottery” did not come from local government but from the NHS because things have been done differently in different parts of the country. More accountability through mechanisms that will potentially be set up is the way forward. I hear the concerns, but they are a debate for Members to have with their colleagues in councils in Greater Manchester.
The Committee defined fiscal devolution as:
“handing to local authorities the power to raise money through a range of existing and new taxes and charges; some responsibility for setting those taxes; and the facility to borrow.”
We contrasted that with decentralisation transferring powers over service delivery and spending to local authorities. We welcomed these developments, but said that greater control over local spending did not constitute devolution. In that sense, we are disappointed with the Government’s response, which seems to equate fiscal devolution with a desire to raise taxes everywhere. The two are not the same. Fiscal devolution is about making tax-raising decisions at a different level, not necessarily about raising taxes through those decisions. I think the Government missed that point.
I hope the Minister agrees with the Prime Minister, when he said the other day:
“Today’s agreement paves the way for a referendum, that could deliver an assembly that’s not just a spending body but is actually responsible for raising more of its revenue too. And to me that is responsible devolution, that is real devolution and I think that is vital for Wales”.
It is vital, too, for Manchester, London and the other major cities that we are going to devolve powers to. The Prime Minister has made a really important point. It means that those who spend taxpayers’ money must be made more responsible for raising it. That is an absolutely fundamental point. Devolution is not simply about handing money out from the centre and allowing more say in how it is spent at local level. It is about holding local politicians to account not just for spending the money, but raising it in the first place. That is fundamental. If the Government resist that, they will stop the general flow of movement throughout the House and the country that requires genuine devolution that is more than simply decentralisation of spending powers to take place.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
My hon. Friend has produced an excellent report. On the relationship between taxes and responsibility, does he agree that one of the problems in Scotland, which has allowed the Scottish National party to have fantasies that it can spend more and more money, is that the Scottish Parliament was set up with the ability to spend money but not to raise taxes? That is the exact opposite of what the plantation people had in north America, where their cry was “No taxation without representation”. In Scotland, we have had representation and tax without taxation, which has been a democratic disaster.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
I would like to start by disagreeing with my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), who said in an intervention on the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), that decentralisation was not an aim in itself. If democracy and local democracy is an objective—and I believe it is—then decentralisation is an objective. To allow local people to vote for people to take decisions that affect them directly, and for the people who are elected to raise local taxes to pay for those services, is a clear objective. There is absolutely no guarantee, in any system of national or local democracy, that this will lead to efficient services or economic growth, but at the heart of the matter is the principle that we should be able to vote for the people who take decisions using public money raised through taxes. I therefore believe that that is an objective.
I am not on the Select Committee, but I have read the report and I have been left with two conflicting emotions. First, I found the report depressing, although not because it is not a good report; it is a good report and it goes into a lot of detail. I was elected—as I suspect my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East was—to a local authority more than a third of century ago. At that time, local authorities had complete control over the level of the business rate and over their other rates, and they could set levels of expenditure. It is a measure of how far we have moved that we now think it an advance to have a share of the local business rate. That is a depressing thought. On the other hand, I am optimistic about some of the Government’s proposals and some of the activities in our major cities and counties where agreement to devolve powers has been reached. There seems to be a movement to reverse many decades of centralisation.
There is one thought that lies behind a lot of the Government’s thinking and behind the thinking of other Members, even though it might not be expressed. It is that central Government somehow do things better than local government. I have never seen any evidence of that. Let us consider the waste of money on the NHS computer. I do not have the exact figures, but I believe that about £12 billion has been wasted—a mere £12 billion. That would probably be sufficient to fund the Government grants to run Manchester and Birmingham for about a decade, and that is just one example of a failed computer programme. It is extraordinary that central Government can sit there and think that they are more effective than local government. There is no evidence whatever for that.
Mr Betts
Thinking slightly cynically, may I ask my hon. Friend whether he thinks that Treasury Ministers and shadow Treasury Ministers are interested in pushing more spending powers down to local level because they think that they can get better value out of that arrangement and that if there is more austerity to come, local government would probably manage it better?
Graham Stringer
Sometimes that is absolutely true. It is sometimes the objective of central Government to pass on the responsibility for “difficult decisions”, which can often be code for “cuts”.
In the light of the great achievements of cities such as Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle—the cities that this country’s wealth was built on—we have taken that money and power and centralised it. This has led to an increase in the north-south divide. London has such a booming economy because of its geography and because of the City of London, but also because the expenditure in local government has been centralised, and about 90%—we can argue about the final decimal point—of the expenditure on transport has been spent in London and the south-east and not in the other regions. That in itself leads to economic growth. There is also an increased intensity of investment in hospitals and science in the golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London.
On that basis, I very much welcomed the statement about the devolution to Manchester, the powerhouse of the north and the combined authorities, which would give control over the skills budget and over transport, allow the re-regulation of buses in Greater Manchester, give control over the housing budget and allow a look at the social care budget, so that local people would take decisions locally. A lot of the criticism, including from my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), is that nobody has been consulted about a mayor for that process, but let us look at what the combined authority was faced with. All those local authorities—Labour, Lib Dem-led and Conservative-controlled—believed that more decisions should be taken locally, which, incidentally, would also lead to more efficient services. The Government’s position is that they are willing to hand over control of that money but that because a lot of those services, particularly transport and skills, are provided at a county level, there should be an elected mayor. One could either recreate the Greater Manchester county council, which used to deal with many of those services, or have an elected mayor, and the Government prefer an elected mayor. The position facing the leaders of the 10 authorities was: do we accept this—and we wanted this kind of thing when I was leader of Manchester city council, a long time ago —accept what is offered by the Government and plug the hole of the democratic deficit, or do we not?
Lisa Nandy
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this issue about the mayor. He says it is a directly elected mayor but, unfortunately, it is not; the mayor that is envisaged will be appointed immediately and will serve until 2017, or possibly 2019, without facing an election. In the meantime £13.5 million-worth of public money has been spent and, according to Ministers, there are currently no plans for public involvement or scrutiny in this process.
Graham Stringer
I do not disagree with my hon. Friend about that, although we do disagree on other parts of this devolution. The gap between what we have now and an elected mayor is too long. Appointing a mayor is almost a contradiction in terms; mayors should be elected and then they should take the responsibility that the electorate give them, having stood on a manifesto. I would prefer the 10 leaders, who do have an elected mandate, to continue. Having an appointed mayor is a halfway house—a solution that is not really a solution—and it would be better to move earlier to an elected mayor and not have an interim situation. Having made that criticism, I do not think it spoils the whole broth—the essential elements of the decentralisation.
The next part of the decentralisation that seemed to cause some difficulty to some of my hon. Friends, and to some other right hon. and hon. Members, is the devolution of the health budget, so that health and social care can work together in Greater Manchester and deliver better services. When it was announced on the “Today” programme—six days ago, I believe—the presenter said, “This will mean that local councillors will get their grubby hands on the health service.” That represents not only an appalling statement by a supposedly neutral BBC presenter, but an attitude of contempt for local democracy. There is absolutely no guarantee that when locally elected councillors, working with the clinical commissioning groups, get together the service will be better, but the expectation must be that it will be, because when decisions are taken locally, the decisions are usually better. That is not always the case and it is not inevitable, but usually when people of good will try to make things better and they can see the detail on the ground, we get a better service.
I have been fighting the Healthier Together proposals in Greater Manchester, which are all about bringing care for the elderly and the ordinary services together. I have been fighting them not on principle, because the principle of what they are saying is right, but on detail and procedure. In every case, we go back to NHS England. I would much rather discuss my disagreements over detail with people who are elected locally and with local clinicians than with some distant bureaucrat in London. I do not believe that this measure is being imposed; it is being negotiated by properly elected local government leaders. One objection that may be made before a general election—I had better be up front about this—is that Labour councillors should not be sitting down with the devil of a Conservative Chancellor. Well, I think they should. It would be an absurd position if any elected leader of any district or city said, “I will not accept something that I think is good for my area because the person who is proposing it is of a different political colour.”
There are still many details to be decided and some obvious pitfalls. We need to ensure that at least the amount of money that was scheduled to go into the NHS actually goes in and is transferred to Greater Manchester. If that money goes across but there is a deficit, we come back to that most difficult decision—I will finish on this point because I know many Members wish to speak—which is the closure of a hospital. If care for the elderly works in combination with the NHS and many people who should not be in hospital are taken out of hospital, hospitals may have to be reduced in size. If that happens, who would Members like to take that decision: somebody sat in Whitehall or locally elected people who have to face the electorate daily? That is the toughest decision, and I would prefer it to be made by local people, which is why I am pleased to support the proposals for Greater Manchester. I hope that this Government and the next one get more enthusiastic about devolution.
Kris Hopkins
I think I got off lightly, because I appreciate that language is important when we are talking about identity. Certainly, the Greater Manchester area has been extremely engaged in this issue for a long time, and I welcome the path it has taken. I just want to correct the point about two to four years. Elections are anticipated in 2017, and we want to see that. Primary legislation needs to be put forward to deliver that. The models for then holding the mayor to account will be debated in this House. There will be an opportunity for every Member who is re-elected to participate in the process, and I am very confident that we will have a democratically held to account mayor driving forward a very extensive range of services, including transport, housing, planning, skills, policing, welfare support and, of course, health.
Other cities have been engaged in this, including Sheffield city region, and there are continuing talks about Leeds. We believe there is scope for decentralising more funds, but the key is making sure that local authorities have an opportunity to grow their own local economy, and we have assisted in that through business rates retention and the new homes bonus.
Graham Stringer
Select Committee recommendation 49 starts:
“Growth in one area of England does not mean reduced growth elsewhere.”
Frankly, I did not understand the Government’s response to that recommendation. Can the Minister confirm that he agrees with the Select Committee recommendation, and that growth in one area will not mean less borrowing powers or less resources for another part of the country?
Kris Hopkins
That is certainly not my intention. My intention is to see every part of the country grow. The Chancellor has gone out there and supported the northern powerhouse, and we have gone to every corner of this country to make sure that this works. At the end of the day, however, growth will be locally led and individual areas will need to be supported in this process, but many will seize the opportunity to grow their local economies.
We have heard some good contributions from Members and I want to comment on them.