Draft Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield Combined Authority (Election of Mayor) Order 2016

Grahame Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 19th July 2016 General Committees

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. I welcome the new Minister to his post. We were both elected at the same time in 2010 and served together on the Select Committee on Health, so we are old adversaries. With the inside knowledge that he is a first responder in his spare time, there could not be a more appropriate subject for his first response than devolution to the regions.

I know this is a narrow order, Mr Gray, so I am not going to test your patience or that of the Committee by straying beyond its very narrow focus, which, as the Minister has indicated, relates specifically to the elected mayor for the Sheffield city region and the date of the election. There are, however, some questions I want to put to the Minister and a couple of points relevant to the order in relation to resources and securing European funding for the period when the mayor is in office. I do think that this is relevant.

[The Chair]

The hon. Gentlemen will have to be very ingenious to get that in, but he can try.

[Grahame M. Morris]

I have been called many things, Mr Gray, but rarely that. However, I am grateful for the advice.

The names of the regions in these devolution packages are often a misnomer. The Sheffield city region covers diverse areas, all with unique identities. This very narrow order will affect nine areas: Barnsley, Bassetlaw, Bolsover, Chesterfield, the Derbyshire Dales, Doncaster, North East Derbyshire, Rotherham and Sheffield. I understand those named on the order are currently full members of the combined authority, with the other five as associate members that will not participate in the election of the mayor. I ask for some clarification on that point. I appreciate that the Minister is brand-new in post, so if he cannot give the answer now, perhaps he can clarify by letter.

I am advised that Chesterfield and Bassetlaw are seeking full membership of the combined authority. Will the Minister outline the implications of today’s order? If these two areas become part of the combined authority, would they automatically form part of the electorate for the mayoralty?

The Sheffield combined area is home to more than 1.8 million people, with 55,000 businesses employing some 700,000 people and an economic output of more than £30 billion a year. The Opposition welcome any investment from the Government to our regions—including the Sheffield city region—and that includes the £30 million a year as part of this devolution deal. However, as my hon. Friends the Members for Rotherham, for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough and for Penistone and Stocksbridge have indicated, our concern is that this is new and additional money, and not simply a rebadging of existing resources.

Returning to the issue of resources, this must be put into context as regards directed cuts to the councils that make up the new city region. Local authorities in the area have had to deal with around £635 million of cuts. I am confident the Sheffield city region will use the new powers over education, skills, business support, transport and planning that the Minister outlined to boost economic activity in the region. However, there are serious difficulties with politically empowering a directly elected mayor while financially impoverishing local government.

The Minister’s predecessor coined a phrase—or we discussed it in Committee on the last statutory instrument on these matters—that this is a process rather than an event. However, if the mayor, who according to the order is due to take up office in 2017 for a three-year term, is not empowered financially and the local authorities he is working with in the combined authority are not, that will cause huge problems. This is only the start and I know that local Members of Parliament and the Sheffield city region are eager to go further and faster when it comes to devolution. I hope that further devolution, along with the finances to give it real substance, can be achieved in the not too distant future.

I do not want to sound like a broken record, but I think that it is important to point out for the record that I, on behalf of my party, must restate my opposition to the imposition of mayors in return for devolution deals. The public have had the opportunity to express their views on directly elected mayors. I point out to the Minister that in 2012 the Government held a referendum in Sheffield on this issue and 65% rejected the idea. However, I also acknowledge that on the same day Doncaster held a referendum on whether to retain its directly elected mayor and 61.7% supported that proposition. The Opposition neither oppose nor support directly elected mayors; we believe that, as we have seen from previous referendums, local communities are best placed to organise and arrange the systems of governance that are most suited to their needs. I have discovered from 16 years in local government that if you try to be prescriptive and, in particular, to apply models that work in the metropolitan areas in London to the regions, they do not necessarily work. We have to have the local flexibility to apply models that work in particular areas.

[Sarah Champion]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the deal on the table is very much like the ones that my schools are being presented with: they either become an academy or we will make them an academy? The sweeteners seem to be real, but when it comes to the detail it is not new money at all.

[Sarah Champion]

In the context of this SI.

[Grahame M. Morris]

That is a very real concern, which I hope the Minister will address. It is a feature of this specific SI and the resource period that we are dealing with, given the elected mayor’s term of office from May 2017 to 2020.

In conclusion, will the Minister explain why the Government chose to consult the electorate on mayors in 2012, but will now insist on them as a precondition of these devolution deals? I believe the Minister should trust the electorate and if he believes in elected mayors so passionately, he should make the case to the public rather than reaching agreements with the exclusion of the public.

[Andrew Percy]

It is a delight to have the hon. Member for Easington as my shadow Minister today. We did, as he said, serve on the Health Committee together. I think we got on all right. I will not sully his career any further by saying that we agreed on things. I am not sure that would be welcome in today’s Labour party, but we did get on very well and it is a pleasure to see him across the room today.

I will not deal with the issue of EU funding again; that would be straying, Mr Gray. I think I was quite clear on that. We are still a member of the European Union and until we leave, nothing has changed. In terms of the consultation, we have been quite clear that it is for local authorities themselves to determine how they engage with the public on these devolution deals. They are the democratically elected representatives of their areas. If they wish to adopt a devolution deal on this model, including an elected mayor, that is for the local authorities to determine.

I spent 10 years as a councillor on Hull City Council in Yorkshire. One problem with accountability and responsibility as a city councillor is that we did not have anybody speaking for our city as a single voice, and there was a weakness in that. I take the point that not every model necessarily works everywhere, but I want to see regional faces more involved in policy making down here and in policy development. Our traditional local authority structure sometimes makes that difficult. Leaders come and leaders go; they do not always speak for the whole of their council and authority. Having somebody who is a name with specific powers can be positive although, of course, there are always arguments on both sides. The more we can get people whom the public can see are clearly accountable, the better. That is something I always believed when I was a councillor.

I also welcome the shadow Minister’s tacit support for more devolution.

[Grahame M. Morris]

May I clarify? It is not tacit support. For more years than I care to remember, I have been an enthusiastic proponent and supporter of devolution, but it needs to be real devolution. On the issue of a precondition of an elected mayor, I know the Minister is honest and sincere, but the truth is that that has been a gun held to the heads of local government leaders: if they want this deal, they must accept an elected mayor. I think that is fundamentally wrong.

[Andrew Percy]

I have dealt with the mayoral issue as best I can. On devolution, having served as a local authority councillor for 10 years, I think the Government are doing a great deal more than previous ones to devolve powers. I sat in a local authority where we were constantly told what to do by central Government. We were repeatedly told we were being given powers and some funding. Occasionally that funding would appear for two or three years and then disappear. We would take on all the responsibilities and get none of the resources.

This Government have gone much further than any in recent history to reinvigorate local government and communities through this devolution package, which local authorities are free to accept or decline as they see fit for their area.

We will not stray into local authority funding today but the budgets have been broadly flat. Many local authorities in this particular area receive a lot more per head than those in other areas, including mine. On expansion, I can confirm to the shadow Minister that there is a consultation out at the moment to expand the area, including Chesterfield, Bassetlaw and other councils in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. I spoke to my parliamentary neighbour the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), one of the shadow Minister’s colleagues, last night. He is a big supporter of this, as are many people in the region. We would have to table an order to extend the area and we would expect that to happen later this year. Those areas will be included if they choose to join the mayoral model before the elections. Their electors will then take part in the mayoral elections next year. It would be wrong to include them after that, in my view.

I think I have dealt with the shadow Minister’s points. I welcome his enthusiastic—not tacit—support for devolution. I commend the order as the start of an exciting process for South Yorkshire, north Nottinghamshire and north Derbyshire.

Question put and agreed to.