Draft Greater Manchester Combined Authority (Functions and amendment) Order 2016

Jim McMahon Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2016 General Committees

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

May I refer you, Mr Turner, to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests? I am a serving member of Oldham Council, which is part of the Greater Manchester city region.

First, this is a welcome step if people believe in devolution and in taking power away from the centre and giving it to communities. The order is quite an important step for that. It will establish an enhanced city region with a directly elected Mayor and the additional powers that come with that. We could spend time talking about where the gaps are, but most of us accept that devolution has never been, and will never be, a big bang in England; it is about making incremental gains in that journey.

I will refer to the consultation that has taken place. In a conurbation of 2.7 million people, we would expect that devolving power from the centre into the hands of the many among those 2.7 million people would elicit some kind of response. The fact that just over 200 people responded perhaps exposes a fundamental flaw in the Government’s approach. This is very much devolution being done to people, rather than devolution being done with people co-producing the answers for their local areas. Interestingly, of the people who responded to the question, the majority did not support the idea of a directly elected Mayor, which is part of the requirement in this statutory instrument. That is not to say that this is the wrong thing to do, but sometimes we can do the right thing in the wrong way and not bring people with us. It is really important, for Greater Manchester and for other areas, that we start to involve the public in the debate about where power sits, particularly here in England.

On the funding of the combined authority, Greater Manchester has a number of precepts and levies in place to fund the activity of its outside bodies. For instance, the police and fire services are both funded through a precept, while the transport and waste disposal authorities are funded through a levy that is passed on to each local authority in that area. It is proposed that the combined authorities should be funded jointly by the 10 authorities through a fee distributed per head of population.

In the spirit of democracy and holding authority to account, so that local people can see what the Mayor is doing and spending, it makes sense to look in a more active way at rolling up the precepts and levies that are already being charged and passed on to Greater Manchester taxpayers, and seeing which can be better used to fund the Mayor’s activities across Greater Manchester. In that way, local people will see the charges on their council tax bill, they will know exactly what the mayoral function in Greater Manchester is costing, and when they go to the ballot box they will make a judgment on whether that money is being spent to the best effect.

The Minister commented on the exercise of skills powers, which is absolutely welcome because we have seen a fragmentation of skills in Greater Manchester. However, there is real concern about the review of post-16 education and the funding of local colleges. Although the Government have been pushing the agenda of a review of the colleges in each of the localities, there are still well over 300 skills providers in Greater Manchester that have not been subject to review and that are spending public money with questionable outcomes. It would be far better to give full power to Greater Manchester, rather than simply getting it to enact the cuts that are coming through the system.

That brings me to some of the other consultation responses about academies and education. It is absolutely right that we devolve power for post-16 education, because it is better that local people determine how that money is spent. However, it feels contradictory to tell the very councils that we are trusting with additional money for skills, employment and infrastructure that they are not up to the job of running local schools or dealing with education provision. We are giving skills powers away with one hand and taking education responsibilities away from local schools with the other. At the same time, we are telling councils that they do not have a role to play in running those schools or even in giving leadership to those localities. If devolution in Greater Manchester is to mean anything, the Government should move forward with devolving education responsibilities to the combined authority and the component councils.

On health and social care, this is absolutely where the country needs to go. We understand that the fragmentation of health and social care does not give a good service to the people who need it most; it is also a very expensive way of doing it. The devolution package for Greater Manchester is welcome, but we need to put on record our concern about the £2 billion funding gap in health and social care predicted between now and 2020. We also question how much is being devolved. For instance, a number of weeks ago, we debated community pharmacy funding, which is being cut in local areas. For the Oldham area, that means a potential loss of 16 pharmacies. We asked whether that power would be devolved to Greater Manchester, since all the health services are being devolved and the social care system is being brought in. The Government’s answer was that that service and responsibility were not being devolved. I question whether they intend genuine devolution on health if the 10 authorities cannot even stop the community pharmacies closing in those areas.

The biggest challenge for a Government who are trying to demonstrate that they are letting go is the small print. The small print in this case does not say that the Government are letting go; it says that they are commissioning at local level responsibilities to deliver services, but that they want to do so in a tightly defined framework. For instance, for the Government to impose a requirement in a statutory instrument that restricts the Mayor of Greater Manchester to one political adviser must be almost unique. That is not devolution and it is not localism. We will not have an empowered Mayor if they are told by the Secretary of State how many people they can employ in particular posts.

We welcome the order with caution and concern about the framework for devolution and the funding that is being devolved, but we accept that this is another step on the journey of devolution in England.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Percy]

There are a few issues to address. Not all of them relate directly to the order, but I will try my best to answer anyway.

I congratulate the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton, on his appointment. This is the first time that we have faced one another across the aisle since his elevation, and it is good to see him here.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned gaps in the measures, but we have to accept that the process of devolution is incremental. We have been clear about that from the beginning. The fact that Greater Manchester has been through so many rounds of devolution and is so much further down the road than anywhere else in England is something we should recognise, accepting that this is a substantial devolution of powers and cash from Westminster to local people. Manchester is lot further on than other parts of the country—sadly, in the case of some.

Consultation was a matter for the combined authority, which tried hard to engage people in the process. I have to be honest with the hon. Gentleman: local governance structures do not always excite people. I do not doubt that when people in Manchester and across the north of England are asked whether they want more powers and decisions to be exercised locally rather than at Westminster, they express strong support for that, but we should not delude ourselves that people will rush out in their thousands to take part in a consultation about the governance structures of combined authorities and mayoralties. It can be a challenge to engage people on such subjects.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned his feeling that devolution was being done to people in Greater Manchester. I do not share that view. I have met Greater Manchester’s interim Mayor and various members of the combined authority and I find that they are quite proud of what they have negotiated. The process has been very bespoke, which is why Manchester has been able to negotiate things that other areas have not. Only the other week, Sir Richard Leese was in to talk to me about some of his exciting ideas about further devolution of education. I am not promising anything on that, because it is a challenging area given the complexities of having a local approach as well as a national approach, but that indicates that the devolution has been delivered very much from the bottom up, in line with demands on and requests from those in Manchester. Each devolution deal—Tees Valley, Sheffield city region, Liverpool or Manchester—is different, which demonstrates that the process is bottom up rather than top down.

I thought long and hard about the elected mayor requirement over the summer. As I have said in previous debates, the fact is that when someone is exercising powers over a large geographical area from which no one else involved in the decision making has a mandate, we have to have someone whom the public throughout that entire region can hold accountable. No individual council leader, MP or anyone else has been elected across that area, but someone has to be accountable to the public for making decisions and spending cash across the area. That is why an elected mayoralty is the best option and the best way to deliver direct accountability. I have thought about other ways in which it could be done, but I have not been able to come up with one that gives such direct accountability.

The hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton also talked about the area-based reviews for his local colleges, but I cannot go into any detail because they do not form part of my policy area. I am aware of what is going on in my own area, of course. He also mentioned academies, but they do not form part of the draft order either. I merely state that many people would argue that academies are anyway a devolution of power to the local level, in a policy introduced by his party. Admittedly his party has gone through a few different guises since the glory days of the Blair years, but it was a Labour policy.

Similarly, health and social care are not part of the draft order, but we continue to work closely with Greater Manchester to implement what we think is quite an imaginative devolution of health—the first in England. From the outset, we have always been clear with Manchester that we expect future health decisions to be taken with Greater Manchester’s input—in partnership, rather than against it.

The hon. Gentleman talked about precepts. The mayoral precept will be treated as are all major precepts, so people will be able to see the amount of it when they receive their council tax bill. The police element will be different and accounted for separately.

[Jim McMahon]

May I have clarity on that? As the Minister knows, a precept is an amount of money added on top of the council tax bill. The draft order reads as though the precept is a levy that forms part of the council tax, but is not separated out in the council tax bill.

[Andrew Percy]

The mayoral precept will be treated in the same way and should be identifiable on the bill in the same way as the policing element, but I will check on the wording to be clear with the hon. Gentleman.

As I said, the Government are well aware of the challenges in health and social care at the moment, which is why we have pumped in extra money, but that is not a matter for this order so I will not say anything more about it. The hon. Member for Stockport also mentioned health and social care—

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Percy]

It is for each local authority that is represented at the combined authority to determine its decision making behind that representation. If they wish it to be a vote of the full council or a decision of the council’s executive, that is a matter for them. When they are at the combined authority, they must act in unanimity. They are there representing their local authority. It is the same for any other decisions they take at a combined authority level. Decisions taken at the combined authority are not referred back to the local council for a vote on every single occasion. It is for each local authority to determine its processes.

[Jim McMahon]

This is a really important point. For the 10 local authorities in Greater Manchester, the policy framework is a full council decision; it is not devolved to the executive or the council leader. The difference here is that the component councils, not the combined authority, are the decision maker. If it is not in the order, will the Minister at least give us comfort that a letter will go out to the 10 authorities setting out very clearly that the expectation is that each of them will, at their full council meeting, have a vote on the spatial framework? That is really important to give local people confidence in the process.

[Andrew Percy]

On the one hand, the hon. Gentleman is telling me that the Government should not be telling local authorities in the combined authority what to do, and on the other he is telling me that I should be telling the combined authority members what they should do. We believe in local decision making, so it is for each local constituent council member at the combined authority to determine what its arrangements are for involving the broader council on that matter. The leader of the council is there as the elected leader of the council. Behind their individual authority, it is for them to determine their own process. It is certainly not for me to write to each of the constituent councils telling them that they should exercise this function in a particular way in their authority. It is for each council to determine that.

I think I have dealt with most of the points about where the spatial framework sits. It does not supplant the local plan; the local plan must conform to it, in the same way as it has to in London. This is very much about trying to provide a system in which people are collaborating across a broader geographical area so we can make good on the pledge and deliver more homes for people in Manchester, which we all agree about, and a more integrated approach to planning across this strategic area.