Draft Greater Manchester Combined Authority (Functions and Amendment) Order 2017

Jim McMahon Excerpts

Monday 24th April 2017 General Committees

[Andrew Percy]

Thank you, Mr Hanson. This is such a popular order, I am—

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

There is great excitement.

[Andrew Percy]

There is such excitement, among Conservative Members anyway.

As I was saying, the order also provides the necessary powers for the allowances for the Mayor and other members of the combined authority.

The origin of the order is in the governance review and the scheme that was prepared by Greater Manchester in accordance with the requirement in legislation. In 2016, Greater Manchester published two schemes that set out its proposals for powers that could be conferred to Greater Manchester in 2016, as provided by the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009.

That first consultation ran from March through to May of last year and the second from July through to August. The combined authority provided the summaries and the Secretary of State considered those, as per the statutory requirements. In conferring those functions, the Secretary of State has concluded that they would indeed be likely to lead to an improvement in the exercise of the aforementioned statutory functions.

In considering it appropriate to confer local authority powers on the combined authority and make constitutional changes, the Secretary of State has, of course, had regard to the impact on local government and communities. Importantly, from a local democracy point of view, all 10 of the constituent councils on the combined authority have consented to the making of the order.

You will be pleased to hear in conclusion, Mr Hanson, that the Government are making good progress on implementing the devolution deal to Greater Manchester. The draft order we are considering this afternoon is a fairly significant milestone, contributing to greater prosperity in Greater Manchester and opening the door for what we want to see, which is a more balanced economy and continuing economic success for Greater Manchester, which is already playing such an important part in driving forward the northern powerhouse agenda and the economic development of this country. On that basis, I commend the draft order to the Committee.

[Jim McMahon]

Thank you, Mr Hanson. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I put on record a declaration of interest. My father is a truck driver who used to work for the Greater Manchester waste disposal authority until its transfer to Viridor under the private finance initiative contracted there. Unlike me, he has a proper job, as I think he would say.

I am pleased to see the order, which I see as a tidying-up exercise in many ways. I have always felt that the myriad outside bodies that were the legacy of the joint committees that were established in Greater Manchester did have room for efficiencies to be made, particularly with back-office facilities around HR, finance, payroll, comms and press, marketing and such areas. That will provide a capacity to support the Mayor in their functions.

It would good to get some clarification—today or in writing—on the transfer of assets and liabilities for the waste disposal contract to the Greater Manchester combined authority. At the moment, the Greater Manchester waste disposal authority is made up of nine of the 10 local authorities within Greater Manchester, with Wigan outside that agreement. There would have been room for Wigan to opt into that quite recently, particularly when the private finance initiative contract was being negotiated in 2009, but Wigan local authority members decided, for their own reasons, that it was not for them.

If any assets or liabilities are being transferred to the Greater Manchester combined authority, which is owned by the 10 local authorities in effect, any assets in particular cannot be divided by 10, when the value has been created by the nine local authorities. I accept that is quite a technical point but it is quite important in tracking where those assets and liabilities will ultimately go.

On paper, talking about waste disposal sounds like a very dry subject. It is, but it also involves a great deal of public money. When the PFI contract was agreed in 2009, at £3.8 billion that was the largest PFI in the whole of Europe. We are now only eight years into that contract, so a significant amount of money is being transferred.

There is a link to the order that we will consider later today at 6pm, which relates to the precepting responsibilities, but this order is primarily about the levying responsibilities across transport and waste, which, as I said before, makes complete sense.

I will address my final comments to the mayoral development areas. I again support that principle. The ability of local areas to determine for themselves where their development priorities are is absolutely in the spirit of the type of devolution that we have been pushing for.

From a Greater Manchester perspective, when the call went out from Government I know a request was made for a number of the town centres and business parks to be designated as enterprise zones to enhance development in those areas. Unfortunately, under the criteria the Government were not able to allow for that. It struck me at the time that while it might not be a national priority for those areas to be designated as some kind of development zone, our town centres in Greater Manchester absolutely need a focused energy and determination from some authority to ensure that development can be kick-started. Instinctively, it feels like that the combined authority level is the right one at which to do that.

Again, I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm whether the Mayor will be given powers in the way that enterprise zones have tax reliefs and tax incentives in place when they are approved by Government. Will the Mayor have the same type of powers to give tax relief and business rate incentives within mayoral development zones in those areas? If that is not provided for in this statutory instrument, will that be brought forward in the future?