Draft West Midlands Combined Authority Order 2016
Debate between Lord Spellar and Tim Loughton
Mr Spellar
I was going to come to the hon. Gentleman after I had acknowledged the presence of my co-presenter on the midlands “Sunday Politics”, the hon. Member who comes from the east midlands. Where do the other Members come from? Gloucester is just down the M5, I suppose. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham is clearly deeply interested in the fate of the west midlands.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I went to university in the midlands.
Mr Spellar
That sounds like what people always used to claim when they went to selection conferences: “My great grandfather worked in this town” or whatever. We also have the hon. Members for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich and for Rochester and Strood.
Tim Loughton
Before the right hon. Gentleman takes up more of the Committee’s time going through the CVs of every Government member of the Committee, may I inform him that I spent three glorious years at university in the west midlands? Is not the point that we are representatives of the United Kingdom, we have experiences, whether from devolution or not, in different parts of the United Kingdom, and those experiences are relevant to the Committee’s deliberations about whether devolution should apply to the west midlands? As such, we have every entitlement to be here.
Mr Spellar
The interests of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents may not coincide much with the interests of the constituents of those of us who represent the great conurbation of the west midlands. That is one of the problems: we have had people meddling in local government—this applies on both sides of Parliament, by the way—who in many cases have had no experience in local government. That is why they so cavalierly ride over the wishes of local councillors. In the referendums that were imposed on our great cities, we saw all but one of the cities that were asked turn down the proposition of elected mayors. I shall come back to this in a minute, but interestingly, two of those cities, Coventry and Birmingham, which rejected elected mayors by an overwhelming majority, are now being forced to have one. I understand that that will come later, but it is part and parcel of this scheme, which has many merits in itself. As my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton said, if these things are properly applied, there is great merit in the ideas of having a combined authority and of authorities working together, but not in the context of the enormous cuts that have taken place and that have been directed principally at the metropolitan authorities. I am talking not just about the disproportionate cuts to council spending but about cuts to the West Midlands police authority, which, along with one or two other of the metropolitan authorities, has borne the biggest percentage cuts of any of the authorities, as has the fire service in the west midlands. That may be why there are so few west midlands Members on the Government side prepared to defend this scheme.