Draft Greater Manchester Combined Authority (Fire and Rescue Functions) Order 2017 Draft Greater Manchester Combined Authority (Transfer of Police and Crime Commissioner Functions to the Mayor) Order 2017

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 13th March 2017 General Committees

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. The Minister will be delighted to know that I will not repeat at length my arguments against the course that the Government have taken on police and fire mergers. I will, however, begin by saying that the core of our objection last year concerned local demand and local consent. We thought then—and still think today—that it is wrong to force a merger of police and fire authorities on an area that does not want one.

Thankfully, that does not apply to these draft orders, which have received the consent of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and are part of a wider devolution deal. That deal should enable the Manchester city region to adapt, to the extent that any level of government can, to the extremely difficult combination of reduced service funding and increased service demand that they will face over coming years. We welcome the devolution settlement as a way to bring powers together at a level where they can be used effectively and their use can be held accountable effectively.

There is a long history of local authorities working together across Greater Manchester, with or without a permanent statutory framework, which bodes well for such reforms. That history of co-operation in major cities is one that the Conservative party has not generally had much respect for, so I am delighted by the apparent change of heart. We still have serious concerns about the fragmentation and incoherence of this Government’s attempts at devolution within England thus far, but that need not prevent us from endorsing reforms if they go in the right direction.

I hope that none of us assumes that the devolution process has gone far enough to put in place genuine devolution to Manchester. Our local areas need more control over revenue raised locally, so that such deals will not simply transfer responsibility for cuts made by central Government. Governments should never pass the buck without passing the bucks. Local government needs a system for national funding that is fair, transparent and based on real need—not sweetheart deals with Ministers at meetings in cars outside Downing Street. That is particularly important for areas such as fire and rescue and policing, where community safety is paramount.

More generally, the current model of piecemeal reform is inadequate. Restructuring should not be imposed from the top down and cannot be based only on local authorities going cap in hand to Ministers either. We need to make devolution the default if we are to open up public services to the experience and creativity of local areas and truly demonstrate our trust in the people who are most affected by changes in policy.

The Greater Manchester Combined Authority consent documents noted that the draft orders

“will need to be in place by February 2017 at the latest to allow sufficient time for Mayoral candidates to be fully aware of the powers of the elected Mayor and to prepare a manifesto.”

Clearly, that has not happened, since it is now the middle of March and some of the legislation determining the new Mayor’s powers is still not fully confirmed. Does the Minister have an explanation?

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I am sure my hon. Friend agrees that not only the mayoral candidates need to be sighted of the Mayor’s powers but the Manchester electorate, many of whom are completely baffled by what the Mayor will and will not be able to do.

[Lyn Brown]

I completely and utterly agree. My hon. Friend made the point better than I could.

More broadly, this is the first case—apart from the now well-established arrangements in Greater London—where full accountability and power relating to policing will be assigned to the elected Mayor of a city region. The fact that responsibility for fire and rescue services will be mixed in at the same time makes it doubly significant, because the Mayor of London does not have direct responsibility for fire and rescue. There is now an urgent case to be made that the new Mayor of Greater Manchester will have a truly unprecedented degree of authority across those two public services. It will be an important test case for future structural reform.

It is important to note that the offices of Mayor of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and of police and crime commissioner for the area have already been combined to some extent for almost two years now, because Tony Lloyd, Labour’s elected PCC, was appointed as interim Mayor on 29 May 2015. He has served in both capacities admirably and has set an excellent standard, which I am sure my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) will live up to, starting on 8 May.

To sum up, we support the draft orders. They will help to cement the devolution settlement for Greater Manchester, which has received the agreement of local authorities and residents in and around that great city. I hope that members of all parties will join me in wishing the new Mayor well in helping the city region to deal with the undoubted challenges of the future.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, in a debate on a matter as important as this to me and the many people who live in Greater Manchester and will be affected by these changes.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, I very much welcome the thrust of what the Government are trying to do, particularly pushing power out of Whitehall and Westminster and ensuring that decisions affecting our lives are made much closer to where we are. I echo her words by paying tribute to all those who have been involved—not only Tony Lloyd, the interim Mayor, who has done an excellent job, but the many politicians and officials who have done something quite unique in bringing together a whole range of diverse interests and circumstances across Greater Manchester and getting everybody pointing in the right direction. It has not been easy, and they deserve real credit.

These statutory instruments, quite understandably, concentrate a great deal of power in the hands of one individual. However, I do not think the Government have thought hard enough about the level of scrutiny and accountability that needs to be built into the system. There is considerable confusion among the general public in Greater Manchester about what the reforms mean. I heard what the Minister said about the consultation, but if he means the consultation on the legislation that gave rise to these statutory instruments, he should know that that was advertised on one Government website and ran for just three weeks and garnered only 12 responses, 10 of which were from the same council leaders who set up these arrangements in the first place.

People must be part of the conversation, not least because Greater Manchester is a very diverse area. For example, the needs in my borough of Wigan are very different from those in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston. If we look at the details of what is being devolved to the Mayor and the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities through the statutory instruments, a very large borough such as mine obviously has different fire and rescue needs from the city of Manchester, which is very small. That is why scrutiny and accountability really matter.

The election of the Mayor is long overdue and very welcome, but the only real place where the Mayor will be accountable under these arrangements is to those same 10 council leaders who helped to establish this situation in the first place and who retain a great deal of decision-making power across Greater Manchester. As the Minister will know, ours is an area where one party dominates politics. Obviously, as a Labour Member of Parliament, I am very pleased about that, and long may it continue. However, that poses a question, particularly when we consider that Greater Manchester is intended to be the first of many areas to follow this model: where will the challenge come from? Of the council leaders who currently represent the boroughs across Greater Manchester, only one of them is a woman and only one is from an ethnic minority background.

In relation to the fire authority, I understand from the documents that a committee will be appointed by the Mayor. Members of that committee will be councillors or officers of the 10 borough councils, but they will be proposed by council leaders—the same council leaders who provide the primary scrutiny function for the Mayor. Those posts appear to come with an allowance; I imagine they will be hotly contested among councillors and officers.

We have a very centralised model of council leadership across Greater Manchester; council leaders are responsible for making the vast majority of appointments to their cabinets and to outside bodies as well. In such a system, what incentive does the Minister think there is to challenge decisions that are made? The documents reference the need to mirror the balance of political parties. I would be grateful to the Minister if he elaborated on the Government’s thinking, particularly on making sure that some cross-party scrutiny is built into the system. That is even more important because a report by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations recently found that, in areas where devolution is under way, the voluntary sector has had little or no involvement at all. As a representative of civil society, I think that is unacceptable; it mirrors what I have seen happening in my area of Greater Manchester so far.

I will say something about the police and crime commissioner functions, because I think that all the points I have made are more important in that area than any other. The Mayor will be scrutinised by a police and crime panel, but our police and crime panel in Greater Manchester is made up of those same council leaders I have just referred to. They also make up the Mayor’s cabinet and provide the only channel of accountability and scrutiny for the public outside of election times.

I understand that the diversity problems I have raised may be addressed by the Mayor via the appointment of up to five additional members to that panel—I would be grateful to the Minister if he confirmed that—but even so, it is likely that the scrutiny membership on that panel will be heavily weighted in favour of council leaders. What resources will those additional lay members have to ensure that they can do that job properly and effectively? I say that because Greater Manchester is an incredibly diverse area, which is not currently reflected in our political arrangements.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is raising concerns that a number of us, although we welcome devolution, have raised throughout the process of designing the devolution settlement for Greater Manchester. Does she think it unlikely that, in making appointments to those five lay places, the Mayor will appoint people who are likely to be assertive and critical of his or her decisions?

[Lisa Nandy]

The problem with the vision set out in the documents is that it very much relies on the good will of the person who holds that post. In such an important area, I do not think that is an adequate safeguard.

The same seems to apply to the hearing of police and crime complaints. If those are criminal complaints, I understand that the responsibility will continue to lie with the Independent Police Complaints Commission. However, if they are non-criminal, they will be heard by the local authorities, which will of course take them straight back to the 10 people who sit on all those boards and provide that level of accountability. The Minister is shaking his head; I would be grateful to him if he cleared this up. One of the problems we have had in Greater Manchester is in trying to penetrate the arrangements that have evolved over the past couple of years. Obviously, with an election looming large, it will be helpful for the Committee and the wider public to understand where that outside scrutiny and challenge will come from.

Finally, the documents set out that the Government have not seen fit to do an impact assessment, which is a mistake. They say that there are no plans to build in any kind of review period for the arrangements because there will be elections for the position of Mayor three years after the first election and then four years after that. This could build up real problems threatening the very success of this enterprise. Real devolution has to be based on consent and built from the ground up. The people must be heard.