Economic Leadership for Cities

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in the register that my wife is the statutory Deputy Mayor of London and a local councillor in London. So I welcome this debate, and thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, as I know first-hand that great cities need great economic leadership.

I find it particularly interesting to debate this issue here in the House of Lords, where cities are perhaps underrepresented relative to the countryside. This is partly because of our age profile, as young people go to cities. But the truth is that the cost of houses means that many noble Lords cannot live in London. Indeed, the cost of living in cities is generally higher than outside them, partly because of higher housing costs. For that reason, the London living wage is higher than the minimum wage.

The Government’s emphasis is on building new garden cities; one to be built in Bicester was announced recently. I declare another interest in a property company building homes there. Garden cities will certainly have less air pollution than bigger city centres, where levels of dangerous PM2.5 particles are much higher. Perhaps we can give the Green Party some credit for helping us to focus on building new towns that will be cleaner and greener.

A city is only as good as its people and we have to ensure that the younger generations are capable of economic leadership so that our great cities compete globally. That is why I am so happy about the work being done to improve economic and business competence among young people. I have been very impressed by a fantastic charity called Young Enterprise, which does exactly that. It operates in nearly half the schools in the entire country, teaching children to operate small businesses. That is exciting because more young people should be encouraged to go out and get some real experience, take some risks and see how far their new ideas go. That way, we will be bringing through a much bigger and more talented group of people, with knowledge of economic leadership.

There are reasons why we are not yet seeing enough young people coming through with the right leadership skills. They should experience leadership in school. But between supply teachers, a lack of autonomy for good teachers, a wide variety of first languages and large class sizes, children do not get the leadership they need. It is extraordinarily difficult for a teacher to both teach the material and inspire the students. This is something that people just do not talk about enough.

We know that cities work well. They make people more efficient. As they get more efficient, they become more prosperous. Will cities become the new heartlands of Conservative voters? But what is a city? Could a whole group of people and businesses in the countryside connected to the internet operate as efficiently as a city—but without the traffic jams and bad air pollution that we suffer from in cities?

We know how important cities are for a nation’s economic growth. In the UK, cities occupy 9% of the land but provide 61% of the output. But do we need different economic leadership in each of our cities? If economic leadership means inspiring young people to contribute to the economy, I am thoroughly in favour of it. If it means the ability to come up with new taxes, I am against it. The most valuable economic leadership comes from the family. No economic leadership from any city could ever compete with taxpayers deciding what to do with their own money.