Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Heseltine Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I said on Amendments 1 and 2 that we should avoid being overly strict on what structure and governance can be proposed and approved, but we need to be very careful that, in not being too prescriptive, we do not end up giving the Secretary of State carte blanche to do whatever he wishes. There has to be a set of principles by which proposals can be judged. We have set out four in this amendment: democratic accountability, the support of local government electors, the need to avoid risk to the proper functioning of local government within the area of the elected mayor, and that it should not be an automatic requirement that there is an elected mayor.

We should note the context here. In Greater Manchester there is to be an elected mayor without either a referendum or a full consultation with local people, and with an interim mayor elected by a handful of council leaders, not by the general public. There appears to be little evidence of positive public consent to the governance structure. Indeed, a referendum on an elected mayor in the city of Manchester received a no vote very recently. We need to be very careful that we do not introduce new structures that, because they lack democratic legitimacy, could put at risk the devolution of power that we want to achieve. The Government have to explain why, if an assembly is right for London, it is not right for Greater Manchester and other parts of the country.

As they stand, the proposals in the Bill run the very serious risk of creating a one-party state in some parts of the country without adequate checks and balances in the governance structure. Let me explain. It would not be good for democracy or for accountability for an elected mayor from one party to be able to appoint a deputy mayor of the same party from the combined authority, and then to chair that combined authority—dominated by that same party—with the overview and scrutiny function led by a chair of that same party and dominated by members of that same party. This is dangerous, because the only connection with the governance of the combined authority for an elector is to vote for the mayor, but nobody else. We want to change the electoral process to include the combined authority itself. That is because we do not wish to replace one form of centralism with another. This is about accountability, which cannot be guaranteed with the proposals that the Government are making. Our amendments are designed to improve the Bill’s failures in this respect.

Let me be very clear: this is not about refusing to accept the concept of elected mayors. The concept can work, with the right governance structures around such a mayor—indeed, the Government have a mandate to introduce them. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that the election of one person for the whole of a combined authority area would of itself be sufficient to secure public consent to the new arrangements.

We must amend the Bill to improve it in order to make the proposed structures more accountable, with checks and balances which everyone understands. We shall therefore examine the way in which overview and scrutiny will work, particularly as regards the rights of the public, the press and the media to obtain information, and the rights of opposition councillors to call for papers. We do not want to end up with meetings of combined authorities in which the business is conducted in secret pre-meetings composed of just one party, and then announced to the press and public as decisions in short public sessions with little debate or discussion.

All our amendments to the Bill are tabled with the aim of improving it and enabling it to earn broad public consent. It needs to be amended to achieve that and the requirements and safeguards recommended in subsections (3) and (4) of the new clause proposed in Amendment 3 are extremely important in that regard. In moving Amendment 3, I have spoken also to Amendments 9 and 10.

[Lord Heseltine (Con)]

My Lords, I have worked with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and I know of his long experience and dedication to this cause. However, I disagree with the consequences of what he is asking your Lordships to accept.

We are looking at a system of local government which has not delivered the necessary standards in a whole range of fields. In my life as a politician, I have seen how we have ruthlessly taken power away from local government and centralised it in Whitehall departments. I see present many noble Lords and noble Baronesses who supported that. The reason we did that was because the standards of local provision were in our view inadequate. We may have been wrong, but whether it was my party and the Housing Corporation, which I think was established in the 1970s, or the academies which the Labour Party introduced under the leadership of Tony Blair, the same basic premise has always applied—namely, that local government was not up to the job of delivering the services to the standard that central government believes in.

We now have an historic opportunity—it is historic, as we discussed on Second Reading—to create locally a standard of service and a scale of delivery which can produce results which reflect local strengths and weaknesses, and which is of a different order from that which exists today. The great dilemma I hear expressed is that, time and again, noble Lords taking part in this debate assume that we are trying to recreate powers for local government as it is. That would be a great mistake and would not command the support that the thrust of this Bill is trying to achieve.

We are trying to create organisations of a scale and resource, and with the leadership qualities, that can compete on a world scale. We are looking at the départements of France, the states of the United States and the Länder of Germany. We know that to maximise the endeavour of this country we must have the ability to compete in a whole range of activities—education, economic generation and perhaps health—so we are looking to attract men and women who command respect and have the capacity and the leadership qualities to change the public perception of local government.

We hear about accountability. What accountability is there in local government today? The noble Lord referred to a “one-party state” but two-thirds of the constituencies that elect another place never change allegiance. The battles are fought in the marginal constituencies. In a vast number of councils in this country, the councillors never change from one party to another. A significant number of councils do not change allegiance either. So if one is talking about changing, the present system does not do it.

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[Lord Heseltine]

I am most grateful. I think that the noble Baroness is perhaps not old enough to know this but the real problem was the Redcliffe-Maud inquiry of the 1960s, which the Labour Party of the time established, and which set out the model for local government in this country. It replaced 1,400 local authorities with about 60 and it is towards that model, created by a Labour Government of the 1960s, that we have been progressively moving.

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[Lord Heseltine]

My Lords, we are trying to create world-class prestigious authorities to negotiate on behalf of our major urban areas a massive range of opportunities. I ask the noble Baroness what she thinks about having a directly elected Bristol mayor in Tokyo negotiating a billion-pound investment for the city when, in the fortunes of life, the mayoralty is relatively politically unpopular—and they will be, as we all are. The Japanese negotiators will say, “It is all very well for you to come all this way, but you may not be the mayor in six months’ or a year’s time. We have seen someone from one of the German Länder where there is no question about their future. They all know where they will be. So I am sorry, Mr Mayor of Bristol, you go home and sort out your future and then come back to us”. That is a classic example of exactly what we are not trying to achieve in the new dynamism of localism.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

Will the noble Lord help us out? The fact that a mayor has to be elected means that the individual’s circumstances are uncertain at certain times. The noble Lord is surely not suggesting that we should do away with elections for elected mayors.

[Lord Heseltine]

The mayor would be speaking in his position as an elected official and in normal circumstances he would be able to refer to his successor as representing a policy that was the Bristolian policy. If the issue is, as suggested, that the mayoralty may go and a completely new form and structure of government take its place, what is to say that the devolved responsibilities that had been associated with the mayor would be retained after the abolition of the mayoralty? It injects a degree of uncertainty that is wholly unrealistic in the competitive world in which this country is engaged.

[Baroness Janke]

I would like to respond to that. Basically, at the moment there is huge confusion about mayors. The meaning of “mayor” depends on the context. I know a mayor of 500 residences in France—he is still the mayor. We have a Lord Mayor of Bristol and there is the Mayor of Bath. The Bristol mayor, should we have a combined authority, will not be the mayor of the combined authority because the other authorities will not support that. I think that we are getting really hung up on the business of the name. Under the system of governance, I as a leader had exactly the same powers as the existing mayor. What we are talking about in terms of devolving powers is actually about power, not about personalities and names for civic leaders, and not about vesting individuals with celebrity and enormous powers over public money with no accountability whatever. The people of the city and the people of the combined authority are paramount. They are the electors and, if they want to change the system of governance, we should listen to them.