Lord Heseltine
Main Page: Lord Heseltine (Conservative - Life peer)Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]
Lord Heseltine Excerpts
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
I support my noble friend’s amendment. I was not expecting to speak on this but, if I may, I want to challenge the view expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Deben. As far as I can see, it is a view supported very strongly by former Secretaries of State, who think that basically local government should be led by people like them, ideally swishing round in cars and flying off to Japan to make contracts and so on. However, that is not what local government is about; it is about a sense of place.
The noble Lord, Lord Deben, seemed to suggest that local government has declined since the 1960s—when I came into local government, and stayed with it right through to the 1990s—because of a lack of local leadership, but I say to the noble Lord that the primary reason local government has declined is that my Government to some extent but his Government notoriously have taken away our powers, our responsibility, our finance and our accountability. They have centralised us in field after field after field, and have tried their best to turn us into postboxes of central government decisions.
I respect the position taken by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, in favour of devolution. However, if his answer is that leading local authorities should be strong people—mainly male, I guess, but not necessarily so—who are just like Secretaries of State so that in local government we get a mirror image of what is happening in central government, then I say as someone who has lived my life in and trained in local government that that is not the route that I want to follow. A sense of place means collaborative, consensual arrangements that local people want and support. If they choose to have a mayor, that is fine by me, but if that does not fit their sense of place then it should not be imposed on them by the swagger factor.
Lord Heseltine (Con)
I have listened to the noble Baroness with interest and I wonder whether she has not caught up with the news that both Alan Johnson, a former Cabinet Minister in the Labour Government, and Liam Byrne, the very perceptive Chief Secretary who noticed that there was no money left, have said that in the circumstances of there being mayors they would be interested in a nomination. The fact is that creating the job of mayor has attracted a degree of interest at the very highest level in government and opposition politics. To me, one of the attractive ideas of a mayor is that it will be a ladder up which budding national leaders will climb on their way to another place, or it will be the opportunity for people who have served at the highest levels of government to serve their local communities with all the experience that they have gained in government, having ceased to be members of a Cabinet. That is an interesting evolution of our constitutional practices that would enrich the political process. I very much hope that my noble friend will resist Amendments 3 and 4 because—let us be frank—they are wrecking amendments.
This Government were elected on the basis that there would be a deal—I quote the noble Lord, Lord Smith—of a sort “unimaginable” to local government in his experience. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said on this issue, we have taken power away from local government decade after decade after decade without a referendum and without any sort of consultation; we did it because we did not think local government was doing a good enough job. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, rightly said that it was done by both parties and admitted that her party played a part. But her party never did anything to restore any of the powers that my party had taken away; it loved it, shared in it and wallowed in it, as it exercised the powers that we had extricated from local government into the hands of central government.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill (LD)
Can the noble Lord explain what it is that is wrecking in Amendments 3 or 4?
Lord Heseltine
The first point on Amendment 3 is that it removes the nature of the deal with government that there will be a mayor. It is designed to remove that condition. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, has a different version, which has another delaying process, about consultation. But what does that mean? It means referenda. It means consultation of one sort or another. This is a delaying process.
I have no doubt that noble Lords all over this House are fully aware that from one end of England to another local councillors, leaders and industrial partners from the local enterprise partnerships are way past the debate that we are having today. They are actually designing the deals that will make this a reality. In his speech last week, the Chancellor listed Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and the possibility of the West Midlands as being already in the process of evolving the most detailed proposals to put to the Government. The condition behind all that is a directly elected mayor, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, said in this House not that long ago. It is a deal. He said: “We did not particularly like directly elected mayors but the offer was too good”. I therefore urge noble Lords to consider carefully whether we should be concentrating on whether there is a mayor, because there will be no deal in the circumstances we are talking about unless there is a mayor. What we should be talking about is how to ensure that the deal that is done is of the scale and level of imagination that meets the extraordinary offer that has been made.
I was surprised and disappointed when the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, asked: “How can one man, or woman, cope with such a situation?”. Look outside this country and show me one where there is any alternative form of local government except what the Bill is proposing. There are senators in America with huge power. Germany has the Länder and France the departments. They seem perfectly capable of handling this massive responsibility. Are the English so impoverished as people that we have no one in our country capable of being the equal of what every advanced economy seems perfectly happy to deal with?
Anyone who has looked at this legislation will know that this is not the creation of a dictator. The checks and balances that exist within the negotiation that has been concluded with Manchester, for example, are very clear. The existing councils that make up the combined authority retain very large powers. They are part of an arrangement with the elected mayor that provides very substantial checks and balances.
The heart of this matter is that the Chancellor, in arguing for his deals, is looking, as my noble friend Lord Deben said, for a range of men and women capable of exercising leadership and appealing to the local community across the board. That is what we hope to see. In doing that, there is an offer from government to transfer power in a way that is outside any experience that any of us have had, with the exception, partially, of London.
Those of us who care about this issue are very familiar with Leicester and Liverpool, both of which have Labour mayors. One is a former Member of another place and the other a council leader who persuaded his colleagues to allow him to become a mayor. In talking to those who hold this responsibility, I have learned that their experience of the change in stature that takes place when they are seen as being a mayor—an internationally understood and recognised position—is extraordinary.
I hope very much that we in this House can perhaps move on from the minutiae of the Bill to the implementation of the legislation at the greatest possible speed. I really hope that your Lordships will catch up with where local government and the local enterprise partnerships are already. They are making this happen now. It is an exciting prospect that I never thought to see happen.
Lord McKenzie of Luton
Forgive me for interrupting, but before the noble Lord sits down will he clarify something? A statement was made at the other end that, if an area wants a deal that is not the size of Greater Manchester, it may not have to have an elected mayor. Can we have some clarity on what the lesser deal is that does not cause the imposition of an elected mayor?
Lord Heseltine
That is a very good question and rightly asked. Where the difficultly comes is that no one is imposing a deal. The Government are not saying that A, B, C and D must happen—the noble Lord shakes his head, but I had the privilege to sit in some of the negotiating discussions that have taken place and know that no Minister is saying that this is the prescription. That is what we would have done. All my life, that is what happened: it was not a question of whether an area wanted power over housing; it was a question of filling in 75 forms before building a council house. I had all those forms on my wall in the Department of the Environment—70 forms, about the slope of the roof and the pitch of the eaves. That is what we did. And here we are talking about trying to impose some sort of structure of deal in the detail, which the Government are not going to do.
Lord Woolmer of Leeds
My Lords, the noble Lord spoke with great passion and is very well informed. For my own part of the country, West Yorkshire, I am very supportive of the proposal for elected mayors, but much of his argument was that there is no alternative to that wherever you are in the country; in other words, this model really ought to be adopted everywhere. If that is true, why does it not apply to individual local authorities? I am not advocating it, because I do not agree with it. For example, in my neck of the woods, you have Leeds, Bradford, Calderdale—which is Halifax—and Kirklees, which is Huddersfield and Wakefield. If the only way to run a local authority is to have an elected mayor, is the noble Lord saying that that applies to all major local authorities? As we know, this legislation relates not to all services and local authority activity but to certain strategic powers, where the case that he makes with great passion and history is persuasive. However, if his arguments are generalised to imply that you can run a significant-sized authority only by having a mayor and you cannot get the same thing with what we now call the leader and cabinet model, is he advocating mayors within combined authority mayoralties?
Lord Heseltine
The noble Lord asks me for my personal opinion on that matter and I give him my answer: yes. I think that we would have been incomparably better over 50 years if, instead of taking power away from those authorities, we had concentrated on their leadership and performance. Yes, that would have meant differentiating in the early stages about the financial support that one entrusted them with, but it would have left them with the potential of the power that we have taken away. I have no doubt that if we could rewrite the last 50 years we would have seen much stronger local government. Frankly, for those of us who remember Redcliffe-Maud: well, he was right, wasn’t he?
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, I support Amendments 3 and 4. I have listened with interest to what the noble Lords, Lord Heseltine and Lord Deben, have said. The amendments are about flexibility—the whole point of devolution is flexibility—and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, let the cat out of the bag when he said that you would only have a deal if you have a mayor. That is diktat, not a deal: it means that you have to have a particular model. In this new world of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, the conurbations of Leeds, Sheffield and others are coming back to a mayor. That is because they know that they can only have a deal with a mayor.
Not only politicians but business people said on BBC Radio Sheffield this morning, “We do not necessarily want a mayor. It is unfair that we are being told to have a mayor”— particularly only a few years after the people had a voice and said no. This is what Amendment 4 is about. What arrogance to say that this place knows what the better governance arrangements are for cities and conurbations elsewhere in this country. Again, it marks the political class as being distant from the people whose lives it wishes to improve.
I was surprised when the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said that he was erecting a ladder for politicians to climb up—the very thing that local governments have done which has failed their areas. It was a very strange thing to say. Again quoting directly from what noble Lords have said, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said that we need to do something new. As someone who led a council relatively recently, I agree. However, something new does not necessarily mean one issue in a straitjacket called a mayor.
Are mayors so successful? Tell that to the people of Doncaster, where the Government had to send in commissioners when they had—and still have—a mayor. Tell that to the people of Stoke-on-Trent and Hartlepool, who have voted to no longer have a directly elected mayor. Go down the road and tell that to the people of Tower Hamlets, who have a directly elected mayor. It is not even a panacea internationally. Some cities in the USA have become bankrupt even though they have a directly elected mayor.
The amendment is not against directly elected mayors in areas where people wish to have them. I would not stop people who feel it appropriate and wish to have a directly elected mayor in their area from having one. However, it is arrogant to say to people who may come up with a new model that works for their area that they cannot have the powers because we have decided that their governance model is not correct. It is not only politicians who are saying that. The PwC report by Jon House, its head of local government and devolution, which was published only a couple of weeks ago, said that you have fallen into the trap of moving away from innovation and outcomes when you enforce one model of governance and people start talking about that.
I support the amendments. Amendment 3 gives flexibility and allows for the kind of innovation that the noble Lords, Lord Heseltine and Lord Deben, have talked about—I am sure other models will emerge. Secondly, what kind of Bill sets out the way a locality is governed and administered on the people’s behalf, but does not ask the people what they think about it?
Lord Shipley
My Lords, this amendment would require meetings and documents concerning the discharge of functions by the mayor or the combined authority to be accessible to the press and public unless they were necessarily excluded by existing law. This is important to ensure transparency of decision-making. The Minister has said on several occasions this afternoon that an elected mayor would be a single point of accountability. It is therefore important that that accountability is transparent.
The amendment talks about the discharge of functions in transferring any functions of the mayoral combined authority to the mayor under new Sections 107D or 107E introduced by the Bill. New Section 107D talks about the general functions of mayors. It says:
“The Secretary of State may by order make provision for any function of a mayoral combined authority to be a function exercisable only by the mayor”.
New Section 107E, which relates to the policing functions of mayors, says:
“The Secretary of State may by order provide for the mayor for the area of a combined authority to exercise functions of a police and crime commissioner in relation to that area”.
On the face of it, the Secretary of State can require a further centralisation of power to the elected mayor from a mayoral combined authority, and it is clear that the function would be exercisable only by that single person. Therefore, if the power lies with a single person and there is a single point of accountability, it really does matter that that person and the decisions they make are seen by the general public to be properly accounted for.
The aim of Amendment 14A is to allow the Minister to counteract any slide towards behind-closed-doors decision-making. That seems to be all the more important given that, as the Bill stands now, overview and scrutiny applies only once decisions have been made and not while they are being discussed. I have a very serious concern that the Bill could be used to reduce the rights of the press and public to access meetings and information, without which the general public may not be properly informed or engaged. I do not want more and more decisions made behind closed doors. The Minister herself said in Committee in reply to our Amendment 42A that,
“the decision-making has to be in public”,—[Official Report, 29/6/15; col. 1810.]
but of course it is not just the announcement of a decision but the discussion that can matter profoundly, in that the discussion can explain how the decision was reached.
I fear that the Bill as drafted runs the risk of encouraging further secrecy outside the scope of the Local Government Act 1972 and subsequent regulations. Therefore, I hope that the Minister will agree that we should have on the face of the Bill the right of the press, the media generally and the public to attend meetings and to receive information, as is currently the standard within local government. I beg to move.
Lord Heseltine
My Lords, I see reference in the amendments to public access to officials of the council. I am opposed to that concept. I have had the privilege of serving in Government after Government and value hugely the advice that comes from officials, but I have never believed that officials always give you agreed advice. Some do, but the composition of such advice starts at a relatively low level in the official machine. Committees and dialogues take place and a consensus emerges. That becomes the agreement that officials put to Ministers.
Often, one finds oneself in disagreement with that advice. Some of the most rewarding experiences that I have taken part in are when you get the officials to break down the consensus which has been put to you. You may find that the more-established and long-serving officials have taken a rather conservative view, while some of the younger, more energetic, adventurous or imaginative—you can use any language you like—have a more dramatic option which has been suppressed in the process. In the end, it is for Ministers to take their choice: that is what they are paid to do.
If we were to have full public access to the official process, the consequence would be that Ministers would try to ensure that they got the advice they wanted. The easy way to do that is to politicise the Civil Service or the officials in local government and to ensure that the people providing the advice do not leave you with any great issues of controversy, which will be fanned by the press the moment that they get their hands on them.
Although I am in favour of the thrust towards openness and accountability in local government, as in national government, and of the facts being widely available, I am not in favour of there being exposure of the official debate which takes place in providing advice to councillors or, in my experience, Ministers.
Lord Shipley
Perhaps the noble Lord will comment on the fact that within local government now, officers of councils are required to give advice publicly when full council meetings or council committee meetings are held, so there would be nothing new in that happening. I understand his concern about official advice being given at the point at which ideas are being developed, but will he bear in mind that the amendment states that,
“the Secretary of State shall make regulations”?
Broadly speaking, that is designed to prevent a slide towards access to the press and the general public being denied through the structures now being created.
Lord Heseltine
Unlike the noble Lord, I have never served in local government, so I cannot speak with his experience. As I understand it, officials give advice in public, but I do not think that meetings of officials before they formulate that advice are open to public or press scrutiny. I was addressing that concern when I intervened.
Lord Scriven
My Lords, I have some practical experience of this as a former council leader. When I became leader of the council in Sheffield, we had an economic development agency which met in private. Everything was in private—advice, meetings and papers—because it was deemed to be somehow arm’s length and pseudo public sector. Through a very hard-fought and long battle, I thought that it was absolutely right that that was dealt with in public, because huge amounts of public money were being spent on behalf of the people of Sheffield. The reason to write this in the Bill is to open up the advice and the decisions made.
I hear what the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, says, but exactly the same arguments were used in another place when what became the Freedom of Information Act was published. With freedom of information, a lot of the advice given now could be made public. This is just the next step concerning that type of advice. I see no reason why, if someone wishes to understand a decision in the area where they live, where multi-billions of pounds are spent on their behalf to improve their lives, they cannot be privy to some of the advice given before someone makes a decision. It is really important that both the press and the public understand the process that has been carried out to reach a decision, not just the decision itself.
My recent practical experience in local government, in an area of economic development, makes me believe that this is the right thing to do. Open decision-making is good decision-making; closed decision-making is bad decision-making, on the whole. It is really important for the press and the public to be able to understand both the decision and the process of how their taxes are spent—to know how decisions are made to improve their area. It is for those reasons, both the practical ones based on what I saw in Sheffield and to take freedom of information one step further, that it is really important that people can understand the advice given to and the process followed by politicians, the mayor or the combined authority to enable them to come to a decision.