King’s Speech (4th Day)

Lord Heseltine Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Heseltine (Con)]

My Lords, it is with some trepidation that I follow the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. It is some time since, in another place, I suffered under the lash of his distinguished father, but I learned my trade the hard way and I am delighted to see him in full flow.

I congratulate the Minister on his maiden speech; it was a formidable tour de force and historic analysis of what is wrong with this country. It was well prepared and well polished, but no one should really be surprised because we have heard it from the Front Benches opposite for generation after generation. It is all about the problems of this country and our history and what they intend to do about it, but what they intend to do about it is a very pale part of the speech.

I will give noble Lords just two examples, the first being the skills agency the Prime Minister has talked about today. I was in the other House when we created the Manpower Services Commission. This is just another national quango set up by government for government, centrally to impose policies on somebody else. Look at the skills agenda.

I appreciate the compulsion that Ministers and people on the Opposition Benches feel to lash out at regulation. I was responsible for deregulation, now 20 years ago. I published every one, 3,000 of them. I wrote to every trade association, “I’m your man. Tell me the changes you want. Here is the codicil; give me the examples of change you want”. I did not get one single reply. Why? It is because regulation is about the quality of civilised life in our country. It is about the environment, health, safety and a whole range of other issues which politicians trespass upon with care.

There is no greater example—if I may say, a lacuna in the Minister’s speech—than Brexit. We have had Brexiteers up to our ears over the last eight years. Where are all the regulations that were holding us back? Did they not prepare the case? Did they not have an agenda when they set up a department called the ministry of Brexit exiting? Was there not someone there who had a list? Of course not. What is now the story? It is, “We were never given the chance; we haven’t had time. Give us more time”. I think the Minister missed an opportunity in not explaining the damage that Brexit has done and how this Government intend to do something about it.

I want to make a third point: this country is dramatically unlike any other advanced economy. It is top-down dominated. Spending departments, functionally divided, have branch offices in the local authorities. By circular means of one sort or another, they are controlling influences thinking about their functional activities. For what we need today, one has to go back to when I was first in another place, to the Redcliffe-Maud report of 1969. Some 1,300 local authorities became 300; that is broadly where we are today. The Redcliffe-Maud recommendation was for 60 unitary authorities.

We have made massive changes, such as the Labour Government with the mayoralty of London. My noble friend Lord O’Neill, with George Osborne, was deeply involved in the process of introducing mayoral authorities—he is going to speak today. We made massive change. We now have mayoral authorities in the great conurbations of England, governing half of our country. Did the Minister mention the other half—the rest of England? No.

The proposal is simple: we need unitary authorities and an incentive for local people to prepare their plans. They have already done it in the local enterprise partnerships; they are all there in the documentation, ready to go. Where is the money to come from? Of course, there is no new money, but there are buckets of money in the capital programmes now allocated to local government.

The Government should do what George Osborne did and top-slice off it. He did £2 billion a year over six years: £12 billion. That should compare with the new growth fund that the Government are talking about, of £7 billion over five years. It looks like half of what George Osborne did; in just money value, it is about a third of what he did. The money is there if you top-slice it and make local mayoral authorities bid on the basis of plans locally designed by industry, academia and the public sector as to how to make their 60 local economies more effective. That option is available today to the Government, and I can think of no good reason why they do not set the process alight.