Devolution: English Cities

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on his powerful follow-up to his original 2012 report, No Stone Unturned. I make it clear at the beginning that I have no great experience in local government. My contribution to today’s debate flows from four—or maybe three and a half—episodes. The first is the year that I spent chairing a Select Committee of your Lordships’ House looking into citizenship and civic engagement. My noble friend Lady Eaton, who was a doughty member of the committee, will speak later. We looked at some of the underpinnings of the issues that my noble friend referred to in his remarks. The second is my chairmanship of several companies, both in the English regions and abroad—they are all declared in the register of your Lordships’ House—which has given me some economic thoughts. The third is my personal belief that we have created and are creating two nations: London, with its environs in the south-east, and the rest of the country. If that trend continues for the next quarter of a century, we will create strains to our social cohesion that we will come to regret. The last—this is maybe the half—is the fact that, for a very few years, I was the Member of Parliament for Walsall North. This gives me an opportunity to thank my noble friend, who came to speak for me in my by-election all those years ago.

I share the view of my noble friend that, unless we find a way to create at Whitehall a central focus for the regions, the possibility of developing the vision that he has is doomed. There is far too great a danger that critical issues either fall between the departmental cracks or become the subject of departmental turf wars. In the civic engagement committee, we saw this in spades. Our recommendations went to the Department for Education, the Home Office and the Cabinet Office. Indeed, my two noble friends on the Front Bench have in turn replied to them in different ways. We recommended that there ought to be a Minister with overarching responsibility for this matter. I regret to say that all that we have achieved so far is an interministerial working group and we feel relatively neutered.

A second challenge that arises from having no Minister with overarching responsibility is what we came to see in the committee as “initiativitis”. A new Minister arrives. He or she is very keen. They start up something and, a year later, they are moved on. The initiative drifts into oblivion. Nobody checks whether it worked. Nobody sees where there are lessons to be learned that could be deployed across other parts of the firmament and nobody sees whether taxpayers’ money is being wasted. There is a need to find a way to build up the institutional memory, as one might call it, of what works.

In my view, it will not be sufficient for individual regions to go it alone. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, talked about the northern powerhouse and the rail link between Hull, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool. If that is to go ahead, it will require a carefully co-ordinated interregional programme of promotion. The cities that form the heart of the region will need to be supersensitive about how actions taken at the centre will be seen in their constituent parts.

In his report, my noble friend refers to Walsall’s worldwide reputation for the leather industry. Walsall and the other towns that make up the Black Country, all with their own specialties, will need reassurance that their concerns are always being fairly addressed. For example, I chair a company based in Manchester. We can recruit people from Manchester and the immediate surroundings but from further away in that geographic area we cannot. Why not? Because the transport links are insufficiently good, the commuting times are too long and people do not want to move to work for the company as they do not want to spend an hour and a half or two hours sitting on a bus or a tram.

My noble friend will understand from my remarks so far that I support the strategic thrust of his report. I hope he will forgive me if I urge him not to try too much to cram together the uncrammable. For example, he and I have some knowledge of the county of Shropshire. Shropshire makes up part of the West Midlands Combined Authority. Take the small town of Clun, west of Shropshire on the Welsh border, on the one hand, and Nuneaton, on the eastern border of the authority, on the other. Those two places are 90 miles apart. According to Google, it takes two hours to drive from one to the other, and the environmental and societal differences between the two of them are self-evident. I hope very much, therefore, that although we are discussing the important subject of devolution from the centre of the regions, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, pointed out, there is a need for the regions in turn to be thinking about how they are sensitive to the devolution responsibilities that they have—in this case, to Clun and Nuneaton.

That takes me to my final point. Much of my noble friend’s report is focused on economic activity and performance; and the importance of those metrics cannot and should not be overlooked. If there was one overwhelming thread, however, in the evidence we received at the civic engagement committee, it was that people wanted to belong. They all feel that the developments of recent years have left them uprooted and their sense of community undermined. There is a series of qualitative aspects, some of which my noble friend referred to, which need to form part of any devolution settlement. They are not easy to measure, but are critical none the less.

As an example, when I see, on page 62 of the report, the proposal to transfer responsibility for affordable housing to the combined authority mayors, I have my concerns. It is not that I oppose the idea of finding housing for our fellow citizens, but because, far too often, “affordable” housing has come to mean bad housing: poorly designed, poorly constructed and crammed in, with no sense of community involved. In my view, too often we are in danger of creating the slums of 50 years from now. The housing market has become dominated by a handful of housebuilders who, by careful pricing, impose standardised designs all across the country. The glory of the country, and the glory of our communities, lie inter alia in vernacular, distinctive buildings. Today, if, blindfolded, one is taken and helicoptered into a modern housing estate and the blindfold is then removed, one cannot tell whether one is in Truro, Norwich or Stockton-on-Tees.

The need to create communities to which people feel committed and in which they feel proud to live is a vital part of any devolution settlement—and, indeed, as my noble friend said in his opening remarks, vital in the future creation of a society at ease with itself.