Devolution: English Cities

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to contribute to this debate and to join others in expressing warm thanks to my noble friend Lord Heseltine for this report. Like the right reverend Prelate, I rather enjoyed reading it, and not simply as an exercise in nostalgia. It was asserted, perhaps on this side, that we sometimes think of this as an obsession on the part of my noble friend. In fact, we do not; we properly regard it as a mission which he has not given up, and all credit to him for that.

I feel a bit like a Johnny-come-lately. Starting in the 1980s, I have been engaged in these issues for only just over 30 years, rather than going back to the 1960s and 1970s. Before I talk about them, I wish to draw attention to two of my interests. I am chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, and I shall talk about the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, and I was the deputy director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, and I shall talk about private sector involvement in devolution, which also goes back to the 1980s.

At the end of the 1980s, when I was deputy director-general, we very nearly succeeded, on the basis of an understanding on the part of government that comparisons with other countries included an adverse comparison of the relative strength of the business community to generate infrastructure and investment and a focus on private sector decision-making at a local level, which we lacked. Part of the argument, which my noble friend was engaged in, was that we should have public law chambers as they do in most parts of Europe and around the world. We did not take that view. We took the view that we could achieve some of the benefits that public law chambers of commerce achieve while retaining private law status but taking responsibility for public functions.

I know from discussions with colleagues at the British Chambers of Commerce today that, in a sense, that is where they still are. They do not want to become part of government. They want functions that impact on the business community—including business investment, the promotion of trade and exports, and the development of skills—to be something that the business community can take responsibility for, including a responsibility for funding that activity. Back in the 1980s, we did it on the basis that one penny on the new national non-domestic rate would be available principally for the business community to invest in the training and skills of their community. In that sense, it is not unlike taking responsibility now for the apprenticeship levy or something of that kind.

I know that the chambers of commerce would want to take on this kind of responsibility. In the past, when the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce and Industry was working hand in glove with Birmingham local authorities, it was able to achieve dramatic things; including, for example, the establishment of Birmingham Airport, the National Exhibition Centre and so on. It can do more of these things in future. The problem is that government does not trust local bodies, and that extends to local business bodies.

That is where we were in the 1980s. The then Government had established local enterprise agencies, which should have been part of the responsibility of chambers of commerce, and then let them go and stopped the funding for them. We were in discussion with the Government about supporting the chambers of commerce to do training and enterprise promotion. They said that chambers of commerce were variable across the country and patchy, with quality differing from place to place. They therefore set up training and enterprise councils, which took all the money and employed all the people—who coincidentally were most of the people who used to work for the Manpower Services Commission. About 10 years later, training and enterprise councils were abolished on the grounds that they were variable in quality across the country and not reliable. That is exactly what happens time and again. It happened to local employer networks; it happened to training and enterprise councils; and it happened to Business Link in due course, which my noble friend established.

At some point in the past 30 years, we should have had the confidence to say that if the Government give the responsibility, funding and accountability to the business community, it will step up to the plate. We should not be surprised if it does not step up to the plate, when we do not give it the responsibilities and the funding. That is what I think we should do.

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough have a combined authority that embraces cities and countryside. It is not large; if anything, in my book it is sometimes too small for the 30-year vision required to be achieved. Arguably, for the Cambridgeshire-Peterborough city region to be looked at holistically, it is always a good idea to think about Suffolk and Norfolk alongside them to achieve scale. None the less, we are where we are. However, what should not have happened is that we ended up with one more tier of government. Parts of my old constituency have a parish council and the district council, and then there is the county council and the combined authority. People wonder what on earth they need all those tiers of government to do.

To echo what my noble friend said, at the very least the responsibilities of the county council and the combined authority must be put together—perhaps with those of the police and crime commissioner, as my noble friend suggested. Certainly, we must do that, because otherwise we are asking the combined authority to set out its vision—for example, in the non-statutory spatial strategy—without it being able to deliver it; it does not have the wherewithal to make it happen. The same is especially true of the local transport plan, and to some extent true of training and skills. If we give the combined authority and the mayor those wider responsibilities and the capacity to deliver, we will be impressed by what Cambridgeshire and Peterborough can achieve.

We are benefiting from the rebuilding of the A14 and the Government’s sponsorship of the east-west rail link from Cambridge to Oxford, but we are not asking in the long run to have more money from a limited government pot. What we want in a place such as Cambridge, which has the highest employment rate for a city in Europe, is to be able to invest for ourselves and through tax increment financing to demonstrate that the private sector borrowing that supports that can be repaid with interest. I hope that we can tackle that.

As my noble friend illustrates on page 67 of his report, we know that it is down to us to deal with the deep inequalities that continue to persist, literally only a few miles apart, in a city such as Cambridge. We know that we have to deal with that and that it is not somebody else’s responsibility.