Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not sure whether to speak on this first group of amendments or on the second. However, the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, have encouraged me to speak on this amendment. I agreed with everything he said, apart from his conclusion that the reports are not necessary. The point of this amendment, as I understand it, is to open up the debate and the issue about the variety and possibility of many forms of devolution, and I am sure that in that respect we are on the same side as the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine. However, there are problems, and it would be very helpful if, as early as possible, we could get a steer from the Secretary of State and his Minister in this House as to the Government’s thinking.

Mid-sized cities outside the north are driving economic growth, but many face barriers to their full potential. They may have tight boundaries, as the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said; they may have rural neighbours; and they may also be shire districts without the full range of unitary powers. My local authority, Norwich, has artificially tight boundaries of 137,000 people within a built-up area of 270,000 people, and services 1 million people for professional services, shopping, administration and leisure. Boundary extension has naturally been resisted by our rural neighbours, who enjoy our services and a lower council tax, but who gain from the overspill business development generated by the city but located outside it because of those boundaries. Partnership arrangements, such as the city deal based on the greater Norwich area, are and have been our way forward.

So devolution, as all your Lordships have said, will differ not only within and among the north but among mid-sized cities. The unitaries—Southampton and Portsmouth, Bristol and Plymouth, and Luton—have far greater powers and resources than cities such as Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, and Norwich, which are trapped in two-tier shire structures. So the Secretary of State and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, are both absolutely right to want bottom-up proposals that will fit the needs, potential and geography of our inconveniently untidy country. Combined authorities will make sense for most of us, but with whom we will combine—with other towns and cities, adjacent rural districts, and perhaps with a chunk of county involvement as well—and with what additional powers, responsibilities and finance, will all vary from place to place, and rightly so.

I do not doubt—again, as the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said—that the Treasury may try to tidy it all up, indulge its obsession with size, and seek in the long term to superimpose unitary, uniform shire counties or some such at some point, much as the Colonial Office parcelled up Africa along tidy lines after the First World War, with disastrous effects. I hope that the Secretary of State will ask—we certainly will—for a more respectful attitude to the history and identity of our country if that is the Treasury’s future route.

However, as many of us in the House will remember, we have been here before. Before 1974 I served in a very different local government. Norfolk stretches some 70 miles from Great Yarmouth to Wisbech, and 50 miles from Cromer south to Diss, and in Norfolk then we had a unitary county borough—Norwich—the boroughs of Great Yarmouth, Kings Lynn and Thetford, and urban and rural district councils, as well as parishes. Although each tier had certain statutory responsibilities and powers, partnership between the two counties, the county of Norfolk and the county borough, founded the University of East Anglia, and Norfolk bought into Norwich’s international airport and its FE college. Education, however, was devolved to one large borough, Great Yarmouth, and agency powers were devolved to other boroughs—other UDCs—reflecting local knowledge of what worked best.

Function, in other words, was shared, bought, devolved, delegated or delivered according to the individual service, local geography and the wishes of local people. It worked well. Large swathes of our services were better then than now. With more powers, we focused on city needs and our business rates were reinvested in our local economy. Of course it was untidy and offended Whitehall—but then Norfolk is and sometimes does. It was local, it was government—and every reorganisation since has made local government less local and less government, so we have bigger and bigger authorities but with the authority to do less and less.

I am not suggesting that we return to the pre-1974 patchwork; this is not meant to be an exercise in nostalgia but to show that patterns of partnered, combined, devolved and delegated arrangements have a long history and can be a flexible, sensible and well-tested response to our varying geography. We want and need devolution that fits our sense of place.

Can the Minister say how devolution might work now in two-tier shire authorities such as Norwich, Cambridge, Exeter and many others? We have in place a city deal, delivered for example through the Greater Norwich area partnership, bringing together Norwich, its two adjacent districts which share in the gain from our economic growth, and the county council. Norwich already pools its community infrastructure levy receipts to help fund economic investment in the Greater Norwich area. Cambridge City, I understand, similarly partners South Cambs and Cambridge County Council. Exeter, I learnt today, is working with East Devon and Teignbridge district councils towards a combined authority or possibly an economic prosperity board.

What might work for us are combined authorities—as we are not unitaries—within larger combined authorities: not a hierarchy with big authorities supervising smaller ones, but concentric rings of combined partnerships, with a recognition that different services need different geographic scale and therefore a different combination of authorities. We do not want to overlap. We want to pool and to work in partnership. In my patch there could be three combined authorities: an inner ring with the combined authority of the Greater Norwich area could nest within a wider combined authority of the county—and that, in turn, would be part of an East Anglian combined authority of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridge.

The smallest combined authority of the partnership would handle economic development, housing and local transport, with one team advising the joint programmes of the four authorities, building on city deals. The Norfolk-wide combined authority would look at transport links with Cambridge or the A47 route to the Midlands, or at health and its interface with social care, or education, skills and training and so on. The three counties as a combined authority would become an expanded LEP—local economic partnership—where business especially is strongly represented. Like the former East Anglia Economic Planning Council on which I sat, it could shape our strategic regional choices.

In health, for example, every county needs its district general hospital but only one regional burns centre—a regional decision. When Aviva in the last few months was determining its UK future, it worked not with the combined authority or the county of Norfolk but with the LEP. It chose that level of strategic responsibility. Added into the LEP could be blue-light services and digital infrastructure—and I would like to see integrated into that regional structure more democratic accountability of our regional quangos. There would be a combined authority around a mid-tier city, within a combined, wider county partnership, which in turn would form a combined regional authority. That would work for us, combining both local and strategic initiatives and value for money.

I conclude with some questions—and they are not rhetorical. Does the Secretary of State agree—indeed, does the Minister agree—that the clustering of specialist knowledge and skills in mid-sized cities is vital for our economic growth? If so, will he accept those mid-sized cities, as in these amendments, need devolved economic powers and associated budgets for business support, employment and housing and transport connectivity? Would he agree that this requires fiscal powers, devolved skills money, retained business rates, power to CPO land and grant ourselves planning consent so that the gain from that land is further reinvested in economic growth and not privately appropriated, transport money to enhance site development, and wider planning powers?

More specifically, would he consider allowing such combined authorities to have urban development corporation powers—new town powers, if you like—allowing us those additional powers to acquire land and finance development? If he would, and given that quite a number of mid-sized cities on which economic regeneration in this country will depend are not unitary, would he therefore consider new models of combined authorities, including combined authorities within combined authorities in concentric rings? At the very least, would he support pilot schemes that build on our existing collaborative models? Would he welcome proposals from us to that effect?

We really want to work with the Secretary of State and I hope and believe that he wants to work with us—he has shown every sign of wishing to do so. Our local Norfolk maxim is, “Do different”. I paraphrase that as “Making a real difference”. We really could transform life chances as we work in partnership to promote the economic growth that our city, county and country need. I hope that the noble Baroness will move this agenda forward on our behalf.

[Lord Maxton (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak very reluctantly, because I live in Scotland, not down here, and therefore the local authorities that I am concerned with are those in Scotland. But I think that there are lessons to be learned, not for this Bill, oddly enough, but for Scotland from this Bill and the amendments that we have tabled. The fact is that what we have in Scotland, where the first example of devolution arguably began, is a centralisation of power in Edinburgh rather than the genuine devolution of power downwards from the Scottish Parliament. That is something that we have to be very wary of. We have seen one police force for the whole of Scotland, one fire service for the whole of Scotland and one ambulance service for the whole of Scotland. We have also, however, seen local authorities curtailed because they have little or no control of their own finances. As somebody said to me very authoritatively, Glasgow and South Lanarkshire, where I live, are having problems finding the money to buy jotters for school kids next year because local authorities have been so hidebound in the money that they have available to spend.

As I said, I am reluctant to speak on this, but it is a very strange anomaly that a Conservative Government are introducing a Bill that extends democracy in England, whereas a so-called left-wing Government in Scotland are curtailing consistently the powers and democracy in that country.