City of Birmingham (Scheme of Elections) Order 2015

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very glad to debate the City of Birmingham (Scheme of Elections) Order 2015 and glad to see that we have such a full House still for this important debate.

This order imposes on our second city a new scheme of elections that commence in 2017. It also changes Birmingham’s current practice of retirement by thirds and moves to all-out elections. Noble Lords need to be aware that last week the Government laid a new order that actually amends the order we are debating this evening by changing the date of the first all-out elections from 2017 to 2018. That order has not been through the scrutiny committee and other scrutiny processes and, no doubt, there will be a report to your Lordships’ House, I believe after the next meeting of the scrutiny committee next Tuesday.

I want to raise some issues about the change to all-out elections but I want to set out the context. I have lived in Birmingham for nearly 40 years. It is a wonderful city—very vibrant and friendly—but it faces a number of real challenges at the moment. Its economy has underperformed compared with London, Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield over many years now. Parts of Birmingham are among the most deprived in the country. In fact, we have more poor children in Birmingham than in any other part of the country and many of our adults are locked in a spiral where they have low skills and cannot take advantage of some of the new jobs that are being created in the city.

Birmingham has a great history, great strengths and potentially a great future but a lot of that depends on the city council and the quality of leadership it provides. At the moment, it is fair to say that it is being held back by a number of very significant problems. Its children’s services have been rated inadequate or worse for a number of years now. The Trojan horse incident raised a lot of serious issues about the education service in general and about the city council’s engagement and understanding of its local communities. Its financial position, following the equal pay debacle, can be described at best only as horrendous.

The city council is subject to a number of interventions. My noble friend Lord Warner is a commissioner appointed by the Secretary of State for Education looking particularly into children’s services. Sir Mike Tomlinson has been appointed in the wake of the Trojan horse issue and Sir Bob Kerslake, the former Permanent Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, has undertaken an independent review of the governance and organisational capabilities of the city council. That is what I want to focus on. Let me say at once that I believe Sir Bob has undertaken an enormous task. I am very grateful to him for it. His report is well written and many of its conclusions are absolutely right. However, there are some issues I want to raise, particularly in relation to this order.

Where I think Sir Bob is absolutely right is that he says, essentially, that for Birmingham to achieve its full potential and deal with some of the problems I have mentioned, the city council has to rethink its role and the way it does its business. In a telling phrase in the report Sir Bob says it has to end the,

“not invented here, silo-based and council knows best culture”.

Leadership of the council has changed hands between the three political parties over the past few years. I was a member of the city council a long time ago, but I recognise that criticism. Of all the changes Birmingham needs to make, that is probably the one that I would focus on.

Sir Bob goes on to talk about the governance of the city council. In particular, he says that the council needs to clarify roles, responsibilities, behaviours and ways of working expected in relation to the leader, the cabinet, councillors, chief executive and officers. I agree with that too. I agree that the city council should draw up a robust plan on managing the financial challenges it faces. I certainly agree that it needs to establish a new model of devolution and partnership with key stakeholders. As a former chairman of an NHS foundation trust in Birmingham, I am struck by the inability of the city council to forge strong relationships with other key players in the sector. That is an issue that goes across leadership between two different administrations. I certainly support the recommendation that there should be a combined authority—what I would call greater Birmingham—covering Birmingham, Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Solihull, rather in the way that Manchester has been developed, in order to deal with some of those cross-local authority strategic issues.

I want to have a debate, because it is important that this is debated, on the proposal about the scheme of elections and the move to all-out elections. Sir Bob says:

“Birmingham City Council is an outlier on the size of the council and the size of its wards. It has 15 of the 20 wards with the largest population in the country”.

Because Birmingham is forecast to have a big growth in population over the coming years, those wards are likely to become even bigger. There are already 120 councillors but, speaking as a councillor in a three-member ward representing 22,000 electors, it is a very tough challenge for 120 councillors to represent effectively a population of 1 million. We are going up to 1,150,000, yet Sir Bob’s proposals are to reduce the number of councillors. For ward councillors, that is going to be a major challenge.

Sir Bob also says that we should move away from the traditional, current election by thirds to all-out elections. If you read the report, he clearly favours reducing the number of councillors and moving to single-member wards, rather than multimember wards, at the same time. I know opinions differ about the merits, or not, of all-out elections and elections by thirds. Essentially, it depends upon what you are used to. I spent time as a councillor in Oxford and I have lived in Leeds and Birmingham, so for me the natural order of things is election by thirds. Equally, I am sure that the Minister thinks all-out elections are the right thing to do because that is what he has experienced. It is a 50:50 argument. I know Sir Albert Bore, the leader of Birmingham City Council, favours the move to all-out elections because he thinks they will provide greater certainty of political control over a four-year period, allow confident medium-term financial and strategic planning for that four-year period and that the majority group will have a clear mandate for the whole of the period. Well, that is fair enough—I am not going to argue about that. I like the old tradition of election by thirds; it makes sure that the electorate have an opportunity to have a say on an annual basis. None the less, I very much accept what Albert has said. However, I worry about reducing the number of councillors. Even more worrying, for me, is the fact that the city council will be subjected to a boundary review. The chairman of the Local Government Boundary Commission has already been in the city and has issued a challenge to local councillors to say that, if they do not like the reduction in numbers, they must put up a convincing case against it.

The problem that I have is that, in the original Kerslake report, he identifies that this great city of Birmingham is facing mega-challenges in its leadership and partnership approach as well as in how it operates, the services it provides and the skills of its people. Yet we know that the moment the commission starts to do its work, in a situation in which it is proposed to reduce the number of councillors, the focus of most councillors’ attention will not be on these core issues of leading Birmingham out of the very difficult situation that it is in. It will be about responding to the boundary commission review and worrying about the new wards, and selection will then take place. Councillors’ focus will be on those really rather secondary issues rather than on the core issue of tackling the problems that Sir Bob addresses.

The reason I am raising the issue tonight is to ask the Minister to give this some consideration. After all, another order is coming down the line. The last thing that we need in Birmingham is the distraction of a wholesale boundary review, which will get rid of three-member wards—so it will be a mega-change. We need to focus on improving the services in the city of Birmingham. I beg to move.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the order. I was born and raised in Birmingham, and my first and last jobs in manufacturing were in the city. I am old enough and my memory is still good enough to say that I can still recall my mother’s Birmingham co-op number. I served in the Commons as the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr, where I went to school and had my paper round, for 27 years. Although I no longer pay council tax in the city, I have just arrived at your Lordships' House from chairing the Neighbourhood Partnership Board at Castle Vale in the city. So I am now an outsider, but I have insider roots, insight and, indeed, support. However, my memory is also good enough to remember how the city was considered by others as a leader over five decades, over a variety of issues—an exemplar.

At the time when the noble Lord, Lord Nash, made the Statement in this House last year on 22 July, I did not get the confirmation—it was buried in the paragraphs—that the Kerslake review would not have any no-go areas. As such, in July, I put in my long-held views to Sir Bob about the governance of the city being split into separate boroughs. I copied my views to the city leadership at the same time—I have always been quite open on this point, which I raised in the 1980s and the 1990s. The city is too big. London does not suffer for being split into 32 boroughs, and Birmingham would not suffer for being split into two, three or four boroughs.

Sir Bob, who is soon to join your Lordships' House, has explained to me why his team went for what is in the order, and I accept that. I am not going to go over that tonight; it is not the time. His review makes it crystal clear that, if the city council fails to improve, questions of size will continue to be asked. Improvement is urgently required. As my noble friend just said, there are currently two government-imposed commissioners working in the city due to it failing—I do not like saying that, but that is the reality—in education and in children’s social services. The city has massive potential to return to being an exemplar for strong, good local government, as it was in the past and I want it to do so.