Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle Upon Tyne, North Tyneside, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Sunderland Combined Authority Order 2014

Lord Scott of Foscote Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Wrigglesworth (LD)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to support the comments that have been made by other noble Lords during the debate and to support the draft Order.

I think everybody these days is in favour of extending resources and power to the people and decentralising power. Many of us have been in favour of it for a very long time. Getting government to do it is another thing. I can think back very many years and the resistance of Whitehall departments to devolving people, power and resources to the regions. It is therefore a very welcome step today to see the combined authority being established and I hope that the united support of the region will enable it to get the resources and enhanced powers that my noble friend referred to in the future.

However, the region is undoubtedly facing many challenges. I want to refer to the central challenge for this organisation and others in the region in the years ahead. Before doing that, I will say a word about what I think is of absolutely crucial importance: the relationship between the combined authority and the LEP. They both have the job of building up the economy of the north-east, which is central to the interests of the region, the people who live in it and the national economy. That can be done only if those two bodies work harmoniously and closely together.

As well as being chairman of the port, to which the noble Lord kindly referred, I have spent the past 25 years—I declare a continued interest in this—building industrial estates and offices around the north-east. I think I have probably done more to regenerate the north-east in that capacity than I ever have done in Westminster. I have certainly created a lot more jobs. However, I have seen it from a worm’s-eye view in relation to local authorities and other bodies that are responsible for development. As a developer of industrial estates and offices, I can tell you that it is sometimes a nightmare dealing with so many different bodies in the region that are dealing with the same thing. I see this happening with the LEP and with the local authorities. That is why I say that they have to work harmoniously together. They have to do it also in relation to inward investors. I was a director of the Northern Development Company and we had a very good routine which we had worked out with the local authorities so that they each got a turn when an inward investment came along. Those of us who were involved will recall that the debates over where Nissan was going to be placed within the region were extremely difficult but were resolved, successfully. The task of doing the job with inward investors, developers and other investors is crucial.

I assume each local authority is going to continue with its own economic development department. How are they going to relate to each other? Seven economic development departments—that is a pretty big number of people and a big budget—and the LEP will be doing very similar things. I am not going to prescribe how it should work; I just want to flag it up as one of the crucial issues if this new arrangement is going to succeed. If there is a will, it will succeed. I hope that the economic development departments of the local authority, because of the success of the LEP and because of the whole thing, will gradually wither away and will not be seen to be as necessary, as they have often been in the past by individual local authorities.

I have those reservations but, to me, the crucial issue for the region and for the development of its whole economy is not to do with the physical infrastructure; it is to do with our people. The reason we have a millstone around the economy of the north-east is that we have too many people who do not fulfil their great potential. Look at the LEP economic plan: it has highlighted that as one of the most important issues facing us. I hope that the combined authority, the LEP and everybody in the region will do whatever they possibly can to help all the Easingtons and the Benwells—we know the places in the north-east—that have people leaving school without qualifications of a high enough standard to be able to get them into the labour market. That is the challenge above all for the north-east.

The substantial growth of apprenticeships has been one of the most encouraging things that one could have imagined. I checked the figures: we have 61,000 apprentices in the region, a tremendous number. That brings hope to those many young people who get training of that sort, but there are many other skills that they have to get—computer skills and all sorts of modern skills to deal with the businesses expanding in the region today. Look through the names of all those businesses that have had money from the regional growth fund: what a wonderful roll call of high-tech, pharma, engineering and other businesses. They are just the sort of businesses that we all want to see, many of them exporting products throughout the world. However, to work in those businesses, you need qualifications.

The focus of all of us in the region, and of the organisations in the region, must be on those people who have not been able to achieve their full potential and will not be able to in the future unless they are given the tools to get the jobs available to them. I very much hope that the new combined authority will work well; it certainly has my best wishes, and I am sure that we in this House will do everything to support it. The whimsical comment about this House possibly moving to the north-east would no doubt please many people in the Room today. I would only say that if any whimsical person should come along and take it seriously, there is a wonderful county hall becoming available in Morpeth. It has a wonderful chamber and lots of administrative facilities. We could move there overnight, almost. That would make up for the bank that we did not get to which the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred. I wish the organisation well and look forward to seeing it operating.

[Lord Scott of Foscote (CB)]

My Lords, I have a short point about the order, which came in front of the scrutiny Select Committee of which I have the honour of being a member some weeks ago; I made the same point there. It relates to the name of the new combined authority. It will of course be a corporate authority in its own right. It may sue and be sued in its proper name. My recollection of the wording of the order is that it states that the combined authority shall be “known as” and then sets out the name. I said on the previous occasion—I repeat it—that it is an absurd name for a corporate entity. It would be easy for somebody to make a slight slip and get the name wrong, upon which the lawyers might go to town and deny the proposition that action has been properly brought or defended, as the case may be. In the Select Committee, I suggested that a provision be added to the order to say that the new combined authority may sue or be sued as the “north-eastern combined authority”. I do not know whether that has been done; I imagine that it has not, but if it has not it really ought to be.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

Part of the problem is that the new combined authority does not cover the north-east. I am sure that the Minister replying will want to—I am sorry; I thought that the noble Lord from Teesside was replying. However, this problem is where we are and I am very supportive of what we have got.

However, I must be getting old. We have been around these houses time and time again. When I was first elected to Parliament in 1987, my good friend and neighbour, now my noble friend Lord Radice, brought forward a Private Member’s Bill to establish a north-east assembly. Governments have responded to these proposals, but the next Government then want to unpick everything that has been done and we start again. I do not want to bear a grudge today, but the Government have taken us around the same sort of territory yet again. We will do it, because what we in the north-east want more than anything else is for our region and the people living in it to have every possible opportunity. I am sorry that the region has now almost been split in two. It is not a large region, and the region as a whole should be coming together and acting together. However, that was undone in the first years of the coalition, and we are not going to get back to that, even though folk like me get a bit worried about it every now and again.

I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Adonis. He did a magnificent piece of work for the north-east LEP—as it is called, even though it does not include Teesside. He did a really good job of getting people who were fed up with what was being done to them from London around the table to think about the future and what the priorities should be. In his report he identified the key priorities for the region. I looked on it as an exemplary piece of work from a member of the Opposition working in a cross-party way and making sure that the Government knew exactly what was going on. We in the region owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.

I did not have quite the same view of Tyne and Wear met as the noble Lord, Lord Walton. Apart from anything else, the one good, important thing that it did—even if it did nothing else—was to identify and secure large pieces of land for development. I suspect that Nissan would never have come to the north-east if it had not been able to get permission on such a large site with the potential for further development. You needed a large organisation, working across authority boundaries, to come up with those sites. That has been important in our development. I hugely welcome Hitachi coming to Newton Aycliffe with the promise of many more jobs.

As the noble Lord, Lord Wrigglesworth, said, that also really heightens our focus on getting skills. This morning I was with people from Sunderland and the chair of the university council, Paul Callaghan, who was for a short period chair of the regional development agency until, two weeks later, the Government had a different idea about them. He runs a significant global IT company. He has just opened his offices in Australia and is now looking to four other countries; he has them already in America and goodness knows where else. That is a Sunderland-based company that is at the absolute forefront of IT. He chaired a conference a couple of weeks ago on bringing together IT companies in the region, and said that while they do not have problems with premises or local authorities, the one thing they have problems with is getting a suitably skilled and educated workforce. That was from about 70 local companies. This needs addressing, and the combined authority is really going to be pushed to come together to address this across the board. It is a real challenge to our universities. We have good universities in the region; Sunderland has been acknowledged as the university that does most in the country about widening access, and that is very important in our region because we still have the lowest proportion of young people going into higher education.