Economic Leadership for Cities

Lord Scriven Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Scriven (LD) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I rise before you today with a sense of pride—pride in the fact that I come from a very humble background: born in a council estate in Huddersfield, the son of a refuse collector and a hospital cleaner—but also with a sense of nervousness. As I look round the House at all the experience, the wisdom and the knowledge, I understand that in my five minutes I have to share some of my experience as leader of Sheffield City Council.

I thank noble Lords for the warm, generous and open welcome they have given me, for the advice they have given me, and for playing to my male vanity: never in the past 25 years have I been called “young man” so often as in the past two months. I thank them, too, for their advice on giving this, my maiden speech. I have been given two recurring themes: keep it short and sharp and keep it non-controversial. Those who know me know that I will struggle in the next four minutes, but I will do my best. I also want to thank all the staff who work diligently, quietly but effectively to make your Lordships’ House work so well, and I give my personal thanks to the doorkeepers.

I thank my noble friend Lord Shipley for introducing the debate. Why have I chosen this debate in which to make my maiden speech? I am steeped in localism and local government and I love my adopted home city of Sheffield, where I have lived for 18 years—a city that is green, open, welcoming, industrious and nonconformist. I suppose that is why I chose that city as my adopted home. As a former leader of Sheffield City Council, I understood that, in a global world, city areas are key to growth. The Royal Society of Arts points out that 62% of all economic growth across the world in the next 10 years will come from city areas. There are examples from across the world of cities such as Boston, Hamburg and Bilbao, which have been given powers and autonomy, reinventing themselves and growing. They all have greater powers, autonomy and financial control than city areas in the UK.

In the UK, our journey has just started, but there is further to go. I shall explain how Sheffield’s journey started and some of the things that we have done in the past couple of years. The debate on city area versus rural area or town area can become sterile. The real issue is not one of lines on maps or administrative boundaries but of where real businesses are located and of where real people travel to and from work: that is the economic area. Sheffield city region comprises areas as diverse as the Derbyshire Dales and the city of Sheffield, and political leaders drawn from the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative Parties—even, initially, an English Democrat mayor—who understood that for our people and businesses to succeed we needed a certain skill set, infrastructure and plan to enable businesses to grow.

The area contains 1.8 million people, with an output of £28 billion per year. There are 700,000 jobs in the area and 47,000 businesses. It is our real economic area, not designed by a bureaucrat or by a line drawn on a map but by people who live, work and invest in that area. In the past four years, we have achieved a number of things. Thanks to my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister, who happens to be the MP for Sheffield Hallam, through the city deal and the Local Growth Fund more than £500 million of public money has been handed back to the area to enable us to have autonomy and control. The key areas that have come up are skills, skills and skills, infrastructure, access to finance, transport and housing. We have used that money to make sure that local control, local decisions and local knowledge were used to design schemes such as the Sheffield city infrastructure fund, where more than £221 million of public money was put in one pot, leveraging in an extra £500 million to enable investment in 15 infrastructure schemes. A £130 million skills bank has been created to enable local employers to create a demand-led skills scheme, so that people are skilled up for existing jobs and jobs that will exist in the area in the future.

As time is short, I end by saying that, as I sit down, I do so with the sense of pride I felt as I stood up, but with fewer nerves, thanks to the gracious way that noble Lords have listened to my speech. I hope to play a full and active role in your Lordships’ House and promise to keep my future interventions short and sharp. However, I cannot promise that I will always be non-controversial or conformist. As the saying goes, “You can take the boy out of Sheffield, but you can’t take Sheffield out of the boy”.