Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill [HL]

Lord Smith of Leigh Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

I am moving from a position of saying, “Well, let each area decide for itself”. I have been convinced by my own speech, actually, that maybe there should be a system whereby central government says, “No, we’ve decided that the parliamentary system is the right one for us, so we are certainly not going to tell anyone at a local level that they must have a system different from the one that we have. We think ours is democratically accountable”. I am moving rapidly away from the position of the permissive possibility of maybe some areas having directly elected mayors and others not, to saying that central government should probably say, “We think it’s a pretty good system—we think it’s the one you should have in your areas, where your executives are answerable to the council”. That is the democracy that works centrally and, in my experience, the one that works locally. Give me a parliamentary system over a presidential system any day of the week.

[Lord Smith of Leigh (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise somewhat reluctantly to participate in this debate. I declare my interest as leader of Wigan Council and a member of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority—so maybe I have a little experience there. I am also a vice-president of the LGA, and perhaps my contribution will show that, whatever party they are from, vice-presidents of the LGA do not always agree with each other. I have been a councillor only since 1978, so I am a mere stripling compared with some people here, and I do not intend to go back over my version of local authority history. However, the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, was right—there has been increased centralisation for a number of reasons. Partly, it was to do with mistrust of local councils. The irony is that, having given the pass to Whitehall, has Whitehall done any better? The answer is no—and in many cases, it has done a lot worse.

In facing the current austerity, there is more innovation going on in local government than in any other part of the public service. We actually have to deal with the problem on a day-to-day basis, and we are not doing it by simply slicing bits off as we might have done in the past. We are thinking radically about what we need to do and how we do it, and how we engage with the community. It is good.

In Wigan, there is a Labour council. Whatever I have done over the past five years, I have done it from my own perspective. I have always done something in Wigan that has, quite frankly, reflected my political values. I think that we get that difference in local authorities.

Electoral participation has gone down in local government, but my goodness it has gone down in national government, too. It is a real problem for the country that we do not get people to think that what we do as politicians is important.

In my experience of trying to get devolution from Governments of different colours, what is on offer now is the only thing that has been real. In the past, we got sympathy in Greater Manchester from Ministers but, frankly, they did not have the determination to get it through departments. Now we have a Government who are actually beginning to break that down and who are offering us some devolution.

The combined authority, which the last Labour Government set up—and a lot of us are trying to say this—is a new way of working. It is not working as in the past but working in a new manner. I think that the Minister will say that in Greater Manchester different parties sat down together to work in a consensual manner for the good of the conurbation. At one stage, when I was chairman, we had five Labour and five opposition members, but we worked together through that issue. As the electoral cycle has swung in other areas the balance is now eight to two, but we have not changed the style in which we work. I have still not had a vote as chairman of the combined authority, and if I did have one I would think of it as a failure.

It is about the leadership provided by leaders, who need to think how they can make an area more economically viable—because that is the objective. In Greater Manchester we have the twin aims of growth—clearly, everyone has that aim—but also reform of public services.

In Greater Manchester, over the last summer and into the autumn we had a long debate about how we saw the future of our governance. We came to the conclusion that the system that we had was not working properly, and we needed someone separate from the leaders—and we have 10 leaders in Greater Manchester. There is a view that Manchester is one city with nine outriggers, but Bolton would not regard itself as a suburb of Manchester and neither would Wigan. In fact, parts of where I come from, in Leigh, do not regard themselves as part of Wigan. With all those obstacles to overcome, we do it in a different way. It is not as though Manchester was some wonderful, single city where we can all work together. We do work together, but we need someone who is going to be independent of local authorities who can help to get it through, with more powers and responsibility, and be an executive for Greater Manchester rather than someone representing a district.

In the autumn, we met the Chancellor, who offered us a deal, with significant devolution—a bit more than we thought we were going to get; although we knew that we were going to get quite a lot, we got slightly more in some areas. There was a price—it was a deal—and the price to pay was to have the elected mayor. My noble friend Lord Grocott will be pleased to know that I am not the greatest fan of the elected mayoral model but, quite frankly, the prize was worth it—it was worth getting more powers and devolution to be able to influence the lives of ordinary people in Greater Manchester and not have all the decisions made by Governments and civil servants who live in Surrey, and so on. We wanted that change; we wanted it to happen.

And it is not one size fits all. The model that we are going to work in greater Manchester will be different from the elected mayor model in London. The elected mayor in Greater Manchester will be subject to the wishes of the combined authority and will not be superior in lots of ways. That is important. It is not one size fits all; it is what you want to make it. We want to make it a model for governance that can deliver significant change for Greater Manchester.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)]

My Lords, it falls to me to give the Opposition’s official position on this amendment. I hope that in doing so I do not disappoint too many of my noble friends. Overall, we are not able to accept this amendment as it stands. There are a number of issues to raise, but there is the prospect of recasting the amendment by the time we get to Report so that we may well be able to accept it.

Subsection (1) of the new clause proposed in Amendment 3 must be subject to further consideration of the report by the Delegated Powers Committee which has crossed over this issue because it focuses on orders and delegated powers and talks about whether that broad order-making power is appropriate. Subsection (2) suggests that any order or a proposal must start with the combined authority and then go to the Secretary of State. My understanding is—my noble friend may be able to confirm this—that this is an iterative process. In any event, if that unwittingly stopped additional powers going to a combined authority after it had been set up simply because they were initiated by the Secretary of State, that would be a backwards step.

On democratic accountability, I am not sure from what the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said whether this is an integral part of the elected assembly. We have a debate coming on the elected assembly in due course, and I will hold my comments generally until then, but I will make the point that if we were to accept the amendments’ proposition of an elected assembly, which I would oppose, we would end up with a situation in which we would have first-past-the-post elections for members of the combined authority, a supplementary vote system for the elected mayor and STV for assembly members. That seems unnecessarily convoluted.

We see circumstances where an elected mayor might be entirely appropriate, but we do not believe elected mayors should be prescriptive and mandatory. We think it should be for local areas to make their own judgments. That is the thrust of the amendment which will be our next business, but I shall deal with it now rather than have a repeat of this debate. The amendment I proposed to move was to make clear that there must not be an inevitable linkage between having the full benefit of the devolution provisions of the Bill and the acceptance by a combined authority of an elected mayor. It is accepted that devolution deals entered into ultimately involve an agreement, and if an elected mayor is included, it could be said that it is with consent. However, if there are circumstances where that is a clear red line for the Government—it was clearly so in the case of Greater Manchester, as my noble friend Lord Smith outlined—our amendment was seeking to address and negate that proposition. It is difficult to implement at the margins because there is an iterative discussion going on. I shall take this opportunity to be clear where the Government stand on this, but before doing so, I should make it clear that strong visible leadership is essential to the success of devolution. That leadership could well come in the form of an elected mayor, and combined authorities should have the opportunity to choose that course if they think it is right for them, but they should not be forced to have an elected mayor if they consider that an alternative leader model suits their circumstances. This view is consistent with the recommendation of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, in his No Stone Unturned report.