Devolution: English Cities

Lord Storey Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, I believe in the importance of cities. I look at the great northern cities of our country and at how they languished. They could have been the engine of growth for the whole country. Thanks to the noble Lord and others, we now realise the importance of our cities and our city regions.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, reminded me of the Toxteth riots. My house was at the top of Lodge Lane. The riots were not about race; they were about policing. Locals joke and say it took a riot for Margaret Thatcher to come to the city of Liverpool. She came, and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, came with her. I was quite taken with Eric Sorensen, as I remember. I was also quite taken with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, at another event I went to where he said, “I stood and looked at the Mersey from the Liver Building with a glass of wine at the end of a difficult day wondering what had happened to this great city and what had gone wrong”. As I think he said, he spent three days listening to people and then he put some of those thoughts and ideas into practice. That listening is so important, as is having a vision about where you are going to go.

I became leader of Liverpool, that great city, in 1998. There were 99 councillors and we won 52 seats. The following year we won a further 10 and we won a further nine the year after that. Trying to lead 71 Liberal Democrats was the hardest job in the world. I though, “What do I do here? Where do I go?”. I thought, “Why don’t I visit two cities which have had very difficult times and talk to the leadership?” I went to New York and Dublin. The mayors of those cities separately said exactly the same thing. They said it is about having a vision of where you want to go and confidence—I think an earlier speaker mentioned confidence—and that even if the cupboard is bare you should talk up your city and your region and then count the number of cranes on the skyline. I did that, but I soon realised that the structure of local government made it very difficult indeed. We had a committee structure. A decision would go the sub-committee, then it would go to the main committee, then it would go to the performance review committee and then to the policy and finance committee and finally at the end of a 10-week cycle it might come out of the sausage machine at the end.

New Labour was looking at the idea of the modernising agenda for local government. In Liverpool, we embraced that with an executive board, scrutiny panels and councillors having a powerful role in their communities. Then the modernising agenda, which I think Hilary Armstrong—the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong of Hill Top—brought in, meant that local authorities could adopt it if they chose.

I probably agree with everything on the 10-point or 20-point plan, with a few little changes here and there, but what is perhaps missing from it is this. You can have all the vision and powers in the world, but if you do not have the quality of the leadership it does not happen. One of the proposals is that the mayors should,

“establish a leadership academy for city governance”.

That is crucial.

Secondly, and I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, will agree with me completely on this, it is about accountability. Noble Lords will recall that the Localism Act allowed local authorities to establish elected mayors. Of the 10 that had a vote, only one—Bristol—decided to have a mayor. Doncaster decided to retain its mayor. In Liverpool, we never had the opportunity to vote on whether to have a mayor. I think there was an agreement between the city leader and the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, to establish a mayor in Liverpool. I regret that, because it would have given more strength and power to the mayor of Liverpool.

Accountability means that you have to listen to people. It is very alarming that the scrutiny panel in Liverpool has been abolished by the mayor. There is no scrutiny of his decisions. For example, it takes 60,000 people to sign a petition to stop their park being sold to Redrow developments. The mayor does not want to listen to them , so they have to go to the High Court to get an injunction to stop that development. That should not be the case.

I was very taken by the briefing, which perhaps all noble Lords saw, from the London Assembly. It said:

“London has made a success of devolution … Devolution works. It makes government more open, more accountable and more relevant to local voters”.


I agree. It also says that there needs to be overview and scrutiny to be effective and hold the Executive to account to contribute to better public policy and decisions. To my mind, that is the other key element we must never forget. We have a system of elected local councillors, and they need to have an important role in the work of the council as a whole. They should not be there as sheep that just follow the leadership. They should have a clear role and be able to hold the leader to account.

I went to the presentation of a book by Professor Michael Parkinson from Liverpool University. At the time of the Militant tendency in Liverpool, he wrote a book called Liverpool on the Brink. He has now written a new book called Liverpool Beyond the Brink. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, was the guest of honour there. One of his great legacies will be not only the huge contributions he has made to Liverpool: we now have the Heseltine Institute in Liverpool to carry on his work, which is hugely important.

The importance of cities to the national economy must never be forgotten. The challenge, as the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, points out, is that we need more of our cities to be successful. It should be not about problems, but about solutions, wealth creation and entrepreneurship. Cities do not create jobs; they create the conditions where jobs can be created and businesses can be successful. We need to devolve sufficient powers and policy, because we continue to live in a very centralised society.

Professor Parkinson also talked about the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, as I have. He said, “Trust the people”. They deserve nothing more.