Economic Leadership for Cities

Lord True Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as leader of a London borough. I guess I am a sort of city dweller. I thank my noble friend Lord Shipley for introducing this important debate. We have heard two remarkable maiden speeches already from my noble friends and I am looking forward with confidence to a third one.

It is true that the road to the city across the centuries has been the road to the hope of a better and fuller life. We see that in waves of demographic movement even today in many a megalopolis in the developing world. Cities must be centres of new enterprise and we must encourage and cherish successful businesses and business leaders who we need to keep our cities great.

However, no city is immune from change. The greatest cities of England before 1700 were, after London, Norwich, Bristol, Newcastle, Exeter, York and Great Yarmouth, in that order. Of course we can regret past decline in places such as Lowestoft or Nottingham, which shaped my childhood. But for Lowestoft or Yarmouth you cannot put the herring or the gas back in the North Sea. In Nottingham you cannot reverse the war on tobacco, the fall of lace from fashion, the sourcing of textiles from the developing world, or the environmental movement’s successful felling of “king coal”.

History shows that cities cannot stand still in resentful nostalgia. Today they must diversify, embrace new technologies and invest in education and skills, as other noble Lords have said, working with employers, such as in the new enterprise and education campus we plan in our own authority. I welcome so much what the Government have done in assisting that through city deals, partnerships, educational reform, support for small business, infrastructure investment and much else. It is quite a long time since the Government took such a committed interest in our cities.

While I agree with much that other noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Goddard, have said, I have some concerns. I share the views of the noble and right reverend Prelate on this. I do not share the rather faddish obsession with new statutory political structures in what seems, at times, a rather hasty response to the referendum in Scotland. I do not think the answer to city decline is more law about local government structures. Waste, churn, conflict and cost have followed almost every past statutory interference in local government structures.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Shipley that we need more joint working, co-operation and bottom-up partnership, but there are mechanisms already for that. We also need local flexibility and freedoms and not single institutional models pedalled in clever professorial lectures and imposed by statute. Each city must choose for itself, but it is ridiculous, for example, in my own city of Nottingham to say that it cannot solve its economic problems unless the suburb of West Bridgford is put under the same authority. If the fad for constitutional change leads to the submergence of the concerns of those who work in cities but live in small communities around them—and to governance without consent—then I would not board that band -wagon. I say yes to partnership and yes indeed to devolution, but with super-authorities I am not so sure. I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench, who understands suburban communities very well, will make it clear that these will not be imposed—by our side, at least—whether by statute or by the effective blackmail of conditional resourcing.

I underline this issue for London. We already have a regional super-authority in London. The most slow-moving, bureaucratic and least accountable parts of London government are the Molochs of the GLA’s transport and planning departments. Co-operation and partnership work well across London and are developing further from boroughs upwards. It would be folly if, in a constitutional spasm, we were to identify more devolution with more central powers for a mayor, or sanction new governance that enables the piling of ever more taxation on already heavily taxed suburban communities.

In conclusion, I agree with the right reverend Prelate. There is a spiritual element, in the largest sense, to the conundrum of city revival. After all, cities were once identified by their cathedrals and enhanced by local philanthropy. People today are crying out for a sense of being rooted, with some idea of permanence and security. The spirit of place matters enormously in that. It is a great motivating force and a binding element. Whatever change we may contemplate in our cities and their surrounds, do not let us stifle that spirit of place, wherever it is found, or fail to hear the diverse voice of smaller communities.