Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nick Clegg and Gerry Sutcliffe

Tuesday 6th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I wish my hon. Friend, and Members on both sides of the House a happy new year. On the governance arrangements, clearly we need improved, strengthened governance when we give an area more power. As he rightly suggested, however, this should be a bottom-up process; there should not be a one-size-fits-all blueprint imposed from above. So it is not the Government’s policy to say that every area that has a new devolution deal has to subscribe to a particular form of new governance, be it metro mayor or otherwise. That needs to be driven by each local area, and I suspect that they will arrive at different proposals, according to their needs.

[Mr Gerry Sutcliffe (Bradford South) (Lab)]

Twenty-odd years ago, before I came to the House, I was the leader of Bradford city council. At that time, there was great budgetary flexibility and councillors had flexibility as to how they spent the money. That flexibility has now gone. Should we not be looking at merging some of these councils in order to cut the bureaucracy? We should keep the accountability but seek to merge some of the bureaucracy to improve the conditions for West Yorkshire.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman that the more different local authorities can do things together to protect and improve front-line public services, the better. I do not entirely agree with his characterisation of the freedoms that local areas now have to use the moneys available to them. We have actually removed a lot of the ring fences that used to mean that Whitehall micro-managed the way money was spent locally, and we have also provided new borrowing powers. For example, tax increment financing is a major new financial innovation that local authorities can deploy.