Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill (First sitting)

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Tim Farron]

Q Thank you. I represent a rural community in Cumbria. The problems there are specific. As a member of the advisory board, do you think there is room for different rules to apply in different parts of the United Kingdom, so that certain local authorities might have different powers from others to, for example, control the number of holiday lets and second homes, so that there is a decent number of affordable and available properties for a permanent population?

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: Again, the specifics of that question are well outside my area of my expertise. From an R&D point of view, I hope I have been stressing all along that the key to success is specificity—it is understanding local regions and therefore understanding what the bottlenecks are to their growth and targeting investment very specifically in the context of those bottlenecks. That obviously requires really deep local knowledge and local empowerment.

I am absolutely in favour of careful consideration of local needs in the investments that are made. That is very much how UKRI is going about thinking about our R&D investments. I would hope that that approach is considered more widely, because I do not see how one can tackle these problems unless it is through putting in place specific, targeted, well thought-through locally aligned interventions.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Q Professor Leyser, given that economic cluster development grows exponentially, what risks do you foresee of the legislation choking off development space for the growth of economic clusters, particularly inward investment on key strategic sites? Housing developers getting a quick return and receipt, for example, could choke off the opportunity to grow a cluster outwards.

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: As I have said, this careful alignment of multiple interventions is crucial precisely because if one rushes in with a particular input, its knock-on consequences are not always foreseen, and we need to be able to respond to them and adjust accordingly. It is critical to think hard upstream about the aligned series of investments being made, and to monitor and feed back, so that where the evidence begins to grow and the chosen interventions have some of those knock-on and unforeseen consequences, they are identified and rectified before things get dug in too deeply. Exactly as you say, growing those clusters is very much about creating the right ecosystem and the right sets of interactions between the different parts. That drives positive feedback and sucks in additional investment in the virtuous cycle that we are all seeking to build. That is critical.

The answers are very specific and depend on the particular element of the overall system that you are looking at. From our point of view, we are really keen to ensure that our investments build synergy between local specialisations and growth, and national capability and capacity. It is important that our investments outside the greater south-east do not in any way undermine the extraordinary powerhouse that the greater south-east is for our R&D activity, and that, rather, those two things are synergistic with one another and that the skills and specialist areas developed in particular parts of the UK work in synergy with activity in other parts of the UK. That local-national map is critical to ensure that we do not drive the negative consequences of interventions, which, as you have highlighted, are a risk.

[Rachael Maskell]

Q Do you believe that there is anything missing from the legislation that could enhance economic opportunity?

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser: These are long-term problems to fix, and they need multiple concerted and co-ordinated interventions. To me, a critical element is getting long-term cross-Government commitment to drive this through to completion. That is a very hard thing to achieve in the context of our parliamentary democracy, because those interventions will last over multiple Parliaments and everybody has to be behind them. That challenging aspect is, I hope, deliverable through the combination of the Bill and the mission statements, but, as we discussed earlier, it will require relentless focus on the missions, and accountability for delivering them through successive Parliaments.

[The Chair]

Professor Leyser, thank you so much for your evidence, and in particular for the kind things you said about Northern Ireland—not that I am biased in any way whatsoever.

Examination of Witnesses

Tracy Brabin and Ben Still gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron]

Q A quick follow-up: which powers relating to housing stock would you like in the Bill so that you can ensure sufficient affordable and available homes for people in every part of your region?

Tracy Brabin: What may help more is the strategic planning, which I understand has not been agreed because the planning was going to be changed from Government, so we do not have clarity on our strategic planning powers. It would be incredibly helpful if we got some conclusion on that.

Ben Still: I might add that the common theme in many of our answers is that what is needed is not necessarily additional powers, but the freedom to work with local authorities to deliver the right solutions in the right areas. That is what we will be looking for in the Bill as it progresses, namely the ability to take local decisions within a guiding framework.

Tracy Brabin: May I add a supplementary point? The city region sustainable transport scheme—the big transport fund of nearly £900 million—has felt as if it is really heading in the right direction. It is really progressive that it is multi-year. It is money that we can really deliver; it is long term, and it is about local freedoms. However, in implementing it, we are getting check and challenge from Government about, for example, whether we can have silver bins in a particular project or a grass roof on a train station.

It is really important when the Committee is looking through the Bill to identify how Government can enable Mayors to make those decisions and trust them to deliver, because if we focus on outcomes rather than processes, then I think we can deliver for Government and be challenged as to whether we have delivered against the 12 missions once those schemes have been approved.

[Rachael Maskell]

Q Tracy, it is nice to see you again. This Bill is about levelling up, yet the different mayoralties have different powers and cover different geographical spaces, and therefore have different economic inequality between them. How do you think that real levelling up can come across all regions and indeed all nations through this legislation?

Tracy Brabin: Thank you, Rachel. I would say that poverty is everywhere. It is not one region over another; it is everywhere. And poverty is expensive. Our mission in West Yorkshire—I know that other Mayors share this mission—is to close that disadvantage gap, to close the wage gap between the highest earners and the lowest, and to close the health inequalities that blight some of our communities. Some of our communities were extremely badly hit by covid, particularly in West Yorkshire, because of various circumstances, and it will take us a long time to recover.

However, Rachel, in direct response to your point, I would say that transport really preoccupies most of the Mayors—how can we make sure that we can get our talented people to opportunity? We have seen the HS2 Bill being laid before Parliament, and how frustrating it is for the people of West Yorkshire to see so much investment going into one side of the country, when we know that levelling up and tackling poverty are both absolutely about making sure that people can get to good jobs, and to colleges and to skills training, and so on.

As the M10, we work together to try to improve transport. Collectively, for example, Andy Burnham, Steve Rotheram and I work on buses, which is the transport system that the majority of people in West Yorkshire use. We are reducing bus fares, capping single trips to £2 and making it £4.50 for a daily pass. We are doing what we can to make sure there is more money in people’s pockets and that transport works. However, it is more than a structural problem, Rachel, in that transport has to work, and Government must invest. I know that it is one of the mission statements, and I know that Government want to do it, and we can help them to do it.

[Rachael Maskell]

Q Do you believe that having West Yorkshire as a combined authority provides sufficient leverage to bring about the economic regeneration that you seek, or do you believe that the unit is perhaps too small and there should be a Yorkshire-wide, more combined authority? Some will be much smaller—for instance, North Yorkshire.

Tracy Brabin: That is right. When there is a mayoralty in North Yorkshire, I think it will be really powerful for us all to work together collectively for team Yorkshire. It is something that I am really looking forward to. On whether that delivers more, perhaps Ben wants to come in.

Ben Still: Only to say that the legislation that underpins the creation of CAs was based around the model of the functional economic area. Yorkshire and the bigger geographies have more complex overlapping functional economic areas. In our devolution deal we looked at broader options, including looking at the Yorkshire level, but ultimately the discussions with Government came back to focusing on the functional economic areas around the metropolitan area of West Yorkshire. That is the geography that the legislation works most effectively on.

Tracy Brabin: But we do work with and fund a number of schemes with York.

Ben Still: Which is why I suspect the county combined authority model is not based on that legislation.

[Rachael Maskell]

Q If I may ask one more question, what additional fiscal powers would enable you to have better leverage in being able to deliver your programme?

Tracy Brabin: It is not necessarily about further fiscal powers. It is about being free to deliver what our community needs with the powers that we have currently without continually having to go back to government for sign-offs and cheques and challenges when government can give us the money to deliver.

There are other powers that I would need. For example, we were talking just before this call about the precept and how Mayors have the opportunity to impose a precept, but it does feel that it has to be around something that impacts on people’s lives and around policy. For example, Andy Burnham uses his precept to have free bus travel—I think it is for the under-25s or under-19s. A precept adds cost for local people and the mayoralty. What we should be doing in the MCA is saving Whitehall money, because we are delivering on the things that it would normally deliver from Whitehall and Westminster.

Going forward, there are lots of discussions about fiscal powers, and there is work that we are doing in the M10 to look at that. Do you want to come in, Ben?

Ben Still: Only to say that the move towards an outcome framework, as the Mayor has previously mentioned, with a multi-year funding settlement—perhaps through a spending review process directly with Treasury, rather than through individual grants agreements with individual Departments—would be a significant step forward for us and a better reflection of proper devolution.

[Robbie Moore (Keighley) (Con)]

Q Morning, Tracy; it is good to see you. I want to touch on the point around accountability. You mentioned the role of accountability with Government, but do you think the Bill will improve your accountability or the role of a Mayor directly with the electorate?

Tracy Brabin: The accountability is the election, so I suppose it depends on whether people believe that I have delivered on my 10 manifesto commitments. More seriously, I think I would be open to more accountability from Government. If you give us the freedom to work directly with the Treasury and then focus on outcomes, we will be accountable to Government. In this Bill, it does not feel like there is that focus on outcomes and assessment of delivery against expectations.

Ben Still: When we became a mayoral combined authority from a combined authority, one of the things that we did in preparation was to increase the number of scrutiny committees that exist in the CA, so we have three—up from one—scrutiny committees that look at the work of the combined authority and have both pre-decision and post-decision scrutiny capabilities. The Bill mentions paying scrutiny members to get better attendance and so on, which we welcome, but we already do that in West Yorkshire. The issue for us is the high levels required for scrutiny committees to be quorate, so we would welcome more flexibility in that regard.