It is now more than 50 years since I first wrestled with the restructuring of local government. After the Conservatives won the 1970 general election, I was sidekick to Peter Walker, secretary of state for the newly created Department of the Environment, and our attempts to change things faced entrenched resistance.
It would be understandable, therefore, if I were to say that I know where the bodies are buried. Michael Gove’s new white paper on “levelling up” makes it clear that, far from being buried, the bodies are alive and very much kicking.
In the white paper, Gove has proposed cautious, evolutionary moves towards greater devolution, achieved by agreement. I cannot criticise him for this. Time and again I faced the same pressures, and was able to persuade colleagues to accept only partial and gradual shifts in the status quo.
The objections came from all directions. The Treasury wants to maintain its tenacious grip on expenditure. The Whitehall barons fight to preserve their functional powers. Local councillors resist the abolition of their jobs, and members of parliament are deeply suspicious of change that creates local figures more powerful than them and deprives them of the foot soldiers they need to hold their seats.
In the 1970s, we tried and failed to bring in a proposal commissioned by Labour from John Redcliffe-Maud. He suggested replacing the existing 1,300 authorities, many of which reflected an England where the only means of transport were by foot, cart or horse, with 60 unitary authorities and metropolitan authorities covering the larger conurbations. Peter Walker found a compromise that reduced the number of authorities to just over 300 by introducing a two-tier structure based on counties and districts, while accepting Maud’s proposal for metro councils in the metropolitan areas.
The metro councils were deeply controversial because the prosperous Tory fringes feared the Labour heartlands, and to my discredit I abolished rather than reformed them as environment minister in the 1980s. In mitigation, I helped George Osborne and Greg Clark when they pioneered the recreation of metro authorities with elected mayors in several of our major cities. (London had already achieved this under Tony Blair, whose government had used legislation I enacted to enable a small number of county councils to opt for unitary status.)
It is a major failure of public policy that well over half a century after Maud we are still left with an expensive, multitiered local administrative machine. It is against this backdrop that Gove inherited responsibility for the devolution agenda and the drive to level up the less prosperous parts of the country. Gove cannot be held responsible for the delay, and he is right to make clear that there are no short-term fixes. Regeneration is a long-term process, and he is right to recognise the role of central government in bringing it about.
He is also right to chair a committee of the relevant ministers to drive the agenda. I walked the streets of Liverpool for three weeks after the 1981 riots. It changed my understanding of public administration beyond recognition. He should hypothecate a minister to each conurbation authority and insist they have regular dialogue with the mayor and other influential local people in both public and private sectors.
Another wise move is the recreation of the old government offices in each region to coordinate central government’s interactions with the mayoral authorities. These will be chaired by levelling-up directors who will replace the old regional directors that disappeared under the coalition government. I hope that Gove will take a personal interest in these appointments. They are a critical building block in any devolution plan, as a partnership of trust is a must. He may wish to seek some appointments from outside the public sector to bring entrepreneurial experience to the task.
Considering the constraints at play, there is much to welcome in the white paper. Three mayoral authorities, West Midlands, Manchester and Glasgow, have been invited to negotiate more comprehensive deals. There is a clear indication that this is a path others will be able to follow. The paper also sets out a range of incentives to encourage a list of authorities to negotiate new mayoral deals. I hope they will – though the risk is that local pressures will drive councillors to opt for one of the lesser options tabulated in the document.
An observer could very well ask what the point of all this is. The answer is set out in the white paper’s 12 mission statements that cover virtually every aspect of modern life. Machinery is to be put in place to monitor progress against targets set for each of these criteria. A quango is to be set up to report on the facts. Joint select committees of both houses of parliament should keep close to this process. I tried something similar in the 1990s with my white paper on competitiveness. It provided an invaluable source of criticism for the opposition. Annual comparative statistics tend not to survive long in the heat of party politics.
It is inevitable that the first question many will pose in response to the white paper is how much more money is promised. But it is the wrong question. Huge capital programmes flow into every part of our country every year. The right question is how relevant are these sums to the needs and priorities of local opportunities. The white paper reveals the problem by endless reference to existing budgets. These are all programmes designed in Whitehall to fit the functional judgments of individual spending departments – they are not designed to reflect Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle or anywhere else. Devolution is about replacing the myriad different funds with a single fund to finance strategies devised and led by local mayors that best reflect the circumstances of each local economy and attract the largest additional expenditure.
The next great task for Gove is to add a sense of urgency to the good intentions outlined in the white paper. Why not invite each of the metro mayors to separate meetings with Gove’s committee to outline individual programmes for each area? The public is more than capable of judging who simply uses the occasion to play party politics. The outstanding quality of Andy Street in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen on Teesside ensures the government has everything to gain.
Lord Heseltine is a former Conservative deputy prime minister and environment secretary
