Tony Reeves is a former Chief Executive of Liverpool City Council of the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council. He has worked for a number of Yorkshire councils, including involvement in the regeneration of former coalfield communities. In recognition for his work for Bradford, Business in the Community asked him to become an HRH Prince of Wales’s Ambassador for Yorkshire & Humber.
This interview was conducted on 21 November 2021.
Q: Can you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy between 1979-2015?
Working on coalfield regeneration after the pits closed in South Yorkshire was my first real regeneration role. From 2003 to 2006, I worked for Wakefield Council and I was deputy Chief Executive. I led the regeneration, housing and economic development function, worked with a couple of MPs, it was a great experience.
Then from 2006, I was chief executive of Bradford City Council, leading regeneration and getting the city to reinvent itself because it had been through some very hard times. Fascinating place, but through all that time I was working at a sub-regional level at a West Yorkshire/Leeds city-region level, working both with the other towns and cities in West Yorkshire. The city-regions emerged from The Northern Way initially, which John Prescott and Gordon Brown commissioned.
That was the start of my regional work. From 1997 onwards, the Regional Development Agencies were emerging, and they were working at the county level. So, there was an RDA for Yorkshire. You worked at a local level, at a functioning economic level and also at a regional level, trying to make sure there was a golden thread running through everything you were doing. They were working to achieve agglomeration between those places as well. Of course, that work has ebbed and flowed since then but it is still highly relevant, in my view.
Q: Is agglomeration the primary thing you were trying to achieve? Or was it about inequality?
There’s three bits to this for me: one is about making sure economic growth is inclusive so that it does help to tackle inequality. The second is aligning economic growth with proper public sector reform, because the way the state works, in my view, ends up inadvertently trapping people in poverty. Liverpool’s a great example of that: for communities in North Liverpool, the dial hasn’t changed from the last 40 years. Parts of East Manchester have been the same. That is starting to change. Parts of Leeds are the same as well, tackling inequality is important for me.
The third thing is how you bring those two things together, and I think it’s always interesting to look at the productivity lens and the reasons why some of the northern cities are lacking in productivity. I think agglomeration is at the regional level and in some cases pan-regional level – where you can do things at a northern level, for example. We can accelerate that potential and that growth and make sure that by making the places smaller, we can almost turbocharge those initiatives. Ultimately those goals are the key goals that we should be focusing on.
If I’m being brutally honest my thinking has sharpened up on these things over time. I don’t think, at the start of that journey, we were thinking about tackling health inequality and improving education as key elements of building a productive economy. They were all important, but they were separate policy areas. We weren’t seeing them as part of the same systemic approach to tackling the barriers that were holding individuals, communities and whole economies back, but I think we absolutely see that is the case now.
If you take Grimethorpe as an example where I spent a number of years working. Grimethorpe was the most economic pit in Europe and it was closed because there wasn’t a market for coal. The response from the government and from local agencies came from the fact that nobody knew what to do with the place and the people that were in it. The whole purpose for the town disappeared when the pit and the coking plant left.
I’ve chaired some really challenging public meetings or participated in them over the years. But chairing a consultation meeting for a planning application from RJB Mining to opencast two years after the pits closed, and when there was no market for coal because he found a market for coal and was going to create 15 jobs – there are probably war zones that are less hostile than that was. The thing about Grimethorpe was that, unlike Castleford, it didn’t really have an economic history before the mine. It was therefore just not connected in any way.
I think the most important thing has been the start of the devolution journey; it hasn’t continued, not properly. I’m a really strong believer in national policy frameworks that enable appropriate local action. These issues are systemic issues. A good starting point is to start looking at these problems from a productivity lens and understanding what the barriers are. You need to keep improving productivity in order to get sustained growth without driving huge inflationary spikes. The thing that has held a lot of the North back for years has been lack of productivity because of poor health, inequality, poor education and skills, lack of investment in infrastructure, although that’s been that’s been lumpy.
There hasn’t been a consistent approach to that regional policy to create the conditions required, and there haven’t been enough levers at a local level. The start of the devolution journey has created real opportunities and getting the northern cities and their hinterlands to work together rather than against each other has been positive. I’ve worked on some fabulous regeneration schemes, but at an economic level, macroeconomic level, or a regional economic level, I think that’s been the biggest issue. The biggest frustration felt like being in a meteor storm of 100,000 initiatives that were coming out of central government. The opportunity to allow places to work with government and get local area agreements potentially created a framework that allows us to get the mix of interventions right to really tackle issues.
One of things I’m doing now is to develop a city plan. There wasn’t a plan when I came here, the council had no priorities or anything which is bizarre for a city. What we’ve done now, rather than the council writing the plan, is to develop it with all our partners, including the Chamber of Commerce, voluntary sector, NHS, police, all the big public services and the universities. We’ve got a single set of outcomes and what we’re saying to government is, ‘Here’s a great opportunity to work with us.’ This is rather than having a debate about centralisation versus devolution which has always felt sterile to me.
Let’s instead work out what the role of central government has and what the role of the local state is, and make sure the two are properly aligned. At the heart it is about empowering people to take control of their own lives, including economically empowering people. That’s absolutely about tackling health inequalities which is massive in Liverpool. We want a multi-year funding settlement for the whole city, it doesn’t mean that we decide locally whether we have a police force or an NHS. Now there are 14 different sets of metrics by which we’re held to account by central government, and they pull us in different directions. If we’re going to tackle the underlying issues that are holding people back, we absolutely need to focus on outcomes and systemically address those wicked issues.
We’re absolutely convinced we can do this. We can save boatloads of money. We obviously want to reinvest some of it because we’re stretched for cash, but we know we can achieve significantly better outcomes. In doing that, we are aligned with clear economic policies that play to our strengths, that complement Manchester and other parts of the North. It isn’t about ‘Just give us all the power and give us all the money.’ It’s getting a proper settlement. The way that Number 10 was run, not Number 11, and with your government Ed, it was difficult to get some purchase in that discussion. But the opportunity was there, and we had the cash at the time to do it as well.
Q: Do you think Whitehall or Westminster was speaking with one voice?
Whitehall is incredibly siloed, and it’s run by Permanent Secretaries as a whole series of fiefdoms. You have to broker relationships to build good things and we’re partially successful in doing that. We’re as good as any other place. Tom Riordan is absolutely superb at it, but we’re certainly making progress on that, but we have to broker those arrangements and join those things up. When Mark Sedwill was the head of the civil service, he really got the place-based stuff and the need for government to focus as a government on places with the places. But that was pretty unique in my view.
Q: Have there been different attitudes from different departments consistently?
Yes. The Department of Work and Pensions have been until very recently, hard to engage at a local level in terms of their policy thinking and their ability to flex their model to fit in with other local assets and address local issues. There’s always a difference between the Department of Health and the NHS.
The local leaders, I’m afraid they’re branch managers, they’re called chief executives, but they’re actually branch managers because they are part of a national organisation. The local leaders are quite often very keen to work on integrated models and looking at broader issues. But the pressure they come under from the centre is to stay in the health silo.
Most of the decisionmakers – they just don’t get local government and they don’t get social care. That’s a big worry. That’s why we have, in my view, an ill health system rather than a population health model that is capable of tackling health inequality, it consumes a huge amount of resource. When you talk to Treasury about productivity it gets interesting. The Treasury is the department that is capable of looking holistically across government and thinking about place through an economic lens. When I have conversations with Will Gardner and others, they absolutely get this – that we have to get the ingredients right at a local level to create the potential for improvements in productivity and sustained growth.
It’s a real mixed bag. That ebbs and flows and to a certain extent, it depends on the attitude of the Secretary of State. There are Secretaries of State that have a very political view around, for example, school governance. One mantra is ‘I want to create lots of academies and get rid of locally maintained schools.’ Others look more holistically at how we create the conditions for young people to thrive. A massive issue for me is making sure that young people growing up in our poor communities can see a credible pathway to a good job from an early age. Education is the vehicle to get them there.
Further education (‘FE’) is phenomenally important and has central policy frameworks, but you need local action to work on that basis. Some of the combined authorities want to control everything at a local level. So, you still get a provider-led approach to FE and skills development. Others are more enlightened and want an employer-led approach with a focus on growth sectors in the economy and to allow industry to create or shape a system that creates pipelines of talent into the right places in the economy. I think it is a real mixed picture.
Q: Does the attitude that the Treasury and Number Ten take together or separately make a big difference?
Huge difference. The messages from Number Ten being conveyed deliberately or otherwise, were that government had to be seen to be solving all problems. So, they announced lots of initiatives and made almost daily announcements instead of getting the role of central government right. They should have been creating those frameworks, securing deals with places that enabled multi-year approaches to tackle these systemic issues and then within those frameworks, allowing people the freedom to do things.
It is an absolute crime that we spend billions upon billions on the criminal justice system and more than half the people who come out of prison reoffend and go back inside. Even though the vast majority don’t want to. We know because there’s evidence that if you get people into stable housing, if you get them into work (and we’ve got skills shortages all over the place), you get a proper plan in place so when they come out you’ve got appropriate support services, you can massively reduce the risk of reoffending. There’s some really good private sector led things from National Grid from Timpson and others. A project I started on this in Bradford has continued. 100s of people have gone through that programme and nine percent of people reoffend, and it saves an absolute King’s ransom and you get much better outcomes.
When we measured this in Liverpool, when somebody reoffends and goes back inside, on average, 33 offences were involved. When the wheels come off, these people are human crime waves. It’s a classic systems failure when everybody can convince themselves they’re all doing their jobs properly, yet 55% of people reoffend and go back inside. That costs the UK taxpayer about £20 billion a year. We’ve convinced the combined authority to give us half a million pounds to do up the workshops in the prison in Liverpool.
Q: What was your experience of local leadership?
There’s been real progress. Some places have found it easier than others. Some have got a bit bogged down on semantics, ‘Do we have a Metro Mayor or not?’, This is very frustrating because in 2012, Tom [Riordan] and I negotiated the first city deal. It was announced the day after Manchester’s in the end, because Howard Bernstein got the then-Chancellor to announce Manchester’s first. We were then left in Manchester’s wake because the chair of the combined authority at the time, who was Peter Box, decided he was going to put himself on a collision course with the Chancellor and say, ‘Over my dead body are we having a Metro Mayor.’ It was swatted into the long grass, and it took nearly a decade to get that sorted, which is frustrating. There’s a lot of progress being made.
Even in the most advanced places like Greater Manchester, they still fight like cats in a sack on certain issues. But they do it behind closed doors. There’s been real progress made, and it is so important that we do get joined-up at that local level. I think the RDA played a role to a certain extent, but when it got difficult, they worked with the places that were easier to work with. I’ll be honest, I exploited that situation when we were working at Wakefield. Every January, I phoned the RDA up and said, ‘We’ve got some great projects if you want to put some funding in’, because we knew damn well, they wouldn’t have allocated all their funding because of local politics. This included a lot of things, such as buying dairy sites to unlock the Westgate development at Wakefield, and another site to unlock the Trinity Walk shopping scheme.
We used RDA capital for that, we were supposed to have an allocation of about five million. We ended up getting 20 million every year, because we were smart about it. It has got progressively better. I think the RDAs provided that regional infrastructure, that was important. If they hadn’t been abolished… if they’d stayed focused purely on the agenda they had, then I think we’d be in a much better place regionally now. It was the Eric Pickles ‘Bonfire of Quangos’ as he called it. A lot of that was political posturing quite frankly. But the thing that really stuck in my throat was getting rid of the RDAs. I know that people in different parts of the country have different experiences but in Yorkshire, it worked really well.
Q: In terms of new and alternative institutional configurations, how can we ensure that regional economies don’t get lost in a focus on core cities?
Core cities for me are not the important thing, it is about the whole economy that they’re a part of. The clue is in the title: ‘core city’. We can’t achieve our potential in Liverpool without working with our neighbouring authorities and we do that with a combined authority and in collaboration with them. Now, just look at the labour supply into Liverpool and about a third of the people that work in the city centre live in Liverpool itself. If you look at the travel for arts and culture which is a massive issue in Liverpool, there’s a higher percentage of people from the Wirral who come to the Philharmonic music hall, than come from Liverpool itself. So, you just need to be a bit grown-up about this. If we’re going to achieve the benefits, it is about being able to establish the roles that each of the centres play. They need to be complementary and not competing against each other and the core city isn’t the whole of Liverpool, it’s the city centre that plays an absolutely fundamental role.
So does Daresbury with the supercomputer, Port Sunlight with all the R&D. The coastal parts of Merseyside play a fundamental role. Some of the industrial estates in St Helens and Knowsley have got some fabulous businesses in high-growth sectors. They all play an important role in the economy.
It’s never about city versus the sort of hinterland. Politically, that can be the case sometimes, I don’t mean locally, although that can happen. But nationally the government doesn’t think cities are the priority and I find that extraordinary when our productivity is lagging behind other developed countries. The assets in cities are absolutely critical in terms of unlocking that potential, in my view. But it only works if you work across the whole functioning economy and that means we should work with city regions.
If you take health and life sciences, we’ve got some world-leading expertise, particularly in infection control, which is quite relevant currently. If you look at Liverpool’s strengths, they’re globally important and significant in one or two niche areas. If you look at Manchester and Liverpool together with that sort of arc into Cheshire with Alderley Park and think of that as a whole sector working together, it is globally significant across the board. When we’ve looked at Bruntwood SciTech, a JV [Joint Venture] between Bruntwood and Legal & General, it has bought a 25% stake in Liverpool Science Parks, which was its own JV between the council and the two universities. When we were looking at their stake in Alderley Park and their stake in Manchester Science Park, we were really worried initially about competing interests and when we did the due diligence on it, we found that 95% of the activity across that piece is entirely complementary. We only overlap on about 5% of those areas, and so it makes absolute sense for us to take a regional view of health and life sciences.
Q: What do you think works to support regional growth: investment in skills, investment in infrastructure or investment in business clusters?
I’ve always been keen on focusing on growth poles in terms of economic growth. You play to your strengths, but actually, when you take a regional view, there’s a collection of strengths. When you take a Pan-Northern view, for example, you may think about material science. You think of graphene in Manchester, you think of metals in Sheffield and you think of polymers in Bradford. There’s a particular strength in Bradford University. You think about some of the material science expertise in Liverpool and Port Sunlight over in the Wirral. You start to put those things together, and they’re important. So, I don’t think it’s a question of regional versus sector specific. The default position is to do things at a local or a city-region level and go above that where it’s relevant to do higher level skills.
To stand a chance of regenerating Grimethorpe we had to reconnect Grimethorpe to the world because it was completely isolated. So there’s transport links. Why is transport important in economic growth? It’s three things for me. You connect businesses to labour and labour markets to employment, or your labour to employment opportunities. You connect businesses to end markets and obviously that’s products, but it can be services as well. You make places smaller so you can achieve agglomerated benefits from those things.
Even if you look at it from a Grimethorpe point of view, you couldn’t create an economic strategy for Grimethorpe and think, ‘Oh how do we connect Grimethorpe to Barnsley Town Centre?’ You had to connect it into the regional infrastructure and there was a whole host of other things we had to do. Had we had a greenfield site, would we have done the things that we did in Grimethorpe? No, but there was a very real need to respond to what was happening to that community. The south-east Wakefield coalfield area around South Elmsall had good access to the A1, and you could connect it quickly into the regional infrastructure. A major distribution centre would enable not just distribution of goods, but also lots of engineering jobs to keep all the conveying equipment moving. You can build things around that, and one of the big things in mining industries is conveying. Engineers that create conveying appliances because you have to move coal from the services. So, it’s quite easy to re-skill people and get them back into skilled jobs, but in places like Grimethorpe that was hard.
It’s a missed opportunity that we could have been much more joined-up. The opportunity to flex that local skill base and capability base of the local economy to address those opportunities was there, but I don’t think we were joined-up enough in our thinking and fleet of foot enough to position ourselves to do that. I think maybe we’d be better if that happened now.
Q: What would have allowed you to have been joined-up in your thinking?
I went on a tour of the distribution centre with Next when I first arrived in Wakefield, and we probably had a conversation about it at the time. I was jumping up and down saying,
‘There’s massive opportunities here. This isn’t a load of low-skilled jobs, it’s lots of management jobs. You know, there are thousands of people employed in this place. There are lots of management jobs, lots of IT jobs, lots of programming jobs, engineering jobs, 24/7 work to move 800,000 parcels a day through that distribution centre.’ They were looking to double the size of it as well. It’s a huge operation. We got some local companies together, spoke to the lead engineer for Next who was from Leicester and so he knew people back in Leicester that could service some of their needs. One of his senior people was from Liverpool and he knew people over here who could address some of those issues.
They had no idea at all about the strength in conveying machinery in the local economy. I got some engineering companies together to talk to them, but what it required was support from the council, the RDA, ‘Right, we’re going to change our plans and put a load of our skills funding into this now, to help re-skill the workforce, pour some grants into the businesses to change some of their manufacturing processes, and there was a great opportunity.’ It wasn’t just an opportunity with Next, there was an opportunity to create a centre of excellence that would have supported distribution and because of Wakefield’s position.
But there were too many vested interests and political commitments to make that shift, and we didn’t ever get the chance to exploit it properly. I was deputy Chief Executive at the time, now I wouldn’t have taken ‘no’ as easy as I did then. I’d have been kicking down doors to exploit that opportunity and potentially embarrassing people into doing the right thing. But you get to a point in your career where you don’t really care if you get sacked because you just want to do the right thing. That was a golden opportunity.
Q: How do you think about London? Is London an opportunity? Or has it been a driver of inequality?
No, London is a huge opportunity. When you have a world city like that in your country, you need that world city to be competitive. For London to be as good as it can be, I think the regions have to be successful as well and it’s a balance in terms of regional policy. You won’t ever find me saying, ‘Everything goes to London, we need to get all the funding out into the regions.’ I’m back to the sort of system failure where healthy life expectancy for men in the poorest part of Liverpool compared to the most affluent part of Liverpool – and those two wards are less than a mile apart – is 22 years difference. People are losing more than ten years of their working life in large numbers in North Liverpool.
Investment, proper investment will help us tackle that, and there has to be a proper plan behind it. It is in the national interest and that’s that’s not unique to Liverpool. That’s where getting the public sector reform agenda and the economic growth agenda and the productivity lens is helpful. It’s not a false economy to invest in those areas. It’s a false economy not to invest in those areas. That doesn’t have to be at the cost of London because you’re investing in things that will give you a pretty quick return. You can build that over time.
Q: Where has done a really good job investing in productivity?
I got the new Mayor to go to Copenhagen and have a look at how they joined up policies, with a long-term approach to taking traffic out of the city centre. He looked at the way they’ve integrated their waste system into other policy areas. The big waste treatment plant is also a ski slope, it’s fantastic. As a city, they will be net-zero carbon before, I think, any other city in Europe. Yet, that change began in the late 1970s, taking a long-term view of the city. They’ve continued to prosper, and by not building tall buildings all over the city they haven’t sub-optimised the economy. In fact, they’ve created a place that people want to be in because it’s such a joy.
Liverpool has the ability to mirror that if we can tackle some of those underlying issues. It’s an absolutely beautiful city because of its history. It was the second city of the Empire, so lots of great buildings, a great waterfront, great public spaces and what we don’t have is 30 story towers all over the city. You can still get strong urban form without building at that scale. I think about Copenhagen as a good example of the type of city we should be looking at and thinking, ‘Okay, how do you do that?’ Then there’s some other examples, where cities are utterly transforming, places like Bogota, where you can learn the lesson that you don’t have to accept the lot that you have. If you get the strategy right and you act systemically, you can address these issues. There isn’t any rocket science in getting Liverpool to be a really high functioning city. It takes time and you need to hold your nerve over that period of time and not keep changing course every five minutes. You need the right support from central government as well, but it’s completely doable.
Q: If we were to take away from your experiences one idea or innovation which you think worked and should be the focus of any Levelling Up in future, what would it be?
Have a look at our city plan. The idea is that instead of having all these disparate policy areas, you see them as pieces of a jigsaw that come together to create a whole place that is capable of thriving, and at its heart it’s about empowering people to take control of their lives. Economically empowering but also tackling some of the other things that are holding people back to really get the place thriving. You cannot achieve Levelling Up without tackling inequality and not just inequality between regions, but inequality within regions as well. It’s incredibly important, and you can tackle climate change at a global level or at a national level, or even at a local level without attacking inequality.
40% of our emissions in Liverpool come from really poor-quality housing and terraced housing that were built over 100 years ago. Housing market renewal being scrapped was a nightmare because it could have been more efficient. We’ve got a huge obsolescence issue in a huge part of the North where there is an oversupply of the wrong type of housing. So they end up getting converted into multiple occupation properties and create downward spirals in communities. Tackling those emissions requires a lot of retrofit and neighbourhood regeneration. If we sell retrofit to poor communities on the basis this will help carbon emissions, when people are hanging on by their fingernails just to feed their kids and get by, we won’t get any buy in. But if we sell it as, this is regeneration in your community. You get one and a half jobs on retrofit, for every job you get a new build, we can build local supply chains. We can reduce fuel bills, so tackling fuel poverty, then you get buy-in. The outcome is the same, that it will tackle climate change.
We need to focus on the issues that people are facing in their communities and construct the narrative that people can own and buy into. Even if we’re addressing the same policy areas and joining those things up. You cannot do that from a national level and that’s why local action within national frameworks must be properly evidence-based.
Devolution in Scotland has led to centralisation, because everything gets sucked up to a national level and and then they start to lose the essence of place in that. It’s not this argument about centralisation versus devolution. It’s about the centre playing its role. We want to take our city plan into negotiations with government and get a deal where we work out the role that central government is going to play. Then align that with the role of the local state and all our partners locally in order to achieve the outcomes in the plan.
Central government’s role in this is critically important, but so is the freedom to flex things at a local level. If we can do that, then you set economic policy within a wider plan that is capable of systemically addressing the issues. Out of that, you’ll get failure demand coming out of the system. You’ll get productivity improvements at a significant rate and the opportunity to start reinvesting and building. So you create a multiplier effect by then reinvesting and accelerating what you’re doing. But, we’re absolutely convinced we can make a real difference. The thing in Liverpool, despite the political madness, is there are partners who are prepared to act together and really tackle those issues systemically. We just need a few more levers. We don’t need permission to act, but we do need a few more levers to enable us to really do that properly.
ENDS