David Blunkett was Secretary of State for Education and Employment, Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Prior to that he was leader of Sheffield City Council. He also led Labour’s Council of Skills Advisers, who published their report for Labour in October 2022.
This interview was conducted on 28 November 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about the roles you have had relevant to regional growth in the UK?
I had experience of regional growth personally as leader of Sheffield City Council for seven years in the 1980s, in the teeth of the Thatcher government. Secondly, as the Secretary of State for Education and Employment, then Home Office, then Work and Pensions. I was in the cabinet for eight years.
Q: Could you tell us what do you think have been the most significant achievements for regional growth policy and what are the frustrations?
I think regional growth policy has been at its best when it’s engaged those at local level with what is necessary to transform the local economy and takes into account the social and cultural changes as well. We’ve had very few good examples since 1979. There were examples in the 1970s, some of which went very badly wrong. Most people who have examined this area will be familiar with investing in substantial oil refineries, which employed very few people. Important as it was to have them, they could have been anywhere.
It’s a ‘not anywhere’ syndrome that’s important, that you build on the natural resources of an area, as happened in the 18th and 19th century. You are creative in terms of using the talent of the population in the regions that you’re targeting, and you listen. When I say that few schemes were successful, I mean that in the sense that in the 2000s, when the Labour government took over from 1997, we did a lot of good, but we were understandably in a hurry and a lot of it was top-down. When we attempted to engage in regional policy through Regional Development Agencies [RDAs] they also replicated the central model of top-down. When deputy prime minister John Prescott attempted to establish Regional Assemblies we found that people hadn’t been persuaded that they wanted them. So if people didn’t want a regional elected assembly, there was very little point in enforcing it on them. Although latterly, of course, we’ve seen the imposition of elected mayors.
Q: What stands out in terms of the main intellectual shift you’ve made today compared to when you were thinking about these issues, say, in the 1980s or 1990s?
In the 1980s, I saw the value of metropolitan authorities. Obviously, people are more familiar with the GLC [Greater London Council] than we are with the other six metropolitan areas that existed. But the concentration was on putting in the right infrastructure, whether that was in transport, in the case of South Yorkshire, it was a forerunner to the GLC’s transport policy. It was about affordable, available, reliable bus services and, to some extent, building the road and rail infrastructure. It was substantial investment in alternatives to the collapse of the steel engineering and mining communities which covered South Yorkshire.
That was a combined effort of the innovative programme of Sheffield City Council, which can be accessed by reading the book: Democracy in Crisis, The Town Halls Respond that Keith Jackson and myself wrote in 1987. That spelt out the endeavours to try and both engage the community and have an overarching vision. At that time, I was fascinated by the rise of the intellectual right. Namely, the new enlightenment and the way in which Milton Friedman and those advising Reagan and, to some extent, Thatcher were drawing down on Friedrich von Hayek’s work from 1944 onwards. I was interested in the way in which the response from those opposed to the free-market dogma were stuck in a time warp and couldn’t actually get out of what became known as Old Labour.
At that time, myself and a whole group of councillors in the area, but also reflected to some extent in the GLC and the London boroughs, were looking at local economic policy, and we played a part in setting up the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, helping to fund it. We were involved in trying to look at urban renewal policies. Some money came from government, we weren’t completely bereft. We were trying to use a grant called Urban Aid creatively and imaginatively to create cooperatives to develop social enterprises, to try and lift the morale of the area.
I can’t stress too strongly how important it is that you change the mindset of people from wanting someone else to do it for them, to wanting someone else to support them in being part of achieving it. If people felt that they were part of an endeavour of bringing about change, this would lessen the tendency of ‘us and them’, and embrace what might be described as an ‘enabling government’, rather than something that is ‘done to you’. But it was important to make people believe that we’ve got to get up and do something about it rather than wait for government to change. That was really important and got somewhat lost in the ’90s. It was revitalised with the New Deal for Communities programme alongside the RDA.
However, the RDAs were very top-down and very resistant to imaginative, creative, bottom-up initiatives. They were interested in building roads and to some extent, large-scale amenities and investing in projects that would get some attention, but not building from the grassroots, from the community, and making that a joint endeavour. I think that was a failure. We didn’t learn a lot in the implementation of New Deal for Communities from the community development programmes of the 1970s and we might have done a lot better if we had. RDAs were very physical [infrastructure] orientated. So people kept on wanting to refurbish and reopen buildings that were long closed without any understanding of the maintenance and the revenue requirements of using those buildings for creative measures, including job creation.
So, under the Labour government, we were reliant on initiatives that related to the macroeconomy. They were successful in terms of high growth, low unemployment, low interest rates, low inflation but not so much in terms of building resilience from the community upwards. Whilst regional policy did transform some of the worst blights of the 1980s, particularly in the mining communities, it actually didn’t transform people’s view of themselves. It didn’t restore confidence from those who had been in highly paid, relatively speaking, often quite prestigious jobs, particularly in engineering and the high-tech part of steel, but also in terms of the respect people have for mining, to jobs that change the nature of the relationship within families and the relationship of those individuals to their wider community. That pride in the job and the self-esteem and the confidence of community was eroded.
Q: What are your reflections from your time, especially as Secretary of State for Education and Employment in the first Blair government?
The department that I inherited from Gillian Shephard had only been around for a very short period of time when the Education and Employment departments were brought together under the permanent Secretary Michael Bichard. Employment brought a different perspective to the Education Department. Employment had been engaged even under Thatcher in initiatives through the creation of the Manpower Services Commission. Amazingly, government ministers did not intervene and stop such initiatives which went on under the radar.
There were civil servants in the Department for Employment that came across who had been involved in quite innovative work behind the scenes, often embryonic. With the windfall levy and the support on this occasion from the Treasury and in particular, Gordon Brown, we were able to combine the new deal for the unemployed and other employment initiatives with the learning and skills agenda. This meant that we were, after two years, able to start the establishment of the Learning and Skills Council. This was a devolved initiative to the subregional level. Later, sadly, in my view, the Learning and Skills Council was centralised and then abolished. The centralisation almost inevitably led to its demise, because the whole point of the Learning and Skills Council in replacing the Training and Enterprise Councils and the Further Education Funding Council was actually to engage employers as well as the local authorities and the wider community in trying to put forward initiatives that were both meeting the immediate skills needs of the locality, whilst looking at the future skills needs of the country.
Here we are, all those years later, endeavouring with a Conservative government to put in place something that looks like employer engagement with metro mayors and in other areas with local authorities. We’re talking once again about the critical nature, not only of the skills agenda for post-16 and the part that plays in growth, productivity and rebalancing, but we’re looking at it in terms of all the way back from early years through to lifelong learning. There is a continuum. With an incoming Labour government [I hope] that initiative can be heavily built on because it’s infrastructure at its very best.
Q: How centralised were the Learning and Skills Councils?
I think one of the problems was that the further Education Funding Council had been based in Coventry, and the funding regime, in part, came from the same people who have been delivering a centralised FEFC [Further Education Funding Council] directed resource to further education colleges. The mindset for learning and skills was very much still in that compartmentalised viewpoint. I felt that some Learning and Skills Councils were really good and not only created their own initiative, but the momentum to pull in investment from the private sector and to engage employees in a very positive way. Some of which was reflective of those areas that had the engineering and the construction industry training boards and were familiar with that kind of combined resource and initiative. What we’ve seen over the last half century is the inability to spread the best, so that it overtakes the worst, so that you’re able to scale up what is working well very quickly. I plead guilty not to have necessarily built that into the creation of the Learning and Skills Councils from the beginning. In other words, you embed the kind of best practice of innovation and creativity rather than the worst of bureaucratic hands-on directionism.
Q: What do you think about the frustration on the post-18 side that more power wasn’t handed to the regions?
I understand the frustration very well. The nuances of the truth of over-centralisation comes from quite a complex architecture, landscape, of what we inherited. The Department for Education had been both centralised and hands-off. This is perverse and can seem contradictory. But they had no levers to pull, albeit they were very centralising in their diktats. What we did was twofold, first we recognised that what happened at local level and specifically what happened in school is what really mattered. Schools, colleges and adult learning can only be transformational if the provision itself changes. Therefore we put levers in place to have people locally encouraging, supporting, and resourcing change, particularly with the numeracy and literacy policies. It took on a life of its own. Once that had been put in place it was very difficult for the department to let go.
The employment element of the department had been much more proactive in terms of the relationship with locality, not least because they’ve been running the job centres. We set up Job Centre Plus at the end of my time in the department, which drew together the employment and benefits elements and tried to initiate a much more positive view of welfare policy. But there’s no question in my mind that we were too over-centralised and we didn’t want to let go of the levers. We didn’t let go of the resource or encourage people to believe that they had the freedom to do what they wanted. I plead guilty, but at the time, the imperative of making a transformation required action to save a generation.
Q: On the post-18 side, why do you think under Labour and Conservative governments, there was the unwillingness to allow money to go to regional local discretion? Is it because people thought the money wouldn’t be well spent?
I think there is a genuine problem in terms of the construct of local government, which has had the stuffing knocked out of it. So, the mix of controversial and zany local government in the 1980s had both resource and initiative taken away. Or it lost the will and therefore the local authorities’ situation in the 2000s was substantially not being seen as capable or not having the vitality and initiative to take on new challenges. I think in retrospect, that is entirely wrong. Once people are given the wherewithal and the initiative, they’re more likely to respond positively and to start that momentum and restore self-belief. Of course this does involve what might be described as ‘capacity building’, which should go hand in hand with decentralisation.
I had some responsibility prior to the failure of individual learning accounts because they were transferred into a voucher system. That, I think, set back the initiative of giving both individuals and combined authorities and employers that kind of initiative that would have freed up decision making at local level from the individual outwards. Whilst this was after my time, I was sad that the intervention by the Treasury had changed what was a good idea into an exploitable system where fly-by-nights took advantage of what became the ‘voucher’. I think that the Sector Skills Councils, which were established at the time didn’t really work. Had they replicated the engineering and the construction industry training boards with a levy going in at local level, that might also have been a way of stimulating bottom-up local initiatives. I produced this policy document, ‘The Learning Age’, in 1999. It has to be said that both ends of Downing Street were deeply uninterested in it. But it was an endeavour to say lifelong learning has to be something more than just a few schemes devised in Whitehall.
I do believe that the creation of a Department for Education, as it later became, with children, families and schools, was understandable and a concentration on the family and on schooling, but it actually meant that trade and industry, and then subsequent iterations of it, took on skills but were detached from the core learning programme. It’s a real dilemma as to how you could put that back together again. In talking to people in the sector and politicians today, most of them want to see skills in BEIS (latterly split into two new departments: Business and Trade, and Science, Innovation and Technology) rather than Education, but that’s, I believe, because education has shown so little interest and initiative and vitality in embracing that agenda. We can see that from the centre where the autumn statement from Jeremy Hunt didn’t include any new resource whatsoever for post-18.
Q: How important is the view of prime ministers and chancellors for local policy?
There are messages that come from the centre and it is the prime minister and the chancellor who are the centrifugal force. It makes an enormous difference. What happens is failure builds on failure. The balkanisation of government didn’t help. So not only did we change the Department for Education and Employment, with Job Centre Plus going into Work and Pensions, but the government later had Trade and Industry with a finger in the pie as well.
We had four different departments with a stake in this, the Treasury, the Department for Work and Pensions, DTI [Department for Trade and Industry], and the Department for Education as it became. There was a lack of coordination and clarity of purpose: i.e. what is it we’re trying to do? Can we pull this together to do it coherently? It could have worked if there had been some overarching structure, which is why in my Learning and Skills paper, I’ve recommended what now Keir Starmer calls Skills England, a National Skills Task Force which replicates the task force that was set up with the support of Gordon with employers, which became UKCES [UK Commission for Employment and Skills].
Q: Has there ever been much enthusiasm for English devolution?
No, and there wasn’t a coherent voice at local government level saying: ‘We’ll get our act together. We’ll combine for economic and infrastructure purposes in order to make it possible for you to devolve more effectively to us.’ Local government didn’t say: ‘This is a great opportunity.’ So, it’s a two-way street: central government were too centralised and local government were too enfeebled to actually grasp the opportunity. The exception was, of course, the mayoral structure in London, and the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities [AGMA] that drew together 10 local authorities west of the Pennines. I mean you’re talking about a very large number of districts. Ten districts got together and started that process with local leadership in the business community, but also in the public sphere. They had a grasp of the importance of getting this, the architecture, therefore, the jigsaw right, at local level to make it possible to have a voice and to demand further devolution. So this was a failure of bottom-up as well as top-down.
Q: Was it right to aim for the regional scale for the non-London parts of England? Was that too far away? Was it too abstract? Or was the problem that RDAs were too centralising?
They were very centralising and there was a view which was reinforced from DTI very strongly that they were only interested in what could be described as economic development. That missed the point that you have to do this with people and missed out the crucial agenda of lifelong learning and the vitality that comes from engaging people in the process. So there was a failure of bottom-up from the local government units.
There was a failure of the RDAs to really engage and to connect in a way that meant that people knew something about them, what they were about, what they could expect from them. Rather they would sit at a regional level and dole out central government money. I don’t think that employers were sufficiently engaged with them either. As you have gathered, I wasn’t a fan of RDAs, but probably because I thought Yorkshire Forward was pretty useless. They were slow and cumbersome and unwilling to take decisions.
I think also it reflected, and you can see this in Yorkshire as a good example: Yorkshire’s got the population of Scotland, is a very diverse but historically proud county, which has virtually nothing in common between North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire. The problem for me in the campaign for a One Yorkshire is that it has to be built incrementally from where people currently find themselves, again from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. There are major issues where combining across a much larger geographic area makes sense, but most people want decisions taken as close to them as possible – such as travel to work, travel to leisure and culture, travel easily to friends.
Getting South Yorkshire to work together was the sole endeavour of Dan Jarvis (as the first elected Mayor of the Combined Authority, before he stepped down and was followed by Oliver Coppard), just to get them to agree to work together whilst some of them pretended that they wanted an even bigger unit, i.e., One Yorkshire. Now getting the mayoral authorities of South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire to start to work together in the future, replicating that with North Yorkshire, which incorporates York and then building what is relevant at the wider regional level into that structure so that what becomes right for action for the wider region, would then become obvious. That’s a bottom-up approach as opposed to ‘Let’s invent this wider structure, and then we’ll think about what it’s actually going to be doing and where it’s going to be doing it.’
Q: The counterargument was that RDAs were able to get areas that historically hadn’t worked together to work together effectively. Do you see any truth in that argument?
Well, I see the truth in that the RDAs had substantial resource. I mean, when the coalition came in, they took two-thirds of it away. So, they were able to use that resource and to coordinate the European resource as well, The [European] Social Fund, as well as the Regional Development Fund. That, I think, was probably their best crack at the job, their best effort to actually ensure the most central government and European funding was pulled into the region, which otherwise wouldn’t have happened. I can’t rubbish putting the money in, I just wish that the money had been applied in a long-term programme of self-generation.
Q: It is also interesting comparing the RDAs, which were comprehensive, with the Manchester model which left some areas out. How much do you think there should be a comprehensive model for devolution?
Well, we’re back to the same dilemma, aren’t we? Whether you impose from the centre to have coherence, or you have a messy system that allows people to join and you go about systematically persuading them as to why that’s a good idea. I can see a really good case why Blackburn and Burnley, and probably Preston, should join Greater Manchester in some form, maybe as an associate relationship. I mean, that would be even more powerful than the Greater Manchester model is at the moment.
I can see every reason why Humberside eventually might want to join with South Yorkshire with all the dilemmas of natural hostility to something immediately outside your own locality. It’s this contradiction of wanting the scale and the resource alongside the resentment of the pulling power of a large, core urban centre. You get that more in South Yorkshire and in West Yorkshire, than you do in Greater Manchester. Manchester isobviously a key city, but it’s not overwhelmed the rest of Greater Manchester. What’s more, in the early stages, it was more diplomatic about its key magnet role.
Q: What do you think of the prospect of a comprehensive local government reorganisation?
Well, Redcliffe-Maud in 1972 had enough problems with the abolition of rural and urban district councils, and pulling them in to either top-tier authorities or into the metropolitan counties. There was a massive upheaval to try and achieve even that, I think that some sort of centralised diktat of drawing boundaries on maps from Whitehall would be a total disaster. We’re going to have to do this incrementally, persuading people to join.
We thought we got Chesterfield and North East Derbyshire to agree to join South Yorkshire at one point because they are part of the economic Travel-to-Work-Area. But then things went very badly wrong: the referendum, the consultation process wasn’t done properly. Derbyshire County intervened, understandably because it was taking part of their role. They didn’t see that they could have joined with Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, and a configuration that could have been organic, turned out to be a source of irritation and including from other districts in South Yorkshire who resented the idea that the expansion of the Sheffield Travel-to-Work-area would be even more dominant. That parochialism where people cannot see the wood for the trees or the objective. What is it we’re trying to achieve? What is the best structure model to make it work? We don’t even start with that. We start with drawing maps, and we saw what that did in Southeast Asia.
Q: Are you now of the view that area-wide combined authority elected mayors is a good way to go or is now the inevitable way for devolution to go?
I think it’s now inevitable. I think it has taken on a role which has some coherence but needs a lot of working out. What would make it work better? I think we need to acknowledge where we are and think about how we’re going to make it work effectively. That can only be done if each element making up the structure understands what its role is and how it can complement and add value to the other so that it’s actually not separating out but actually building on what can be done at city or district level, as opposed to South Yorkshire wide.
Q: And your preferred model would be to add a tier like the GLA [Greater London Assembly] or to do, like Manchester, where the ten authorities come together and are sort of the counterpart to the mayor?
I prefer the Greater Manchester model, but I think that’s because they’ve made it work so well.
Q: Do you think London is a help or a hindrance?
My view about London is because it’s so overwhelmingly the economic centre of England, because its GDP, its growth, its productivity are so entirely different to the rest of the country it is bound to distort what we’re talking about and the solutions that we have to come up with. It’s a country within a country. Its diversity and its dynamism in terms of its financial institutions, and its ethnic makeup, are so completely different that it’s a world apart. We have to work out a model which doesn’t resent and try to pull down London and the Southeast, but actually provides a way forward for building a constructive way out of the low-productivity, low-growth imbalance that exists everywhere else.
Q: Do you think we’ve ever got close to that model? That we found a way of making it work, at least in part, in the past?
No, we haven’t. My preferred model is that we try and replicate the financial model of Germany because unless you have financial investment centres, in whatever form, then we’re always going to have this problem of the pull of London. Just disabling London or trying to force things out only works if you’re devolving government-funded elements, government departments. There was the big fanfare of everything going to Darlington. Sheffield already has 6000 civil service jobs which could provide a hub for building out. That’s the contradiction: we’re being told now that those areas that got government jobs were those which were previously too reliant on government-funded employment, they neglected the creative private sector and therefore they’re to blame. So, you know, it’s come full circle.
Q: So earlier you mentioned the tension between focusing on economic regeneration and then wider social reform, having a sense of agency, a sense of community empowerment. How does that relate to your views on how to get regional economies growing again?
I think that education throughout life is absolutely the key. I think we should be engaging with entrepreneurship in school and in university. Quite clearly, apprenticeships engage with it because they’re involved with business. But we don’t promote entrepreneurship with SMEs. We don’t help them to come together at critical mass. We don’t provide them with a light-touch umbrella. There’s a good example, in the cell and gene therapy sector, where they have created a way of helping SMEs obtain critical mass. There are all sorts of ways in which we could do that in which business would play a part with their supply chain, not just in creating jobs or apprenticeships, critical as they are, but actually working with anchor institutions in the universities. This could be where research could be applied directly to helping the local economy, and that would require a shift from the university, but a massive shift in thinking from government and from local government.
Q: Reflecting back over the period that you’ve been in office as a decisionmaker and the conversation we just had, what do you think is the most important lesson for us to take away for future policymakers?
It’s important to listen to people and not presume that we know best and, above all, to have a proper explanation of what it is, if we know what it is that we’re trying to achieve. If we don’t listen it shouldn’t be a surprise that it goes badly wrong because traditional ways of proceeding, the centrifugal force of pulling everything back in, will inevitably prevail.
You must have clarity about what you’re trying to do, what mechanisms will make it work, how to infuse as well as nudge in a quite robust physical sense, nudge organisations, business anchor institutions, into that mindset and how to get sufficient resource to oil the wheels, but not to end up with them relying once again on central government, telling them what to do or providing all the resources to do it.
It’s not a natural way in England to do things, and there’s not an easy, systematic way to do things. And if you’re trying to deliver, you want a plan which will work for everybody rather than some. What you’re trying to do in four or five years is to initiate energy. But, you don’t have the belief that you’re going to have the time to do it. Instead, you do things that are quick and easy, and then get some kind of result. I don’t have a way around that because we believe in democracy.
Q: Is there any way you can get sufficient stability into this policy space to actually have a 20-year chance? Or is that just impossible?
I said: if you could actually persuade this lot, as Gillian Shephard did in ‘96, that they might be remembered more kindly if there was a continuity of policy development so that what they do in the next two years can be carried forward, we might start to get somewhere in that space of the learning and skills area. You have to be optimistic and hopeful.
ENDS