Alan Johnson was the Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle from 1997 to 2017. He held a wide range of ministerial portfolios under the Blair and Brown governments, covering universities, welfare, industry, education, health and security. He served as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2011.
This interview was conducted on 9 August 2021.
Q: What was your role in growth and regional policy? What were the key successes and key frustrations of your time in office?
After the 2001 election, I was made Minister of State at the Department of Trade and Industry. I had been a Parliamentary Undersecretary beforehand. That was when responsibility for the Regional Development Agencies (‘RDAs’) moved from John Prescott’s department over to the Department for Trade and Industry (‘DTI’).
Patricia Hewitt, who was Secretary of State, asked me to be responsible for the RDAs. Being responsible for them was a delicate balancing act. Here we were in Britain, very centralised, very loathe to let anything go from the centre. Whilst the great Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary after the war, had have been very keen on regionalisation in Germany, no-one seemed to be very keen on it over here.
The issue was, ‘we might have responsibility for the RDAs, but we don’t have control’. They feel that it’s just a spectre of devolution, and that actually everything is being done from the centre. They’ve got a good pot of money, some of which came from the DTI. We had a tiny budget, about £6bn was our annual budget, and half of that ring fenced for science. But the money went into the RDAs from the department for local government, from other departments, culture and sport, all of that.
My job in particular, I remember Patricia telling me this, was to make the RDAs know that they’re loved and respected and to give them a sounding board into government without it turning the other way around. I was not trying to command and control what they were doing. I thought they were successful, given the circumstances. You not only had a lot of Civil Servants loathe to let go from the centre. You had Ministers as well, despite all the lip service we paid to it. You had Local Authorities convinced that these were going to replace County Councils even though we told them over and over again that they weren’t.
We had the situation where there was the huge democratic deficit, apart from in London. While I was in post, London set up its RDA. There’d been a delay, but it was accountable to the mayor – like Police and Crime Commissioners. When police and crime commissioning is responsible to the mayor, you can see the logic of it: there’s no democratic accountability and you’re creating some vehicle for it. But we never created the vehicle [for local accountability for RDAs]. That was part of their downfall near the end.
London was probably better placed than most of the other RDAs. For the others, they had to battle through jealousies within the region, jealousies over which businesspeople got the job (they’re all business-led primarily, although their boards also had politicians and trade unionists, etcetera). And then a lot of jealousy, put in East Yorkshire terms, ‘all the money is going to Leeds, all the money is going to Sheffield. You know we don’t get any of it over here’. Or vice versa sometimes, because Prescott was from Hull, and John Prescott was one of the great architects of this policy. People were convinced that Hull was getting an unfair advantage.
I don’t think the Tories ever bought into it. I can’t remember exactly whether there was a period when they decided that they wouldn’t pull it all up by the roots. In the end, that’s what they did. There was certainly still a political controversy over that, as there had been devolution to Wales and Scotland, which was another issue because as they devolved to Wales and Scotland, their pre-devolution development agencies became much stronger. If we hadn’t have gone down the RDA route, the imbalance with London in the South, Wales over to the West, and Scotland to the North would have been sucking all development and growth [from the rest of England]. England would have been where they’ve always been: very centralised, and paying lip service to devolution.
Q: Was regional growth on your agenda as Secretary of State for Education and in other ministerial roles?
Yes. I came back to DTI as Higher Education Minister, then I moved to the Department of Work and Pensions. I came back to DTI after the 2005 election and saw the policy bearing fruit. Universities were a big part of what they were doing. We had Lord Sainsbury working in the DTI and his agenda was all about this. We’d fallen behind. He didn’t have to convince anyone on that, we had. Science, new technology, all of that was really important to the RDAs. It was part of their remit. I think we set them goals from the centre. They had to develop their own economic strategy, but one of their goals was about growth based on new technologies.
Universities were a crucial part of what the RDAs were doing. Working with the universities to make sure that areas that didn’t have a university, that were outside the universities, actually got some advantage from the fact that these great centres of innovation were in their patch.
I kept bumping into the RDAs in every role I did after that. There were some pretty formidable people leading these RDAs. Sometimes you wondered why they did it. They had other things to do with their time, rather than take up what sometimes seemed to be a poisoned chalice in terms of the jealousies they had to move between. We had some pretty impressive leaders there, and they were the kind of leaders that you would ring up if you had a problem, wherever you were in the government, just to get a bit of perspective. For example, a hospital was due to close when I was at Health, or there was a talk about centralising maternity services in a certain area. I could pick up the phone to the RDA chair in that area. And there were some very good chief executives, exceptional one in Yorkshire and the Humber, Tom Riordan. It was a good sounding board.
Q: What did the RDA leaders think they were trying to achieve, given the wider pressures you mentioned mitigated against regionalisation?
Well taking the last part first [wider governance pressures]: it was a ‘machinery of government’ thing that the public are never going to get excited about. The good chairs were very keen to ensure that the public understood and knew what they were doing. The not-so-good ones didn’t put enough attention into that, in my view. But the real difference were the people who were evangelical about their patch. Some of those patches were difficult to be evangelical about. If I think of the South West, the Chair was constantly facing this battle because in the South West… I mean, Cornwall doesn’t even get on with Devon. If we think here in the Humber, we’ve got a problem with Grimsby on the other side to Hull. Go down to the South West and you’ve got Somerset and Gloucestershire all lumped together. This was probably the most difficult RDA to justify. But we needed nine. And that seemed to be logical. He’d be fighting those battles.
It was much easier for people like Derek Mapp in the East Midlands, and for up where I am in Yorkshire and Humber. The Humber was a bit of a problem, with two bits of Lincolnshire shoved in, historically back from the seventies. But there’s a real feeling about Yorkshire. There was a real passion for the county. And I think that was the same with One North East and the North West. They saw this as their chance to grab back some of that power that was constantly moving south. They might have even described it as levelling up. Who knows? Where they really got that kind of political feel for what they were doing, I think they were more successful than those who didn’t grasp the importance of it.
Q: Was it right to try and force individual local authorities to work together on the economy, planning, housing, investment? Or was it always doomed to fail due to that lack of cohesion?
If you look at what Heseltine did when the Coalition came in, he wrote this report No Stone Unturned. Heseltine really got this issue. He’d been trying for years to end District Councils, County Councils, local councils. Heseltine wasn’t coming out and saying, ‘RDAs should come back’, but really, if you talk to Chris Haskins – who knew him very well – that was really his point.
You know, the old proverb, ‘I wouldn’t have started from here’? We could only start from where we were. I think it was inevitable that you’ve got those Leicester, Nottingham, Derby tensions. And you’ve got the issues about local government. We were pinning RDAs on top of a hodgepodge of government changes. It was important for people to realise we weren’t going to challenge parish councils or challenge these guys.
The other thing we had to decide is how to deal with the people who said, ‘what this country doesn’t need is more politicians. We don’t want more politics at a regional level’. In the end that was one of the things that did for us, that referendum up in the North East.
I don’t see any alternative, and it wasn’t my job to interfere with the RDA structures that had been set up in the Nineties. Much though the Chair in the South West moaned about it, it was an impossible task. And even more impossible would have been to say, ‘let’s start from a clean piece of paper and set up the local government structure of which the RDAs will be part’. That was too big a job for anyone to take on. It might have been in someone’s long term plans, but it wasn’t in the DTI’s.
Q: Did these barriers to local participation and cohesion dissipate over time, as RDAs gained more resources?
The single pot was a big slab of money: £2.6bn, I think, at its height while I was there. It might have got bigger after that. It’s what the Local Enterprise Partnerships (‘LEPs’) didn’t have, and it is why the LEPs fell flat on their face. The general public didn’t care a damn whether they had an RDA or LEP, but people who had dealings spent all their time saying, ‘this is nothing like the RDAs, it’s just a tiny, tiny version’. There was no there was no government money going into LEPs.
Q: Was the problem for RDAs a lack of powers and money; a lack of local accountability; or simply that they weren’t around long enough to bed in?
With the RDAs, it was that accountability gap. To me, RDAs were growing in authority, growing in influence. The only thing that stopped them was the change of government to the Coalition — and, of course, austerity. They played a really important role after the financial services crash in easing through that period. I think overall, they were a success. But they couldn’t get round this democratic deficit, other than in London. They couldn’t get round. Now, maybe what would have saved them would have been regional mayors. At one stage, we were talking about a mayor for Yorkshire, weren’t we? You know, maybe that would have been the saving grace of them, in that democratic accountability gap.
Q: Did you find that Whitehall was speaking with one voice towards RDAs?
I can’t remember any great bust ups. Local government, with John Prescott still having an interest in all of this, is somewhere where we could have been at loggerheads but I don’t remember that. I remember there were really supportive MPs. John Healey, for instance. On our backbenches, there didn’t seem to be people arguing, ‘the RDAs are picking up too much power; we’re not being talked to; we’re not being involved in all this’. RDAs also had responsibility for distributing European Regional Funds, so that meant that they had to have a constant dialogue with, with MPs and even MEPs. They seemed to do that very well. I don’t remember any bust ups with the Treasury over this.
I would put it at the Civil Service-level. This was a big change for them, and one that wouldn’t have been entirely welcome. But that would have been more in the Treasury’s domain, rather than any other department.
Q: Some RDA chairs cite particular problems with education, especially the centrally-run Learning and Skills Councils?
I don’t know the history of this. We probably made a mistake there. That’s one of the things we could have done better. The Learning and Skills Councils were set up on a regional level and they were separate from the RDAs, and yet RDAs had a big remit on training and unemployment and all of that – so you can understand the resentment. It’s more a resentment of a structure that we had created, rather than a resentment of RDAs per se.
I mean, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (‘PwC’) did a report on RDAs towards the end of our time in government and said that you get back at least a pound for every pound spent on your investment and longer term, it was going to be much bigger than that. I remember in that period, Siemens were casting around the whole of Northern Europe – 110 locations – as to where they would have their huge manufacturing plant to make the engines that ran turbines, and final construction, and then shipped out to the North Sea to these three huge wind farms.
It was the RDAs in their swan song, in their last moments – Tom Riordan etc – who attracted their attention to Britain. Siemens will tell you this, because when they were talking to the Germans and the Danes, they were talking to their regional structures. It was only because we had the RDAs there, that in the end they looked at four locations in Britain, and then plumped for Hull and East Riding. And by the time it came, the Coalition were in government and trying to pretend this was some great success for them. It was Mandelson that did the financial deal, but it was the RDA who did a lot of engagement. This was part of the criticism of the RDAs, wasn’t it? They had an office in Brussels, ‘oh that’s terrible, wasting money and all that’. But it was because they were on the same field as Germany and Denmark, industrial competitors, that we managed to get Siemens.
Q: Could the Government have gone further in empowering RDAs? If so, did Whitehall resistance stop them?
I think post-2010 they were things we could have sorted out [had Labour been re-elected]. I mean, on transport at least, the Department of Transport knew what the priorities were in Yorkshire and the Humber, or they had their priorities themselves. Before that the Department have this huge job of trying to pick out projects. I remember in Hull we had to agree what we wanted on the roads plan through the Yorkshire Forward priorities before the Department of Transport even had to be troubled with it. That seemed to be a good process of filtering through the RDAs, before you went to the centre. But we could have given them more resources, so they sorted out the problems themselves rather than act as the filter. I don’t believe that if we had have stayed in government we’d have backtracked on a devolution policy that had included Wales, Scotland and London.
Q: Are we giving RDAs too much credit here, given that regional inequalities rose through the 2000s even before austerity?
If I was trying to put my political allegiances to one side and be absolutely fair about this, I’d still say no to that for two reasons. First is that PwC report. You remember they were saying, ‘this wasn’t going to happen overnight’. The RDAs weren’t going to change things overnight, and their pound back for every pound you spent, they pointed out, the longer term, it’s going to be four times that. Well the longer term never happened. That longer term would have also meant more jobs, better skills, and not having to go off to London as there’s a good, decent job for you.
The second point is wider. This government talks about levelling up, but so far as I can see, there’s no mechanism for how it’s going to happen. There’s nothing you can look at to say whether they’re succeeding or not, and from the Prime Minister’s speech a couple of weeks ago, I don’t think he really knows anything beyond just a phrase.
We were the first government ever to commit to the eradication of child poverty and put a date on it, and more importantly in this context, reducing health inequalities. Michael Marmot showed that if you’re born in Hull, you die seven years before you before a boy born in Beverley, for instance. All of those health inequalities had become apparent, and none of which could be sorted out by the Department of Health alone.
There’s only one bit of health inequalities that applies exclusively to health, which is where GPs are set up, under-doctored areas. For the rest, it was education, it was jobs, it was housing. It was all the kind of things that the RDAs were due to bring together in a regional economic strategy. And whilst the sainted Michael Marmot would say that – it’s true – we didn’t meet our absolute target set around infant mortality and life expectancy, as to how we would close those inequality quality gaps. Marmot says, whilst they weren’t closed by the end of our 13 years, the health of the poorest in society was at the same level as the health of the more prosperous at the start of that period. The gap didn’t close because they health of the more prosperous got better as well. And that’s fine. It wasn’t part of our job to make more prosperous people die earlier. In terms of that, it was an incredible, as Michael Marmot said, incredible achievement over that period. It was to do with jobs and it was everything from Sure Start centres, to expansion of higher education, to put in money in further education, to skills and schools. The RDAs really were there to coordinate all of that across their region. There’s very little of that that they didn’t have their, didn’t have the, at least the authority to poke their nose into.
Q: These socio-economic inequalities were seen across the country, but it was only London that really saw an economic take-off. Was London a help or a hindrance for the rest of the UK?
It’s a good question. We were all proud of the success of London as an international city, attracting all this inward investment. The Olympics coming along in 2012 was symbolic of all that. The way the Olympics had a beneficial effect on Yorkshire and Humber, for instance, in a sense epitomised what we wanted to London to be. We never wanted to drag London down. Of course we didn’t.
Through devolution, the London situation had changed completely. The only way you would have let London fall for the benefit of the regions, I suppose, was to carry on with the kind of policy of Thatcher and the pre-1997, where London was the only major city in the world that had no single leadership body.
I think we all thought that if London succeeds as our capital, that when people saw the capital, they’d want to see other parts of our country. You can actually ensure that that prosperity was shared more equally across the country.
Q: While leaders elsewhere would agree with that, they cite frustration with London receiving disproportionate investment?
Well, it’s a bit like now, isn’t it? The control that the Mayor had over transport in London other authorities would give their eye teeth for. That was the resentment I guess, if there was any resentment. It was always, if it was expressed at all, expressed very quietly because I didn’t hear it.
Q: How did you think about the brain drain towards London and the South?
Everyone knew that was one of the problems we were trying to resolve. That’s where universities in particular came in. I can’t remember a single university where they didn’t have a policy of trying, once their graduates had graduated with their terrific ideas of innovation, to keep them in that area. They gave them the facilities for start-up companies. They gave them help to pilot their ideas. They went out of their way to stop the students who had come to Hull University and done a wonderful job going straight back to London, straight afterwards, or from other parts of the country going to London because they felt that’s the only place where you succeeded. So, yes, there was an issue about that. But they knew that was part of the issue they were there to solve. It wasn’t a resentment that suddenly London has become, you know this problem for them. London in that sense, if you want to phrase it that way, was the problem for them that the RDAs were set up to try and resolve.
Q: How much did RDAs engage in technical education, beyond universities?
They were very into it, and so were we. I was Higher Education Minister, incidentally, when we were introducing fees to finance higher education properly and to expand it so that unlike when I was born, 2% of kids went to university and when I left school, 4%, it was no longer the preserve of the elite. People used to come to me and say, ‘we need plumbers not graduates’. But it was never their kids that were going to be plumbers, funnily enough.
That expansion was never 50% of 18 year olds going to university. It was 50% of 18 to 32 year olds going into higher education. And as I keep saying until I run out of breath, a large part of that were FE, were foundation degrees, two-year vocational foundation degrees in further education colleges. They never went anywhere near a university. They’re technical, so the idea that higher education was something different from technical education, technical education at a higher level was an important part of that. The area where there was a political consensus, unlike over RDAs, was over University Technical Colleges (‘UTCs’). They were in very early stages of that during my time, both there and in Education.
But technical skills was meat and gravy to the RDAs. Which is why I accept the point about the Learning and Skills Council, which never really worked in the way that we thought it would. The offer to the business people – who had very loud voices if you think of someone like Digby Jones – were forever saying, ‘the trouble with higher education and further education and skills is that government keeps develop all these courses’. And we said, ‘well, you develop them then’. Through Sector Skills Councils, we said to them ‘you have the complete power now to produce what you want, the skills you want’. I mean, for many of them, it was a case of ‘where do we start?’. They never grasped the nettle. They would come to government again for help, so that that seemed to me to be a complete failure.
Q: How do you think about the different places within a region, and how they relate to each other?
There’s one view, which I think is quite a strong view, that you should just back the big cities and that pulls up everybody else – and that actually the RDA mistake was to try and have a strategy which was going to include Barnsley, Rotherham, all those places. You should have said, ‘let’s have some more London-like cities who really succeed, and that will then spread out across the sub region or the region, like London supports Swindon or Reading or Stevenage or whatever’.
But, you know, if RDAs still existed in Yorkshire they would see: Leeds doesn’t have a waterfront, neither does Sheffield. Hull does. If you were looking at an economic strategy for the region, you would have a cruise terminal in Hull and you would say, ‘the cruise terminal in Hull means that people would like more to stay on Hull, but they’ll want to go to York. They’ll want to go shopping in Sheffield. They want to get the buzz from the nightlife in Leeds’. Here’s a good example of something that benefited the whole of Yorkshire but is seen now as, ‘oh, just Hull looking for something for them’. You can think of other examples where different cities have different advantages and those advantages can be used. Whether it’s attracting tourists – a very big part of income coming into the country – or businesses that you can actually partner up and show where you can do other things.
We would have never got a medical school in Hull if we hadn’t have teamed up with York, and we were able to do that much easier, I have to say, because of the RDA. The universities were all working together and looking at how they could benefit the whole of the area. I think there was a genuine sense of, ‘this is for the good of our area’. The feeling they were doing something good for their region was something that was almost palpable amongst the RDA Chairs in particular and the CEOs.
Q: Do you think that the Combined Authorities model adds anything to the RDA offer?
I think it could. We’ve missed the boat here in Hull. Everyone’s gone off their own way. The two Lincolnshire authorities on the other side of the Humber went off for a Greater Lincolnshire. And strangely enough, when they both elected Tory MPs, they didn’t want anything to do with the other side of the Humber. Even though the Humber is this precious resource that carries more freight traffic into this country than anywhere else. On paper, that should be what happens. Combined Authorities as a kind of way back to the RDA with devolution route, if you like. But it’s difficult to do. Hull has now been left with a Combined Authority with the East Riding, just two little bits of East Yorkshire. Everyone else has gone off to different parties. No fault of Hull by the way, or East Riding Yorkshire, Labour and Tory, who were continuously trying to make a bigger patch of this. If they failed in Yorkshire to do that, God knows what it’s like in other parts of the country.
It was 1974 when Humberside County Council was created, which was terribly unpopular. I got more complaints about letters to people in Hull addressed to Humberside – ‘we’re not Humberside, we’re Yorkshire’ – than anything else. That coloured our ability to do a genuine partnership across the Humber, because it looked too much like recreating Humberside.
Q: Do you think the voluntaristic MCA approach ends leaving some local authorities outside of administrative barriers, even if they are plausibly part of the same functional economy?
Yeah, that’s why I think if we were back in government tomorrow and we looked at all the various options for how to recreate this, would come back down to the RDA. If you put plenty of money in and you enticed Blackburn and these other areas to come in, that could work. But they’d be worried about the public, and how the public felt about it and their own popularity, and their elections, because that wouldn’t escape the public’s notice, that you were going into this. Whereas the North West RDA… in a sense, it was the making of the RDAs and the undoing of the RDAs. The making of the RDA is that we didn’t disturb or tackle these big problems that you’re talking about, but still managed to put lots of money into those areas and get them to work together (though not perfectly). That also ended up as its downfall because there was a democratic deficit.
Q: If you could get a structure which was going to work more effectively and more comprehensively, what policy levers would you prioritise?
I think skills, for two reasons. One is that we’ve still got the problem that we all decry: a snobbery around vocational education. The only way to break that down is to keep working at it and to get much better at ensuring that those pathways. There’s a UTC in Hull that’s best in the country, but it’s only doing it for 500 students. There’s a huge amount of work to be done there.
The second reason I think that that, is that no one talks about adult illiteracy or innumeracy anymore. Digby Jones was always going on about it, and in a sense that shows the failures of previous education systems. People always say that grammar schools were the making of social mobility. But look what grammar schools left us with: the secondary modern. The problem of illiteracy and innumeracy amongst adults is still there. And we were doing some really good things, learning and skill, learning reps, all of that stuff, the encouragement to come forward and tell their friends and then give them help with it and all of that. It all ceased post-2010. I think this would be the perfect round for not just youngsters coming through, but also tackling, giving people a better life than they have. They have the ability to learn new skills.
Q: What are the most important lessons for us to take away?
Look at how you could marry up regions and cities.
We [New Labour] introduced mayors. We thought you had to have a referendum because it was a constitutional change, just as you had to have a referendum in the North East to give the RDAs some proper democratic accountability. We all know where that went.
Now we can see a clearer picture. We can see the mayoralty is working. When we were in government, it was only London, and then you had a bit around Hartlepool and Teesside. Well, now you can see some very substantial powerful mayoralties, and you should involve them in the discussion, as to where you go next.
It would be some kind of marrying up between the old idea of RDAs and George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse idea. Ironically, it was the RDAs that created the Northern Way. It was virtually the Northern Powerhouse. And you would engage the South West and all. You’ve got a very good mayor down in Bristol. You’d engage them in a conversation to say, “I’m sure we’d all want the same things”. Even the things Andy Street in Birmingham would want, where it’s a different political persuasion. They would all want the same things for their areas, as a successful way of ensuring that the decisions that affected their lives weren’t made by Civil Servants in Whitehall. It was made closer to the people actually benefiting from it.
I don’t think it’d be impossible to put that together and still leave this spaghetti bolognese of a local government system. Heseltine tried. I think he’s a bit of a hero in this, by the way, because his vision in No Stone Unturned struck me as something we could have. It could have been our document. It could have been reporting to us, which is why he got in so much trouble about it I suppose. It cannot be beyond the wit of government to develop a system that marries up to really successful ideas albeit from different political persuasions.
ENDS