Bev Hughes served as Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester for Policing and Crime between 2017 and 2023. Hughes was the MP for Stretford and Urmston from 1997 to 2010. In 2004, she was appointed to the Privy Council. From 2005 to 2009, she served in the Government as Minister for Children, Young People and Families.
This interview was conducted on 12 September 2023.
Q: Could you start by telling us how you’ve been involved with regional policymaking over the last 40 years?
It is 40 years because my involvement didn’t start in central government. I was a local councillor here in Greater Manchester from 1987 and became council leader in 1995. That was at a time when we did have the association of Greater Manchester authorities, which is the precursor of the combined authorities. So, the 10 leaders were working together to try and have a collective response to certain city regional issues. I started there as a councillor and then as a council leader and then came into parliament and into government. Again early on, I wouldn’t ever claim I’ve been at the forefront of developing regional policy, but actually my first ministerial job from 1999 was a couple of years in, I was parliamentary undersecretary in John Prescott’s department, renamed Environment, Transport and the Regions. Working with Hillary Armstrong particularly, but I was in that department for a few years before moving on.
I had various government positions in the Home Office and then in Children, Schools and Families. Then I went into the Lords in 2010 and I was on the front bench shadowing education mainly for five years. Then, out of the blue, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham asked me to be his deputy and to take on the police crime and fire commissioner role, very much at the heart of the combined authority. I was with Andy and alongside the 10 leaders. So, although I had a very specific brief initially, it did get bigger because it was in the context of a Combined Authority, and I was very much part of all the leaders’ discussions and the combined authority activity albeit with a very particular focus. I’ve had a role with the Chamber of Commerce for much longer than that, and in fact, I’m still a non-executive director on the board of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce. I started off with a policy role over 10 years ago. I was a non-exec director in 2015 and before 2015 I worked for two- or three-years developing policy for them.
Q: What stands out as the big success in that period in terms of regional growth, and what feels like a missed opportunity?
I’ll cite my most recent experience in Greater Manchester on the combined authority with a directly acted mayor as the thing that stands out, the activity where I think we’ve made the most progress – here, anyway, in this city region – in developing a regional perspective, a regional policy and strengthening the kind of apparatus and the relationships that you need to put that into place.
I think the biggest frustration would be those years in central government in which we had a great deal of promise. My first ministerial job was in John Prescott’s department, and John was absolutely evangelical about progressing the regional agenda. It never happened. We had regional development agencies and we had regional assemblies. We had government offices for the Northwest- and then we lost the vote in the Northeast on directly elected regional assemblies. But those structures to me, both at the time and on reflection, were very pedestrian. They were very clunky. The RDA and the regional assemblies were casts of thousands. The regional assemblies had no real leverage over the development agencies, which were business-led, and I had no problem with that at all. But there wasn’t the agility within and between those structures to really pursue a dynamic regional strategy and make the implementation of it dynamic enough when they floundered.
So that was my frustration because there was a real commitment, mainly around John, but not also around John. I think there was ambivalence from the Prime Minister and probably other ministers. I understand Tony Blair’s ambivalence around that, we had a lot to do in 1997, but the imperative to try and keep central control to try and make progress on all those different fronts that we wanted to achieve, was profound. I understood then, and I understand now the sense of having to feel that you keep your hands on the levers in the centre, but actually, that meant that the development of regional approaches and regional activity was much more difficult. It turned out that you do need to build relationships, and you need to cede decision-making to some extent to make that work. That really didn’t happen.
Q: There was a lot of scepticism about whether local government had the capacity to deliver, what did you think?
I’m from local government, but I’ve never, ever been starry-eyed about local government. I think the best you can say even now is although it’s probably developed, the capacity and particularly the capability, within elected local government, councillors and others, is very variable. That’s still the case now. I see that variability across Greater Manchester, and I know it’s reflected across the country as well. I’m not sure what you do about that because these are directly elected people.
But certainly, when they come into positions in which you do need a lot of capability in all sorts of ways to make progress on this agenda and it isn’t always there. I see across Greater Manchester, there are local authorities that are doing very well. There are other local authorities that have been historically, and still are, so mired in factionalism and discord that their groups and its largely labour groups actually can’t get their acts together. And I think that’s replicated across the country.
Q: When you look back, do you think that trying to do it through regions, RDAs, was flawed?
I think it’s very hard to make that judgment call. On the one hand, it’s a particular kind of almost statist approach to trying to pursue that agenda, creating a monolithic architecture like that. It never had the agility, but also, it never really had the freedoms either from central government to really develop. So, I think going for, and I know why we did it, I think going for a regional development agency and then a nonelected assembly was never going to really power up the regional political activity that needed to happen. The regional assemblies were not directly elected. They had senior people from the different local authorities. So, the one for the northwest had about 50 people on it from across the northwest and leaders of councils and others and sometimes not leaders of councils. I think the person delegated in Manchester to sit on the regional assembly was not the leader. Local authorities didn’t always put their most senior people into those positions. So it didn’t get off to a good start from the outset, and it never really got the push and the momentum from government.
I think in government, there was a lot of scepticism The concept of what should constitute a regional strategy in political terms has always been quite limited, in my view. It’s always focused on the kind of hardware, economic performance, transport, and more laterally on skills. It’s never really embraced the things that certainly are holding us back in Greater Manchester and other areas, such as health, such as early years and childcare. I’ve always argued these should be regarded as an infrastructure issue but because it’s soft and it is families, it’s not been included in that prospectus. The concept of what we should be trying to improve, with a regional approach, must include some of those issues as well.
Q: What was your experience working with the RDA in the North West?
As a minister, I was trying to work with the RDA constructively. I remember some of the meetings and they were quite difficult. But I wanted to make it work. I think that is the view, if not in the North West, then certainly in Greater Manchester, I think it may be in part because, as I’ve said, there was already and had been for about 20 years an association of Greater Manchester authorities. And they felt they were embryonically a city regional development agency, if not a Northwest regional agency. So, I think certainly it was the feeling here that the RDA was cutting across things that were already trying to be developed by the local authorities acting together here.
Q: How important was the RDA’s lack of accountability?
I think local authorities and many leaders in particular, face two ways on accountability. Many of them have resisted, for instance, the directly elected mayor. They wanted to continue with the age-old pattern of the local authorities themselves, choosing their leader rather than having a directly elected leader or a mayor. And yet I think that was certainly view at the time, that the lack of ability to hold accountable the RDA was held to be a factor in the attitude of the constituent local authorities.
Q: Why was the choice was made to go for RDAs, notwithstanding accountability?
I started as a PPS and then quickly became a minister, junior minister in 1999, so I wasn’t there in the middle with the Prime Minister and Secretaries of State and all of that. But my perspective on it is that was very much a k compromise between two competing imperatives. John Prescott was very keen to progress the regional government agenda for England as well as devolution for Wales and Scotland in particular. And that was at odds both with the views of some other people, but also the need for us as a government to make really rapid progress on some of the big-ticket issues that we were all concerned about.
Educational reform, Bank of England, employment, health, meeting those pledges, that was central. I think the way in which the Prime Minister and the cabinet saw things was that we had to do that through central government for a time anyway – it may have suited them in terms of their inclination as well, but needed to keep their hand on the tiller and to control things. So there was a competing set of imperatives – and I think that’s why we ended up with what we ended up with in terms of the actual structure of business led regional development and then the parallel nonelected regional assemblies, allegedly to provide scrutiny, but not really with the powers to do that.
Q: Was your experience of Whitehall departments – in their willingness to commit to working with the RDAs or with local government or to devolve as this agenda develops?
I think it evolved a bit, in my view, certainly as regards civil servants. I think my experience early on, and even then, later on in the education department, Home Office particularly, was terrible. You know, senior civil servants hardly ever did visits to the regionals, let alone talked about ceding any decision-making responsibility, it was like outer space sometimes was because needs must really. I’m thinking particularly here of Sure Start, because that until the Tories dismantled it completely, was a very successful policy. It was followed through very carefully from evidence-based research, Tessa Jowell leading it, very centrally, tightly controlled. But then realising that actually, if you’re going to scale that up, you cannot open 3000 Sure Start centres from Whitehall. You have to actually develop a partnership with local authorities and voluntary organisations. That means ceding some decision-making power. There was concern about that.
I had concerns because the effectiveness of Sure Start was very much about staying faithful to what the evidence from Head Start in America had shown worked. As soon as we started to cede some of the decision-making out to local authorities, we got local authorities starting to say, ‘Well, actually we think this would be better and we’ll do it this way’. So, you could see that the kind of fidelity from what works learning was beginning to slip. But you just had to go with that because that was the only way we could open 3000 Sure Start centres by March 2010. And we succeeded in doing that. So, you know, that was needs must. And I would say, despite some of the slippage in the fidelity to the programme and that was particularly around parenting, it did achieve an awful lot. That was Education – Children, Schools and Families. I never worked in health, but I had quite a bit of linkage with health over the years through mental health issues and so on from the Home Office. Again, I think health, notwithstanding that it does have many outposts in the regions, doesn’t really bring a regional perspective to its overall policymaking in implementation. But I do think there was a shift from 1997 going over the next 15 years. There was a shift. I don’t know what it’s like there now. I’ve not been there for 10 years or more.
Q: You have a Chamber of Commerce Greater Manchester perspective on the post 2010 period. What changed in 2010?
I felt and I think people around me here felt there was a lot of promise in some of those statements. I think people were excited by the concept of Northern powerhouse particularly. I think sadly that promise has never been realised. I think it just fizzled away. There were successive promises, and nothing really was ever delivered through that vehicle. I don’t think people here would ever look back now and say, ‘That was successful’. They were excited initially because nobody expected the Tories to really focus on that. So, when George Osborne started talking in that way and the Northern powerhouse was being talked about, I think people were almost grateful and felt that there’s promise here. But actually, despite his promises and I think possibly genuine commitment initially, it’s never gone anywhere.
Q: How was the experience for you seeing the abolition of the RDA and the setting up of LEPs?
I think there was some confusion and I think people were waiting, in a way, for something else to happen, for something else to be put in his place, whereas in a sense, what we got was that all this is going to go to the local authorities again. There was nothing clear about how things would be done in the future, other than saying local authorities would pick all this up. I think there was a period of stagnation, expectation, but eventually stagnation. Because nothing happened that people could latch on to until we got the LEPs. The LEPs did start to bring a focus, and I think from a chamber point of view, particularly, that was very welcome. And also, from a local authority point of view here in Greater Manchester, the LEPs have always been a body that has been well embedded and linked up with the kind of civic structures. There’s been good relationships and they’ve worked well.
Q: If we are to devolve across England, is it better to do it evolutionarily or comprehensively?
I think that’s linked with the question about what is the best footprint for a body to take some of these responsibilities on. And I don’t think you can answer that question in a uniform way. I don’t think it just depends on geographic footprint, it’s also about historic footprints. What are the relationships between different bodies in a geographical area? And are those relationships mature enough to go forward to the next stage of development and work together on a regional, strategic economic basis? I think probably you’re doomed to fail if you simply create an area with various constituent parts, various constituent local authority parts and say, ‘Get on with it’ – because there is a real importance to those historic relationships, those sense of identities as well, that are part of the bedrock that makes it work in some places and not in others.
So, you have to pay attention I think in going down this road and thinking about structures, you have to pay attention to those issues of history, geography and identity, if you can, because that is more likely to make for success. Even in somewhere like Greater Manchester, where there’s been 30 odd years more of working together across the 10 local authorities, there are undoubtedly really difficult issues in terms of differences of opinion that have to be negotiated. And I’ve seen that over the over the last seven years, but also before that. If you haven’t got some sense of the reasons why you’re doing this together that comes from those that history identity and that geographic kind of closeness, then I think it’s really difficult for you to overcome those issues when they arise.
Q: What would you say to Blackburn and Burnley, close to but outside Greater Manchester? What advice would you give them having had the experience you’ve had?
I’d ask ay what would they regard as the conglomerate of localities around them that they think make coherent sense as a vehicle for regional activity, strategically. I would ask them, Where would you put the boundary around a group of local areas that you think work together.’ And it isn’t straightforward. You end up with a hotchpotch It’s what we’ve got. You end up with some areas that have got a regional approach and structures that enable them to operate in that way. And then you end up with areas in between that don’t. That’s what we’ve got. And I don’t know if the Tories concept of combined county authorities is going to address that or not. You do end up with a hotchpotch, but I can’t see any other way forward.
Q: There was a choice not to follow London and recreate the metro counties in places like great Manchester in the late 1990s. Do you think that was a mistake in retrospect?
I’ve not experienced governance in London, but looking at it from the outside, it seems to me that it’s potentially more difficult to have the London arrangement in which the elected mayor is completely separate from the Greater London authority. There’s occasionally an adversarial relationship because of that split. That’s not to say we don’t have adversity here between the mayor and the combined authority, but they’re all part of the same body, and they have to work through those differences within the confines of the combined authority and its meetings and its structures and so on. And I think that’s a healthier model.
Q: On the evolution of devolution from a Greater Manchester point of view, what more should be done in terms of handing over power or decision making from the centre?
Andy Burnham takes the approach that he will always try and achieve consensus between the local authority leaders. So, we had tremendous difficulty over the Greater Manchester spatial framework, for instance, because some of the outlying local authorities were very upset and concerned about the kind of housing targets and the use of land designations in their localities that the original draught of the framework. In fact, when Andy was elected, he said he was going to rewrite it, but the rewriting wasn’t that straightforward because of these differences. So I don’t know what he’d say. My own view is that I think it would be preferable if an elected mayor did have some final decision-making ability around those kinds of issues where it wasn’t possible easily to come to an agreement. And for the elected mayor to be able to exercise that authority. That’s my view. I don’t know if Andy would say the same.
Q: What ought to be on the agenda for the next wave of devolution?
I’m very agnostic about taxation. It may be that I’m just not brave enough to think in those terms. I can see that opening a whole hornet’s nest. And I’m not sure I’m yet equipped enough with the arguments for and against to take a position on it. But I certainly think that some of the things that we’ve been talking here in Greater Manchester to the government about we very much want. So some of the DWP responsibilities, welfare benefits, health – we’ve got some devolution of health. It’s not working terribly well, I don’t think, to be honest. I’m not sure how you do this now because we’re in such a mess with schools. There’s such a patchwork there in terms of academies and so on. But I think some ability to have the powers to pursue educational attainment – childcare and early years in particular, I do feel really strongly about.
Q: Britain has had widening regional inequality at a time when other European countries have seen narrowing regional inequality. Has London and its contribution to England and the UK been a positive or a negative for the Northwest?
I think we’ve seen a widening divide because that policy for a long time has not consistently and persistently addressed some of the really basic issues in terms of growing people’s potential, addressing some of the inequalities with which people have been born. Since 2010, we’ve not had a government that has persistently pursued those ends. We have such huge inequalities here in Greater Manchester, across the North West, as in other parts of the country. I mean inequalities between our areas as well as between us and the South East. And we will never address those inequalities and catch up with London and the Southeast unless those issues of educational attainment, health and all those things that fuel worklessness and the ability of people to get on.
Second, if we could mainstream the whole focus on regional inequality into all the other policies that come out of central government, that might be a help – what would this policy do for regional inequality? And if it’s not going to do very much, how do we refine it so that it is contributing to reducing regional inequality?
But then third, I do think, and I hesitate to say this because I don’t want to sound like somebody carping from the Northwest, but I do think there is evidence, we’ve looked at it over the years, that there has been a significant differential in the funding for areas like ours compared to London and the South East. And that has got worse over the last five to 10 years, much worse. We can cite the evidence to show that in financial terms, in economic terms, in benefit terms, London and the South East have done far better than areas like the North West, like West Yorkshire and so on. So, there’s definitely been an advantage, financially and economically, to London and the Southeast.
Q: Of all those levers, which is particularly important?
I think it’s hard because it’s multifactorial. People aren’t disadvantaged in just one area; you tend to have multiple disadvantages. But I would always cite at the top of that list educational attainment and educational progress, as being something, we ought to focus on. That’s not to say things like housing aren’t as critical here. But if you can actually make a difference to children and their prospects in life through education, particularly, then you are you know, you’re building in an advantage not just for them, but for your economy over a long period of time.
Q: Do you think police and crime commissioners work and do they work in a combined authority
The first point is that the police themselves and indeed the criminal justice agencies as a group cannot themselves have a significant impact on crime and the experience of crime and particularly the prevention of crime. It involves really good partnership working with a whole range of organisations, including local authorities and voluntary organisations and others. Within the criminal justice space, a great deal more needs to be done about the courts and the criminal justice system which are in an absolute mess at the moment. Probation is recovering from its disastrous reorganisation and it’s getting to grips with its new unification, although it’s got some way to go.
So there needs to be more done to get the elements of the criminal justice system working better together. But in terms of the wider perspective, that system itself needs to work really closely with other local systems. Now here in Greater Manchester precisely because we have the combined authority, that is much easier, has been much easier for me. It’s not perfect, but I have set up and shared a number of structures, organisations, boards, where all of those people, those organisations around the table, were working together on violence reduction, on gender-based violence reduction, on youth crime and youth violence in a preventative way. And I do speak to other police and crime commissioners and they have to knock on the door of local authorities. They haven’t got a place in that sphere that others necessarily recognise. And so I think in terms of the country as a whole, I think police and crime commissioners directly elected, I probably wouldn’t pull back from that myself. Although there’s issues around different levels of capability and capacity in the individuals. But what I would say is that there needs to be some levers by which police and crime commissioners can open the doors of other organisations in order to get the collective response that you actually need if you’re going to be serious about prevention and support, particularly for victims.
Q: In an ideal world what would you change about your role and levers now?
I think, the, I haven’t got an issue with this now with the current chief constable. But we had a real problem with the previous chief constable here, and a terrible inspection. That came to a head because he defined his sphere of operational independence in a very rigid way. So, Andy and I couldn’t get the information as to what members of the public were experiencing from Greater Manchester police. It was only when the inspectors came in and did an end-to-end victim-focused inspection that we could see what he was doing in an operational way. That’s the area, not to encroach on operational independence but to have a right to the information around what’s happening inside the organisation which, as I say, we don’t have a problem now because it’s completely open with this Chief Constable. I and now Kate Green sit on all their internal governance boards. #And that’s because of his attitude. But if you’ve got a chief constable who hasn’t got that open approach, it can be very difficult for police and crime commissioners really to know what’s going on.
Q: When you look back on what are the key positive and negatives of regional policy?
This will be an evolution. I think it’s important that we have an evolution towards directly addressing regional inequalities, which are gross here. And whatever structures you put in place will not necessarily realise their potential unless you get real political will behind them, unless you get real commitment to make them work, both at local level and at central government level, both from ministers and from civil servants. I think there’s got to be a really significant culture change throughout government at all levels. This is what we need to do to make this work. And that means that people have got to put their shoulder to the wheel and genuinely want to work productively with people across central, regional and local government boundaries.
ENDS