Dr Robert Dobbie, known as Bob Dobbie, began as an academic at the University of Edinburgh in Chemistry before becoming a civil servant working in the Department of Trade and Industry and running the Merseyside Task Force in the 1990s.
This interview was conducted on 8 February 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth, regional policy, decentralisation and devolution over the past few decades?
I retired in 2002 when I was 60, so I just turned 80, and my role therefore was in the 1980s and 1990s. I was an academic until I was 34, I was a lecturer in chemistry. I moved to the Department of Trade and Industry, and I worked there and then in the Cabinet Office, and also in various ministries when I was in the regional parts of my job, which amounted to quite a significant proportion of the 25 years that I spent in the Civil Service. So on regional policy, specifically, my first serious introduction was being responsible for delivery of policy and implementation when I was promoted to undersecretary and I then went to Liverpool to take over as head of a unit called the Merseyside Task Force, which is something Michael Heseltine had set up 10 years before following severe riots in Liverpool. Michael Heseltine was determined to get to grips with it.
But when I came along, the unit had been going for a number of years and it was, I suppose, near the end of its life because Liverpool as a place which we’d deal with as an exception, had run for eight years or so, and people were beginning to say, ‘Well, we will just fall this back into the North West’, which was where the government source of regional activity was. I found myself heading up a team which was mainly staffed from the department which dealt with local authorities – the local authorities and housing and the environment, and also from with the Department of Trade and Industry, and also weaker links, but a few people, from the Department of Employment.
And the mission was really to seek to regenerate Merseyside, which goes wider than Liverpool, and it stretches along the river and a bit up the coast as well. The deprivation was very severe and there were also severe problems about a racial minority who had been there for a long time, often shipwrecked from their maritime responsibilities, and they were concentrated in an area of Liverpool called Toxteth. By the time I got there in 1990, it was significantly improved, there was no rioting, but there was still significant unhappiness.
The task was to try to use the policy instruments that we had, which were the traditional ones that were available for the Department of Trade and Industry, which is about companies essentially, and using the financial assistance, Selective Financial Assistance model, to help businesses in the patch. The new tool was an urban development corporation. And that area had an area of the whole of Merseyside that had been chosen and mapped out, really in central Liverpool, and an Urban Development Corporation (‘UDC’) had been appointed to deal with that area. This is Michael Heseltine who had pushed this, and it was an area of really significant deindustrialisation. It was former port land, had been an enormous port, an enormous maritime area on the dock yard, and the hinterland behind it. That was in a terrible state, needed remediation. There were lots of noxious chemical compounds there. There was also a great deal of unwanted kit and scrap heaps and rubbish, the industrial use that was made of the land was poor, and also it affected the neighbouring housing
The UDC had a significant job. It had been running for seven or eight years and it was really winding down in a way that wasn’t satisfactory. My first job was to change the senior staff in the UDC. The overall plan was to seek to clear the docks to where the former warehouses were in good condition, they were converted either to living units or to small business units in one case, or into part of what we now call the cultural industry. That’s to say museums, and also to shop retail units. And the central part of it was well done to a high standard, and it was well recognised.
The Liverpool City Council, of course, was heavily involved in this as well, and it had just moved away from a period of really loony far-left politics. They were good to deal with. And so the general atmosphere, I came at a fortunate time. We were able to get some things done. It showed me how important it was to identify and get the key figures involved. There were two bishops. Well, a bishop and archbishop. I quickly discovered that they weren’t actually doing much, but they were making quite a lot of noise, which is useful in national political terms. The one who was active was the church man who was in charge of the large Anglican cathedral, the dean of the cathedral. And the dean of the cathedral was an entrepreneur. He was fantastic. I mean at times he was – he was a bit sly as a fox, you know, he was cunning. So you had to keep a close eye on him. But, my golly, he could get things done. So getting him before the right people, pushing him on and engaging him in the discussions had a big impact. He was mainly interested in housing initially, near the cathedral, because it was derelict land. But he quickly realised that the job had to be about employment as well as about housing. So he turned his attention to that. And he got some employment on site. And then began to realise, of course, how underemployed the BME minority was and how difficult it was for them to find jobs, and then up to the surface floated one of the heads of Littlewoods, which was a big national store and mail order company, which is now gone. But at the time, it was a family-owned organisation, although large in scale, and one of the two brothers in charge was deeply concerned about deprivation and about assisting people from a minority background. So he was involved as well with the dean of the cathedral. And that was a very interesting combination. It taught me something about getting these people, if you can identify them and bring them to the fore and give them the power that they need if you can.
Q: What are your reflections on being in the Merseyside Task Force?
Well, what else came in with this Merseyside Task Force, it wasn’t what I had moved in, but what had been established there by Heseltine – he saw the need to get not just the department that he was involved in but others. And the other thing he wanted was the industry department. Later on in this discussion we will come to the question of Government Offices. And it was a kind of proto–Government Office. It was an attempt to get other departments involved and another department he particularly wanted was the Industry department. And, as I say, the local government housing / regeneration. In the eighties, I was mainly in the industry department. I was first of all trying to privatise British Telecom. And then I was working as part of a unit that David Young set up. It was called Central Unit. Which was to change the way the department faced industry. Which was mainly – it was a time when industry had changed from being a very large part of employment, 70% or even 75% was in huge companies, and it changed to SMEs.
Q: Do you think the government had an objective about the regional pattern or local pattern of economic activity?
Yes. The Heseltine thing in Liverpool was a bit – I wouldn’t say an aberration, but it was certainly a unique venture. Although it carried on with three others. But the government, I think then, certainly had powers that it used. The powers were related to employment and job creation. Especially job creation in the narrow sense of industry, the Department of Industry. I mean there was no – I was just thinking this morning, wondering when I came to the realisation that cultural industries, so called, were actually a huge economic powerhouse that had a big impact on the economy. And it certainly wasn’t then. Although I’m sure it had occurred to others. And that was partly what this regeneration of Liverpool was about. Before I got there, I had no idea of that. And I don’t think many in the Department of Trade and Industry would have. That illustrates the problem about the departments tending to operate in silos, doesn’t it, in Whitehall.
Heseltine was much more interested in getting others involved – and even then it was beginning to have an impact. He retained an interest. But the interesting thing was that the minister who was involved very heavily, and I counted up, I think he made 40 visits in a year and a half, was Michael Portillo. Who would have thought that? And he was actually engaged. The he was remarkably supportive. He actually, I think, learned something as well from that experience of going up to Merseyside and seeing what was going on. It’s about getting the connection with people. And we always used to grumble then about how reluctant officials in Whitehall were to actually see what was happening on the ground. And I really do think, still think, that’s tremendously important. You know, we used to groan especially about the Treasury, but others as well. And you honestly, you can’t really be serious about delivering policy and understanding what people are doing unless you’re prepared to see them, I think on their territory, on the ground. I really feel that. You know, a Zoom call is fine, but my golly, it doesn’t tell you what kind of conditions people are working under.
Q: How do you think the Competitiveness Unit and Government Offices work then carried into administrations later in the nineties?
I think that the Government Office structure was a good move. One of the problems is that when you have a change in structure like that, the civil service is renowned, or perhaps you would use another verb, for their conservatism, with a small c – so it becomes quite a task. But once you get people in the same building, it’s amazing how things work.
We used to have open days once a year when anybody who wanted could come in and it was mainly aimed at local government and other sort of regional big hitters and industrialists and so on. But it was very interesting how that changed attitudes in staff working in the building. Gosh, I didn’t know you did planning like that. Change is painful, but I think it was beginning to have an impact. But unfortunately, as often happens in the UK, we didn’t hold on to policy long enough. The Government Office structure was abandoned. You finished up with the Local Enterprise Partnerships (‘LEPs’). Which I think are considerably weaker in terms of the rank, the status and possibly the abilities in some cases of the work of the people there. And that means that the influence of central government and the influence of that thing, or that local, the LEP on central government, is weaker than I think it was in the past when they had the Government Office structure. But there we are. I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but the Government Offices had quite a role to play in the foot and mouth epidemic.
Q: 2001 we’re talking about, aren’t we?
2001. Exactly that. Yes, I was involved. The prime minister was visiting, Tony Blair, and he was up looking at a centre that was just being set up in Newcastle, on the edge of Newcastle. He came along and they had appointed a man who was capable, but he had no experience of dealing with lots of people. I went along to kind of rubber neck and see what’s going on. I got back to my office and Brian Bender, who was the permanent secretary, the phone rang, and this is by then seven o’clock Friday evening: ‘Oh, Bob, I suppose you know what this call is about?’. ‘Oh, yes, I know.’ So he said, ‘Would you mind taking over? It will just be for a week or so.’ So I was drafted up there. But the good thing about that was I was then able to know and recognise which of my staff could, you know, push up there behind me and help to fill some of the senior positions in there. But that’s a side issue, really. Except that the epidemic had a big impact or potential impact on employment in the area.
Q: What’s your evaluation of the success of those initiatives? Take Liverpool as an example, how would you characterise the progress or frustrations that you saw in the regeneration of Liverpool?
There was significant progress. It was measurable, and we could see what had happened physically. So there were outputs not just in terms of bricks either, but in terms of visits, tourism, in terms of industry, inward investment. A bit of inward investment, not a huge amount because the reputation of Liverpool and of the workforce was – I wouldn’t say it was under a cloud, I mean, it was more than a cloud. But in fact, once you manage people properly and deal with them decently, then you get a lot more out of them, and people learnt their lesson. People learnt their lesson. So things did get better. And I would say that progress was definitely measurable. I think Heseltine was proud of what happened there. It was certainly a model for other places.
How much was spent? Well, you know, you can always spend more. The reality is that we should have gone on spending more. And that’s one of the things that worries me about the levelling up issue: a lot of it looks quite sensible, but for goodness sake, is it going to be a long term commitment? And also, is there really an integration effort? I don’t see it. Anyway, that’s not about historic, that’s about current day, but it makes you think about historic times. And I think the lesson then was, if you can integrate things, people, and encourage people to put their work together, not just coordinate, don’t just tell each other what you’re doing, but actually think about how your policies are going to work together — and it’s bloody difficult. I don’t think we had all that many successes. But nevertheless, I think we did have successes, and I think they did have an impact. And it was also a bit of a flagship for others to look at and say, Well, what could we change? What would we change? What would go better?
Q: Do you think that was scalable? Or was this really a one-off that was too demanding on the governing system?
There were other UDCs created. I think the lesson, too, about inward investment was very powerful, impact that inward investment can have. If you look at the North East of England, it’s Nissan that is the key example of what’s worth doing. And that was somebody in the Department of Trade and Industry, that was Robin Mountfield. Yes, he was. Not in that ministry, but in another. But, you know, he died five or six years ago. But very capable man. Good guy. I mean, he even persuaded Maggie [Margaret Thatcher] to get involved. So that was quite good. There was also planning, about the impact of inward investment on the locality, the impact on the suppliers, on the effect it would have on the performance of competitors in the UK and on the skills and attitudes in the North East of England and Sunderland, which was a basket case as well. Not quite on the scale of Liverpool, but getting there.
Q: If you look back what do you think the government’s approach was to economic development in the regions? How did you change it?
I would not push myself personally as doing a lot of things. But I think that the work that Michael Heseltine wanted to do. Have you seen that these are the white papers that Heseltine did? Then later his own sort of industrial strategy continued. He was a man with a vision, and the vision was that competitiveness is complicated – there’s no silver bullet, or golden arrow or whatever, that will fix things. You have to consider lots of factors, and that is what he wanted his competitiveness unit to do. Mark Gibson and I and one other fellow set it up. What he wanted us to do was to analyse the position in the UK. Especially when he talks about competitiveness, he wanted to think about how the UK overall was in its economic performance, principally, although we persuaded him that actually, there are social functions as well that you need to think about too. We had two or three people who were seconded to us, but mainly there were civil servants. And you heard me earlier commenting about the conservatism. Well, actually, the people were chosen who were not of that conservative bent and who were willing to look and to think outwardly a bit more carefully. But the work was – I wouldn’t have said it was dynamite – but because people should know about it, should have known about it. But they didn’t. When we went around, people were appalled. You know? God, don’t tell me it’s really as bad as that, for example, in skills and education, on investment, on innovation.
Q: Are these civil servants?
Yes, the people I was speaking to when I was going around would be around in Whitehall, would be civil servants. But we also made it our job to go to other countries and to talk to officials there, and to some extent people like some of the staff and consulates and ambassadors in one or two cases, talk to them about and use their contacts to get properly into our corresponding ministries.
We also had to get a group within Whitehall who were interested in this. And some, of course, were deeply suspicious. It was us taking over the world and so on. But I think most of them were satisfied that that wasn’t the case. And Heseltine himself was – he was very careful. He deferred quite often to his colleagues in ways which I was quite surprised at. And when we came to write the later versions of this, the first one we did without a formal Cabinet committee, I think there was a Cabinet committee, it went to EA [Economic Affairs], but not a special cabinet committee. And then after that he formed a Cabinet committee which had everyone except the prime minister. Everyone who counted was on that. And he summoned them along, and he talked to them at an early stage about what we wanted to do.
And his idea was that we should not just look to see what we could do to address these factors, to first of all set up what our position was, especially in the first white paper, and then address the factors where weaknesses or build on strengths. He wanted clear targets set for each new measure, where possible. Targets that would be picked up in the next annual white paper. There were three of these. He was planning another one had they continued in office. He was keen to have this issue of competitiveness taken into account when people plan policies, whatever they were, to consider the effect of competitiveness. This wasn’t entirely a one-man venture in the Cabinet, but clearly some of the Cabinet ministers wanted to keep the playing cards to themselves. Others were indeed enthusiastic supporters of him. But the reality is, when you look at this, you remind yourself that the US overtook the UK in GDP per head in something like 1900, and then by 2000 it’s about, I think the figure we looked at was something like 15% a head, which implies a small change. Of course, it’s a bit uneven as well, but nevertheless, in other words, the changes that we’re talking about are very long-term changes. That’s the whole economy.
As for the regions, then, well, you look at it more domestically because you’re comparing one region against another. And then the issue is to ask yourself, How can you do what now has been called levelling up? Why is the productivity of Region X so poor compared to others? And why is that particular industrial concentration there? And the Government Office structure was an attempt, and that was again a sort of a Heseltine initiative, although I think it came at a time when [John] Gummer was secretary of state. But Gummer pushed it through in the mid-1990s. As I recall, they came into place about 1995 or so. But I went to Newcastle in 98. I was the second, that was the kind of second generation of Government Office leaders.
Of course, the actual influence of the office and the powers that it had varied a bit between offices, because if you were dealing with London and the South East, then you would say, Well, look, market forces are a much more significant driver than anything government can do. Government interventions tended to be much less significant, and also the powers were less because some of the powers were powers that others didn’t have. Powers, for example, on inward investment and then the use of selective assistance to capture that inward investment where it was mobile.
One mustn’t be too presumptuous in claiming that selective assistance actually always changes people’s destination. It’s very hard to judge whether what you’re doing is actually additional. That’s always a fight, especially with the controlling authorities in the Treasury, for very large investments. And it can be difficult to get convincing evidence. But it was very interesting, you see, the Nissan decision, they came to the UK, they decided to come to the UK, and they didn’t go to a traditional car-making area, and that was, I think, largely because of the problems of labour relations were so poor in the West Midlands, especially in the car industry.
But when they came, the suppliers, which is a large part, you will have been to car plants people work, pretty productive, they’ve got a lot of equipment, but essentially it’s an assembly job. Most of the work is done elsewhere, some of it in the same plant if you’ve got an engine plant there, but a lot done in component suppliers. So much of the added value comes from the component suppliers. And the component suppliers in the UK were frankly not up to the job. The suppliers said we think that the Japanese components industry is subsidised and we were sure of that because they’re producing stuff that – their productivity is much higher and it can, should, could possibly be, and we’re sure that their very low prices have been paid by the industry, and the government is making it up. So we agreed that they should go off and have a look themselves and Nissan arranged it and took them to some of the suppliers, and they came back: ‘My God.’ You know? They were astonished. So I think the point I’m making is that to bring in a company as significant as that involved a lot of parallel actions, which all contributed to the success, eventual success, of the plant.
Q: Could you tell us a bit more about the response to that work in Whitehall more generally? How much of this was Department for Trade and Industry (‘DTI’) waving the flag, as opposed to a wider change in the culture across Whitehall?
l think that the DTI waving a flag was the danger when we started off the work. I mean, it ran for five years, it ran for a full parliament and that was certainly the reaction at first. You remember that Heseltine was the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, and he took the title President of the Board of Trade. And then he had a heart attack about nine months into the job, and he was off for a number of months. He came back, he was invigorated again and got going. And then there was a challenge to John Major as Prime Minister. Heseltine didn’t stand against him and became Deputy Prime Minister and moved to the Cabinet Office.
As Deputy Prime Minister Heseltine could be more of a cross-departmental figure, and he gave us a bit more push in tunnelling beneath the buildings in Whitehall, beneath the department, going from one department to another. You would find out some things from one department which appeared to us to perhaps be consistent with what somebody else is doing, or not consistent. And then you would be asking about the links that they had with each other. And sometimes they were absent, and they weren’t as well developed as they should have been. So, to some extent, I would think that work was a way of trying to say to people, ‘Look, we will achieve more if we can work effectively in Whitehall.’
I then changed from working in Whitehall to working in Newcastle in one of the Government Offices, that becomes more apparent there. And then you have a forum, when the Government Offices were set up we had monthly meetings, quite substantial with a good agenda across the government issues which we were responsible for and in a way that sort of built on the kind of activities that Cabinet ministers were doing under Heseltine, only in his Cabinet Committee on Competitiveness. So we had a bit more cover for that. It was up to us in the Government Offices, to keep in touch with these departments, and that could be awkward at times. During that period I grew my understanding of the extra mileage we could get by first of all having a good presence on the ground and secondly, working together on the ground in the regions, and then taking what we had, what we knew, back to Whitehall and using it properly there.
Because of my links and responsibilities to these other departments, mainly, I would say to these departments that I mentioned at the beginning, about the Merseyside Task Force. That’s to say, the industry department, trade and industry, the local government, environmental, housing issues, planning issues, and also a little bit of employment. But mainly the employment department continued to be separate.
Q: What about education?
Indeed. Education was certainly an important point. And I think our interactions with education, on education, were two kinds. First of all at the top end, at the higher education, we had regular meetings with the vice-chancellors and with the pro vice-chancellors about where they saw issues that we could link with, and sometimes it was about Sunderland. It was about the expansion of the university in Durham, it was a former chief medical officer who became vice-chancellor there. So, there was a lot of discussion about research activities, collaborative research activities, and the universities themselves in the region welcomed the chance to get together.
I wanted to talk about the European structural funds and their activities that were involved there. I mean, the funds are quite substantial. I think it was 700 million for a four-year period when I left, looking forward. I mean, I see that fund is still there, but of course is declining now. And that was done against, expenditure had to be done against a plan which was prepared, a strategy which was agreed with objectives, and they had to be agreed with so-called partnership committee, which I chaired, it was under government chair. Actually the administration of the fund fell to central government but again there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing of staff to do that from local government.
On the partnership there was private sector, the voluntary sector who are often heavily engaged in deprivation in the cultural sector, for example, and also the private sector and then the agencies, the government bit. That was, I think, a useful partnership model. The early stages of the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development in the UK. I think the Treasury used it to sort of claim money back on money that had already been spent. The were matching funding they said. So the project was completed, and then there was an agreement that money would be claimed back on that from the EU. But fortunately, that nonsense stopped. And then it was actually proper money and it needed matching. Of course, then that’s good, because that’s how you justify things are right and worth having.
Q: In the 1990s, was this idea of an enhanced role for local leadership, on the table? Why was it that the approach taken was much more let’s construct national government structures in a region rather than enhancing local structures?
There was already a fairly close-knit organisation of the local authorities in the North East, regional, across the region, which was the same as the government’s region. And it had small secretariats of three or four people. And that was a thing that, of course, the Labour government was keen to have a proper regional government, but it failed. The North East was one of the two pilots.
We thought that that would be a very interesting step had it gone ahead because it would certainly have increased the prominence. We can see a number of the mayors have had quite an impact on the regions. Heseltine is a big supporter of that. But I’ve got a feeling that at the same time as the local government has come up, central government representation in the regions has gone down, and that seems to me a pity.
Now it’s a pity that they can’t have a better interface. I mean, you presumably have done some investigations on the LEPs but I do think that they don’t have the kind of scope and role or indeed representation that could have been there earlier. And that was why the European structural funds was, I think, an interesting model, because it did have all of these bodies involved. Ah, well you might say it was a bit fluffy, and it takes some time to build these things up. And again once you tear things you’re up in trouble. But eventually, when we think we’re getting there on government, on local authority structures, be good. But then who are they talking to? It was interesting, wasn’t it, when Andy Burnham was banging on the table about the pandemic, he had to go right down, seemingly to Whitehall, there didn’t seem to be any kind of proper prior testing of the ground. And what you would have expected would be some kind of negotiation or solution or probably some solutions discussed and set out, which then would have been sorted out more easily instead of sort of rather megaphone diplomacy.
Q: In the White Paper was advice to effectively recreate Government Officers, but called levelling up directors, would that be a positive step forward?
I think it would be a positive step forward.
Q: How you would characterise the transition in 1997 across governments, some people stress the continuity across the two – and where would you fall on that spectrum?
We should try to separate off the actuality of how much change in policy there was, from the actual change of mood. I think the change of mood in Whitehall, across Whitehall, was enormous. That’s to say many people thought that we had got to a sad state, and we really needed a change. And Tony Blair and Gordon Brown certainly offered that in terms of approach, in terms of, well first, day one more or less, Gordon Brown and the Bank of England and so on. So that was a definite change of culture.
Then gradually, of course, we had the quite firm plan about who could do what the grid. Remember that? The grid. And of course, times were changing. We were getting close to the 24-hour news things, and they wanted to keep a hold on that tightly. But nevertheless, I think ministers were pretty approachable then. What happened on the areas that I was working on, this competitiveness, was that there was a discussion. Should the work go to Treasury, or should it stay in DTI? I mean, my view was that it should stay in DTI, and Margaret Beckett, who was the secretary of state, must have felt the same because that was what eventually happened. My concern about the Treasury, always, is that it’s a finance department mainly. And that seems to be the concern. And so for it to be thinking more widely, especially across departments, and to allow departments to have their views on growth issues and other policies related to growth and innovation, for example, I was a bit sceptical of. But they did establish quite a good team of industrialists to advise on competitiveness.
Q: From the vantage point of the North East, how did you experience devolution north of the border in Scotland? Did that have any repercussions for your work in the North East?
Actually, it was quite positive because, maybe again it’s down to personalities, there were a couple of people there at my level in the Scottish office. One of them had worked in the Cabinet Office, and the other was someone who had been up in their industry department and moved around through that, who I had a good dialogue with. And we did have some discussion about cross-border projects as well, and we put some of them in place, so that was quite useful. I mean, I didn’t feel they were negative. I didn’t feel any negative vibrations at all.
Q: Did it feel different when they were no longer the Scottish Office, but now Scottish Government?
Oh, it did. It did feel different. But the reality was that we managed to get on with them pretty well. But maybe the change of government, the change of political focus in ‘97 was helpful, rather than conservative. I don’t know. Perhaps. But I certainly didn’t feel it was negative. I felt it was on the positive side, and we were able to have good relationships with them.
Q: What do you think are the most important lessons for us to take from these reflections, looking forward into policy?
Well I think one is, on issues like this, we really need to try to be as constant as we can on policy and not have switches. Not just on changing government, but within governments as we’ve had in the past. This area has been perhaps less subject to the vagaries of political change than other areas. But I think that’s one thing.
The other one is, if we’re talking about regional policies and levelling up in the regions, then we really have to try to marshal the forces behind it and not try to dictate it from Whitehall, nor try to just have it in the hands of a few people from the private sector. It really does involve quite a lot. It’d be nice to think, for example, that there was some influence on issues like housing from community groups, as there was clearly in Liverpool, for quite a long time.
Perhaps the third thing is, if we talk about regions, there are national policies which can clearly be bent to have a regional influence. So you don’t have to have regional policy all just about a policy for this region. It can be about a national policy where you just sort of do a little bit of polishing at the edge. I was interested in that levelling up paper that came out last week, they talked about innovation and they talked about a number of the pre-competitive work, which has been highly successful, that Mark was heavily involved in, that pre-competitive work giving an offer of saying 40% of it would be happening outside the southeast. Now I don’t know how they’re going to achieve that, but I think that’s very valuable thought. It’s a very important national policy which has hugely positive implications for the regions if you can just add some criteria when you’re running it which will make it more attractive to put it in Region X, Y or Z.
ENDS