Chris Haskins retired from the House of Lords in 2020, having served as a life peer since 1998. He served as Chairman of Northern Foods from 1980 to 2002, having helped build the firm into one of Britain’s largest food manufacturers and a founding member of the FTSE. He served as Tony Blair’s ‘rural tsar’ in 2001, and as Chair of the Yorkshire Forward Regional Development Agency.
This interview was conducted on 24 November 2021.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I used to run a company called Northern Foods, which grew from virtually nothing in 1970 to being one of the biggest food companies by 2000. That was in the fresh food business, supplying Marks and Spencer. I was therefore aware of the social changes that took place in the way people bought and ate food.
Over that period, I worked with various governments, sometimes on agricultural and food issues, sometimes on other issues. I worked on the environment with John Gummer in the Conservative government. I did most of my work with the Labour government in the Cabinet Office on better regulation. My business is based in Yorkshire, and I’ve had a very close – and rather unsuccessful – commitment to devolution for Yorkshire starting thirty or forty years ago. Brian Redhead organised a meeting in Manchester with the then local government minister – who was I think Ken Clarke – about getting something going on Trans-Pennine when the first North-South divide appeared in the late 1980s.
I went on to be on the board of the Yorkshire Forward Regional Development Agency [RDA] for 10 or 12 years. I chaired a thing called ‘Yes for Yorkshire’, which was a belated attempt to get a vote from the Yorkshire people about devolution. They were so disinterested that we abandoned the project. Finally I ended up with the Conservative government, chairing what they called Local Enterprise Partnerships [LEPs], for the Humber rather than Yorkshire.
Q: What’s your overall assessment of the policy around Britain and devolution? What do you think were the key successes and the key frustrations?
I think my overriding issue over those 40 years was business and political indifference to devolution. I always felt that the local politicians I was dealing with in Yorkshire and Lancashire – with one great exception – didn’t take devolution too seriously. They spent much more time thinking about where they were going to sit. The obvious exception throughout that was Manchester.
It has been a difficult job to get local politicians to take it seriously. If local politicians don’t take it seriously, then I’m afraid governments won’t take it seriously. There was always the question mark about whether governments had the confidence in the ability of local politicians to take on things. Even with Yorkshire Forward, which was quite a bit of devolved activity, I always felt two things. First of all, I didn’t think Whitehall really gave up. They said they were going to give us power, but they didn’t. At the end of the day, the civil servants had the last say.
Second, local politicians spent so much time arguing amongst themselves about their section of the cake. You can see it even today in Northern transport. I used to go to meetings with, say, 30 or 40 local authorities and 20 or 30 businesspeople. All the local authorities were interested in was their bit of railway track. They didn’t give a damn about where it went after that. That was the frustration I found with it.
I think the English people – and it is very much English – do not take devolution very seriously. That was my experience with the ‘Yes for Yorkshire’ campaign. John Prescott fell out with me about it. I could see halfway through it that people were totally indifferent, in complete contrast to what they could see was happening in Scotland particularly, but to a lesser extent Wales. It was clear that they were losing out because they weren’t properly committed, yet they still showed great reservations about it.
Q: Does that indifference include business leaders in the region?
I think so. I think that it’s a very English problem. I’d widen it and say – about Europe, for example, which was very key to business thinking and development in the North – that I always detected a degree of ambivalence from both political parties about Europe, on little things like ‘more engagement’. It wasn’t just the Conservatives at the beginning, it was the Labour Party too. There was always this underlying indifference – whether it was Europe, or whether it was regional development – which I think cost us dear.
Q: Are you surprised, looking back, that the gap between regions has grown rather than narrowed?
Not at all. I think partly that relates to what Mrs Thatcher did in the early 1980s. On the one hand, she really knocked the head out of UK manufacturing. In the English context, the North was more affected by that the South. Then the Big Bang in 1984 absolutely switched it the other way. The Big Bang, in my view, was largely a success – but it was a success for the South East of England, to the detriment of the rest of the country.
Q: Did you find that Whitehall spoke with one voice on regional policy?
There was variation. Obviously, the department who are directly responsible for the RDAs was very supportive.
I always felt the Treasury was quite suspicious of what was going on in the RDAs, as to whether they were competent. I was on what I think was the most successful RDA (Yorkshire Forward). I saw activities going on in other RDAs which made my eyes raise. The level of competence amongst the chairs of the RDAs varied a great deal from one part of the country to the other – in part because the need for an RDA in a place like Yorkshire or the North East was self-evident. If you got into the South of England… first of all, the geography of the RDAs didn’t resonate with people. Secondly, the need for that sort of direct support from the centre was less obvious than it was in a place like Yorkshire.
I was always keen that the RDAs had a more strategic role than they had. I think George Osborne’s ambitions for the North were, in strategic terms, more interesting than what the Labour government was proposing. The Labour Party was a bit ad hoc; a bit here and a bit there. As far as it went, it was good. The biggest gain, looking back, was the development of renewable energy in my area, in the Humber. They were very far-thinking about. They didn’t get to spending any money, so the Treasury wasn’t too bothered. The money had to be spent later on, when I joined the Local Enterprise Partnership. But I think there was a lack of strategic thinking, partly because in these organisations you’re trying to please everybody. If you’re doing strategic thinking, you can’t please everybody.
I don’t have any particularly strong feelings that any department was more engaged or less engaged. I think the Treasury was always a bit more sceptical about RDAs. I always felt, at the end of it, the RDAs never really made any big strategic decisions. It always had to be blessed by the civil servants in wherever-it-was.
We always had trouble with the Learning and Skills Council as an agency. They were a pain in the neck. They were very centralised and controlled the funds in a very centralised way. They were always an obstacle. They were an obstacle later on, in the Tories’ early days after 2010 as well.
Having said that, I must say that I had difficulties with my colleagues in business. There is not a culture in British business about training that there is elsewhere. In my company, we were hugely committed to training and development of people. I was always shocked to see how little was going on elsewhere. They tended to think, ‘Training and skills is the government’s job.’ Well, it isn’t. Training and skills is basically the business’s job, supported and backed up by government. Sometimes there’s a bit of passing the buck on skills in this country as to where does the responsibility lie. I firmly believe that it must lie with the organisation, whether they’re public or private, to drive the agenda, and only then for government to come in and give them the necessary support.
Q: Were your views shared by the business organisations you dealt with – the CBI, the Institute of Directors, the Chambers of Commerce?
The Institute of Directors I never took very seriously. They seemed to be sort of a dining club rather than a business organisation. The Chambers of Commerce, of course, are very local. They are almost too local, too parochial – but on local skills they were good.
The CBI was a bit too grand, a little bit too national. It’s intended to be the place for big businesses to feel comfortable. I always took the view on things like skills, good, big businesses will look after themselves. They’ll make sure they get the people. They will train the people. The problem arises with small businesses, and the CBI wasn’t really touching those.
The Chamber of Commerce – and the Federation of Small Business – tried to do quite a bit, to be fair. Again, their performance right across even Yorkshire varied enormously. That is an issue which I struggled with all the time: the variability in the performance and attitudes from city to city. For example, the city I was most involved with, Hull, was being pressed to have a close relationship with the people on the south side of the Humber in Grimsby, which economically made an enormous amount of sense. You just couldn’t get people to talk about. They would fight. The fights that I had to get involved with between Hull and Grimsby and East Riding and Scunthorpe was just awful.
Q: The CBI was in favour of the abolition of the RDAs in 2010. Do you remember that CBI opposition to the RDAs?
I do, because we made an effort in Yorkshire and in the North East to see Cameron and Hague, to make an exception for us. Cameron and Hague were quite sympathetic to the case we made for the North East and for Yorkshire. Pickles wouldn’t have it because Pickles had it in for everybody in Yorkshire. I thought, myself, that a lot of the RDAs were very variable in performance and a lot of them were questionable value for taxpayers. But I think the ones in the North were good, partly because it was easier to justify their existence than it was in, say, Buckinghamshire.
Q: Could you tell us more about your experience campaigning for regional level devolution in Yorkshire? How you think that would have related to RDA performance?
We had Regional Assemblies – unelected, from the local authorities – who were to scrutinise the RDAs. It was a very unhealthy arrangement because the RDAs didn’t like them and the local authorities thought that the RDAs were taking power away from them. There were squabbles about trivia, and proper scrutiny never really took place.
A lot of these politicians were not capable of scrutinising some of the stuff that the RDAs were doing – like the big developments in Sheffield, or the scientific developments around Boeing, like the offshore wind. The local authorities really hadn’t got the skills to scrutinise, and that is a problem.
There’s a chicken and egg here. If you don’t give people power and you keep checking them all the time, you get what you deserve. Sometimes central government has to take a chance. Manchester is a classic example where those two guys [Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein] took the net, grabbed the mettle and said, ‘We are going to do this.’ They were very competent. Central government saw that they were competent and let them get on with it. The trouble is there weren’t too many Richard Leeses around in local governments. That’s been the problem.
Q: How much was this about the absence of scrutiny? Would that have enabled change?
It’s the quality of the scrutiny. I saw lots of things happening in the RDAs with people playing games. For example, you’d get a request from central government to reduce your payroll by 3 percent or whatever it was. Once the civil servants colluded between London and Leeds, they could produce a reduction of 3 percent. It was never really scrutinised because it was not in the interests of politicians or civil servants to say, ‘We actually haven’t achieved that.’ An awful lot of the things that in business you’d scrutinise – sound and credible figures – would be cloaked in mystery when RDAs were scrutinised. I remember a few times we’d see things that were in order to satisfy the needs of their lords and masters in London. All sorts of games were played. Every so often the National Audit Office used to have a go, and they didn’t have enough wherewithal. It’s a disease in the British civil service system – probably in all civil service systems.
Q: Could you tell us more about the attempts within Yorkshire to establish Yorkshire-level devolution?
Both Labour and Conservative said, ‘It’s up to you chaps in Yorkshire to get together and put propositions to us.’ I think that was always a failing. Even in the RDA days, you couldn’t get the politicians in Leeds and Bradford to agree or anything. We, the RDA, tended to take a strong, independent business-led attitude towards things. I always recognised, at the end of the day, democratic legitimacy was what the RDAs lacked. Until they had democratic legitimacy they were only going to be an agent of central government. Local government never got themselves organised in such a way as to take responsibility for it. The Yorkshire public were totally indifferent to the whole proposition.
It always depresses me how much deference there is in the English regions to London, and it’s still there. It was desperate. The difference is London was given real powers, particularly over transport. The boroughs, the local authorities in London, saw that the money was there and the power was there, so they went along with it. I think as long as there was serious money and serious power there, then that drives engagement.
Manchester was a slightly different kettle of fish. I mean, this was just strong arm stuff by Leese and the chief executive Howard Bernstein – wonderful people. They went around these 10 local authorities and muscled them into saying, ‘Look, we’ve got to do this together.’ They came to power just as the Manchester bomb went off. The Manchester bomb had a huge influence on the way people thought about Manchester, including these outer boroughs. These outer boroughs were, of course, very dependent on Central Manchester, the city of Manchester. They were much more integrated.
If you take places like Leeds and Bradford – as I said earlier, they were always sparring with each other. I found it very frustrating. I always believed that there was a case for a Yorkshire approach to all this because Yorkshire is an identity, Yorkshire’s got an identity of its own. People in Yorkshire talk about themselves as a people. The problem is they’ve been let down by their politicians. Cameron once said that he never saw anything like the way Yorkshire people fight with each other. As long as they fight with each other, what can central government do? That is very frustrating and very depressing. Here in the Humber, we had this Yorkshire and Humber thing going. It’s a big economic opportunity. It all fell down because the North Lincolnshire people couldn’t talk to the Yorkshire people. It’s symptomatic. It’s a really English problem.
Q: Where are these regional issues handled better? Are there any places you think that the UK should be seeking inspiration from?
Post-war Germany – designed ironically, I think, by British civil servants – is the classic way to deal with regional issues. I think every country you look at…!
There was always a question mark about France being very centralised. Well, I spent a lot of time looking at the French system of devolution. Although the policies were very centralised, the delivery of those policies was very decentralised. In the case of England, you get policy and delivery all in a muddle in the centre.
I am a great believer in having policy being controlled from the centre, and I did so in my very large business. But I was a great believer in making sure that those policies were delivered at the local level and that the people at the local level owned those policies. I think there’s been a huge failure in England on that. The rest of Europe, or Western Europe, are way ahead of us on devolution.
I think it’s a history of Empire; it’s a history of Britishness. It’s all going through a trauma now because when Britishness was at its peak, it wasn’t Britishness at all. It was English dominance. The fact that the English dominance has been undermined, if you like, by Scottish devolution, by the loss of the Empire … that has created a huge cynicism in England about their role in the world, about the way they run themselves. I’m Irish, so I can say this. I think England is a very unhappy place to live in at the moment. I’ve seen it deteriorate in those 40 or 50 years.
Jeffrey Owens, the editor of the Financial Times in the 1970s, wrote a book after he retired about demonstrating the positive impact that that European Community membership had had on British competitiveness and British productivity. It was quite evident to me that that happened in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of the stuff that happened then was a result of the deals we were doing with Europe. Yet the English never were happy with it. They could never see it.
Q: What are the policy areas where there is further to go in improving local delivery capacity?
Transport is very much on the agenda at the moment. It’s never quite simple, because transport doesn’t lend itself to one particular town or one particular region. You’ve got to work across. That’s again where the local people let themselves down. Transport is clearly, in the north of England, a huge issue.
We need national policies on health, but I happen to think that the delivery of health through one central organisation of 1.5 million people is nonsense. I think it was the Labour governments of the 1970s, at one time thought of moving huge amounts of the administration of the NHS to Leeds, but they didn’t follow it up. The net result is whenever I used to get onto a train from Leeds to London, it was always full of NHS people who are meant to be in Leeds who were spending all their time in London.
Education is a third. All of them would lend themselves to more local accountability. The more people feel that the accountability lies elsewhere, the more cynical they are about it. You really do have to keep your eye on accountability. If the regions aren’t competent to be accountable, then you have a problem. That’s our problem.
Q: How should we be thinking about rural economies when we talk about regions?
I spent a bit of time in France looking at the way they dealt with the rural-urban divide – this is 20 years ago. They didn’t divide it between rural and urban, nationally. They said was that in every area, a large town or city would be the centre of economic activity. They drew something like 50 or 100 kilometres around, and people who were within hospital distance of a city – where there was a big hospital which the rural communities depend on – that would determine what the economy would be. It would bring the urban and the rural together.
France is slightly different, they’re a much bigger country. They have the space to draw a 50-mile line, which we couldn’t do between Leeds and Bradford, obviously. But that concept of integrating a big city with the surrounding rural area – which finds itself very dependent on that big city, at any rate – seemed like a starting point to me. Everybody in the rural community knows where their local hospital is and their big local hospital is in a big town or a big city. Then you get the identity.
If you deal with the rural issue as if it’s a homogeneous issue, it’s nonsense. If you take the rural issues where I farm here in the East Riding – which is a highly prosperous operation, making money – compared with the Lake District, you cannot do it that way. I don’t think there’s ever been any proper strategic thinking about these issues.
Q: Should we back big cities, to act as regional dynamos, over towns and rural areas? Did RDAs spend too much time worrying about towns and rural areas?
I think there’s quite a lot of truth in that. Take areas which the Yorkshire board used to worry about, like Withernsea and Hornsea, Scarborough, Bridlington. They have their serious economic problems, no question about that. But none of them are going to sort out their economic problems on their own.
It comes back to transport. If people had easier access to, let’s say, the city of Hull, which would be one of those cities you would want to develop, they could get in and out to work. They can’t do it, because the transport is bad.
I also remember another strange issue about the English. Ed Miliband once said, when he was the MP for North Doncaster, I think, that when the mines were shutting, jobs were being generated in South Doncaster, and the people of North Doncaster weren’t prepared to travel to South Doncaster for the jobs. There’s a social mobility issue to be addressed here as well.
I do genuinely believe in big cities. It depends on how big a city is: York’s a big city; Leeds is a big city; Bradford is actually a big city; Sheffield; we’ve got lots of them. I believe in driving the economy through those [cities]. In the West Riding it’s less worrying because the rural side is (a) pretty close to the big cities and (b) less important. If you take somewhere like the East Riding, there are big areas where Britain is really quite a destitute place. Politicians understandably say, ‘We better do something about Bridlington.’ Well, I’ve heard that said for 40 years. They say, ‘What are you going to do about Bridlington?’ It’s got to be closer linked with Hull.
Q: Why were you insufficiently focused on the big cities? What caused that?
That was partly because we were trying to satisfy the aspirations of the warring local authorities. I always remember people [asking]: ‘How much have we given to Wakefield this year? How much have we given to Grimsby this year?’ You’re always trying to balance it out in some sort of equitable way rather than what was the right economic decision.
The trick is accountability and identity. If you can get the people of Bridlington to come to Hull for their hospitals, for example, they know where Hull is. If you can get people to identify more with their closely adjacent city and integrate them more, then the thing would work. But no effort has been made really to bridge that gap. There’s a diversity: the appeal is, well we’re Bridlington and we’re different, we don’t like Hull. As long as you’ve got that, it’s very difficult to do anything except hand things out in the way I mentioned with the RDAs. The strategic side takes second place to the local politics and then Westminster politics.
Q: Does having a directly elected mayor increase a place’s ability to be more discriminating?
My impression from the outside is that the London mayor works and can make decisions. At a certain point it runs out of steam – Transport for London at the moment is an issue far beyond the capacity of the London mayor to cope with, and Crossrail is not really the mayor’s job. That’s a national job.
It’s early days to say, but Andy Burnham has inherited a situation in Manchester which is working. Whether the people of Manchester think it’s working as well as observers like me think it’s working, I don’t know. I suspect they do. It’s all about getting people to get away from this indifference. The indifference is the bane of our politics at the moment. Not surprisingly, with the sort of character we have running the country.
Q: Have other regions been held back by a brain drain, or capital flow, to London?
When I first joined the food business 50 years ago, the centre of the food manufacturing business was in the South East of England. Lions had a cake factory in Knightsbridge. Heinz still have a big factory in west London. The UK has always been a very centralised set-up. The food industry moved out of London over those 40 or 50 years because they were pursuing cheaper labour and because there were more profitable ways of developing property in London than just food.
I look at a place like Leeds – which I know very well – Manchester too, and they have the potential to mirror London. Leeds is quite a booming central city, but it’s very simple – similar to London in the sense that if you edge five miles out of Leeds, you hit awful deprivation, just the way in London you will find pockets of terrible deprivation and inequalities. It isn’t all like W1.
The brain drain has been a huge problem for places like Yorkshire. The exodus which has gone on – and still goes on – to the South of England has been probably the biggest problem we have. Towards the end of the Yorkshire Forward days, I was quite optimistic that we were going in the right direction. Then, when the government came in and sank RDAs without any proper consultation and put in the LEPs – which are a bit of a joke, frankly – they set regionalism back years and years.
Q: Is this brain drain mainly about wage differentials, or is it something else?
I think it’s twofold. First, wages would be right. The jobs are obviously there and the money is there. Second, there’s also the cultural side. Young people find London a very exciting place to go and do things, which is nothing to do with business.
I think London is a sad sort of place. It’s a very young city. When I go down there, I see the average age of the people in the tube in the rush hour is probably no more than 30. When people get older and have children, they find they have to commute and go outside London. I’ve always felt that surely this bubble must burst. Maybe the pandemic will change that. If you wanted to have a reasonable life – for middle-income people with children who are living in the suburbs – even Hull is far more attractive than living in the suburbs of London.
Q: How do you think of the way that things have progressed – with LEPs and Mayors – over the past decade?
The Conservatives – and why the Lib Dems went along with it, God only knows – put the Regional Development Agencies to one side, without realising that they were something to build on. They’d only been in existence for 10 or 12 years.
Hardly as soon as they’d gone, Cameron suddenly realised, ‘We’re in a mess here.’ They then started inventing a whole series of alternative initiatives everywhere, which were fragmented, incoherent, with no public buy-in to them at all. 90 percent of the public wouldn’t know what an LEP was. There’s been no recognition. All the Regional Development Agencies, certainly Yorkshire Forward, had quite a high profile. That’s all gone.
When Johnson talks about Levelling Up, he doesn’t know what he is talking about. What matters is getting the accountability and the power away from Westminster. Then you’ll find the levelling up will take place. You won’t get levelling up by handouts from central government, that’s for sure.
There are so many other things on the agenda. What’s going to happen to the English regions if Scottish devolution really happens? What’s going to happen to the resentment there is? There is resentment in the North of England between what Scotland appears to be getting against what they’re getting. If you take up in the North East, they see them shoulder to shoulder. I have to be very depressed about the whole thing. It’s a real mess, and I’ve been at it for 35 years. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where it’s been in such disorder.
Q: Is there a stand-out initiative or innovation over the decades that you think really did work?
I’ll give you an example – and this was a business issue. Siemens were contemplating doing something on offshore wind. The government was prevaricating. The Labour government had started it off. The first thing that the Conservative government did was cancel a deal with Siemens.
We – the LEP and Alan Johnson, who was then still an MP – worked together with Siemens, and, to be fair, with Cameron. They eventually persuaded the government to support the Siemens project, which has been an outstanding success. The whole offshore wind story, particularly from the Humber’s point of view, is a good one.
When I look at what’s happening in Middlesbrough, where there is a Conservative mayor, is that they are getting all sorts of support that Humber isn’t. There’s no mayor – no Conservative mayor – for Humber. You have to live with that in politics, I’m afraid. But we have too much of that in British politics. We had it with the Yorkshire Forward too. There was far too much political messing up of who is going to be on the board and who wasn’t.
Q: What are the most important lessons for us to take away?
What about the English? I think the biggest lesson is getting the English public, whatever the English public is, to recognise the need for change. It’s a very nostalgic country, England. It holds onto its own institutions; looks back to the Empire; thinks that it’s God’s own answer to everything. Yorkshire particularly thinks that – ‘God’s own country’ – far too much. Self-satisfaction and complacency. Not enough questioning.
I was hoping that with Scotland developing the way it is, and with Europe developing the way it was, that we’d learned lessons in England from that. But no, we’ve gone backwards. We’re worse in our attitude towards change and innovation than we were 50 years ago. Whatever they say, I think innovation is going on now. It is driven by science and technology, like health, like the stuff that AstraZeneca are doing in Cambridge at the moment. That is market-driven, if you like. There’s a huge opportunity. But I don’t think the need for change and the benefits of change, the positive benefits of change, the excitement of change… England doesn’t seem to understand that. (I’m overstating the case, obviously.)
Q: Will England warm to devolution as Wales did, or is there a particularly English thing at play here?
They’re very different. I throw Ireland into all this, because of the British Isles. If you look at the way the Irish economy has thrived in the last 60 years, compared with let’s say even the Scottish economy…so much of that is through discretion that they have. When I was brought up in Ireland, we still felt in Dublin deferential to London. None of that now. It’s gone completely. Scotland has moved a bit, but I don’t think it’s moved anything like the way Ireland has, and nor will it do. I think to an extent the English disease is still there in Scotland and certainly in Wales. The Welsh deference to the English has eased a little bit, but they feel they are overshadowed by the English. That is a source of discontent, which is a different issue. That’s about the United Kingdom. The English seem to be losing their grip, and they don’t like it.
ENDS