Derek Mapp was chair of the East Midlands Development Agency. Originally a councillor in Cheshire County Council in the 1990s, he became a Chair of several PLCs and High Sheriff of Derbyshire in 2014.
This interview was conducted on 6 July 2021.
Q: Can you tell us about your involvement in regional policy and looking back, what do you think were your key successes and your key frustrations?
As an active young man, at the age of 21 I became a county councillor for Cheshire County Council. At the time, local government changed from the County Borough of Warrington to Cheshire County Council and Warrington District Council. That was an attempt to bring some sort of strategy and uniformity to the way in which transport and county wide policy was applied. What came out of that was a competitive conflict between County Councils and District Councils for who should be responsible. And, as a councillor, you spent more time answering questions to your constituents on district policies, even though you’re a county councillor. It was very much a new style of governance in those days. I did five years of that and then I came out of politics to dedicate more time to my own business and try and earn some money. I then came back into organisational politics when the Regional Development Agencies (‘RDAs’) were formed in 1998 although the RDAs were expressly mandated not to be political.
When the RDAs were formed, the concept was very much driven by John Prescott and Richard Caborn but heavily supported by the Treasury. What came about was a new overarching regional structure. The trouble was, conceptually, it was ahead of its time, but on funding, it was behind the times. It was primarily funded by carving funding from compliant departments. The main department that was compliant was what is now called DEFRA [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs], so you picked up quite a lot of funding from them. With the likes of Blunkett leading Education and Beckett leading what is now BEIS [the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy], you really were not dealt with as a proper entity as far as regional structure was concerned and little funding cascaded from their departments. This did not enable the effective delivery of a strategic plan that was to be established.
Interestingly, during the six years that I was chairman, it experienced greater funding – and also no ‘cliff end’ of financial year funding. That enabled us to avoid the bizarre situation that government has of budgets based entirely on yearly cash expenditure. That allowed you to undertake more longer-term strategic planning. In those six years, the RDA became very much a more powerful organisation, one that picked up the strategic policies for both industry and, to a lesser extent, skills – and emerging towards the end of it with regards to transportation.
In the East Midlands, of which I was chairman, there were 48 different authorities that constituted the region, made up of district councils and county councils. It’s not much different now, to be honest. To enable a common philosophy to be able to be achieved across all of those different constituencies, all of which there was a mixture of political flavours, made it incredibly hard work. And I always used to say the East Midlands needs about 10 authorities. It had a population of 4.4 million, and it needed about 10 authorities of size to actually be able to manage that business. But of course, that’s not happened. What happened after [Gordon] Brown was defeated at the general election and [David] Cameron came in, was a political decision to get rid of the ‘quangos’ (as they said, the “bonfire of quangos”), and to get rid of the RDAs.
I had been out of the RDAs for a while by that time. They certainly needed a new mandate and a new focus, because in many ways they were becoming the Post Office payment centre and where you went for your handouts, but they were not powerful enough with regards to the influencing of decisions. Their power was by the distribution of funding. Today I look with interest and a great deal of reticence and some horror at the way that regional policy has evolved through the politicisation of it, led by the Treasury, which has led to a number of different mayoral large city structures being set up. I can see why they’ve done that and it’s why they only want to establish this structure where there is local consensus. But if you’re in an area such as Chesterfield or the East Midlands like I am, there’s no such structure here that works. There is a mayor of Leicester, but that’s a unitary authority as one structure. In my local area, there is not the cohesion of attitude that’s required to be able to make it work. And Chesterfield, being on the perimeters of Sheffield, sees Sheffield more as its city than it does Derby, which it’s geographically or historically attached to. I think my observation of what’s happened of late is that there was a really brave idea with regards to the regional structures to take over strategy, and then there was a move from that to what is now a hodgepodge and a rag bag of authorities.
There is no doubt that both London, and especially Andy Burnham in Manchester, are getting more voice on what’s required of policy, than sometimes the government is doing. But you must look at places like Warrington, which is my hometown: where does Warrington fit with the Liverpool mayor? The Manchester mayor? Where does Warrington fit as an entity to be able to influence strategy? And what I see has happened now is a gravitation towards city strength. Towards the end of my time there was a move by the city regions to create greater strength of cities, which, of course, is driven by the power brokers within the city. Howard Bernstein led Manchester as a great example of that. Whilst I accept that the ripple in the pond might come from the cities to the towns, in fact that often doesn’t happen. The funding ends up and the priorities end up more within the immediate city focus than it does with the suburban town. You’re creating an inequality within the regions.
The one good thing I would say that happened in the RDA period was that Richard Caborn initially appointed eight business leaders – London was excluded when it was initially established – to run and develop the economic policies of the different regions. Alongside that was a board structure that had partly political, partly business and partly third sector representation in it. Those boards worked effectively and efficiently driven by a business behaviour.
The key thing was that those RDA chairmen met every three months with ministers directly, much to the discomfort of the civil servants. The sponsoring department, the DTI [Department for Trade and Industry], spent the next six years that I was there to try and find ways in which that link could be broken – because the establishment of civil servants felt they had lost control. Often in the direct meetings that we had with Gordon Brown, and in ministerial meetings that we had, particularly in the early days with [John] Prescott and [Richard] Caborn, things got done because there was a direct link between ministers and the policymakers or the policy creators that were in the regions. I look back with some humour and some horror as well at the way that the civil service worked very hard to actually untangle that relationship and make sure that link was not there in the future, assisted by the odd choice of managing ministers who were not really wedded to the concept. Hilary Armstrong, I felt, was never a real fan. Her and Beverly Hughes, they were difficult, but Patricia Hewitt was okay. But when [Peter] Mandelson came into the DTI, the whole thing changed to the positive because there was a man who saw an opportunity to make things happen. And we could and did make things happen for him.
So historically, I look back and think, “Good idea. Funding route was poor as we had to fight for funding from each individual department”. I think there was one time that we had about 120 different requirements to demonstrate achievement to guarantee funding for future years across the different departments – 120 KPIs, none of which were joined up economically. Then we had the period of wilderness where this government got rid of the RDAs and set up these poor substitutes of Local Enterprise Partnerships (‘LEPs’), which have hardly done anything effectively. Now, with the mayoral structures, there are some good, powerful mayors. There are things happening to a few beneficiaries. There is increasing recognition and improving. But it’s a colander of economic benefit because there are places such as Chesterfield, such as Warrington – in fact, the whole of the East Midlands at the moment – that do not participate any similar functioning body.
My view is that local government needs rationalisation if you’re ever going to get an economic equality and delivery that’s required. I think to his credit for electoral reasons, this current prime minister, Boris, sees that he’s got to be seen to be doing things in the north. There is definitely an inequality in every way that you could measure it at the moment, between the North and the South East. It’s not too difficult to find ways of investment and creativity within a structured plan. I’m not sure you’ll ever get that with the way in which the mayoral structure works at the moment.
Q: How did you try to deliver? Which relationships did you build as a chairman that really worked?
A lot of my peers, the other RDA chairs, were competitive for their region’s success yet saw the value in working together and crystallising their thoughts and energies on achievement of an improvement to be able to deliver the outcomes that were required for the country as a whole. The problem is, the government is funded in departmental silos and if you try to create a regional entity that cuts across those silos, to be able to combine that funding to get an outcome, then you’ve got to look at the way that the government is funded in the first place to be able to cascade to get a single output entity. Government cannot do single output entities. It tries to, but then different departmental initiatives fail.
Let me give you some examples. A key element of RDAs was over-18 skills and development of the workforce that you needed to be able to take advantage of the different entities. For instance, take the West Midlands. Very strong in automotive manufacturing, and everybody recognised that was the place that efforts should be given to all the skills development as far as that’s concerned. The RDA would have featured that as a major part of its regional economic strategy. But the Department of Education didn’t want to lose that funding, so they set up something called Learning and Skills Councils. We challenged that long and hard and, in the end, Charles Clarke was successful in retaining the newly formed Learning and Skills Councils when he was secretary of state, in persuading our lead Chair of skills Brian Gray, that there should be an accommodation of Learning and Skills as a separate entity outside the RDAs. What should have happened is that skills budget should have been included in an overall economic strategy.
Government thinks that it can pool resources and achieve outcomes, but this is against the very culture and establishment, as far as the Civil Service is concerned. You work within the department, you get a budget allocated from the Treasury for that department and you spend money within that department. No departmental Secretaries of State are going to do anything other than hold that precious funding. Learning and Skills was one example.
Q: Did this Whitehall attitude shift at all over time?
The only time that there was any difference was when you had someone like John Healey, who was a minister and believed in regional politics. He was the education and skills minister. He worked with the RDAs to achieve an outcome. He made the best of a bad structure.
There’s a difference between the ministers and the departments. You have a fleeting time with the ministers. 90% of your time is with civil servants who are educated and geared entirely to be departmental by orientation. Unless you have KPIs to the departments that also have responsibility for the outcomes of KPIs, with other departments interlinked, it will never work. The funding of the department is considered to be precious by the civil servants of that department, and they’ll put their own KPIs specific to that. I don’t know how Andy Burnham’s funded at the moment, but I’ll bet you he has a whole series of different funding metrics and outcomes that’s required from individual departmental funding that will be going in there, and it will end up as a nightmare.
Sometimes you need to do things that don’t neatly fit a department’s KPI. For instance, we often talked long and hard about the inequality of the North East versus the South East. John Bridge, who was the was the North East RDA chair – we all recognised and we discussed it as a group of chairs: just how can you get the North East a more powerful economic base? How can you get people to relocate there? How can you get people in industry to establish there, other than by large government handouts? Each of the RDAs were wedded to the concept that what you had to do was significantly invest in further education and universities in the North East to create a core educational base there, of which many people would continue to stay and live in that area, which would actually give a resource, an opportunity, to the North East to break out from its demise that it was in at that time.
Now, there are some great universities up there: Newcastle, Durham, even Sunderland has got a university now. And I think what couldn’t happen is that John could never use a cross-departmental outcome that is required. If you think about your life, going to work and living in life, you use multiple different departments to even travel to work. We would have ridiculous discussions about whether riding your bike to work was transport or whether it was part of rural affairs or whether it was part of DCMS [Department for Culture, Media and Sport]. The issue is that unless you create pools of funding with pools of outcomes that are cross departmental purposed, you’ll never do it because the basic infrastructure you’re starting with is wrong.
Q: Was the Treasury supportive of these financial reforms when you were Chair?
Very much so. I think senior advisors and the ministers who were in those departments were in control of their departments and so therefore the civil servants were more compliant. All the time that Gordon was there…the meetings that we used to have at Number 11 achieved outcomes. They allowed a certain amount of financial roll over from one year to another. They were big deals, because the way that we were doing it in the past is that we were lending each of the money at the year end, which nobody knew about, or in theory didn’t know about, but it was the way in which we stopped the clawback of funding for underspend. When you’re doing a regional economic strategy, you cannot work it on a financial year to financial year basis. It has to be a three-to-five-year funding pot that has different levels of funding required during that time.
I spent my time in business, I do a three and five-year plan. I know when I need to invest, and I know when I need to reap during a plan to achieve outcomes. Government doesn’t think that way. Government thinks year to year tax take, granting aid. It’s got to balance the books at the end of the year. Now, of course, all that’s gone up in smoke in the last 12 to 18 months with the amount of funding that has taken place [in response to the COVID-19 pandemic]. But there has got to be a more coordinated strategy across different levels demanded by the Treasury — we used to gag for the meetings with Gordon because we knew would make a breakthrough if we had his time.
We were told by Stuart Wood, ‘you’ve got 14 seconds to impress Gordon so whatever you say, make sure he listens in the first 14 seconds, otherwise the rest of the meeting is wasted’. And we used to bet on how long the meeting would take. It was booked for an hour. If we achieved an hour, it was a good score. If we achieved an hour and 20 it was an outstanding score. We would bet on that before we went into the meetings and we used to think right, What’s the 14-second message that we give Gordon and to be able to trap him to want to him stay longer? Because it was eight o’clock morning meeting and he was on his third meeting by then, so we had to be tactical.
Q: But if a specific minister was not on board, the RDA struggled for traction?
Right. And the only way it will ever work is if the boss, the Prime Minister, owns this. Otherwise, the civil service…it’s an honest civil service, but it’s geared to be able to manage its own life and make sure that life doesn’t get more challenging than it needs to be. You get eight business leaders suddenly walking into the DTI and having a discussion with either Prescott when he was at DTR or the DTI with Margaret Beckett… I remember her saying, “get your tanks off my lawn”, is what she said to us, when we were asking for funding. It was a pittance what we got from the DTI but the very essence of why we were there was to stimulate economic strategy in the regions, but it was not owned by that department..
Q: What was it like working with local government, in the East Midlands in particular?
The piper plays the tune, doesn’t it? If you had funds and you could influence things for them, they were more attentive than otherwise. Power was nothing without the money. It was different between the rural counties of Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire versus the cities of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham. It was very much based on the characteristics of the politicians, if they had a representation around your table, they were engaged. Leicester didn’t with us, so I had very strong fights with now-Sir Peter Soulsby when he was leader of Leicester City. They believed we were irrelevant, and they should get all the funding directly. This is the problem with power and politics: people don’t ever give up power and politics.
Another good example locally is Bolsover and North East Derbyshire. 10 years ago they had the foresight to say, ‘look, let’s merge our back offices, share a chief executive and support services’, which they did. They still retained 36 councillors each, both having different meetings. Now this share arrangement is breaking up because it has not delivered as well as a single entity would, although they’re both the same political colour now. Believe it or not, Bolsover is Conservative majority and MP, it’s just staggering in my mind as ever a possibility. But Bolsover and North East Derbyshire… they go through some platitudes of connectivity now, but local councillors don’t like giving up power and unless you actually set up a structure where power is going to be achieved it will not materialise. I don’t have any empirical knowledge with regards to how Andy is doing and how Dan Jarvis in Sheffield and people like that are doing. I just don’t understand that system of funding or mechanics or whether they’re getting what they want.
I would have said where government made the mistake was that they established the RDAs. What they should have done then, and it would have been a bloodbath, is they should have gone into a reorganisation of local government with the creation of 10 unitary authorities – about 400,000 each. It is a quantum of sufficient size. They should still have had a regional structure for things such as major transportation projects, economic policy and connectivity across those areas. If you’d have done that, you’d have made it happen.
As an aside, one of the things that used to frustrate me on economic grounds – and a lot was happening with governments and planning – is that we had planning authorities that were just hostile to pretty well most planning applications and those that were receptive. I remember trying to get my 48 authorities to agree to a planning charter and basically the planning charter was set of words which said, “we will help people to achieve planning applications”. I had fisticuffs with people about the word “help” because I said, ‘look, these are economic generators. If people want to come and build something in your area, if it’s in the wrong location that they’re requesting to do it, then help them find the right location. Take the money off them’. There’s a big gap in the competence levels of people who are delivering economic policy in our areas.
Q: What was your goal? Was convergence with London, or its rate of growth, something you thought about for the East Midlands?
Whenever you were in a regional situation, there’s a perception of arrogance from London.. For us to establish a series of SMEs in the East Midlands there was a very detailed strategy, in depth and a lot of very hard work. In London, it just happens. However, I think it was widely understood, if partially resented, and we would always argue as a group of chairs London’s success was important in that when you drop the pebble in the London Pond, it ripples out to the regions and it ripples out almost in the shape of a pond because very little of that ever gets to the North East and South East- the ripple fades before it gets there..
We used to get it towards the southern end of the East Midlands in Northamptonshire and then into Milton Keynes. You would never get it in Cornwall. You never get it in the tip of the South East. London had an influence, as far as I was concerned. But we’re going back to 1998 and the understanding of economics then to now and one of the economic drivers that’s required. I’ve personally got quite a lot of business in Cornwall. Parts of Cornwall are booming, for two reasons. One is it managed to get the European grants to put a high-speed fibre network in there 10 years ago and many people are operating from Cornwall. Seconfdly, it’s had a turbo boost because of COVID. I know lots of people who, still have London offices, but are operating on a very efficient internet network that enjoyed significant investment.
I’m not convinced that a high-speed line from Leeds to London is going to stimulate Leeds. I’m not convinced that that will do anything other than make it easier to get to London to do business for London based businesses. I’ve never been an absolute advocate as far as that’s concerned. I am an advocate with regards to carbon-free transport policy, but not as that is a resource that Leeds will benefit from because it makes it easier to travel to London. I think there is still this flow down the hill towards London and it will be easier to go down the hill then it will be to go back up the hill to Leeds. Leeds needs to have its own identity, its own structure, its own strengths – as Yorkshire does – to be able to attract the type of businesses and specialism that they can relate to. The same goes for the West Midlands in regard to motoring.
I was the RDA lead for small businesses when I was chair of the East Midlands. I led on a small business growth and did the work with David Cooksey on the Small Business Task Force which promoted the establishment of regional venture capital funds and other funding initiatives. I don’t know how similar initiatives are happening at the moment. Who is doing that/what other than the private sector? How is that happening? Where is the philosophy that says that we need to invest in?
When David Sainsbury came in, he was so bright and so helpful when we looked at the cluster policy with regards to businesses, some of which is still in existence. Dick Caborn is the best example of any with regards to the advanced manufacturing park that’s been established just outside Sheffield.
Q: Is there a particular place, maybe in the UK, maybe elsewhere, that you think is a good example of what you were trying to do at the RDA?
Well, London is a different model entirely. London’s GDP is one of the leading financial centres of the world. And that creates a type of activity and the type of response. In different parts of the country, there’s different emphasis with regards to professional services versus manufacturing versus rural economy.
Did I see another operating model? Look, Bernstein was a pretty clever guy when he was running Manchester City Council. He was a massive power freak, but as a result of that, there was the creation of an infrastructure and power-base there that Andy Burnham was able to create this Manchester mayor position. I know why many of our talented politicians are ending up in mayoral positions, because they can actually do something and actually make things happen, whereas as a back bench MP it’s difficult to do. I’ll bet you if you said to Andy Burnham, “would you like to be a Secretary of State or a mayor of Manchester?”, He’d say mayor of Manchester, not just because he’s a northern lad but because he thinks he can effectively get things done. And that was the same as when I was the chair of the RDA. I was passionate about it. Nobody knew what the East Midlands was or what area it constituted when I started. I spent so much of my time developing an East Midlands brand and an image that actually would become available to encourage inward investment.
The big difficulty that you’ve got when you talk about London and you talk about the regions is that there was the establishment of Government Offices in the Regions, which was a bit of a waste of time. It was just another watershed of bureaucracy. What really needed to be done was a cascading of departments funding and representations. That could well have been departmental representation as part of the RDAs, to actually deliver something.
It amuses me when I see Nicola Sturgeon talking about her country. It’s the same population as the East Midlands and yet they have much more power. So much more opportunity, based on the historical fact that Scotland was a different country. I don’t know why it is acceptable they have so much more freedom and power compared to the rest of England. And at the moment she has power to coordinate resources. For example she has a single police force. In the East Midlands, we still have five police forces. Why? I’ve had things stolen from my businesses in Chesterfield and the thiefs went across county lines, such that the police won’t investigate. All of these are issues with regards to political ownership. But more importantly, as far as economic ownership is concerned, there is no coordination. I’ve got Derby competing against Nottingham competing against Leicester for the same thing. Instead of accepting what their primary skills should be, how they leverage what resources that they have through the different universities and the different higher education departments to create businesses for the future. That’s not going on at the moment.
Q: Do you think a one-size-fits-all model works for all of England’s regions? Or should we have a different set-up of powers and funding across different regions?
Well, I know what I think, but I know it won’t happen. There should be a regional structure possibly as a mayoral authority, and under that regional structure should have 10 unitary authorities. And then there should be a very big equalisation in the distribution of the funding. You’ve got parish councils which are local small instructions, and sometimes derided — they should have modestly more power for all local matters, but the unitary authorities should be actually much more powerful than currently exists in a dual authority structure. That way you would ensure that everybody who was a constituent within that area had an opportunity to influence policy that was relevant to them. At the moment, there’s a funding imbalance going at the moment by funding through the mayoral structures that many parts of the country are not getting. And that is an inequality that I think is unfair.
Q: If you look back over the last 40 years, how would you sum it the UK’s approach to regional growth?
It’s a bit of a patchwork quilt, I think. There is a desire, certainly under different Chancellors to try and stimulate and level out the economy. They have become involved with actually creating regional structures because of their frustration, and because it would not happen naturally. I think what’s happened, because there is an inequality that’s evolving, whereby certain structures are being created, but no comprehensive solution is being delivered.
Q: Within your experience, what’s the one idea or innovation you were involved in which you think really did work within that patchwork quilt?
Well, I think to be fair, my view on the mayoral structure is that it might be working for those constituent parts of it. Certainly, I listened with great interest when Andy Burnham speaks and, to a lesser extent, London. Part of me is frustrated that they’re getting that amount of attention. You’ve got to understand that people are proud of where they live and want to be proud for their town and their outcome. I find it slightly resentful that Manchester’s getting so much airplay. And yet I’m not in my in my area. That’s where I think the equality comes. And that, I think, is just natural fairness that will, I think, cause future problems unless something is done as a structure to put in place.
It won’t happen because they just set up the city mayors and they’re here until they become unpopular. And they will become unpopular if there are all led by mayors who are competing against government for voice especially if it is a Labour major versus a Conservative government. I feel slightly violated as a constituent that I’m in an area that is controlled by a number of politicians who can’t or don’t want to get their act together to form a mayoral structure that would help me as a resident of Chesterfield. There has got to be a structure that is inclusive of everybody, as opposed to selected by existing interested parties.
Q: How would you think about ‘drawing the boundaries’ for the places currently left out of combined authorities?
Well, look, the East Midlands had a 4.4 million population. You need constituent elements of at least half a million, so you would draw around existing boundaries. If we did that, what happened would be too much politics involved in this and too much pride. But that’s what it should be. I mean, the country of 60 million should have 120 authorities running it, all of which have their own flavour and different characteristics.
It’s interesting, I go to Cornwall often, and Cornwall County Council is a unitary authority and operates as such, and it works well. You know where to go for everything. Here, you still don’t know where to go for everything. We still have the competing county and district councils. And it’s just a failure of effective democracy that’s going on at the moment.
Do those places outside the combined authorities benefit from them at the moment? I’m not sure. There will be some examples. I mean, in the centre of Chesterfield, they’ve got an office building going up on a car park and it says, ‘benefited from Sheffield City Region’. Recently changed to Northern Gateway. You know, it’s a funding exercise. It’s not an entity that means anything to anyone who is not an elected official.
ENDS