George Osborne served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016, and as First Secretary of State from 2015-2016. He was Member of Parliament for Tatton from 2001 to 2017. He has been chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership since 2016 and of the British Museum since 2021.
This interview was conducted on 29 March 2022.
Q: What was your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I got involved in politics in my early twenties, first for the Conservative research department, then briefly in Number 10, and then in the Conservative opposition from 1997 onwards. I was a Member of Parliament in Cheshire from 2001.
Although I had been interested in regional policy in those earlier advising roles, my real interest came from being a Cheshire MP. I was born and brought up in Bayswater in central London; went to school in central London; went to university at Oxford. It was a life-changing experience to represent a constituency that was an affluent commuter belt to Manchester. It was the first time I’d been exposed to a very different part of the UK. As the Conservatives had been basically wiped out in the north of England, I was the closest thing to a Manchester MP for the Conservative Party. There was an MP for Altrincham, Graham Brady, but I took it upon myself as a new opposition MP. I think at one point I was actually a ‘shadow minister for Manchester’, in one of those things Oppositions go through to demonstrate they’re back in touch.
I took it upon myself to be the Conservative voice in Manchester. I was lucky in that the politics of Manchester, although essentially 100% Labour, was very consensual – very different from the politics in some other northern cities. The Labour leadership in that city and the chief executive – Sir Richard Leese, and Howard Bernstein – were very relaxed about having a Conservative MP turn up to events. I remember specifically being asked to support, and being involved in, the BBC’s move to Salford, which was a Blair government initiative as far as I’m aware. There were figures in Manchester arguing for it, and I was roped in to give the whole thing cross-party support.
It was being an MP there that got me thinking about what is it that you could do for cities like Manchester and sparked the beginnings of an interest in regional policy. I then became Shadow Chancellor in 2005, first under Michael Howard then David Cameron. Self-evidently, we had to try and have a policy that appealed to the whole country, and particularly parts of the country where the Conservative Party had done badly in recent elections. I wouldn’t say we had a brilliantly thought through, all-encompassing plan for regional economic development; but we had certain policies like high-speed rail which did, in the end, morph into High Speed 2 and is being constructed now.
Those were attempts, in a way that an Opposition often does, to come up with totemic policies that illustrate a broader approach: an approach at the time that was trying to signal that the Conservative Party was interested in life beyond the South East of England and the Home Counties. We were identifying certain totemic policies, but we did also – as again is often the case in Opposition – accumulate a lot of baggage, of things we opposed. We were against Regional Development Agencies and John Prescott’s Northern Way… various things we’d accumulated, which were a bit of a jumble to be honest. I was trying to move us on to, ‘here are some concrete things we can do for the North of England’. When I say the North of England, I should say it was also very much the Midlands and the North in the wider sense, the North East, the North West and the West and East Midlands. We developed the policy around Local Economic Partnerships (‘LEPs’) – I was involved in those as the Shadow Chancellor and as northern Tory MP – but the one that I was by far the most involved in was high speed rail. The others were left to other shadow Cabinet members in the local government space.
Q: Colleagues in Manchester, Michael Heseltine too, have said to us that there was a point in your chancellorship when there was a gear change: where you changed your view strategically about what could be done and the Treasury’s role in that. Is that right?
That is fair. First, I’m a big admirer of Michael Heseltine – not everyone in the Conservative Party is. There is part of me that sees a role for government in big infrastructure projects like the M25 or the Channel Tunnel or Docklands or indeed Liverpool regeneration when I was a child. I’m not a ‘Government should get out of the way, small state, there’s no role for government’ Conservative. I admire Heseltine’s activism. I admire, also, his insight, which is that you’ve got to create something that’s sustainable, that private money and private investment and private business wants to be part of. It’s not enough to create the government infrastructure and the physical transport. In Docklands he did amazing things: he builds the road tunnel, clears the land, builds the airport and so on, but he also puts a lot of effort into getting the Canary Wharf Company up and running. I think that’s why he’s such an attractive and interesting politician.
My early period as Chancellor was focused on trying to deliver the economic plan: come up with reductions in the deficit, and implement a lot of the things that, over many years in Opposition, we had accumulated as policy. That’s why we got things like High Speed Two off the ground right from the beginning. I had resisted the Treasury’s early calls for big infrastructure cuts. On the first day when I was Chancellor, they suggested cancelling the Crossrail project. I said, ‘Well I’m not sure about that.’ They also wanted to cancel the Tate Modern extension and the Crick Institute at King’s Cross. I think they saw Crick as Peter Mandelson’s vanity project, basically. The Tate Modern was ‘well, why is the Government paying for the arts?’ And Crossrail was on the legitimate grounds that if you’re going to have to make some painful decisions, why not start by cancelling something that hasn’t even started? I remember resisting those three things and thinking, ‘that’s interesting.’ I began to think that we are going to have to get some things built alongside the austerity cuts.
Politically, by 2013, I was shifting my attention: austerity was not done in terms of implementation, but the policy had been set out. I was thinking, ‘What else can I use this job to do?’ I was more comfortable in the job. I had learnt more about the levers available to the Chancellor. My own position in the Government was strong. I can’t really pinpoint an epiphany moment, but I definitely thought, ‘why don’t we have a real go at regional policy, and particularly in the North of England?’
I’ve been influenced by Jim O’Neill, the economist, who had done a report for the Cities Commission, which had been set up to look at how to improve economic growth in northern cities, but I think he particularly focused on Manchester and Leeds. I’d read it and thought, ‘that’s interesting. Although these aren’t all Conservative ideas, they’re ideas that fit with my philosophy’. I spoke to Jim and that became the beginnings of a plan to make a very visible and marked effort to deliver more for the North of England. I am not pretending there weren’t also some politics here. I remember I used to sit down periodically and say, ‘Well what can we do next, team? I know: why not be the Conservative-led Government that delivers for the North of England?’ It was a bit contrarian as well, because the assumption, fair or unfair, was Conservatives weren’t that interested in the North.
Q: Was the Treasury working on regional policy at that point?
Not really. There had been various town centre funds and an evolution of LEPs [Local Enterprise Partnerships]. High Speed 2 was under development. But there was no specific regional policy. In fact, the philosophy of the government, influenced by some of the other people in the Cabinet at the time, was anti-regional government. The Conservatives in opposition, and in those early periods of Government, didn’t want to talk about regions. We’d been against Regional Assemblies, we’d been against Regional Development Agencies. The LEPs were more of a county or town-based answer. I think we made a mistake when we closed the door on elected mayors as part of the Coalition Agreement. These were city centre mayors rather than metro mayors, but the Liberal Democrats had a presence in places like Manchester and Sheffield and they were against elected city mayors. We came up with a fudge of a policy – to have local referendums – and where they were held, they didn’t really succeed.
That all led to me doing a lot of work – and getting the top of the Treasury involved, including John Kingman who was absolutely brilliant on all this – to put together something that was rooted in Jim O’Neill’s economic policy, based around a theory of agglomeration that would attract private investment. His main proposal was a high-speed rail line from Manchester to Leeds and we took that.
We then made the big decision – ‘Let’s go for an elected metro mayor in Greater Manchester’ – the success of which subsequently led to other cities. We started with Manchester, because of my relationship with Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein, and central government’s long-term relationship with Central Manchester over many decades. This was a council they could do business with; a council that was innovative; a council with a chief executive and leader who they could deal with. That became the speech I gave at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry in 2014 on the Northern Powerhouse – because the speech was in the Power Hall of the Museum. It was really rooted in major pieces of transport infrastructure, elected mayors, and a commitment to the science, arts, and cultural infrastructure of the cities.
Looking back, it was very city-based. It did not include the kind of towns and communities that many represented in Parliament. If I had had a longer – I was re-elected in 2015 and before I was rejected in the summer of 2016 – I was thinking, ‘now let’s try and think about the towns’. I was aware there was a problem. In 2014 it was very much city-based, with the commuter belt around the cities. We got Jim O’Neill into the Treasury. He’s not a Tory, but we got him in to deliver this. I went out of my way to make the Labour leaderships in Manchester and Liverpool and Newcastle feel welcome. It never quite worked in Leeds, for various reasons – partly because it was too contested in West Yorkshire, there were too many Tory MPs doing too well that they didn’t want me turning up. In Liverpool and Manchester, it was a largely Tory-free area. In fact, persuading the Tory leadership of Altrincham council was very important in helping me deliver. Some of the Tory MPs in the area thought, ‘Why are we giving away power to some Labour mayor?’
The approach was rooted in Jim O’Neill’s thinking. The policy was put together by John Kingman and his team. David Cameron was fine with it: ‘great idea, great initiative, thank you George’. Nick Clegg had to be squared and bought off, but then we were able to just go and deliver it and impose it on other bits of the Government.
Q: What were the policy objectives?
The goal was to see those cities thrive. They were already well on the way. One of the great transformations in my life has been the revival of the great Northern cities under many governments. In the early 1980s the idea that there would be lots of people living in Central Manchester would have seemed fanciful.
I would measure success in terms of three things. First, a sense of activity, excitement, growth and job creation in these cities. Second, a reduction in local rivalry and an attempt in the greater metropolitan areas to work more closely together. This was already happening in Manchester through the Greater Manchester Association of Councils. I ultimately wanted to see it between the cities. I was trying to get Leeds and Manchester to put together joint bids to the Treasury. I used to say to them that if you put a joint bid in, you’re going to get more than half each, to get there to be more collaboration. Third, I stated as the long-term objective that the growth rate of the North would catch up with the growth rate of the South.
Q: Was London’s success a problem in achieving that objective?
I don’t think so. London is an incredible international asset for the UK. Through good fortune, history, and economic forces that have driven this, we happen to have one of the world’s greatest cities, with a very large metropolitan area. That’s not a bad thing. I was keen to support key infrastructure in the city like Crossrail. Crossrail has been a bipartisan project for many years.
I think it’s a mistake to think that to support the North you have to undermine London, and to support London you have to ignore the North. Crossrail 2 is now stalled, like other big cultural projects in the city such as the Tate Gallery. In office, I was trying to drive the Bakerloo Line extension. With Boris Johnson, who was then the Mayor, we agreed the Northern Line extension to Battersea Power Station. I wanted to extend the Bakerloo Line to the southeast of London. I was pushing for another river crossing.
These things, all quite Heseltinian, I was driving from the Treasury – often with quite a lot of resistance from Treasury civil servants who were frankly not sure why they were doing all this? The Department of Transport was saying, ‘these should be our projects, and we don’t get to lead these big projects?!’ But by then I had the political clout to do that.
Q: What was your diagnosis of why there were persistent inequalities and underperformance?
First, there are very powerful forces at work in the world: the disruption of technology; deindustrialisation; big economic forces and certainly western democratic governments find it hard to stop. You have to try to bend them, ameliorate them, address the deficiencies and the social injustice they can cause.
Since the First World War, there’s been deindustrialisation – potentially even before – which saw Britain’s competitive position in heavy industry and textiles progressively undermined (first by Germany and America and then by other forces). Our industries became progressively uncompetitive until it all came to a grinding halt in the 1980s.
Second, again through accident of history, Britain did not have big alternative centres to London. It wasn’t a federated country like Germany or Italy. Our Manchesters are so much smaller than London. If anything our ‘regional cities’ historically have been Dublin and Edinburgh. That’s all a bit complicated. The cities aren’t really big enough and London is the place where you’ve got the interface, which you don’t often have in other countries, of the political power centre, the financial power centre, the media power centre and so on.
You’re dealing with a lot of very powerful forces. That doesn’t mean the government can’t do things to, if not reverse, then at least address those problems. I felt the cities had some basic strengths. After twenty years of policy by previous governments, with universities being established and growing in the middle of those cities, they had become more professional and middle class, with crime falling. I thought the cities were an easier problem to tackle. I still don’t really have an answer for Grimsby or Carlisle or the Welsh mining valleys. There wouldn’t be communities in the Rhondda if it hadn’t been for the coal and now coal’s gone. That’s really hard. Not that we shouldn’t try, but what are the things that you could do beyond relocating some bit of a government department or providing a tax break to a microchip producer – which is the Thatcher government answer – for it to then close five years later. That for me is still the unanswered question. Anywhere near a city you can build commuter networks to try and get more commuting, which you do not see as much in the North of England or the Midlands as you do in the South.
Q: You’ve talked about levers to support agglomeration forces like local transport, skills, R&D. When you look back to the 2010 spending review, when you say this wasn’t really part of your thinking, do you think you should have done more?
It’s only when you stop doing these jobs that you realise how fleeting they are. You wish you’d done twice as much. More specifically on spending, there were probably two mistakes made in the 2010 Spending Review. First, Alistair Darling had cut the capital budget in his last budget and it was very easy for me to bank the cuts he had announced. If I had my time again, even if I had stuck to the same envelope, I would have done more on current and less on capital. Capital was easy to cut because it had been pre-announced by my political opponent and because the Treasury would always point out that cancelling things that aren’t built is a lot easier than stopping things that are currently being received.
Second, on infrastructure projects, I don’t think I would have necessarily done less in London. What I have learned is that there is a lack of projects that you can support. There was a terrible phrase at the time – ‘shovel ready’ – as if we were all building dirt roads through the Bayou in the 1930s. I remember that I announced projects then, like the bypass of Stonehenge, and there’s still absolutely no sign of any work happening. Crossrail is brilliant but it’s still not open – and that was a project that was first announced, I think, by Cecil Parkinson in 1988. The idea that there is a set of projects ready to go that lack Treasury funding is just not the case. If I had my time again, I think things like the high speed line across the Pennines, which I was keen to build in 2010, I would have said, ‘let’s get going, let’s commit’, knowing it was going to take years before it requires any serious Treasury money. So, I would address the capital current mix, and press ‘Go’ on planning.
Q: What you look back on the combined authority devolution deals, do you think that the balance of powers and funding that was devolved in 2014 and in the 2016 deals was right?
I don’t think it would have happened but for the leadership in Manchester. They were uniquely willing to engage with a Conservative government. They had a developed policymaking capacity – which many councils don’t really have – and they had very good leadership. Without that team, it wouldn’t have happened.
I went for the maximalist option that I could go for with Manchester in the face of quite a lot of opposition from the Department of Local Government – partly because they had absolutely no idea I was doing this thing until it was sprung on them – as well as the Department of Education and the Department of Transport and elements of BEIS [Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy]. I went for the maximum I could.
In the remaining two years I had as Chancellor, I went back and did the big NHS devolution deal for Manchester, which I still think doesn’t get enough attention. I would like to have done that NHS deal across all the cities, including in London, where the current Mayor didn’t want the NHS devolved to him. The London health economy is incredibly complicated, to be fair to him. I would have done more on the NHS, because I think the NHS is such a powerful force in our country: it’s the biggest consumer of government money outside of the welfare system; it’s incredibly centralised and lives in parallel to every other bit of government as a separate structure; and, it’s often the biggest presence of government around the country. So devolving control of the NHS would have been something I would have added.
No one seems to have got skills right. There’s been any number of skills White Papers. Finding a way to somehow align skills with local employer needs would be a thing I would add. There’s an interesting question about schools. The Tory philosophy at the time, that we picked up from Andrew Adonis and Tony Blair, was the Academy-Free School movement. It was so anti-local authority that we probably missed a strategic piece that you could give to larger areas than just local education authorities, greater involvement in the provision of schooling. One of the big challenges is still poor schooling and poor educational performance.
I now would be quite bold and do more in the tax space. We spent a lot of my time trying to devolve income tax powers to Scotland. I think we spent too much time on that. We could have come up with something clever or and eye catching in the local income tax space without threatening the central revenues of the government.
Q: Were Manchester asking for tax powers?
They were asking for, in their world, quite radical gain-share funding formulas: ’you fund the metro extension and we’ll share some of the uplift in the business rates in the area’ and so on. They were complicated and not very publicly accessible funding deals. We did do some stuff on rates and the retention of council tax receipts if you supported new housing development in your area.
Q: Was it Treasury caution or local caution?
It was probably a bridge too far all round. If I had stayed Chancellor for another five years, I would have got there. At the time, I was just trying to get things off the ground. I was fighting hardest for the metro mayors. Quite a lot of the cities only wanted them in the city centre, or they wanted a metro authority without a directly elected metro mayor, with the councils electing one of their council leaders. I made that a red line in all the negotiations, not just with Manchester but also Merseyside and the West Midlands and others.
Q: Did you worry about the outlying areas, outside of the administrative boundaries of combined authorities?
We did start moving towards the idea of an elected mayor for Cheshire. The problem is that it doesn’t quite work everywhere because the country is a bit different in every place and identities are a bit different. Where I represented in Cheshire, there were more straightforward commuter belt solutions, which can work both ways. In Reading, people live in London and go and work in Reading now because there are lots of business there. There’s no reason why people couldn’t live in Manchester and come to work in Cheshire. The commuting can be two ways. What’s happened now is that they are trying to apply the metro mayor model to everywhere. I would just focus on the big cities. In counties I would go for elected unitary authorities.
Q: Does central government have to accept this voluntarist and bespoke way of doing things?
In all these areas we proceeded with consent. My answer was that, having got Greater Manchester to agree, I could say ‘If you want what Greater Manchester has, you have to come to me with a proposal and you have to all agree locally’. The next area that agreed was South Yorkshire where again there was a very constructive and progressive Labour leadership there. Then the West Midlands and West Yorkshire. North Yorkshire and East Yorkshire remained very problematic. They could never agree to anything – I think some of them have now agreed something. I wanted to include Gateshead and Newcastle but that turned out to be a massive affront to local politics.
I think it’s dangerous to draw boundaries. One of the reasons why what I would argue is a revolution in English local government has happened is largely because people consented without it being a great controversy. That’s not true of previous local government reorganisations. We basically held out the pot of gold; we had an example, we said ‘here’s Greater Manchester. We’ve given them all this power they’ve got more money if you want that then sort yourselves out, work out your area, decide that you want to be a metro mayor, come to the government with some ideas and you too can have the pot of gold’ – rather than taking the gold away as a means of delivering the policies.
Q: Is it right to maintain this consensual approach, even if it becomes compellingly obvious that it’s not working? Would it still be okay for local politicians to say ‘we’re not going to do it, we’re not going to be part of it’?
I think you have to let the local politics work through, or else it doesn’t work. I use West Yorkshire as an example because I spent a lot of time working up there. I wanted the other areas to become so successful – or so obviously getting additional resources because that came forward with collective plans – that in the end the politics of West Yorkshire would change.
On areas outside the boundaries like Blackburn, my answer to that – which unfortunately has been unwound by subsequent governments – was Transport for the North. I thought you could create an equivalent to Transport for London in the North of England – with a proper budget, proper ticketing power, capital budget – that could decide whether to do the rail scheme in Blackburn or the road scheme in Leeds. Forcing them to make choices. I used to say to the local leaders that at the moment it’s the Treasury who are saying, ‘we’ll give a little bit to them, a little bit to them, a little bit to them, and have we ticked off all the areas? Why don’t you come and make the decision for yourselves about where the strategic priorities and try and think about the whole of the Transpennine belt as a single agglomeration’. That was the original Jim O’Neill idea.
Q: Michael Heseltine told us that central government made a huge mistake by ducking local government reorganisation in 1971. He argued that voluntarism only takes you so far. You need proper sized unitaries which can deliver on a vision. Might we need to have a moment where, cross-party, we bite the bullet from central government to do this?
I would agree with him on unitaries and I would move away from the two-tier county government districts. As a Cheshire MP, when I was an opposition MP, the government abolished the district councils and the county council to creates two unitary authorities. All the Cheshire MPs, led by Gwyneth Dunwoody, made an impassioned attack on the government. Thankfully the government at the time completely ignored us and delivered much more efficient local government. It was great. In the county areas you can do that. If you had a couple of outlying cities that refused to have metro mayors, you could impose that now. I think, broadly speaking, these things are better done by offering rewards rather than sticks.
One interesting Heseltine idea that we didn’t take forward but did discuss a lot, was having mandatory business contributions to local Chambers of Commerce, which is what they do in Germany. It seems like a slightly dry area of policy, but he had produced a report for us – No Stone Unturned. At the same time, Lord Green, who was a minster we brought into the business department, was attracted to this idea of a compulsory levy or compulsory contribution from businesses above a certain size to the local Chamber of Commerce: so that they are properly resourced, everyone has to engage with them, they’re the interlocutor between government and smaller businesses because the only businesses the government directly deals with are the very large cap FTSE companies. At the time it was just one of those fights I wasn’t up for having. I remember being attracted to the idea and thinking that it’s clever, a good idea that we could come back to.
Q: Unlike in London, the Greater Manchester Mayor doesn’t have spatial planning powers. Would it be possible to keep the Greater Manchester model but to have some powers which move directly to the mayor with metro accountability?
Yes, I think so. To get the deal done with Greater Manchester, we had to bring all the Labour councils onboard and they were very keen not to lose powers themselves to the mayor. I’m not sure I would create a GLA [Greater London Authority] everywhere. If I asked who’s your local GLA member, you might fail that test. What’s really surprised on the upside has been that the mayors have become national political figures. I wanted that to be the case. I used to say that I wanted that, but I have been pleasantly surprised that the alternative route to the top of British politics is now through being a city mayor. We have a Prime Minister who was Mayor of London. You have people like the Mayor of Greater Manchester who clearly has national political ambitions. I think that’s good. It’s broken up a little the House of Commons monopoly on all of this. This is a good thing and should drive accountability through people wanting to prove themselves locally and becoming bigger targets for the national media if they fail.
Q: What was your experience of different Whitehall departments?
First, I thought nothing but the very best of the Treasury. The Treasury can be a bit cynical and there is a bit of, ‘oh we’ve seen it all before, they want another town centre fund, we’ll dress it up and rename it and call it the town centre fund’. Once they clicked into gear they were absolutely brilliant. That was the very best of what you’d want from your civil service and your public officials. There’s always a Treasury hesitancy that in the end they will have to be the people who bail things out. If you look at the Transport for London example, it’s not been a very happy one over the last couple of years. If Transport for London goes bust, does it go bust because of COVID-19? Or does it go bust because the mayor promises a fair freeze to get themself elected? He didn’t need to. I think you could have sold a fair increase. If the Treasury and Number 10 think the latter, they won’t bail out Transport for London. When they finally do a bailout they start deciding how many night tubes are running – the Transport Secretary deciding those things rather than the Mayor.
That to me is a bad model. It’s Treasury political cynicism that when things fail, that’s our chance to exert power. You have to show real restraint, particularly when it’s a political opponent. My experience is that there is a cynicism there, a ‘we’re going to have to step in when these people screw it up’ mentality. But you can overcome that. You can make people enthusiastic about devolution. So that was my experience of the Treasury.
I didn’t have direct experience with other departments. But ultimately it needs a big and bold vision to get everyone excited. Otherwise, there is the same cynicism in other departments too, understandably.
Q: You mentioned earlier the case for skills devolution to local areas. We’ve been trying to do this for twenty years. Why does it always seem to fail?
I have my own cynical view which is that it’s much better to try and get everyone to university. It might work in Germany, but decades and decades of trying in Britain to create an intermediate institution between leaving school and going to a university – a kind of technical college – has not really worked. I’m not saying that some of those colleges don’t do great things and run great courses. But we’ve had fifty years of politicians saying, ‘it’s time we valued training plumbers as much as we value accountants’. If you take a profession like nursing, which was a vocational, non-degree level career, it’s been professionalised. Now, you take a nursing degree. It can work in nursing, in an important field of professional life. I would apply similar approaches elsewhere.
Another skills White Paper from another government is not going to solve our productivity problem. We’ve sorted university funding out thanks to a very good bit of bipartisanship between the outgoing Labour administration and incoming Coalition on university fees. Let’s not mess around with that, and certainly not restrict the numbers going to university, I would like to see fifty, sixty, seventy percent of young people going to university. If you look at Scandinavian countries and others with higher productivity levels, they have a higher proportion of their populations going to university.
It used to drive me mad in a political meeting when everyone would say we need more people who study science, technology, engineering, maths, and I’d ask, ‘who here did a degree in any of those things?’ What’s wrong with a history degree? That was one of my pet hates. The other was, of course, when people said, ‘not every kid needs to go to university’ and I’d reply, ‘what about your kids?’ the reply would come, ‘actually Harry’s just got a place at Bristol.’
Q: What do you look back on as the key successes and the key frustrations from your time in office with respect to growth and regional policy?
Holding a referendum on the membership of the European Union would be quite high on my list of regrets.
I think the Manchester metro mayor was a very hard thing politically to pull off, a really tough Rubik’s Cube to solve. It wasn’t just me. It was John Kingman and Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein and a whole load of other people, including the Labour leaders of those other Manchester councils and the Tory leader of Altrincham, Sean Anstee.
My biggest frustration was that I hoped educational performance in the North would improve through reforms like academies. It didn’t. What seemed to work in parts of London did not translate so well around the country. I chair the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and we do a lot of work on education. It seems sad to me that the conversation in Britain around education reform has stalled. It’s not as if the Government has got any ideas in this space, nor is it the case that the Opposition has many ideas.
That seems to me a shame because you want at least one side of the political argument trying to move things forward. When I was a young MP, education policy was the most exciting, contested, interesting area. Whatever you think of the Gove reforms, he too came in with lots of thoughts and ideas. If you ask me, ‘what is the Government’s education policy?’, I wouldn’t have a clue. If you ask me, ‘what is the Labour opposition education policy?’, I wouldn’t have a clue either.
Similarly, take public service reform: such a hot political battleground when I was a front-line politicians. It’s just completely disappeared. No one’s got any ideas for welfare reform, no one’s got any ideas for education reform, no one’s got any ideas. When I was working in Downing Street in 1997, it wasn’t just Tony Blair, it was Gordon Brown and his team, and there was a sense that all the new ideas in British politics were coming from the Opposition. The actual policies might have been a little bit thin – like class sizes under thirty. But you got no doubt that there’s a big idea here about 21st century Britain that they’re going to be building.
Today there is nothing. This Government’s been in office for 12 years. It’s time to have the Opposition paint the picture. The Cameron government also did it in Opposition – green and local and Big Society, whatever you think about all that stuff, there was a sense of new ideas coming from the opposition.
ENDS