Greg Clark is a British politician. He has served as MP for Tunbridge Wells since 2005. He served as a minister from 2010 to 2019, across Communities and Local Government, the Treasury, the Cabinet Office, and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. From 2015, he served in Cabinet as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and from 2016 as Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Throughout this time, he was one of the main architects of devolution policy in the UK.
This interview was conducted on 11 January 2021.
Q: Can you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy. What were the key successes and key frustrations of your time in office?
When the Coalition Government was formed, David Cameron asked me to be a Minister in what was then the Department for Communities and Local Government (‘DCLG’). But, he gave me the title of Minister for Decentralisation which was not a pre-existing title but indicative of an intention that he wanted in 2010 to bring to the government. But it did not come with a definition.
I worked closely with a civil servant, still working on these issues, called Tom Walker in the department. We developed what was a critique of how centralised the British state was and, in particular, how the different needs of different places across the country didn’t really have much weight in Whitehall; and proposed that we should transfer powers from Central government, from Whitehall, to places.
We created a new unit called the Cities Policy Unit which was, at my request, part of the Cabinet Office rather than DCLG. The reason for that was that my experience by then, 18 months into the government, was that things that were part of the department were very difficult to get cross-departmental agreement for. So, we created a team in the Cabinet Office and then came up with the idea of what we called City Deals. This was to reflect that for any of the big cities in the UK, improving conditions and improving growth in those cities was in the local interest and also in the national interest; and therefore you should be able to combine this joint interest into an agreement, a compact that gave over powers and resources and allowed them to do things differently.
The first City Deal was done with Liverpool. Hot on the heels of that, we did one with Greater Manchester. And then these City Deals spread across the country. Eventually – because starting with Liverpool, having a mayor was a condition of some of the deals, but not all of them – they became mayoral deals, and they became combined authorities rather than just with the city centre authorities. And that became the mayoral programme that continues to this day.
I should say that while I started as a Minister at DCLG, I took the portfolio with me from DCLG to the Treasury. I had an interesting exchange with some of the Treasury officials: when they said I was the City minister, I said, ‘Well, I’m also going to be the cities minister’. They said, ‘No, that’s not in the Treasury’. Well, David Cameron was relaxed about it and just when the officials were building up to say this wouldn’t be appropriate here, I saw this coming and I tweeted out that I was delighted to be appointed Cities Minister and City Minister. I took that from there then to the Cabinet Office and then ultimately, to the business department when I was Secretary of State.
Q: What situation did you inherit in 2010? What were you trying to achieve?
I was Head of Policy for the Conservative Party in opposition at what was then called Conservative Central Office. I published a book called Total Politics, which wasn’t a very good title. It was about how centralised the country had become, both over decades but also more recently during the time of the Labour government. Part of the critique was that things like the 1997 Pledge Card, while very understandable and well meaning … by crystallising objectives so tight and so clearly so you then had to be able to meet them: that meant there was increasingly a sort of draw to the centre, and that had consequences that were unintended but unhelpful in terms of recognising the differences between places.
It drew on a critique of where we were and also a comparison of how comparatively economically weak UK provincial cities were, compared to, most notably, the Continent, but also in the US – some of the big regional cities there. Comparing the UK with Germany and our shared industrial heritage, whereas there was a sense that many if not most of our big industrial cities were in some sort of decline, that was not true for German cities. So it wasn’t an inevitable outcome: that a city characterised by manufacturing, for example, meant that it was going to be struggling. Other countries managed to do things differently, better. Again one of the one of the points of difference that we observed was that, Germany being case in point, the agency and power that cities had on the continent was so much greater than, at that point, cities in the UK – when only London had a mayor, a non-ceremonial mayor. This applies to the US as well: about that time, Rahm Emanuel quit being chief of staff to the President to be Mayor of Chicago. That sort of thing was not was not a possibility here. So that was our view: we were being held back as a country because of our regional imbalance and a lot of that was about the vacuum of power and structures to give power to cities.
Q: Your focus was on cities rather than sub-regions or regions. How did you think about the relationship between cities and the wider towns within a region?
It started with cities for two reasons. One was a critique of the regional agenda that we inherited: there were the Government Office regions and our view was that they were administrative regions rather than always reflective of a real economic geography. This varies. I was born and bred in middle school in North East region and there was always a tension between Teesside and Tyneside. Actually all the time that I was growing up, I barely went to Tyneside from Teesside, and there was quite a lot of resentment that it was bundled together. Of course, there was the referendum that took place on whether there should be a North East regional assembly; the answer came back ‘No’. And that was partly because of that discontent. People did not really identify with that.
Whereas we had a sense that cities were something that people did look to. So Greater Manchester, for example, wherever you live, whether it was in the city centre or in the periphery, whether you worked there or lived there, that was a pole that drew activity in and was tangible and was more than administrative. Again, from the comparative point of view, cities have a kind of global status. Everyone knows about cities. People can think of cities in a way that they think much less vividly about regions. So we thought that we were underweight on the profile and importance of cities in this country; and there was a chance to do something about that. Which is why Cameron converted my title from being Minister for Decentralisation to Minister for Cities.
Q: From the start you went wider than the individual local authority city unit – e.g. not the Manchester City local authority area but the economic ‘city’ of Manchester broadly defined. Did you have this idea of combining authorities from the start?
It evolved. We did not think enough. The problem was that we were foxed by the administrative inheritance because, as we all know, the real economic geography of most of our cities is carved up into local authorities that don’t reflect that. Greater Manchester being a case in point. The City of Manchester is actually a very small local authority. That was a problem. The initial approach was with the city centre authorities. The original deal for Liverpool converted the City of Liverpool, not the city-region, into a mayoral authority: the mayor was the mayor of the city rather than the city region. But the logic of the analysis that I just described, how people identify with the city, how the real economic geography is known to people, that trumps the administrative boundaries. So we quickly moved to thinking of cities not as the literal city council but of what are now called metro authorities or combined authorities.
We made use of something that we inherited from the previous Labour government that has passed the combined authorities legislation – I can’t remember who the Secretary of State was in DCLG that had passed it. But it had not been used before. I can’t think of any combined authority that was established under Labour – it was quite late on. And so, because we had these rather balkanised small city authorities, we needed a statutory administrative body to deal with. One of our officials, I think it was Paul Rowsell, a wonderful, very long serving civil servant in DCLG, said – because I think he worked on the bill that had created them – ‘Well, actually, the Labour government created this concept of combined authorities that has never been used. Why don’t you use it?’ And so we did. Greater Manchester was the first combined authority. And then we did it for most of the others.
Q: Did you want directly elected mayors to be part of that from the start?
Yes and this was a big row in the Coalition. We, the Conservative side of the Coalition, wanted directly elected mayors. I was very influenced by comparisons with cities and countries across the world where the mayor was an important figure – that degree of direct visibility and authority seemed to me important. Actually I was quite influenced by a tale that Joe Anderson, the first mayor of Liverpool, told: he went to the World Expo I think in Shanghai, at around that time, 2010 or thereabouts, as the leader of Liverpool City Council. And when he came back, he said that everyone was very interested to be talking about Liverpool, a city literally known in every corner of every country in the world, and he said when he was at the Expo he would say ‘I’m the leader of Liverpool City Council’’ and they replied, ‘Oh no, why didn’t the Mayor of Liverpool come?’ So he would patiently explain that in the UK system the leader of the council is basically the equivalent of the mayor of the city. And then they would say, ‘Yes, but why didn’t you send the Mayor’? He got fed up of that, and by the third day he was introducing himself as the Mayor of Liverpool, and he was thrilled.
Q: How do you think about places like Burnley or Blackburn – which used to be in the RDA footprint and are very close to the economy of Greater Manchester – ended up being outside the administrative footprint of the devolution deal?
We did think a lot about that. And again, coming from Middlesborough which always felt like a town rather than a city, we had this sort of relationship with Newcastle. I guess the answer was that, in practice, cities always exert a gravitational pull beyond their strict boundaries. My constituency is Tunbridge Wells in Kent. It’s not part of Greater London but large numbers, probably a majority of my constituents, work in London. London is very important.
We thought that rather than get caught up in something that was so expansive and therefore probably so complex that it will be difficult to organise, to manage the relationships, we should reflect on the fact that for Greater Manchester to be successful would mean better prospects for people in Burnley and Blackpool – just as a successful London is good for people in Tunbridge Wells, and Reading for that matter.
There was so much work to be done in the cities to give them this greater sense of momentum and power. We wanted to start with that. That’s not to say that the towns aren’t important in their own right and later on, when I put together the Industrial Strategy, we proposed what became Town Deals – Grimsby was the first one – reflecting the fact there were particular needs and characteristics and opportunities about towns that wouldn’t entirely be addressed through the kind of gravitational pull and galvanising effect, that they needed a bespoke treatment as well. But we started with cities because that was, we thought, the important thing to start with.
Q: Is that a philosophical difference from the way people more recently talk about levelling up – going to the town’s directly – whereas you thought towns were going to ride on the coattails of the cities more?
Well, I would say it’s partly a symptom of success. Thinking back to 2010 when there were no mayors anywhere outside London, no combined authorities anywhere, just individual local authorities, in some cases, like in Greater Manchester, they had good relations with each other, but there wasn’t a sense of regional dynamism. By the time we got to 2019, 10 years into this, we had mayors in most of the big city regions, and some of them – Andy Street, Andy Burnham – were making a very conspicuous success of it, a real sense of things happening there. We had combined authorities that were in place, and in some cases developing a maturity to the arrangements. So a symptom of success, we were getting for the first time accusations that, ’You’re obsessed with cities’, which was never an accusation, obsessed with provincial cities, that was levelled at the Tory party before. ‘You’re obsessed with Birmingham, You’re obsessed with Manchester, You’re obsessed with Bristol’. We’d made reforms that had, I think, turned the dial and there were further steps to go. So it was the right time to concentrate on the challenges of smaller towns.
Q: Can you tell us about the policy levers that were being used and how that evolved?
When we started with the city deals, we thought we should have proposals from cities as to what they would like to be done differently. It wouldn’t be central government saying, ‘We’ve going to grant you these powers, these budgets.’ They had to say what they would do differently. And the agreement that I established when creating the Cities Unit was that there would be a Cabinet subcommittee set up to approve these city deals – they could analyse them, they could critique them, they could reject them if they thought collectively they weren’t up to snuff. But the one argument that they couldn’t use to reject any proposed city deal was, ‘Well this isn’t how we do things nationally. This isn’t how we do things in the rest of the country.’ That card was explicitly removed.
The cities were quite slow, quite shy, not very assertive. They were asking for quite small things. But in the case of Liverpool, there was a development zone and big suburban development projects that they wanted to engage on. Richard Leese, on behalf of Greater Manchester, had a proposal to extend the Metrolink tram network. So they were all different. The conception I had was that it wasn’t a single deal, a one off deal: you did a deal, Part One of a deal, and then you went back for more. You ratcheted up the level of powers once you’ve demonstrated on both sides: Whitehall could be convinced that this was working, and on the part of the cities that this was workable. It was driven by appetite. Obviously health devolution, a lot of health strategic powers, characterised later Greater Manchester city deals. That was very much an initiative of the leaders in Greater Manchester. It came from them rather than central government.
Q: And how did Whitehall respond?
In the usual way, constantly wanting to standardise, to create a Whitehall-generated and -approved list of powers that were available, to insist that you couldn’t do a deal with Greater Manchester that was different from the West Midlands and at every point to put in controls and reviews that would try to, at the very least, curtail any momentum and preferably, probably when I and George Osborne were out of the way, make sure it could roll backwards.
Q: Was there a singular Whitehall view? How would you describe the attitudes of different departments and different groups within the Westminster to what you were trying to do?
First, I think it’s not wholly inaccurate to talk about Whitehall – probably less Westminster than Whitehall – having a bit of a snobby view that the best policymakers are in Whitehall: if you were interested in a career in public policy, you’d have got yourself into Whitehall department; so why would we give powers to people who we wouldn’t really think, on average, were up to us in cities and regions?
There was a generalised snootiness that Whitehall had towards people who worked in city halls. But the extent to which that was true varied from department to department. As you might imagine, the local government department was pretty keen. One of the most difficult, I’m afraid to say, was the education department. Partly I think through an institutional memory of skills policy: the whole history of local Learning and Skills Councils and the idea of local authorities running FE was not associated with conspicuous success. There was an ingrained view that giving this back to local authorities, even though I would say the mayoral authorities were quite different, was something that we’d done before and doesn’t end well.
Q: So negotiating the local deals was a struggle?
Yes, absolutely. Education was always a back-marker. DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] was another. Again, it’s partly understandable: the national benefit system is a big and complex machine, difficult enough to handle, let alone having carve outs for the West Midlands to do things differently from the rest of the country. The sense of a beautiful well-oiled machine, or at least a machine that would only keep in motion if it were held together coherently, would trouble them.
Transport, curiously enough, were initially quite sceptical of this: you will recall the national prioritisation schemes for road schemes that they started off being quite proud of and thought ‘Well, we don’t see that the local authorities could do anything different’. But what they found was that value for money and benefit-cost ratios are quite important in the transport world and because some of the local authorities were able to get private sector investment alongside proposed transport projects, and were prepared to commit some local authority funding, they found that longstanding road schemes that weren’t progressing because they didn’t get past the value for money tests suddenly sprung to life when it was in the hands of the mayoral combined authorities. So, they went from being sceptics to being enthusiasts.
Q: How about the Treasury?
The Treasury institutionally, as they greeted my suggestion that I was the Minister for Cities, were very antagonistic. In the first year or so, George Osborne was not particularly focused on it. It wasn’t something that he had been particularly interested in in the past. But he became interested in it, and when Chancellors become interested in things, then the Treasury – a very high-class department – quite rightly responds to the priorities and interests of the Chancellor. Once it became clear that he was interested in it – he gave that speech in Manchester at the Industry Museum, the Northern Powerhouse speech – then it was clear that, unusually, unexpectedly, the Treasury was required to be an enthusiast for things that in the past it would always be sceptical voice of.
Q: You said earlier that RDAs were more accountable upwards, but less responsive to local conditions. When you were negotiating City Deals, how did you think about the challenge of getting accountability pushed down to the city-level or the sub regional-level?
We were hampered by the inheritance. The truth is that the structure of local government and local authority boundaries are not ideally aligned with this. Whenever past local government secretaries attempted local government reorganisation, it completely consumed them and usually ended badly. Their gravestones are marked with the folly of having embarked on it. It would have been better to have started somewhere else.
The view that I took, and my colleagues agreed with, was rather than getting into a constitutional or theological debate about the appropriate governance of Britain, we should do it in a more bespoke way, place by place. Insofar as this would inevitably lead to inconsistencies – between how the West Midlands is governed compared to the East Midlands – then the price of having greater elegance would be not to get on and do things. I was conscious that this was not a perfect model. It was a pragmatic model, taking what we had.
Q: Some of the countries you identified – America, Germany – tend to have more revenue raising capacity at the city or local level. That’s not something you offered through the deals?
Given where we started from, with very little power for local authorities, my view was that as a starting point there was plenty of money that central government spent in cities, for those cities, without the cities having any real influence on it. Michael Heseltine was my friend and advisor throughout this. He sat in my office with me, and he talked about creating a single pot bringing together revenue streams that were spent in cities, then putting them under the control of the mayors and the combined authorities.
Q: In the same way as the RDAs had at a regional level?
I always thought of the RDAs having separate funding streams, whereas the idea was to take existing programmes in those cities, programmes that would be administered by central government elsewhere, but in Greater Manchester or in the West Midlands would be administered locally. That was the starting point, enough to get your teeth in, that we should proceed that way.
Secondly, I had a slight concern when we were creating these mayoralties that there was not much public support for them. They were easily prone to the accusation, ‘This is yet another tier of government. We’ve managed perfectly well without a mayor. We really don’t want one’. People don’t see the advantage of something often until they’ve experienced it. Looking at it ex ante, at what it might be in prospect, it is difficult to imagine. The thought that I had, and George had, was that if these new creations were associated in people’s minds with raising your taxes, then that is a very toxic association. Whereas if it were, to coin a phrase, ‘taking back control’ – I never thought I’d say that – but if you were determining locally money that was being spent in your area, being determined by local people, what’s not to like about that?
Q: Does it cap the devolution and the accountability if, in fact, Parliament is still raising the money and voting the outcomes, national government is accountable, and then asking local government to do some delivery on its behalf (as compared to actually allowing people to make their own decisions about raising resources)?
Yes, I think it does put limits on the discretion and agency that the devolved bodies have. That is undoubtedly true. It wasn’t necessarily forever. This was a starting point. You would start with sums that were spent there but over which there was no local decision making and then, as things were settled, take on greater powers.
Q: Weren’t the Liberal Democrats the great champions of a local income tax?
They were great champions of the local income tax, but they were the great opponents of mayoral combined authorities. We fought hand-to-hand in every one, including with Nick Clegg. He was a Sheffield MP, and we did a Sheffield deal, and it did involve establishing a mayor eventually. It was a nightmare to get it agreed. They’re a party of local councillors rather than local leadership in my view.
Q: How did you think about Wales, Scotland and the wider context of devolution and decentralisation in the UK?
A lot of my powers were confined to England because of the terms of the devolution settlements. So most of my engagement was with English cities. But I’m a Unionist and I wanted this thinking to be available across the borders as well. There was a very good man who led Glasgow at the time, by Gordon Matheson, who was very like-minded on these things. I went up, once we’d got Liverpool, Manchester and the West Midlands up and running, I went up to see Gordon and said, ‘Glasgow is just as internationally renowned as some of these English cities – I don’t think you should be left out of this. We are a United Kingdom’. He was very keen, and so we negotiated a Glasgow City region deal – he led the negotiations, but it involved the other neighbouring authorities, and that was seen as a success.
Q: That deal would cover non-devolved spending?
That was one of the reasons, in a Machiavellian way, that I was keen to do it because I thought that there was a lot of devolution within Scotland that was possible: the same logic applies to Glasgow as it does to Greater Manchester. A city as proud, as capable, as substantial as Glasgow ought to have a sense of itself and its own destiny. I was keen to do that.
As it happened, there were some aspects of UK spending, but such was the prospective support for this, because it was in the public domain that we were negotiating this, that we, the SNP, the Scottish government, were all a party to it. It was a deal between the UK government, the Glasgow authorities, Greater Glasgow authorities and the Scottish government, with the Scottish government putting money in alongside the UK government. Again I thought that was a good thing. I do not want to have any antagonism to the Scottish government. I thought doing things together like that was a good thing. And as a model, it took on a life of its own.
Most of Scotland is now covered by city deals or city region deals. Certainly there’s one in Edinburgh, one in Aberdeen, one in Dundee and Tay City region. The same in Northern Ireland – there are city deals there. Probably the most frustrating place was Wales: I tried very hard to negotiate a city deal with the Cardiff City region as the first one and it was very difficult to establish a local political consensus. It was frustrating that we weren’t able to do more on that.
Q: Did you see the London mayoral model as a possible alternative for English cities? Why did you pursue mayoral combined authorities as opposed to a London style settlement?
The London settlement involves the mayor, and it involves a kind of regional assembly – to have done that in the other places would have been literally to add another level of government. Our judgement was that that was probably a bit indigestible: we wanted to have some of the advantages of a London mayor in terms of direct visibility, directly elected, but without having the GLA [Greater London Authority] equivalent. Also because we were making use of the combined authority powers that we’d inherited from the Labour government, we needed the consent of the local authorities to do it – otherwise we would have had to pass primary legislation to be able to create bodies. All of this was done without any primary legislation, using existing powers which was one of the brilliant things, that the civil service found a way to be able to do this, quite a radical constitutional change in some ways, without primary legislation.
Q: How did you find the capacity of local government and their willingness to work together to strike deals with you?
This was another reason for doing it place by place rather than uniformly across the country. Greater Manchester, partly because they were well led by Richard Leese, supported by Howard Bernstein as the chief executive, and because they drew on a successful period of collaboration with the neighbouring authorities going back to Graham Stringer before Richard, they were very capable. It didn’t take much of a reboot for them to organise themselves. Some places like the East Midlands, never really got their act together…Derby, Nottingham and Leicester. There was just as much potential there as in other places.
Q: But it worked in Newcastle, Gateshead, in Middlesbrough and Sunderland?
Exactly. In the North East, the Tees Valley city region was created very smoothly and with a great deal of enthusiasm. They have been motoring away ever since. But we didn’t manage to achieve a Tyneside and Wearside city deal, even now really. There is a North of Tyne thing because, ludicrously, Gateshead wouldn’t come in with Newcastle. Totally bonkers. In terms of sensible economic geography, the idea that the half of the real city on the south bank won’t be in the same room as the people in the north bank. Sometimes it came to that and I was tearing my hair out trying to be a diplomat and negotiating with them to try and reach agreement on it. But they just wouldn’t.
Q: Maybe, at some point, somebody has to sort out these administrative units at the local level and make them fit for purpose?
Absolutely. The trouble was that we did this during the five years of coalition in which the Liberal Democrats were very much against it. I think it’s a minor miracle that we managed to do it. And then when we had a majority in 2015, whatever it was, 16 seats, it was a pretty small majority and I don’t think it would have been possible to have had wholesale local government reform given the strength of the councillor interest.
Q: Can you have the kind of devolution you would like without that?
It would take longer. You can progress towards it. One of the things I did when I was local government secretary, not with as much success as I hoped for, was that I created a framework in which councils could voluntarily merge and become unitary. They did in a couple of places, most recently in Dorset – there are now two unitary authorities in Dorset that replaced county and lower tier authorities.
Places that have gone unitary – Cornwall, Shropshire, Wiltshire – they’ve never gone backwards. There’s never been a grassroots move to say, ‘let’s go back to two tier’. In fact, completely the opposite. The people that were most opposed to unitary authorities at the time will now say that they were completely wrong and it would be absurd to go backwards. It’s a bit like the creation of mayors: people are anti the prospect of it, but the experience of it would convince them very quickly that this was the right thing. But I think you need a big majority to do that.
Q: When you look back, what are the most important lessons to take away? The biggest success and your biggest frustration?
The most important thing is to press on and not be put off by administrative and political resistance. There’s always reasons not to do things. If we’d started right at the beginning and pushed on and created the mayors in the cities, then I think we’d have got further. You don’t get that long in government across a lifetime. It’s too easy to compromise on the full extent of your ambitions. You should regard it as a time limited opportunity and that’s the time just to put your head down and power through. I daresay that’s not an uncommon reflection.
It is important to have a vision: the number of people that kind of go into government without really knowing what they want to do, is astonishing. They just want to be in administration, in power. It is time limited. You’ve got to know what you want to do.
ENDS