Hazel Blears is a former Labour politician who served as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2007-2009.
This interview was conducted on 29 August 2023.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in regional growth policy over the past few decades?
Certainly. I’m delighted to be here and taking part in what I think is a very important project. At the beginning of my political career, I was a local councillor. I have quite a bit of insight into how things work on the ground as well as the macro-policy making we did [nationally].
I held a number of different posts in government: Health Minister; Public Health Minister; Police Minister; Security Minister; Chair of the Labour Party; and then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.
My role most relevant to your research is when I was Secretary of State for Communities. In a way, it is very similar to some of the Levelling Up stuff that is talked about today. You do find in politics that there’s very little that’s very new. People from different administrations tend to build – hopefully in a constructive way – on things that have gone before. Sometimes they discard things that have gone before, if they don’t think it’s the right approach. But you tend to see, as you go along, things that germinated; whether they were able to flourish or whether, in fact, they didn’t have the political heft behind them to enable them to really become embedded for the future. Some things work; some things don’t. You shouldn’t carry on doing things that don’t work because it’s a waste of time and energy and money. But sometimes I think we give up too soon on some things, which ought to be major systemic changes for the long term.
When I was Secretary of State for Communities, I was responsible for not just the community side, but also for housing, for regional development, and for economic development. It’s a very broad brief. My personal interest was always around communities and how we could be more innovative and try and close the gap – whether it’s an economic gap, a skills gap, or an education gap – between the places which were well off and resilient, and the places which had very few resources and skills and needed extra help. I think the idea of the communities department was a good one: it shone a light and unearthed stuff around communities which in the past had been subservient – to the Treasury, to economics, to thinking around crime. Actually, the things that go wrong get manifested in communities. They’re not in the ether. They’re not academic. They affect people’s real lives. Having a communities department with some clout that had a grip on economic development – so it wasn’t entirely owned by the Treasury – trying to close the gap, to do what’s now called levelling up, was I think really important.
I think about the work of the communities department as skills, in its broadest sense: you have the skills of local government, in order to be able to improve people’s lot in life; you then have skills and education as part of economic growth. You find, in government, that the best things happen when people collaborate across a range of different departments. The worst things happen when people go it alone. It’s no way to govern, in my view, when you’re governing people. People are complex and have complex needs.
Q: When you look back over the past few decades of policy, what stands out as the major success, and what is the abiding frustration?
One of my biggest frustrations was the abolition of the Regional Development Agencies. I was brought up, in my political life, that you would have powerful RDAs in places like Greater Manchester (where I’m from. I was the MP for Salford). We had lots of inequality and poor jobs; not work very well paid; a lot of people without skills. All of that.
The Regional Development Agencies – certainly in the North West – were new; they were enthusiastic; and they were actually very ambitious. They wanted to change the world, and they couldn’t do it on their own. They’d need to collaborate. We were lucky enough to have some great characters, many of whom had a business background. Some of them had an education background. They span the whole territory between them.
What you began to see happening, from the RDAs, was an integration – rather than being in silos – of education, of skills, of housing, of economic growth. You had not just an overview, but some people prepared to intervene. I think that made Government slightly uncomfortable, that you’d created these powerful things with powerful and knowledgeable people that were really quite innovative. They really wanted to get their hands on the policy levers. Government at the centre hates it when other people want to have their hands on the levers.
When the RDAs were abolished, I think it was a completely retrograde step. When they were replaced by the Local Enterprise Partnerships (the LEPs), they were just a shadow of what the RDAs were. Sometimes it wasn’t their fault. You had good LEPs and bad LEPs, like you do. But I found them very minimalist and unconfident. They didn’t have the confidence that they would have the backing of Government at the centre, to be able to achieve their potential. They became very siloed, small beer. They didn’t have the people around the table who could make things happen (where the RDAs did).
The LEPs were supposed to be about mobilising business. But it wasn’t the big business. It wasn’t the people who had clout. They ended up being very small…I’m not being rude, but insignificant in terms of the ability to make systemic change. And to improve the economy, just like the way you improve life, it’s systemic change that matters. It has to last. It has to be ambitious.
I think it was a really retrograde step to move from the RDAs to the LEPs, and now we see what’s happening to the LEPs. They’re getting even more… I don’t like the word emasculated because it’s a very sexist word, but they are now almost being denuded of even the small powers that they’ve got. They’re talking about them not having business support. If you want to get businesses around a table you don’t have to bribe them with money, but you have to give them a sense that this is worth their time and effort and experience to be part of it. And I think a lot of business now doesn’t think it’s necessarily worthwhile to be involved with a LEP.
Q: And the policy success?
What I think worked was, first of all, the academies. They transformed education: not just in London, but in a lot of the big cities where young people tended to fall behind; couldn’t catch up; didn’t have the tutoring; didn’t have the backing. The difference in education, I think, was dramatic. A lot of that was run at local and regional level, and people embraced the idea of having academies. Some people were less enthusiastic, but then they saw the results that could happen in the poorest areas. Being the MP for Salford for 20 years, you could see where it worked and where it didn’t. That would have an effect throughout people’s lives: if you don’t get a decent education, then you’re not able to make progress. I think that was a great success.
I think the Olympics was a great success. And I had to do a fair bit of negotiation with Boris Johnson during the Olympics; but when we did the bit after the Olympics, the whole idea was that we would be able to use the infrastructure and this massive investment to ‘level up’ and tackle the inequality that there was in some of the most challenging areas in London. And I would have to say, it was tooth-and-nail for me to get the Mayor to commit to raising academic and educational success to enable – particularly in the east end of London – the regeneration that was going to happen after the Olympics. But we did. We got there. I do think the Olympics was a big catalyst for new thinking: the business people who were involved in the Olympics – turning the athletes’ accommodation into housing, the Olympic Park and all of that. The business people were brilliant. Some of the people at the centre of politics were slightly more hesitant.
The other thing I think was a great success is devolution to mayors, giving people the power to make a difference. Not just in London, but right across the country. And I’m a big fan of elected mayors. You need leadership. And collaboration is great but it’s leadership that makes a difference.
Q: When you look at successful local economies, what do you think it is that helps a local economy grow and thrive?
The core building block is always people, rather than things. You can create things, but if you haven’t got the people to lead and to challenge the existing status quo, you don’t get change. And that, I think is a really hard bar to reach, because a lot of the best people are attracted to not the most challenged areas in the country. I almost wish we could give great leaders more incentives, actually – not personally, but “if you get this right, this is the bonus you’re going to get for your community. You are going to get more financial support. You’re going to get more back up”. All of that.
I don’t think you can just expect good leaders to be born. They are born, but they’re also made. Giving people experience in different roles…we should have planned leadership better. You would do now, wouldn’t you? You’d have a leadership programme in retail or in IT or in a big company. I live in Cumbria now, and we have BAE systems up here. A massive, amazing company. They have a plan. I think what Government lacks, very often, is a plan. They have a plan to do stuff, but then they don’t underpin that with, ‘what will we need to do it? We’ll need great people. We’ll need better education. We might need some tangible things like land and water and all that stuff’. It all seemed to me – when I was Secretary of State, and I was making these decisions – that it was a bit ad hoc. We want this place to be a fantastic place for people to live, work, have their children, look after their families. What does that mean? What does it look like?
I would say some of the weaknesses is lack of planning, but it’s also things like health and well-being. Look at the number of people who are on long term sick now, after COVID, and how that is a drag on the economy. So where were we in COVID, actually supporting those people? “We know you’ve been ill, we’ll help you get better.” I think, again, education and health were somehow seen as a bit mushy, if you like, and that what you really needed was economic drivers and the money and the Treasury. And I think it’s the wrong approach, personally.
Q: It sounds like you’re erring on the side of saying that historically we’ve got the balance wrong between investment in the drivers of productivity per se, and in leadership capability?
Yes. We’re all different, aren’t we? Dare I say this, I sometimes think it’s a man/woman thing (not that I put all women in the ‘soft’ basket, because they’re not. There’s loads of great regeneration people who are female and just as tough as any of the guys). There is something about the male perspective – which is about cars and trains and buses and planes and all of that – because we’re all a product of our upbringing and who we are. Then there’s the bit about communities, and that was always seen as soft. Actually, it’s really, really hard, and it’s really, really important.
I had a lot of tussles with Treasury orthodoxy. You end up doing things to people, not with them. You’re not side by side. It’s top down. It’s a very interesting proposition about how you change communities. You need great people. You need to support them. And you need to think in a different way. That was probably one of my biggest frustrations. It was top down; it was from Treasury. They do the money, but they don’t necessarily understand all the nuances and complications there are in dealing with people. Without the people, you don’t get anywhere.
One of my biggest disappointments was the abolition of Sure Start. I can never forgive the people who did that, personally. Sure Start, I saw in my community, was bringing the next but one or next but two generations up to have ambition, and to know that they were worth investing in. I know how important engineering and infrastructure are; they just don’t really float my boat.
Q: During your time as public health minister, were you thinking in terms of place in terms of the differing geography across the country? Or did it feel much more national in terms how you were delivering things?
Not for me, because I’ve always been local, local, local. I think that comes if you’ve been a councillor, and if you represent where you live (in my view, too few MPs do). I’m not saying you have to do that, because you can’t necessarily, but when you represent where you live and you’re in the heart of it, every morning you walk out and you see somebody and they talk to you and you understand all of that. It’s a very different politics.
On public health specifically, there was massive variation in in people’s standard of health right across the country. Quite a lot of it came from traditional industries, where people had worked with asbestos, where people had worked in mining. All those things that are no longer with us. (In some ways, that’s a good thing; in other ways, it means fewer opportunities.) You could plot on the map the places where people had a really bad health record.
I’ve always had a place-based approach to all of my politics, whatever I’ve done. But there were some big, overarching things we could do. We did five-a-day (fruit and veg) campaign, which sounds very prosaic, but it took the public imagination. It’s still around now. People accept it. One of the biggest things I did as a health minister was banning tobacco advertising. That was one of the biggest steps we could make, because obviously smoking is going to kill you. That’s the way that I was looking at it, but also trying to make sure that people had access to things like Sure Start.
In public health, you had to think regionally. Some people needed more help than others. It wasn’t a one size fits all. You also had to be an advocate because what you’re trying to do is change behaviour, rather than provide people with more pills. I think public health is an underpinning to everything else. If you’re not healthy and you’re not well, then how do you lead a rich and fulfilling life – whether that’s in work or not in work? There are probably five or six pillars that support a good and satisfying life, and health is clearly one of them.
Q: How did you experience, from within Whitehall, the variation in local government leadership quality and capacity across the country?
In a really sharp way, if I’m very frank about it. The differences were enormous. An organisation and a council with a great leader, maybe without a lot of resource to be honest, was able to spread that resource in an intelligent, evidence based way about where to put the resource to get the best dividend for the most people (particularly the poorest people). I think leadership at local government level was absolutely key.
When I was a very junior councillor, I had the culture brief. That was a bit soft. The leader of my council had worked in engineering on the shop floor. He was obviously a lifelong Labour man. He was also fine and intelligent and self-educated. Without him, we wouldn’t have bought the Lowry paintings, on which the Lowry Centre was based. Les Hough, the council leader, was a tough guy. But he also had that working class appreciation of beauty. I think, if you get a combination like that, it’s worth gold dust. He was able to lead right across the council from the youngest councillor (me), all the way through to his colleagues, many of whom had been on the council 20, 30 years. That’s why I’ve always been convinced that leadership really matters. He could be a bit scary and a bit rough and ready, but we all knew that he loved the city. He would do anything to make life better for the people who didn’t get much of a chance. That’s why I’m so caught up by leadership, by advocacy, by empathy. You can’t come and do things to people. You do it with them, you’re side by side.
Q: What do you think central government can do to support that local leadership?
I would say we didn’t do enough. David Blunkett and I at the Home Office did work on citizenship education. That was about teaching young people that, as a citizen, you have rights and responsibilities. You have a duty to make a difference where you can and to help other people who are not as well off as you are. We did the whole curriculum, and it ran for a few years, but to be honest with you, the schools didn’t really prioritise it. It withered on the vine and I was angry about that. I was sorry about it, because it was also connected to the whole political system. How do you get young people to know it’s worthwhile voting? Maybe to even think about joining a political party (of any kind)? To think maybe they could be a local councillor. We had what we called the ladder of participation.
The Treasury wasn’t interested. They really didn’t care; not because they’re wicked people, but because they do things to you, not side by side. They’re big and they’re monolithic and they’re powerful because they’ve got money. That’s the antithesis for me; power is the ability to persuade, to cajole, to bring people with you. That’s politics.
Q: What was more effective: trying to build local leadership capacity; or trying to lead reform nationally, able to marshal a larger scale of resources?
Not the latter. If you’ve got to the point where you need the cavalry to come over the hill, you’re in a pretty bad way. I’ve never believed in that central intervention. I don’t think it works. It might work temporarily; it certainly doesn’t last, because you’ve not won hearts and minds.
If you want to do any change – not just political change – you have to get people on side. To do that, you don’t just say nice things to them: there needs to be a well thought out intellectual offer: of assistance; of sending people in who’ve got skills that you haven’t got; of giving good examples, case studies, opportunities to try different approaches. It’s what you would do in business, so why wouldn’t you do it in politics? Rather, we’re sending in a taskforce because you failed; we’re going to take you over for a year, and then you elect a new set of councillors and then haven’t got any support.
I think the centre fails to support in in a proper way. I don’t see any point in just berating people, because they don’t learn from being shouted at. They learn from looking at other people’s examples; from being mentored. We all learn like that. Whenever things have been in crisis – when we had the sex abuse crisis in Rochdale – it’s all very well to send somebody in, but if you do have to do that, then it needs to be time limited. It needs to be circumscribed. Otherwise, you end up with people who are not elected running the authority. If anybody believes in democracy, then that’s not the right place to be.
Sometimes central government is in that place because they see something going wrong, and for the best of motives, they want to put it right. But actually, if it’s going to be put right and be sustainable, you need to work with the people who are on the ground to make that happen.
Q: Why do you think that it was a mistake to abolish RDAs, which some have criticised as being too far from communities and too top-down?
I would have liked to have seen them stay longer because I think RDAs were one of the first efforts to take a broader, more holistic view of communities (or the places where people lived) and how those could be improved.
I personally think that the North West RDA was quite innovative and intellectually quite gifted, as well as practical. But sometimes, when you’ve parachuted something in, it doesn’t last. Unless people are really committed to that locality – and the locality can be a big footprint – it does feel like people are being parachuted in. If you’ve got a crisis, it’s fine as a temporary fix; but you need to grow local leadership, from the bottom up.
(Again, citizenship education should have been doing exactly that. We were quite brave – me and David – because we set up three strands to the citizenship programme. There was a Labour strand, a Tory strand and a Liberal Democrat strand, for goodness sake. I didn’t really care what your politics were as long as you knew what you were doing. There was just a reluctance to experiment.)
I do think that Whitehall likes to have big things. Sometimes the small things can result in more change – and more lasting change – than parachuting something in that you think is going to resolve everything. It doesn’t, because what the centre doesn’t really understand is people. They don’t understand people very well. They understand big chunks of money and they understand infrastructure and buildings and investment and all of that, but then who do you have who can implement that? If you’re not careful, you create a very narrow cadre of people who can do this.
If you get it right, you’ve got a whole lot of people scurrying around. They might not be able to give loads of time, but they can give one day a month or two days a month and suddenly your community starts to be a living, breathing entity rather than this otherwise sterile thing that’s been imposed upon you. Personally, I would like to see lots of people in the Treasury go through a citizenship experience. I gave lots of people time off in order to do community activity when I was in the communities department. Nobody ever talks about these issues apart from the Community Secretary. When you’re sat around the table in the Cabinet, and you start going on about empowering people, you can see the ones who do big infrastructure going, ‘oh gosh, she’s off again about empowerment’.
Q: There’s a trade-off between your ability to really understand and get the nuance of a particular community, and your ability to deliver a big infrastructure project at scale – to build a railway that cuts across four or five different communities. How do we strike the right balance between bottom-up and top-down?
I think the city regions are a more attractive idea than having an RDA parachuted in (people that you don’t really know, with lots of power, emanating from the centre, and sometimes looking up to Government rather than into the community). With the city region, I think people identify with it. Certainly they do in Greater Manchester; but also in Birmingham, with Andy Street.
Once you have a character who heads it up, who is efficient and gets on with it; then people are not stupid – they will gravitate to the people who can make things happen. If you have a reputation that when you say something, you’re actually going to deliver it, then I think that’s will support people who then will be able to work harder themselves – to make their lives better because they can see that somebody else is trying to help them.
Q: Do you think that sub-regional model would work for somewhere less urban, like Cumbria?
It’s really difficult to govern Cumbria. I’ve lived here now for three years. In part, its geography – because it’s so disparate. The population concentration is tiny. But there is a great sense of loyalty and regard for the fact that we’re Cumbrian.
I think it’s changing quite dramatically. I did some work up at Whitehaven with Sellafield, and they’re like BAE systems. They’re a monolith. if you don’t work at Sellafield, you don’t work. They’ve got all these massively well paid jobs, and yet underneath as soon as you turn the corner you lift the sheet in Whitehaven, the amount of deprivation and drugs and unemployment and lack of skills is huge. Same in Barrow. Barrow’s got all of those problems.
I think, personally, a Combined Authoirty would be a really welcome step forward. They’ve gone from six districts to two unitaries, which is a big step for them. They’re just coming to terms with that. Actually, being able to use their powers, they’d make far more impact if they were to operate with an elected mayor. It is all about leadership at the end of the day. You’ve got two councils now, and actually Jonathan Brook, who’s the leader of Westmorland and Furness Council where I live, is very good. He’s got a very disparate cabinet that he’s having to manage. I just see moving to the mayoral model as the way forward for everybody really. Why wouldn’t you?
Q: Some people characterise Whitehall as an over-centralising monolith. What was your experience as a Cabinet minister of the Whitehall culture, and how it thought of regional growth?
I think there’s a difference between the Whitehall culture and the Treasury culture. I think it’s important that those two things are not melded together.
The Treasury culture… I don’t know, it’s just so powerful. When I was Alan Milburn’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and we used to go to meetings in the Treasury. We wouldn’t stop raising things like the health service, communities and local government, and everything else. In the Treasury culture, it was almost as if you spoke a foreign language. if you were not completely economically literate and had spent 30 years of your life subsumed in this, then your opinion didn’t count.
I think there’s an arrogance in the Treasury. I don’t allocate this to individuals; the culture in the Treasury is ‘we know best. We don’t want you to spend all this money and not make an impact’ – which is perfectly legitimate – ‘we want you to make the biggest impact you can. But we’ll tell you how to do it’.
When we had the financial crash, we had all these emergency meetings. I was Secretary of State for Communities. My view was that we had to reassure people; we had to make sure they didn’t panic; and we had to support them, as communities, going through all of this. I came up with the slogan ‘Real Help Now’, and we had this picture of a man in a manhole, and this arm that was coming out to grab him and help him up. I thought that was quite good, because it was direct. And yet the amount of bureaucracy around the Treasury… People couldn’t pay their mortgages. They didn’t have enough money to feed their children…
I know that they don’t do it deliberately, but it is orthodoxy. I wanted all the people at senior Whitehall level to go and live in Salford for six months, just so that you understand exactly what it’s like and everything. And then the-Permanent Secretary was really taken with this idea. I got him to the point of finding a house to live in a terrace street, like Coronation Street. We were just about to get there, and then I think he got promoted. I don’t come late to this. I’ve been trying to do it all my life. But that Treasury orthodoxy is very hard to get through.
Q: How much do you think that that orthodoxy really is deep culture within the organisation, and how much can it be changed by political leadership?
Like most things, it’ll be a combination. Probably each side of that equation will be more powerful at different times. As it’s about money and resource, and money and resource make you powerful, it’s a power struggle rather than necessarily a project struggle. It is a very cultural thing.
Not everybody in the Treasury is like that at all. I always had huge regard for my Civil Servants wherever I was, whether it was in the police or whatever. They wanted to do the right thing. I’m not in the space of criticising Civil Servants. But the ability of Treasury Ministers to push something is very tempting.
Q: You said there was a difference between the Treasury view and the Whitehall view. How would you characterise the Whitehall view?
I can only say from my own experience. As Health Minister, they helped me all the way. What they wanted was hard working ministers who knew what they were talking about; who had empathy with the public; who could get a message across; and who was not bad on the telly. If you fulfilled all of those characteristics, they like you and they go to the ends of the earth for you. That was fantastic. The first day I got to be Communities Minister, I turned up, and I asked all of the people who kept the offices clean – the janitors and everybody else – to come and have breakfast. Wwe all had breakfast at seven o’clock. I got more information out of everybody in that room than anybody else. I used to speak to people in the lift, and they used to say, “that’s that minister who talks to you in the lift”. So you can change the culture by your own leadership style, through how you how you behave. I think it’s really important that you don’t just have a Whitehall culture. You’re a minister; you’re a leader. You should be moving that culture on to a good place – people waking up in the morning and actually wanting to come to work.
Q: If leadership can change departmental cultures nationally, why have we struggled so much to set a stable regional growth policy?
I think there are a number of reasons why this is the case. One is political: in order to get political power, you need to win elections, you need to be the top dog. You need to be the person that everybody looks to. Political culture doesn’t really run on warmth, openness, kindness, inclusivity…those are not things that are automatically associated with political culture. They should be, in my view.
I think another issue is that hardly any of the elected mayors are women. If we are going to go down this route, I would want to see many more women in those roles – and not because they’re soft and nice and kind (but they are, and kindness is an underestimated lever for getting stuff done).
Q: What would your advice be to a future reformer seeking to address the UK’s regional growth imbalances?
First, I would advise people to not take too long about it. Get a really good insight into how different communities work. What are the commonalities? What are the differences? North, South, East, West.
Second, where do you get the capacity to have good leaders? I said that I set up these political initiatives – Labour, Tory, whatever. I don’t think it’s wrong to spend public money on developing the best politicians you can get: well trained, committed, intelligent. If we are going to have regional leaders, let’s invest in them as opposed to expecting them to rock up and suddenly be a great leader. They’re not going to be, and that is self fulfilling. If you haven’t got a great leader, you’re not going to get the economic growth. You’re not going to get a satisfied public.
My other point would be that you have to stop doing things to people and do it with them side by side. You’ve got to be genuine: not turn up, go on a visit, get a bunch of flowers. You have to be with it for the long term. I would get ministers to have to do a programme of being with it for the long term; I certainly wouldn’t be changing ministers every 18 months or two years or whatever. It’s only after about three years, when I was Police Minister, that we banned handguns. It was fantastic. It was the best thing we’d ever done. The Mayor of Chicago came to talk to me and said, ‘If I could do this overnight, it would be amazing’. But we could only do that because I like to think I understood. I’m only 4 ft 11 and couldn’t even get in the police cars, but there was this sense that, in a way, because I came from Salford and I had gangs and I had shootings, and I had all of this going on, I got it. Your ministers have got to get it, and they’re not in office long enough to do that and to make real change.
ENDS
An extension of Hazel Blear’s argument – applied to the importance of place leadership and relationships in policing – can be found in her contribution to this parliamentary debate of 12th February 2014.