Joseph Irvin began his career as a policy officer for the Trades Union Congress. He later worked as a special advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and then as Political Secretary to Gordon Brown during his time as Prime Minister.
This interview was conducted on 10 November 2021.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in regional growth policy over the past few decades?
My background is initially working in the trade union movement. I began my career as a policy officer in the TUC from 1977 to 1980 and then at the Transport and General Workers Union (during this time, the biggest or second biggest union), in two stints amounting to 18 years in total, becoming Director of policy and research.
In 1996 I was hired to work as special adviser to John Prescott, who was Labour Party deputy leader and, among other responsibilities, a prime mover of regional policy – particularly for the English regions. I served throughout the first term of the 1997 Labour government, until 2001 when I decided to move on and do other things. I came back in 2007 to 2010 to work in Number 10 Downing Street for Gordon Brown when he was Prime Minister. I wasn’t heavily involved in regional policy then, but I had an overview because I was the political secretary for Gordon Brown.
Q: What’s your overall assessment of how regional policy has developed over the past 40 years? What do you think have been the key successes, and the key frustrations?
First of all, it’s not a given that devolution is a good thing, and we have to think about it. For many decades the disparities in the population were considered more an issue about people, or households, or class, not with where you lived. There may be agglomerations, but, for example, the 1945 Labour government was really focused on getting an NHS which provided the same service free of charge, wherever you lived. So, it’s not a given.
As I sometimes used to say – this is a very British way of putting it – “one person’s devolution can also be another person’s postcode lottery”. We have to work that through. I think what was happening in the 1970s and 1980s was a greater understanding of “place” and how place could have an important impact on the people that lived in that place, and the economics and social fabric that surrounded it. I think that was coming to the fore.
In the 1970s, there was a push in the UK for Scottish devolution, which wasn’t overwhelming but had been growing. And in 1979 there were referenda in Scotland and in Wales, not for independence, but for devolution of powers. I don’t know whether that would have happened if the Labour Government hadn’t lacked an overall clear majority and was dependent on votes from the nationalist parties. The Scottish referendum produced a very narrow yes vote for devolution among those who voted, but not what the majority of the whole population which legislation required, and the Welsh vote actually didn’t produce a majority. Maybe it was ahead of its time. Nevertheless, that gave some impetus. And the debate continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
In Scotland, there was division. I remember my days as a youngster, when the Conservatives had a lot of MPs in Scotland. Indeed, the prime minister before Harold Wilson’s first term was from Scotland, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Scotland had been quite a Tory stronghold, outside the Glasgow area for a number of years. But during the Thatcher years, the antagonism between the central government and people in Scotland and local authorities in Scotland and MPs in Scotland and the politically involved people of Scotland, got even bigger. Probably a critical point was the poll tax being introduced which was perceived a very unpopular tax, and it was ‘trialled’ in Scotland in advance of it being introduced in the rest of the UK. I think that was bitterly opposed, and that really alienated a lot of people in Scotland.
Q: You could tell a similar story about alienation in the areas of England and Wales undergoing economic shocks?
Yes. I’m starting with Scotland, because that’s where devolution gained its biggest momentum. By the time we’re coming to the mid-1990s, the Labour Party is committed to at least having a referendum with proposals for devolution in Scotland and Wales. But also, in the run up to that, from the 1980s onwards, thinking about the implications for England. I think one of the political drivers for that was: if Scotland is going to have devolution, what does that feel like in the north of England?
There’s a third political factor: the European Union. Let’s talk about the economic disparities. The Regional Policy Commission – which John Prescott commissioned under Bruce Millan in the 1990s, which was published in 1996 – gave a summary of the economic disparities and therefore social disparities which were definitely widening in England. Part of the cause was long-term structural decline of industries – smokestack, rust belt-type industries in the North and the Midlands in particular. Other factors they mentioned were the rigidity of labour and housing markets; differences in the level of entrepreneurship; and research and development (whether it’s a cause, or an effect, R&D was definitely concentrated in the South and South East). They were the main drivers of the disparities which the Millan Commission was identifying in the 1990s.
They also picked up on a few other points, which were about: “peripherality” – being away from the centre; the capacity for change; (perhaps increasingly) competitiveness; and recognising that the “brain economy”, as opposed to the heavy manufacturing economy, was becoming much more important.
Most measures were showing that the UK was an outlier in regional disparity among the major countries of the European Union. At the same time, there was a political drive towards addressing regionalism within the European Union. Bruce Millan (chair of Prescott’s Regional Policy Commission) had been European Commissioner with responsibility for regional policy. There was a whole programme of regional aid and other countries like Germany and Spain post Franco, for example, had very well developed regional structures. They were well adapted for EU regional aid. I’d say the UK and also France were not very well adapted, because France was another very centralist type of political structure. At various times both the UK and France had to “invent” regional structures in order to be receptive to European regional grants, and it forced the UK to start thinking about that issue.
All those three pressures were there: the groundswell economic pressures, but also the political angles – I think particularly impetus from Scotland, which was dripping into the North of England. People in the North East and the North were saying, ‘why is Scotland getting extra powers, why is Scotland getting extra money when we aren’t, while we’re suffering all of this economic deprivation?’
There was also this impetus from the European Union. I think a thing that’s not often mentioned on the political side is the Maastricht Treaty, which formed the latest version of the European Union. It contained a principle of “subsidiarity”, which is sometimes defined as decisions being taken at the most appropriate level. But often it was interpreted as pushing decisions down to the most appropriate local level. I think all those three factors were driving this move towards devolution in Scotland and Wales and also, increasingly, in England. Those are the big factors.
Q: Given the policies that were put in place in that first term, from 1997 to 2001, are you surprised about the trajectory of UK regional inequalities since then?
I’m not surprised, and I wasn’t totally surprised by the failure of the regionalisation project in the UK. It was always really difficult. I worked for John Prescott, and he worked very closely with Richard Caborn, (whom I recommended you speak to), who was the minister for the regions within John Prescott’s department in 1997 to 2001. They’ve been on this track since the 1980s.
I’m pretty certain the reason there was a search to find a solution for the English regions in the early ’80s was a response to the push for Scottish devolution. Nevertheless, all of the economic factors that we talked about and social disparities underline that.
But there was always a bit of a division between, “were regions the way to go or were cities the way to go?”. I recall, when I was working for John Prescott, we were at a meeting with Tony Blair, the prime minister, and Geoff Mulgan, who was one of his advisers, where Geoff put forward a presentation saying really you should be looking at cities rather than regions. So, I think that was always a bit of a dilemma, and there was certainly a reluctance in certain quarters to back wholeheartedly the move to regional referenda, in particular.
I tend to think that if there had been a referendum in the North East shortly after the Scottish referendum, it would have produced a different result. But I think the whole delay allowed opposition to build up such that by the time the referendum came, it had all gone cold. People had legitimate or imagined reasons for voting against it in the 2004 referendum. So I’m saying, even in the Labour camp, there was not wholehearted support for the regional approach, and there were different views, particularly about whether the focus should be on cities.
And that also went for local government. People who were big fish in a place like Manchester, for example, were not necessarily wanting to see a great region built over the top of them. Still less, people who were in towns and even cities which were outside of the prime city in each region. So, you know, I remember John Prescott going to a meeting with local government leaders, before the 1997 election, in Devon and Cornwall, and he said, “Well, one thing that is pretty clear is they distrust each other almost as much as they distrust London”. So, there were great internal tensions as well.
Q: On that point, how was Scotland different?
So Scotland had much more of a tradition as an independent nation, more of a history. It had a different educational system, different legal system. There is a number of factors unifying Scotland, and differentiating it from the rest of the UK, churches, legal system and education being prime examples. There are still massive disparities within Scotland, you know, Alec Douglas-Home with his grouse moors versus what was happening in Glasgow shipyards closing, but over time, there was something else too, perhaps historical and social, to gather round, which was an entity that people could identify with. And, as you know, coming from the UK, it’s a very distinctive Scottish accent, even though there are different accents, you can always tell a person who’s from Scotland, whether they’re from Aberdeen or the Hebrides or Glasgow. So that’s a unifying factor.
I came from the North West of England, and I felt I could quite easily identify with the North West. But I think it was much to do with TV channels. Do you know what I mean? So, Granada TV was a big factor in the North West of England when I was a child growing up, and all our ITV news was Granada TV regional news with a bit of national news, you know, tacked onto it, so that helped give an identity. You may know, Vernon Bogdanor has written a book on this subject and he asked, what’s the entity you would sign up and go to war for? And for most people in England, it’s not even England. It’s rarely the county they live in, and it’s still less the region, he argues.
Within England, do you think there is a difference from Yorkshire compared to the rest?
Yes, as a county with a strong history. But still, even Yorkshire is very diverse, is it not? A friend of mine used to say, “You know, people in the South think that everybody in Yorkshire loves Arthur Scargill, (who was the miners’ leader). But he said “there are as many people who hate him vehemently as there are people who love him”. And if you think of North Yorkshire and central Yorkshire they are very rural and quite privileged really, compared with say most of West Yorkshire.
Q: In the context of the current debate around decentralisation in England, the Yorkshire context has been the most difficult because they keep pushing for a Yorkshire-wide devolution deal in a way that isn’t true of Greater Manchester or Greater Liverpool. And their argument is that the identity is just much stronger. And I’m wondering whether there were, whether that is a recent thing that might have come from things like the Tour de Yorkshire and what have you, or whether that was present when you were working on this stuff in the late ’90s.
When I was a child in Lancashire, Manchester and Liverpool were removed, I think under a Tory government, to become Metropolitan County Councils. This is way before we got Metro Mayors, this is under Ted Heath (Conservative Prime Minister). And so there were metropolitan county councils around the big city, which are not entirely different, maybe a bit smaller than the current city regions. So, Lancashire was quite a big thing, Lancashire Cricket Club is in Manchester. People would say if for example Liverpool, Everton, Manchester City or Man United were in a cup final, it was a Lancashire cup final. Actually, Lancashire was, I’d say, quite strong then.
[NOTE: Metropolitan County Councils had been proposed under Harold Wilson’s first Labour government but the six were first elected in 1973 under Ted Heath and abolished along with the GLC (Greater London Council) by the Thatcher Government in 1986. They were more or less revived with Metro Mayors from 2015 onwards under David Cameron (Conservative Prime Minister) and George Osborne (Chancellor)]
In Yorkshire you’ve still got very big divisions between what used to be the Ridings; – East Riding, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and North Yorkshire are quite disparate. So, whilst as you say some people are calling for One Yorkshire, actually, I think there are very disparate calls from different parties (I mean, with a small p) in Yorkshire. And that’s part of the problem: that some are clamouring for One Yorkshire, and some are clamouring for city regions which are a quite different thing.
But I think there’s a big problem if you don’t recognise whole regions – that is, what happens to the gaps between the metropolitan authorities? —I won’t go back over those presentations (at no 10), but, you know, sometimes when people were presenting the case for cities, people would include many of these places which in America would not really be big enough to be cities though for historical reasons might have had city status.
The answer to your question, am I surprised by what’s happened? So let me put this to you. I was really challenged, when I was in the voluntary sector, in the early 2010s, and I was confronted by people in Manchester who’d done research on regeneration. Now, I’ve been very much in favour of regeneration, both as a union person and working for John Prescott. Regeneration was very important for us.
The researchers were showing a map of Greater Manchester. They’re looking at statistics. They’ve got a heat map. They showed there’d been not much change between the areas which were the high poverty areas throughout all of the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s. And even 2000 to 2010. And I knew billions of pounds had been put into it. Massive effort had been put into it, with massive goodwill towards it from local politicians and central government politicians. And I’m including Michael Heseltine during the Conservative years. But the researchers said all this regeneration investment didn’t seem to have made a lasting difference.
And they’ve got all sorts of reasons why it might not have succeeded. But one of the reasons is that whenever you regenerate an area, the people who do well out of it, particularly on education and skills, move out. And even if they don’t move out, they commute, to work somewhere else. Did I think this would solve all the disparities? I didn’t think it would. I think there are fundamental problems. I still think it probably would have helped, but it wouldn’t in itself have solved the disparities that exist. So, I’m not totally surprised.
Q: I want to get your sense of the world that you felt you inherited in 1997. When we speak to people, some will say there was a decisive break in ‘97, others point to the fact there was an agenda around regional competitiveness developing prior to then. So where do you fall in that debate?
I think you’ve only to read the Bruce Millan report to see that actually quite a lot had recently been put in place by the Conservative government under John Major. I think the break was after Thatcher. From Thatcher, who was at war with local government and wanted to take away powers and indeed disempower the Greater London Council, if you remember. After Thatcher, there was a change.
So that is what the Millan report is saying, and I think that was due to all three of the factors that we’ve been talking about – including great deprivation in the inner cities (in London as well as outside of London). Perhaps the most dramatic illustration were riots of young people in Brixton, Toxteth and elsewhere that gave an impetus for Heseltine to come forward with a more interventionist policy, which then got the backing of the John Major government. Certainly when Government Offices for the Regions were set up, it was, I think, in response to the European Union as much as anything. The European regional structural funds were coming on tap, but you had to have a region structure to give it to, with someone to administer it.
They had a quite ‘Napoleonic’ way of doing it, (like mayors in France being appointed by the centre in past times). The GORs were definitely staffed by national civil servants. Though many of them were originally from those areas, they moved out of London to go and take those jobs. So, it was quite ‘top down’, though probably quite well-meaning. But the Bruce Millan report is just saying really, ‘not enough’. And I guess the central thing that Bruce Millan’s report came out with was the clear proposal for Regional Development Agencies which were much more powerful than anything that had been envisaged in the Major government.
However, I’d also say, and I found this throughout my time in politics, that things take a hell of a lot longer to come into effect from start to finish than most people imagine. So even if Heseltine-type proposals were in place in ’94, (I think ’94 was when the government office of the regions were formed), they had not had a great effect by the time we got to ’97. And actually the things that we put in place in ’97 didn’t usually have a massive impact until a few years later. Particularly with financial, economic and financial interventions, change takes a long time to get through.
I remember Ed Balls coming to us when I worked for John Prescott agreeing to the proposal for a ‘single pot’ for the regional development agencies. I can’t quite put my finger on when that proposal came through, but it was in one of the budgets, but it didn’t actually come into effect until after the general election in 2002. So all that time, you’re trying to build up to it. So there was policy lag, and perhaps we were not going far enough. But it’s certainly not true that nothing had been done.
Q: One thing that you haven’t really mentioned so far it is the rise of London. One of the things that you’re saying about inner-city poverty and the political challenge coming from cities was especially true of London in the ’80s and ’90s. What was different about London?
There are certainly places in London that come up and come down. That’s always been the case, for example Battersea has been a low-class place and a high-class place cyclically. But the big difference is in powers. So actually, the first regional devolution within England was creating a Greater London Authority, with an assembly and a directly elected mayor (and actually very powerful mayor with a not very powerful assembly, but who scrutinise the mayor), and very crucially, thanks to Prescott, fundraising powers through congestion charge. Hugely important.
I know Andy Burnham (Mayor of Greater Manchester) quite well, and you can see it from the legislation, the powers of these Metro Mayors are very slim. They’re getting more money through the central government, but there’s still more power in a borough or a district council in Manchester than there is with the Metro Mayor. The mayor’s got soft powers, and Andy Burnham’s using them very well, but he just simply does not have the investment power of Sadiq Khan in London.
Education is probably an area that was really transformed in London, but I think that was probably as much done from the centre and through massive investment as anything else. That was a Tony Blair priority, and money was put into it and resources and thinking and so on, so I’m not quite sure that was down to the successive mayors. But with transport certainly, planning, as well as policing, was put in the hands of the Greater London Authority and the Mayor, it’s a much more powerful unit in London.
So at the same time as, notwithstanding the differences within London, the great powerhouse of the financial and brain economy in London increasingly meant London was getting richer; investment, particularly in transport from central government, was getting bigger; but also it had its own resources. I think that’s the difference between the two. A lot of money was put into Greater Manchester, not as much as into London, but much more than in the rest of the North. I would say a lot of it for regeneration and the results, as I said, a little bit patchy. Manchester’s much wealthier on average as a city than, say, Liverpool is, but the actual relative disparities in Manchester have not been solved.
Q: Why did London get so much legislative and financial support and central government interest in a way that Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, the North East didn’t?
I think part of it was that the UK was very London-centric, still is. Wherever your constituency as an MP, you’re still spending most of your week in London. The civil service is heavily based in London. Business is heavily based in London. And people, perhaps, rightly, think that it is the most critical to the whole UK’s economic power. So if you demolish London and hope that everything will come into the regions, you’d drag the whole country down.
Then specific things came up like the Victorian and early 20th-century infrastructure, like London Underground railway, was creaking too. And, under John Prescott it was agreed with the Treasury that a massive investment had to go in. I think there was a greater recognition in favour of London within the government. London’s actually a big part of the population, it’s a big number of MPs in the parliament, but it was seen as the most critical place to get right for the whole country’s economy.
Now the trouble with that is, if you’re addressing regional disparities, you’re in danger of them getting wider. So how do you make sure that everybody else doesn’t fall behind? And then how do you ensure that in the North West, Manchester doesn’t prosper, whilst other places like Preston or Blackburn or Lancaster are being left behind? I mean, that last problem is probably really underlying, if you look at the history from the Brexit vote. The cities were pretty evenly split, mainly voting against Brexit, but all those towns voted for Brexit. And you can see how that’s played out in electoral voting for UKIP, etc., but leading through to the big Conservative breakthroughs in the ‘red wall’ ( Labour strongholds which fell to the Conservatives in 2019) in the North and Midlands.
I hate to concede it, but there is an argument that the espousal of regional policy got in the way of reassembling large metropolitan authorities and making city regions the big thing under Labour. And by the time we got to 2010, the national political leadership for regional policy had gone, and the new Government weren’t much interested in it. The person who got interested later was George Osborne, but after the coalition government and leading up to particularly 2016.
Q: What do you do about, when you’re drawing these borders, about the places that are left out? You mentioned it earlier in the context of Yorkshire as well. From your experience, do you think that the RDA model did a better job for places like that?
Yes, let’s come back to the European principle of subsidiarity. And that’s what I think would drive you to have some things decided and administered at the regional level. There are big transport infrastructure decisions, let’s say about the regional railway links. Lots of people commute from Preston and Blackburn into Manchester, but they are not part of the Greater Manchester area. It’s pretty clear that for the road and rail network, for example, you should be making at least quite a lot of decisions at a regional level. Many environmental planning decisions ought to be decided there too.
I would think actually, there’s quite a strong case for education and skills input. Occupational skills training has been very poor throughout the UK. But it is very big in Germany, for example, and there is quite a big emphasis on the regional level. Andy Burnham, for example, says the big problem for him is how to get unemployed young people in Bury at the north end of the Greater Manchester area, available to take apprenticeships, which are being offered in the south of Manchester, and those people can’t afford to travel that distance.
Do you try and provide the means of transport for them, or do you actually try and take the skills to them? And I think subsidiarity would say, try as much as possible to take the skills to them. But it might be, to do that, you’ve got to administer more evenly. I also think there’s a regional level role for overcoming inequalities within the region.
From an equalities point of view, the big picture is going to be that redistribution within an area with some wealth is needed in trying to overcome those disparities. And it’s probably the only way you will overcome the disparities within the North West between the likes of Lancaster and Blackburn and Greater Manchester. Greater Manchester won’t have either the inclination or the means to do that. The problem is trying to decide what are the things that ought to be decided at that level.
Other things should be decided at metropolitan level, which certainly makes a very strong case for having metropolitan areas, city regions, within a region, and even if they might be ultra-powerful compared with the rest of the region.
But unless you have some things decided at the regional level, you will always have disparities and unfairness and you’ll replicate the bias in the UK towards London within each region so that the whole focus is on Manchester in the North West and Newcastle in the Northeast, etcetera. Having said that, the German experience shows that a very vibrant city at the leading edge of the region can have an agglomeration effect. They just need to be tempered with the idea that you will overcome the inequalities by having some decisions taken at regional level. Does that make sense?
Yes, it does, but I think the problem I’m grappling with, it goes back to the very first thing you said about, so you said that there shouldn’t necessarily be an automatic presumption in favour of decentralisation, precisely because of this trade-off between equity and access to standardised services versus, on the other hand, the economic and the philosophical arguments around subsidiarity, that you need to get to the right level to have the right information and the right level of legitimacy in decision making. Could you share maybe practical examples of when you had to, when you were setting up the RDAs, work through that trade-off concretely?
Okay, so first of all, I’d say a political factor at the start of the RDAs, is that they didn’t get all of the powers that were recommended in the Millan commission, most notably about skills. And it’s been a problem area for the UK, in the late 20th century and 21st century. One of the criticisms of RDAs was they just didn’t have enough resources, enough power. So if that’s a correct criticism then probably the answer is to give them more power and more money, not close them down, which is what happened under the Conservative government that followed.
Examples of the benefits of RDAs I can give you include forcing regions and local authorities within the region to come to collective priorities, I would say that was a big thing. Let’s say in transport, in a place like the East of England, every local authority would have their pet road project. I’m not a great one for supporting lots of road-building myself, but nevertheless, every local authority would have some demand and there’s a whole history of massive amounts being promised in roads programmes by central government. Then they’d be cut back as soon as the economy started to stumble. The Conservative Transport Minister Cecil Parkinson promised the greatest road-building programme since the Romans, (which probably wasn’t such a big programme when you think about it. But anyway, that’s what he promised.) And of course, everybody brought out their pet projects and local bypasses and roads. Hardly any of them got built because the economy turned down and the projects take a long time to decide and deliver. In the East of England it forced those authorities to come together and say, “Okay, there’s only a certain amount of money available, these are our priorities.”
The second area would be housing, particularly new housing development – a green plan for new housing. Everybody knows the UK has a chronic problem of undersupply of housing, over demand for housing, and a reluctance locally to provide the wherewithal for new housing to be built because of planning laws, etc. And again, in the Prescott era, they were just about getting to the point where regions, with Regional Chambers, (because it couldn’t be RDAs that did this) starting to come and say, “Okay, so we do recognise there is this amount of need in our region.”
(The trouble is, the syndrome is that the more local you get, the more resistance you get to anything new, and the beneficiaries of new housing are rarely the people who live there at the time of the planning decision. They’re other people who are going to be moving in or being born in the future. )
Those are just a couple of examples of how things were brought together, so you’ve got priorities on big things at regional level that you couldn’t get through even metropolitan authorities.
RDAs, actually had a history of stepping in where there were big industrial closures and they became the vehicle, so to speak, of moving in if there was a big, manufacturing establishment, closing down in an area and trying to get something to arise from the ashes. I was involved in that in the West Midlands and also the North East.
Q: Where were there tensions? I’m thinking primarily at ministerial level. But if you want to include civil servants as well, within Whitehall. Why was it that skills weren’t devolved?
I can’t give a full answer to that, but we sat down in a meeting with the Permanent Secretary of the Education Department and with David Blunkett the Education Minister, shortly after the election in ’97. And actually, John Prescott agreed not to press the case, shall we say, for skills to be brought in and that it would stay within the Department for Education. I don’t know all the reasons for that. Richard Caborn was rather disappointed about it because he thought it was really central to RDAs being effective. And I think John probably thought you can’t fight on all fronts at once. It was a political decision. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree with skills being included. It was a political trade-off, ‘to walk before we could run’ and make sure we kept David Blunkett’s and others’ support for the whole project.
Did the Treasury not have a view on that?
I don’t remember the Treasury getting into that. They never objected, as far as I know. But I don’t know. The other people who were always a factor in number 10 was the CBI and business. The CBI (the main business lobby organisation) were very vocal. Not in the public sense, but in exerting private pressure on the government, and they had reservations about RDAs. There were certain things which they pressed for which weren’t agreed, such as not having trade union representatives on the RDAs, and delaying the whole thing further, but they were a significant pressure, which was probably quite rightly taken seriously by number 10 in a number of areas. I’m not an expert on skills, but I think the results speak for themselves that nothing that was tried, whatever the good intentions, really worked in the UK, in the way that they had in Germany.
Q: Were there other levers that are on the table?
That’s an interesting one. I don’t think there was ever much pressure to have health and social care put into the regional, certainly not the RDA agenda. It wasn’t thought to be an appropriate thing for a regional development agency. If we had actually got elected regional assemblies, maybe it would have done. I think Ed Balls, as he’s recently said on TV, would agree that everybody who was involved at that time (with the possible exception, I would say, of Andy Burnham in the years of the Gordon Brown government), really didn’t quite grasp the enormity of the ageing population and the social care problem.
The NHS was always the big demand for money. Whenever money was put into the NHS under consecutive governments which said “This is this amount of it is going to be preventative, and it’s going to be about social care and prevention”, it almost always got swallowed up in the big hole of National Health Service hospitals and GP provision.
So I think there’s a whole separate issue about the NHS and social care, which probably ought to be part of the thinking as well. All I can tell you is there was no great pressure for that from us or from others, but we probably should have taken it a lot more seriously. And certainly RDAs didn’t seem to be at the right vehicle for that.
Local authorities might have been. Again, were they big enough to do any more? They already had some responsibilities; it is counties that generally pay for care costs, or contributing to them at least. But of course, local authorities, under successive governments, particularly the Conservative austerity programme, have been the whipping boys of austerity. So that’s not helped. I think probably a regional approach would be helpful. My mother’s in social care. She was brought up in Lancashire, probably only went abroad about three times in her life, but she’s in social care in Nottingham because my sister lives there. So how do you sort that out? That’s even outside the region, and getting all that agreed in practice is hellishly complicated at the moment.
Q: Any final comments?
Two things, just so I don’t miss them completely, if I haven’t made these points. One is that local government representatives can be quite important players. They’ve often got a vested interest in not having a new body being established, that they feel might take over powers from them. Hull and Humberside turning into a unitary authority was extremely controversial because there were people who had been representatives on the county and on Hull’s council who had to give some of it up. And their average age was older than me now. And when we brought in programmes for the most deprived housing estates in the country in the New Deal for Housing as it was called, some really objected that councillors weren’t running it exclusively, and that Government was trying to create some other vehicle to try and get movement through faster. So I think quite often existing local authority representatives can be quite resistant to these changes and could be part of the reason it didn’t happen.
The other thing is to go into the mechanics of the 2004 referendum. My feeling was, if there had been a referendum in the North east in ’98 or ’99 it might well have resulted in a yes vote. I think you know that this referendum was Dominic Cummings’ first foray into a whole different approach to political campaigning, using American style techniques, trying to get to people through social media, and working with very big emotional campaign issues rather than policy. It clearly worked, and generally people thought “they’re trying to create another layer of government that will suit the politicians, whom we hate”. That’s what they were playing to in order to gain the No vote in 2004.
Q: There are multiple models for taking forward regional growth programmes. One view is that the LEP model that was established post RDAs, which was based entirely on local authority voluntarism, was inevitably going to fail. Another camp is that RDAs where always going to struggle politically without the regional assemblies, because they didn’t have democratic accountability except through the local government link, and the local government officials were going to be resistant to it. Would you agree with those two bits of analysis and then what else is missing, what else do you draw from that conclusion about local government resistance?
First of all, there was not uniform resistance to RDAs and chambers, and some people saw an advantage in it. But some people have a vested interest in not going for it. And even if you’ve got quite large regional chambers, as they were, with quite a lot of local authority representatives, not everybody was on it, so somebody’s going to lose out. So, there’s all of that is at play.
Q: The question I put you is that, if Labour hadn’t proposed elected regional assemblies to oversee the RDAs, would anybody have objected to them?
I very much doubt it actually. The CBI was quite happy with RDAs. The business representatives on them seemed to be. I think LEPs were generally ineffective. And they weren’t actually local authority voluntarism. I don’t think it would be correct to say that, because it was actually random businesses who had to come up with them and make a bid defining their boundaries. Many weren’t coterminous — they didn’t have the same boundaries – with local authorities at all. So I think they were always a bit of a disaster. And correct me if I’m wrong, did TECs go into the LEPs, did the skills function go into LEPs?
So I think that later there were moves made to make them more coterminous, and some of the more effective ones, such as in the West Midlands, were pretty well a smaller version of what the RDA had been, and that’s where the current West Midlands mayor Andy Street had been the LEP chair. But I think most were largely ineffective and disconnected. RDAs could fit in, however limited regionalism was, because it didn’t demand too much. But maybe if nobody had gone for referendums and so on, nobody would have objected and RDAs would have been okay, just being overseen indirectly by regional chambers.
Q: Is anything that could have saved RDAs in 2010?
Maybe not pushing the idea that you had to have directly elected oversight, which became very controversial. Another bit of the local authority resistance concerned what would be the political balance in a regional assembly. And all the places that would be in the minority party in that case, but were majorities in their own area, were resistant to that.
But I think RDAs generally were doing a pretty good job. I don’t remember lots of objections to them, and I think the incoming Conservative government had more or less decided to change it. I think it was a Lib Dem policy to have LEPs actually, in the Coalition government, but I don’t think it was treated as a big need to get rid of regional development agencies because they’re terrible and interfering in people’s lives. They were generally well regarded, if perhaps under resourced. The controversial thing of trying to get democratic oversight for them.
Did they lack legitimacy? Well, I don’t recall, when the RDAs were intervening when factories shut down, anybody saying “Oh, yeah, but you haven’t got enough legitimacy to do this”. They had money to bring to bear and help, and they were quite effective.
Where they probably were going to be lacking was in land use planning. And, as you said, areas like social care. RDAs were certainly not the best vehicle for those things, but they could probably become consultees for that sort of thing, and you probably do need some different regional structure for those areas. Whether it needs to be directly elected is another matter. So, perhaps if you’d not asked the question, it wouldn’t have all collapsed, and RDAs would have continued. That’s a hard thing for people like me to take, who were promoting those things at the time. Just like, as I say, perhaps the big focus on regional devolution, maybe got in the way of recreating metropolitan authorities, which were probably always a good thing.
But even at the time of the 2004 referendum, there were groups of northern regional chambers, who called themselves regional assemblies, which were actually calling for city regions to be the focus. So it’s quite hard in that circumstance to really push through a regional assembly for the North East on a wave of mass popularity.
I think a regional mayor, if it had been some popular non-politician like Alan Shearer or Kevin Keegan (Newcastle United football heroes) might have just succeeded. But then all the Sunderland people would have hated them!
ENDS