John Cridland joined the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in 1982, rising to Deputy Director 2000-10 and Director-General 2011-15. Since leaving the CBI, he was the first Chair of Transport for the North, serving 2015-21.
This interview was conducted on 28 January 2022.
Q: How you were involved in shaping UK regional economic policy over the period 1979 to 2015?
I was an employee of the CBI, the employers’ organisation, from 1982 when I joined as a graduate trainee through to retiring as Director-General at the end of 2015. So I have 33 years in the same organisation.
At the beginning I was junior, although I still had a perspective on how things were developing. For example, one of my first jobs was writing the brief for the CBI President to attend the National Economic Development Council. In 1982 through into the late 1980s, we still had that overlay of corporatism.
Then there was a period of laissez faire market-led developments, which was actually challenging for the CBI. The CBI was used to working very closely with government and getting government to do things. That wasn’t necessarily what the Thatcher government looked to the business community to do. The CBI had to reinvent itself. An awful lot of effort went into driving competitiveness improvements, on what business could do to help itself or what government could do to help business to help itself, rather than expecting government to be the answer. That was the period when the CBI was led by John Banhan, who came from a McKinsey background and was very much of that ilk.
Things changed massively in 1997. By then I was a director of the CBI. I was more at the heart of policy making. I can remember the first meeting CBI delegation had with Tony Blair immediately after the Labour victory, and how quickly it was obvious things were going to change. I was responsible for employment policy, and Tony Blair said to Adair Turner, ‘you guys opposed the national minimum wage. You’ve lost the battle. We’re going to implement it. We can do it without you, or you can come on board and try and shape it’. I was invited to join the Low Pay Commission, and a whole series of other economic interventions, working with the Labour government right through to 2010. A very different style of engagement.
The big thing that struck me in that period, other than employment policy, skills policy and education policy much bigger than it had been for the Conservative government – and rightly so – was that regional issues were much bigger. That took a while for the CBI to get aligned to, because the CBI was a national organisation and suddenly, we were breaking new ground. John Prescott’s work, the RDAs [Regional Development Agencies] and all of that, and – thinking about living where I’m living now [the North East] – the referendum on having an elected regional assembly. (Which didn’t go through, much to John Prescott’s disappointment.)
By 2010 I was about to become the Director-General. I worked very closely with the Conservative-Liberal coalition. There was a pull back from regional policy initially and a pullback from regional inequalities because what we’d got was a financially driven depression. And government was looking – George Osborne was looking, with whom I worked particularly closely – at supply side interventions that could make a difference.
My remembrance was that Whitehall was looking for UK-wide or at least England-wide solutions. The biggest two were in the areas of infrastructure – which we worked very closely on and that led to George Osborne inviting me to consider chairing Transport for the North – and Education.
What became obvious as we came towards 2015 was that George Osborne was then reinventing or getting reconnected with some of what the Labour government had been interested in, in regionalism, and that was quite surprising for a Conservative government. But to be fair to the then-Chancellor, he really got the bit between his teeth, which led to the Northern Powerhouse stuff which takes us beyond the 2015 date. I was involved all the way through that, from junior to senior.
Q: Looking back, how would you assess the success of policy over those 40 years?
The word that would come to mind would be ‘Cinderella’. With the exception of short bursts of big enthusiasm – particularly in the Labour government, the Blair-Brown government, and then latterly from George Osborne – [regional policy] was the Cinderella, for all the obvious reasons that we are a heavily centralised administration and economy. Both politically and economically, London is over-dominant. My sense all the way through was that there was a degree of tokenism about these efforts and tokenism about the role of local government. And attempts to get regional entities involved were very, very embryonic and a bit half-hearted, and it felt like that to people outside London. As a CBI executive, I spent a lot of time around the country. Businesspeople from locally-owned companies would always feel that these efforts lacked real energy and passion and weren’t where government’s focus was.
Throughout a lot of that period I led our work on education, skills and employment policy: probably the bit of government that throughout most of that period, and to this day, has been most centrally-driven. I never felt that those in government responsible for education policy or skills policy were particularly committed to regional economic agendas. I don’t think they are today. I think if you looked at the levelling up agenda, the Northern Powerhouse agenda, Midlands Engine agenda, the Department for Education just isn’t central. It isn’t connected with it. It has a philosophical position, which for a long time the CBI supported, that things like education policy, the national curriculum, should be national. I saw that Andy Burnham, in a Times interview in the last few days, was looking for devolving of the national curriculum. That still felt quite strange as a proposal.
Q: What do you think the government thought it was trying to achieve?
I think the 1980s into the early 1990s was overwhelmingly the Thatcher period. The prevailing view was that government interventions have done more harm than good, and government should roll back. The political imperatives were about breaking the power of trade unions and in the private sector, breaking blockages to competition and enterprise caused by inertia and monopolies and prevailing thinking lacking innovation. It was almost like a sledgehammer. Think about the Midlands and the North: lots of manufacturing industry went to the wall because of that prevailing view. It was almost like a central government – up to the early 1990s, when there was some change from John Major – just accepted that Newcastle or Liverpool being damaged was just a necessary casualty of war, in rebuilding a more fit and more robust economy.
Q: If you take the case of Nissan, was the government thinking about where it was best for them to locate regionally?
My sense was that it was a political choice based on the consequence of what I’ve just described. If you think about Sunderland, you think about the northeast of England. The coal mines were going, the shipyards were going, the old car industry was going, heavy manufacturing was going. Therefore, yes, it was a really good thing to get Nissan to Sunderland. It’s a really good thing to get BMW into Birmingham. But it was a consequence of, ‘we have to be seen to do something because things are going so badly wrong for these regions’, rather than a levelling up agenda. It didn’t feel like it was a forward agenda. It felt like it was a consequential agenda.
Q: Did the CBI focus on Enterprise Zones or Regional Selective Assistance?
To be honest, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about them in the CBI. They were fairly second order, or they felt fairly second order. They were clearly far closer to a market economy where, okay, businesses would need a bit of incentive support, but they weren’t mainstream. The exception to all that was Michael Heseltine. Michael Heseltine clearly had a different view, but he was a little bit of a lone voice in the Thatcher government. He was clearly much more central in the Major government.
Q: Did the CBI think strategically about the North-South divide and regional imbalances?
We certainly weren’t thinking about the North-South divide in the way that we are today. We had no conception, just going north of Hadrian’s wall, that we’d end up in the position we are now with Celtic devolution. Those things were not conceived of. Partly this was because of the central planning infrastructure which Mrs Thatcher didn’t abolish initially. She may have not thought much of, but it was still there.
The focus was far more sectoral. I remember the trade unions were far more sectoral than regional at the time. Of course, Northern and Midland issues loomed large, because of the decimation of manufacturing. They loomed large because of the collapse of the coal mines, and the collapse of the steel industry, and the collapse of the car industry.
Q: What was the impact of Michael Heseltine moving to the Department of Trade and Industry in the early 1990s?
There was a Yorkshire businessman who made a speech at CBI annual conference when Heseltine was appointed as president of the Board of Trade. This guy stood up at the CBI annual conference and said, ‘We don’t have any trade and we don’t have a board’. You know, he was taking the mickey out of DTI [Department for Trade and Industry] because DTI felt like a small player. That all changed with Heseltine. You look through the whole period of Secretaries of State for Trade and Industry, and most of them were here today, gone tomorrow politicians – without being disparaging – with the single exception of Heseltine. But again, the mindset, and I hope this isn’t just me, I think I’m accurately reflecting the conversations I remember, with government and with President’s Committee of the CBI.
When people admired Heseltine, they admired him because he was a political big hitter. They admired him because the business community finally felt they had an ambassador round the cabinet table who could take on the prime minister with a reasonable chance. It wasn’t because of his philosophy of regionalism. I don’t remember that being discussed. What was discussed was, he was a big hitting politician. You know, CBI has always been very active in North America just to give you the analogy. And whenever I was across lobbying in Washington for the CBI and we have an office out there, the biggest single government building close to the White House is the Department of Commerce. It’s massive. It may be massive, it may have a massive staff, but it’s not politically a big hitter in Washington. I remember somebody in the White House saying to me once, ‘The Department of Commerce is only important in an Administration if the Secretary of State for Commerce is close to the president’. Other than that, it’s just a technical department dealing with second order issues’, and it felt the same with DTI.
Q: At what point does thinking about cities as drivers of growth come onto the CBI agenda?
I’ll be very frank with you. My memory – and people like John Banham or Howard Davis or Adair Turner may have a different view, and they were the bosses, they may be more accurate – I don’t think it was the focus. Let’s remember that the Conservative government up to 1997 had taken local government to pieces, stripped things away from them, taken funding away from them. It wasn’t a career you went into, local government, if you wanted to be a big hitter. Even in London, you know, before the Mayor of London, these issues would rarely be touched on at the CBI President’s Committee. Industrial policy would, but as a national issue.
Q: How did things change with the election of the Labour government in 1997?
The CBI got a bit warmed up to this agenda prior to 1997, because of the Training and Enterprise Councils that had opened up the agenda. But the focus then was not cities or even regional policy. It was about putting employers in charge. It was further about dismantling local government and public sector. But it had warmed up the CBI. All of a sudden with the RDAs, the CBI did take them seriously. Absolutely. Why? Because government, the Labour government took them seriously. We’d have been wrong not to, and they were much more important than the TECs, because they were operating on a bigger scale, regionally, and they have serious resources and powers to make things happen.
So suddenly, a real shift, I used to go around all the CBI elected regional councils – of which there were 13, made up of managing directors of regional businesses, and plant directors of multinational companies, reasonably senior people. Up to 1997, those regional councils would predominantly have discussed national issues and the regional dimension of the national issue. All of a sudden, in 1997, they wanted to discuss the regional issues because they finally had an interface, namely the RDAs.
So it suddenly became a real agenda. And initially with the RDAs, it was a very positive agenda. I think the RDAs got off to a good start. Sometimes the springs take a long time to wind up: with RDAs my memory is the opposite. They got off to a good start. They started doing good things. The problem was that the Labour government asked them to do too much. It piled more and more things on the RDA agenda.
I remember the point at which the government asked RDAs to get involved in innovation policy, and we were really scratching our heads in CBI headquarters because we didn’t see the added value. It wasn’t that we were philosophically opposed. We just thought that these things were predominantly national decisions, and we began to see the RDAs reinventing things, and we see it with Celtic devolution, just to put a local badge on it. Every RDA wanted to be the best RDA in the country on biotechnology, etcetera, etcetera. They began to be less business-led and more sucked into the public sector. The evidence of that is when we got to 2010, the RDAs were slow to realise the Labour government was replaced by the Conservative government, they were at risk. They really were a bit naive about that. I remember that graphically.
Q: Why did the CBI call for the RDAs to be abolished before the 2010 election?
Because they started strongly and then faded. The enthusiasm of our regional members for RDAs was dissipating because we felt they’d lost their focus and lost their edge. I remember strikingly in 2009-10, the RDAs suddenly banging on the CBI’s door and saying, ‘You know how useful we are to you. We really need you. You’ve got to persuade David Cameron not to get rid of us’. And the CBI said, ‘We’ve no interest in this at all. We think our RDAs have run out of steam, perhaps somewhat unfairly’. The RDAs found themselves without allies. I think the RDAs were quite upset about that, but it was a consequence of the fact that they started strongly and faded.
Q: Was the CBI’s view shaped by it having a regional infrastructure but – through the President’s Committee – a national focus?
Well, that’s an absolutely fair point. And when histories are written, we all know who the big powerbrokers were in the CBI, and the role of the President’s Committee.
It’s not a complete answer, though. Go back to the regional councils. If the CBI was only the President’s Committee, then it was really only multinational chairman. We couldn’t allow that to happen because the brand would be tarnished. The regional councils, which were elected, were typically managing directors of 2000 employee businesses or the equivalent of Jürgen Maier in the Northwest for Siemens. They were still quite big hitters, and their attitude to RDAs changed from enthusiasm in the first half of the decade to, ‘these bodies are no longer doing very much for us’, in the latter part of the decade.
Q: Were RDAs simply asked to do too much, or had the scope of their work shifted inappropriately?
I can only give you an instinctive answer. I remember feeling it strongly at the time, and the CBI felt it strongly at the time, that it was the first [mission creep] rather than the second. It may not be true, but it felt like they would be given too much. Gradually over time, their remit expanded. They had a finger in every pie. They were building big offices. They were taking on more staff. They gradually lost touch with the entrepreneurial community, and they gradually got closer to the public sector. They became a bit
Q: How did the CBI engage with the Coalition Government from 2010?
Let me divide it into three bits, broadly chronologically in those five years.
2010 for us felt very much like 1979. There is a sense of ‘the Conservative government, baby being thrown out with the bathwater’. Were we going to die in a ditch for RDAs? No, for the reasons we described. But there were good things going on that were also thrown out, and it felt like a really politically driven agenda. I remember the meetings we had with Eric Pickles at the time to try and persuade him to save something, and it was really hard. Government didn’t see the need for anything. It was fought to a compromise, and the compromise was the Local Economic Partnerships (‘LEPs’). To be honest, that was really half hearted, and it was almost like throwing the CBI an old bone. Anything that the Labour government had done, they wanted to do the exact opposite. ‘Why do you guys need LEPs? We’re giving you a chance to get rid of all this public sector intervention.’ We did want LEPs. But LEPs were almost stillborn. I mean, they were so half hearted.
I come to the middle phase. We’ve got something, but it was barely worth having. Was anything different from the 1980s? Yes. What? What was different was London. In London, both in terms of the mayoralty, but also in terms of the economic, regional economic agenda, the city agenda, it was obvious that these things were working. London was proving the way. For example, it was London that first developed, through Peter Hendy, advising the mayor of the day, a transport strategy for London that was based on economic needs. You could see that exposed the gap in the rest of the country, that the Cameron government had created by scrapping everything that the Labour government has put in place, because in London it was still happening.
And then the third phase, and I was leading the CBI at this point, was George Osborne’s quite surprising and counterintuitive commitment to Northern Powerhouse. I just retired from the board of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, which is his think tank in the North, still chaired by him. In 2022 he is still trying to keep government’s feet to the fire on the Northern Powerhouse, because it wasn’t purely politics. It wasn’t just about turning Red Wall into Blue Wall, although clearly he’s a politician. He actually had this philosophy that I had never seen from Conservative leaders except from Heseltine: the economics of agglomerations. I had to look up agglomeration in an economics dictionary to make sure I understood what he was talking about. It was very much Treasury-led. I never felt it was in Downing Street.
Q: What are the most important drivers of regional difference?
I think productivity is a much-misunderstood term. The biggest single component of productivity is total factor productivity. As I understand total factor productivity, it’s the bit of productivity that’s left over when they’ve identified all the other things that can measure. It’s the bit they can’t understand that they know is important. It’s a mystery, productivity. It’s a mystery why it exists and why it doesn’t exist.
I always remember – in the days when the Japanese were held up as the best on productivity, so I’m probably going back to the ‘80s – a British steel company saying they had a visit from one of their Japanese competitors. The British company had asked the Japanese, ‘when you’ve been with us for a couple of weeks, if you can see anything that we’re getting wrong, but you’re getting right, we’d love to know, because you’re so much more productive than we are’. At the end, the two chief executives had a meeting and the Japanese chief executive said to the British chief executive, ‘we’ve been all around your steel mills. We haven’t found any big thing that marks any difference on productivity’. Of course, the British chief executive was quite disappointed. Then the Japanese chief executive passed across a manual, very thick: ‘but here’s 248 things you don’t do that we do, that probably make a difference’. And it was small things like ‘how many seconds the door was open’, how much energy lost during that period.
I think productivity is both much misunderstood and incredibly micro. It does not lend itself, as that example demonstrates, to pulling big levers, with one exception I’ll come back to in a moment. That was really brought home to me in 1997 when I was asked to go on the Low Pay Commission. There was originally a view, that I think Treasury felt quite excited about, that if we got the minimum wage right it would drive up productivity, and it didn’t. It didn’t because you can’t pull levers like that. The reasons why our productivity is poor internationally, is that mix of micro things, and that mix of poor leadership, poor management skills, lack of innovation, etcetera, etcetera.
There is one big exception and that is the education system – especially the state education system. I currently sit on the Ofsted board, so I see all the stuff about performance of Northern and Midland state schools, and particularly state secondary schools. I think there is a correlation there with productivity. If we are failing young people, in places like Yorkshire, in some Yorkshire secondary schools, it’s no fault of the teachers that there are, there are intrinsic structural reasons why young people are denied opportunities that they would have in London and the southeast of England. I think that is the biggest single supply-side factor behind regional inequalities on productivity.
There are loads of interventions on the Northern Powerhouse – exports, innovation, infrastructure – but there’s very little activity on education. We shouldn’t have a different national curriculum. But if the government really wanted to make progress on levelling up, it has to do something about state education in the north of England.
Q: Are the distribution of government R&D expenditure, transport or wider investment all secondary to education?
Yes, they are, I would say secondary. I’ve come to the conclusion education is the biggest single lever.
Clearly the time I’ve spent since 2015 on infrastructure is because I do see that infrastructure is a lever. It’s a long-term lever. But the big learning for me is it’s about the paucity of East-West links. If you’re a young person growing up in Leeds and you get the chance to have a high-quality value-added job in Manchester, you can’t get easily there. But it’s only the distance of the Central Line on the London tube. The fact that people can’t move to high quality, high productivity jobs in the north of England is a major factor.
Q: What is your assessment of London’s impact upon the rest of the UK?
I think it’s been positive as a pumping engine for the UK economy, and that’s why the politics of envy are pointless. London is London, and there’s no point trying to spread the jam thinly. London will always be what it will be.
But negative are some of the implications. So what do I mean by negative? You know, financial services would be a very good example. There are lots of financial services jobs in Northern Ireland, in Scotland, in the north of England, but they’re predominantly low value-added back-office jobs. To the extent to which London has supported regional economies, it’s almost reinforced the low skill, low wage equilibrium. That I think could begin to change now. Q
I was talking to a chief executive of one of the biggest banks about economic recovery from the pandemic. He thought that the financial services would redistribute more of the higher value-added jobs out of London. He thought having 8,000 people in one tower in Canary Wharf was no longer a valid model. So maybe that could turn.
There was a lot of scratching of heads in the George Osborne era as to why UK productivity growth wasn’t rebounding in 2012 and 2013. Again, I think there were a lot of missed points about productivity growth. The biggest single driver of productivity growth in the 2000s had been the City of London and financial services. Post 2008, 2010, if financial services weren’t going to grow, then it’s not surprising that our national productivity figures weren’t growing. I’m not saying that’s the sole factor. So that comes back to the credits and debits on the balance sheet of the city of London, and the rest of the country. It’s so important we can’t do without it. But that disproportionate importance means the rest of the country catches a cold, if London financial services sneezes.
Q: Is it important for delivering more balanced growth to have more powers for London or more London-style powers for localities across England, in the way that you have in Wales and Scotland now?
Yes, it is important. But you have to build up capability in order to make it work. We haven’t said much about John Prescott. John Prescott had some big ideas in this area as well. I think some of the things he tried to do with regional assemblies, with the putative efforts with the Northern way, didn’t work because there wasn’t the capability in the North. It had been run down so far. There weren’t the decision makers. I remember reaching the point where if you went to the North East Regional Council, there was nobody senior left around the table, because there were few large companies that had decision makers in the North East of England. So you need the capability to go with the devolution.
I think we’re getting there, but that takes a while. It takes a while to have a combined authority, to have an elected mayor, who begins in the North or the Midlands to do what Alex Salmond was very good at in Scotland when he was First Minister: pulling the regional economic leaders around the table. But it was a small enough table to get things done. And I always remember at a time when business was quite concerned about the SNP [Scottish National Party], you would find chief executives of London based companies say, ‘you know, I don’t want to see an independent Scotland, but do you know if I ask the Scottish government to do something, it gets done the next week, because of the small country model, and it doesn’t get done in Whitehall because they can’t find a way to do it’.
My other conclusion – and I’m probably a late convert to this, but it’s a consequence of Transport for the North – is that there is no point devolving a degree of decision-making power, if it isn’t accompanied by a degree of fiscal responsibility. I think English devolution has to learn the lessons of Celtic devolution, because the halfway house we have with elected mayors is almost the worst position to be in. They have an electoral mandate. They are big beasts. They can make a lot of noise, rightly. They can make government squirm on occasion, but they are more inclined to do that because they don’t have the real resources and the real power to make change. They have to still persuade the Treasury of everything. I don’t think that is just different political parties. The consequence of devolving political responsibility without devolving fiscal interest.
Q: Is it possible to move in the direction you just talked about without a more radical redrawing of the English local government map?
I’m a little bit of a constitutional historian, not being an economist, and we’ve learned the bitter lessons that political leaders need to be accountable to the voter. They need some intermediary, which we call parliaments or assemblies. So that’s the reality, just as it was in the days of John Prescott. I don’t see any public appetite for that, and I think if there were referenda about regional assemblies today, they would go the same way as they did with John Prescott. And that is partly a disillusionment with politics. Some of the frustrations that people have with politics is about distance. It’s not relevant to locality. You know, this country is trying to move away in its public administration, the administration of the health service, the administration of education. It’s moving away from local, and it’s trying to create units which are closer to regional. If I sit here in Berwick-upon-Tweed, we moved some years ago from to unitary authority. But we moved to a unitary authority at the county level, not a unitary authority at the borough level. Northumberland is one of the biggest geographical counties in the country, but it only has one tier of government. Absolutely hopeless. Decisions are made close to Newcastle. If those decisions were made in York, it would be even worse. So I think you’re right that there needs to be, to make this work, democratic accountability, that’s self-evident. But I don’t yet think, because we never had that tradition of federalism that exists in Germany, in particular. I don’t think the public are up for it yet.
Q: Can the elected mayor model work?
I can see it working in cities. I’m not suggesting we go back to Metropolitan Councils, but I could see something for the whole of Greater Manchester, or the whole of West Yorkshire, providing an assembly to which Tracy Brabin and Andy Burnham are accountable. I could see that working. I don’t think it could work beyond cities. And I don’t think it could work in rural areas, that don’t have the agglomeration of a city. And I think government still struggles with this. So, as I understand it, some people were particularly keen to see devolution to the whole of Yorkshire. It wanted an elected mayor for the whole of Yorkshire. Some politics behind that obviously. To me, that was wrong. You know, a mayor for South Yorkshire, Dan Jarvis? Yes. People associate with Dan Jarvis in Sheffield and Rotherham. But you go beyond Sheffield and Rotherham, no.
Q: What do we do about towns like Blackburn or Burnley that are part of greater Manchester economy but outside the footprint of the metro-Mayor?
It’s very, very difficult and my recent experience with Transport for the North (‘TFN’) has brought that home. On the TFN board, we had the most senior local authority representative from every local authority area. But that meant you had five, now six metro mayors on the board and then you had the leader of Lancashire Council, and then you had the leader of some of these in between places. Wearing my TFN Chairman hat, I worried about it a lot, because that didn’t feel balanced. But I’m not sure how to solve it because a neat and tidy map in the North work. But a fragmented map brings with it these problems and consequences.
Q: When you look at the current decentralised, evolutionary map, is there any part of you which wishes we had made the RDAs work better?
Coming back to where we started, if one is looking at it over 40 year time horizon, my overriding sense would be, I wish I had known then or even in 2000, or even in 2010, what I know now because I think I, and I think the CBI, was not sharp enough on this agenda, wasn’t on top of this agenda, was too national, too focused on the national policy levers. But my second observation, the most relevant to your question would be, I’m quite sad about the missed opportunities. You know, I’m sad that the RDAs didn’t work out. I’m sad that the John Prescott agenda didn’t get traction because there’s a lot of missed opportunity for Northern citizens, from the years when these things didn’t happen.
Q: Is there a common Whitehall-Westminster centralising force in policymaking?
I’m very much of the view that there is a centralising Westminster-Whitehall force and I think it’s inimical. It’s unhelpful, and I’ve seen it on both sides of the fence. I’ve been party to it, and I’ve seen what it can achieve. So post-1997 through to the end of the Blair government I spent a lot of time clearly working with them. I was in and out of Downing Street. I think some good things were done that I made a small contribution to, working with him. I’ve seen it can do well, but actually it was far too centralised.
I’ve now, in my post-CBI life and particularly moving up to the North, I’ve seen how it looks and feels from the outside: crumbs off the table. When TFN came up with a new, economically different transport strategy, which had new economic development corridors that weren’t traditional transport corridors, we started arguing with the Treasury for investment. We’d identified a corridor that ran from Cumbria and north Lancashire, pivoted on Manchester and ended in Sheffield, and we were looking at the advanced manufacturing and energy assets, along a sort of L-shape, and the labour markets and supply chains that could be created between the Advanced Manufacturing Centre and Lancashire, for example, with Manchester as the pivot.
I went down and explained all this to the Treasury and a Treasury official who I won’t name said, ‘Mr Cridland, I don’t understand why you’re arguing for any investment in this. Many people in Pendle earn the minimum wage.’ I don’t think he had any understanding of advanced manufacturing and Siemens and BAE Systems so he couldn’t see the need for investment.
Coming back finally to the minimum wage. I remember with George Bain in 1997 when we were trying to design a minimum wage from scratch, the first decision we made was the best decision, and that was to spend most of the first year travelling around the regions, talking to local trade union representatives, workers, and employers, and getting underneath the skin of the surface. That’s why the Low Pay Commission made a success of the minimum wage, because we talked to the people who understood it. You couldn’t understand it from London.
Q: Does your experience with the Northern Powerhouse persuade you that the ‘whole North’ is where your economic strategy should focus?
There’s quite a lot of validity in that argument. TFN was a small, putative step towards that for all the Northern Powerhouse. The only bit that was genuinely pan-Northern, that had 100 staff and a multi-million a year budget and all of the elected leaders of the North, plus some employers, on the board. I always felt that success in TFN would be when the leader of one part of the North voted for something that was of no benefit to her or him, but was important for another part of the North, and was prepared to go home and sell that.
Q: Do you agree that the Department for Education has consistently resisted attempts to move from national commissioning?
We at the CBI were pushing back on that. We were particularly worried about the devolution of skills. We felt – and I think I still feel, to a degree – that there’s a very important sectoral dimension to skills which regions simply don’t get. And if you gave the money to the equivalent in the day of a metro mayor, that would reduce the likelihood that the different sectoral dimensions would get a proper look in. That’s very important to inward investment, because often with big FDI [foreign direct investment] coming into the Midlands or the North, you need some sectoral solutions. Near to me down at Ashington, Britishvolt are going to build a giga factory. They’re probably going to need hundreds of new technicians. That requires some with new skills that don’t currently exist. That’s going to require some national action as well as some local action.
Q: That’s an argument against devolution?
It is. That’s where the CBI was at the time.
Q: How do you think about that now?
I hope this answer isn’t a fudge. My views have shifted. I’ve shifted. I think the CBI was wrong. I think it needs more of a regional dimension. But I think the answer is, to use a textile analogy, it’s the warp and weft of national and regional. I’d almost take the national out and say sectoral.
Where this really came home to me, the first thing government asked me to do when I left the CBI was the first review under the Pensions Act of the State Pension Age, and whether the state pension age should go up. I was two years during that as an independent reviewer. I went to Blackpool. I took the civil service team to Blackpool, because I knew that it had the lowest life expectancy of any English borough, and I wanted to understand why and what was happening. My question was, ‘could the state pension age go up to 70?’, because the Treasury was really concerned about the affordability with an ageing population.
We sat there in an unemployment centre in Blackpool, talking to people in their mid-40s, who were never going to work again. And it was deeply upsetting and really, really moving. Blackpool has some people who have had really unfortunate lives. They’ve got dreadful education records. They’ve been denied employment opportunity. They’ve made poor lifestyle choices. They’ve got poor health, mental health issues, and by their 40s, they’re already almost unemployable. And the idea that those people could wait to 70 for state pensions. Just ridiculous. What that brought home to me was, yes, some things do need to be national. Not everything can be. You don’t want 1,000 blossoms everywhere, but you’re not going to help Blackpool with DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] policies that are decided by theoretical economists nationally.
Q: Did business leaders in the regions or the RDAs ever feel the Learning and Skills Council gave the flexibility to deliver local skills plans?
No. I was vice chairman of the National Learning and Skills Council when Gordon Brown was prime minister. I saw the ramp up of Train to Gain. Big mistake. It was a great training scheme. It needed to be built up. I just saw instructions going from the National Learning and Skills Council head office in Coventry to the regional directors, spend the money. They wanted the money spent. Of course, it was a mistake. It’s back to the warp and weft. And that’s why I said, I’m sorry if it comes across as a fudge, but it doesn’t really advance us because it’s tremendously difficult. That warp and weft of national and local is incredibly hard to achieve. But it’s where the value added is.
Q: Looking back now on those 40 years of regional and local economic policy, what’s the one thing you think really worked and what’s your greatest frustration?
I’m going to come back to the minimum wage, not because of my contribution to it, which was only one of many. I sometimes say to Denise, my other half, I’d settle for the national minimum wage on my gravestone for the single reason, that it, that day in April 1999 a million workers got a 25% pay rise and nobody lost their job. Some people got displaced, but nobody lost their job. Then in later years, when Adair was leading it, it was ramped up much more significantly. That was just the initial success. I think that’s done a lot for regional inequality, you know, if you look at Berwick. It’s a tourism town and an agriculture town. Therefore, it’s got seasonal employment. If you come out of the school at 16 or 17 in Berwick you may get a job in a holiday camp or in a restaurant. The minimum wage has helped those people. It’s got them up now to virtually £10 an hour, and the private sector would never have delivered that on its own. I think that has done a lot for regional inequality.
What I’m frustrated with are state schools. I’ve seen a lot of that in the six years I’ve been on the Ofsted board, some of the things that were done by the Thatcher government and continued and accelerated by the Labour government, good things like the national curriculum, and even academisation: every upside has a downside. I look at state education now, and I think particularly with the Michael Gove approach, which is still predominant, we’ve driven out local discretion. We’ve driven out independent teaching. We’ve driven out creativity. We’ve driven out arts, in the passion for academic rote education. That really dispirits me. Because people like me – I’m a working-class lad, I went to state grammar school, and ended up in Cambridge, I was lucky, the academic route worked for me – I have lots of friends for whom the academic route would never work. And it just disappoints me that we can’t have a more blended state education system, that is strong on standards, strong on rigour. No apology for that. But actually allows people to learn in different ways.
ENDS