Judith Blake, Baroness Blake of Leeds, is Opposition Frontbench Spokesperson for Housing, Communities and Local Government. Before joining the House of Lords in 2021, Blake served as leader of Leeds City Council from 2015-2021, serving in local government from 1996 and as chair of the Core Cities network.
This interview was conducted on 20 July 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in regional regeneration and development over the past two decades?
My administration came into power in Leeds in 2010. We faced 6 years of Coalition government, as Labour went into opposition nationally at the same election. It was quite an interesting period, having had that length of time of Labour government, but so much of it in opposition locally. We then came back into power, facing austerity.
It was very deliberate policy from the government to reduce the size of the state, with some absolutely punitive actions. All of the money that was coming to us as local government through the grant system, for example – which supported so much of our regeneration work, our children’s work, charities, third-sector organisations in the city – was just cut immediately. It wasn’t even as though we had time until the next budget-setting period to realise what was coming in.
Things were cut straight away. It was an incredibly difficult time. Back then, we were able to predict the real difficulties that we’re going to come our way. The lead-in to that took some time. We were looking at the Coalition government and it was at the time when George Osborne was the Chancellor. He brought into being the Northern Powerhouse agenda. I was deputy leader of Leeds at the time, responsible for turning around children’s services (which had become inadequate under the previous Lib Dem administration), and that was linking into our thinking around the inclusive growth strategy.
I became chair of Core Cities when I became Leader of the council, but I was very actively involved in the Core Cities network beforehand. We worked with organisations like the Centre for Cities, for example, really looking at how we could reset the way we worked. During that period, in the run up to me becoming Leader, we negotiated Growth Deals. We did have quite a good dialogue, with the Treasury in particular, but also with the Department of Local Government under Greg Clark. Leeds, through the establishment of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, achieved one of the biggest Growth Deals in the country and we were able to set up really good local partnerships to deliver our skills agenda, for example.
It was through all that work that we really began to recognise that the way to deliver on this agenda was through the local partnerships: through very close working – for example, on skills – with the local authority as convener, bringing together employers, colleges, young people, education, all the different educational establishments, focusing on the best way to get our young people into positions where they could take advantage of the opportunities that we were starting to create in the city and the wider region.
We went into the Brexit referendum, the change of government, and we witnessed a distinct change of direction. The Northern Powerhouse was mentioned but wasn’t really brought into. We got to the point with Core Cities over the time I was leader and chair where we just started to make some engagement with Theresa May’s government, but really, after that, all the engagement with government was really about preparing, helping us to prepare, for Brexit – trying to get them to realise that we could engage with local business, with health authorities, all of the areas that we’re really concerned about.
And then going into Covid-19, it has been a very difficult landscape. Through that period we negotiated the West Yorkshire devolution deal. We wanted to go for Leeds City Region, our functioning economic area, but the legislation was too difficult for government to help. It was the three districts from North Yorkshire that were the problem, because that would have probably triggered a reorganisation, and they didn’t want to go to go there. We then started taking at a one Yorkshire level and got huge sign-up from all of Yorkshire apart from, I think, Sheffield and Rotherham. But then it became obvious that we were going to start losing out. They were giving funding direct to the mayoral authorities that were established, and we bit the bullet and came up with the West Yorkshire model.
I’m very pleased to say that we managed to deliver a woman as the mayor, and that was one of the things that I was very keen to see because I really do feel it makes a difference. We were beginning to see real breakthrough in women coming into leadership roles in councils and the resetting of the agenda, around inclusive growth in particular.
I think it’s been a period of real frustration watching different funds of money become available, with local authorities, mayoral authorities having to bid for these pots of money. It became a beauty contest. We know that money was definitely has been targeted – through the Levelling Up Fund, the Town Centre Fund – into areas where political opponents have been successful. It’s very frustrating to see the emphasis go away from need. Whatever you think of the European Union, their funding was targeted to deprivation and, of course, the other big player on the block is the net zero agenda and trying to work down in London now through legislation to get those as priorities is incredibly difficult.
Why doesn’t it work? The Town Centres Fund does not target the real structural issues that need to be addressed. It does not address the real changes that need to happen. I think it is one of the basic problems that we’ve got. There is no real sense with Levelling Up of the fundamental, structural change which I believe needs to happen to deliver the long-term changes. It is a long-term programme. The other work I do is I’m now vice chair of the UK 2070 Commission that’s chaired by Bob Kerslake. 2070 was deliberately chosen as a long-term perspective, recognising the really big structural changes that need to go over the life cycle of parliaments. The EU 6-year funding, for example, did transcend those time frames.
Q: How was the experience of entering local politics in the late 1990s?
It was a period, it felt to me, of opportunity. There was a huge amount of energy, different thinking, different strands coming together. My own personal story was that I was first elected in 1996, in the run up to 1997. We were winning seats in Leeds that we never dreamt of winning. Mine was very much a marginal. We lost all three seats again, I was the last one to go in 2000. I used my time then to work as social policy manager for the regional assembly.
Q: How was your work as a social policy manager at the regional assembly linked to the Regional Development Agency (Yorkshire Forward)?
There was a Regional Assembly, which was the politicians. It was all the leaders of the councils, and I was supporting their work. Yorkshire Forward had been set up as the development agency and the regional assembly would have had oversight – if we’d had been successful in getting the referendum through in the North East, then Yorkshire would have followed. John Prescott’s dream of elected regional government would have come to being.
I went back onto the council in 2002 and went into a scrutiny role. These were new functions for the authority. I became deputy leader of the accounts of the council in 2003/4 and we had a year before we lost control in 2004. The structure of local government and national government in England does tend to suggest that once you go into national government, you do tend to lose locally. Is there a way through the devolution agenda of ensuring that that doesn’t happen? It’s so deeply frustrating to have a government that is trying to deliver all of those things and not being in control locally to be able to benefit from it.
Q: How much of that excitement in the early 2000s was a result of additional funding and new programmes coming from national government and how much of it was about reform and new opportunities at a local level?
That’s an interesting one. What we were doing in Leeds, in a way, was actually anticipating that we were likely to go into opposition. We set up the Vision for Leeds, which brought together the different sectors, the private sector, public sector, voluntary sector, to work up programmes locally, to take advantage of the funding streams coming in from government. We were able to actually work through partnerships, anticipating that we probably wouldn’t be running the local authority, which turned out to be so.
It was a mixture of the two, actually – funding and reform. Through the period in opposition, we were able to keep those partnerships going. Drawing funding down from government but making sure that we had a seat at the table, if you like. The other thing that we managed to do was modernisation. We established a cross-party executive board, so myself as the leader of the opposition actually had a non-executive seat at that table, which meant that we kept very much in contact with all of the policy development. We very much kept a close eye on what was happening, which then set us up to coming back into power in 2010 and meant we weren’t out in the wilderness.
Q: What do you think of the reform process, especially the move away from the committee to the leader-and-cabinet system, during that period?
I think, unfortunately, the restructuring of the groups meant that – this is always the risk – some councillors felt very distanced from the decision-making process. I don’t think that the thinking went far enough in terms of empowering those local members to really have a say in their local communities. How far down do you devolve into communities and the empowerment of local people?
I think there was very much a sense in local government that you gripped an issue and drove it through. I guess that ability to do that was watered down in a sense, which in some cases could have been a good thing. I think in terms of the desire to have the executive driving stuff through perhaps didn’t always work. There’s so much vested in such a small number of people that keep a handle on it. It all was quite challenging, really.
Q: Do you think that’s improved now?
In other authorities, there has been a desire to move back to the committee system. I think some of it is looking through rose-tinted glasses because actually, the committee chairs did have a lot of power. The idea that there was an egalitarian sort of approach, in respect of the committees and how decisions were made, is probably a little bit a little bit off the mark.
Q: Did you experience issues with a disconnect between Leeds and elsewhere in the combined authority?
There were quite a lot of layers. When I became leader, I chaired the group of Labour leaders on the combined authority. The leader of Bradford took over the chair of the combined authority itself. We tried to work together to make sure that we involved more of the local players in the decision-making. It was quite a tough period because there was politically a sense that devolution wasn’t necessarily the best way to get resources. A sense that it could mean that the tap could be turned off even stronger, if more resources came down through the combined authority rather than directly to local authorities. It was quite an interesting period of time.
Q: What about the move towards directly elected mayors?
Obviously we participated in the 2011 referendum about elected mayors, and everywhere in the region had resoundingly come out and said that they didn’t want to have one. We had to deal with that.
Manchester’s combined authority arrangements have been had been very long established, and they worked very effectively. They unilaterally really moved forward to accept the directly elected mayor model. I can’t remember the exact sequencing. In Liverpool, Joe Anderson moved it forward, and that’s an interesting, slightly different model.
In West Yorkshire all the leaders of the local authorities felt that they had worked very closely together very successfully, and that a directly elected mayor wasn’t necessarily something that we needed. We were proving – through delivering our Growth Deal, working with partners – that we could very successfully deliver the streams of funding that were coming down to us without going through another reorganisation. But it became obvious that this was the show in town, and that directly elected mayors were to be a requirement, and we would have to take that on board and go forward with it.
Q: Where was that coming from?
I think it was more a direct decision from central government. This was the model that I guess would serve their interests best. But it hasn’t actually proved the case apart from in Birmingham.
Q: How do you think about your relationships with other local government leaders?
We’re just recognising that we probably need to be basing city’s models far more on places like the United States, where they have far more autonomy, they work directly with the private sector, they’re getting direct financing coming in. I think there’s a lot of rethinking and resetting, but there was a very strong network and a lot of work going on beneath the levels of the leaders. For example, crosscutting work from across the cities on cultural development, for example, on energy, on housing.
Q: You raised earlier the spectre of Yorkshire-wide devolution as an alternative that was considered by the region. Could you tell us a little bit more about what you’re thinking was on that?
We were told that we couldn’t do a city region [stretching up to York, from Leeds] because it would just cause too much disruption with North Yorkshire. We were told to come up with a model that we thought would work for everyone. We did exactly that, and we got sign up from the leaders across Yorkshire. I think there was a perception in in Whitehall that we’d never get agreement, but we did. We set up one Yorkshire leaders board with all of the leaders from the local authorities, who were invited to develop a set of proposals. We commissioned an economic analysis of how it would work and how it would deliver. I think we actually came quite close to achieving success on it.
There’s still a commitment from the areas to move to a ‘One Yorkshire’ model, and it’s still very much all to play for. We’ve got business interests involved. The CBI [Confederation of British Industry], Chambers of Commerce, Institute of Directors. We’ve got the regional TUC [Trades Union Congress] around the table. We’ve got the archbishop of York’s diocese involved the voluntary sector. All the different political parties are engaged, members of the House of Lords, as well as representatives from the Yorkshire leaders on board. The leads of the Climate Commission set up to deal with climate change in Leeds, independently chaired by Leeds University, are involved. Working with partners was the template. We’ve got now got a Yorkshire Climate Commission looking at all of the energy supplies across the country. Transport is obviously a key area where we think we could get real payback from working collectively.
Q: What would this Yorkshire body evolve into? How would it fit with the new mayors?
The thinking behind it was, there were problems with local authority boundaries. We would rise above that and all come together, but keep the architecture underneath it. You’d still have the combined authorities working in the localities. Then we could work out how the funding would come down from government and then be distributed between the local areas and what resource would be best held at a Yorkshire level to service areas that we felt very strongly would work at a Yorkshire wide level.
Q: What do you think about accountability?
We felt very strongly that whilst people would probably tolerate a mayor for Yorkshire, having another layer of governance was probably just not what where people are at the moment. That’s why we came up with the using the existing democratic structures. There are all sorts of conversations about having a having an assembly or setting up a scrutiny process that would operate as an assembly, but that hasn’t been finalised.
Q: What do you think is preventing things from proceeding?
The frustration has always been that so many decisions are being taken in Whitehall, so far away from what is actually needed on the ground. And that has accelerated. The point is, we don’t want to establish a system where local government in Scotland, for example, feels that you’ve got devolution to Holyrood, but it doesn’t come out then from Holyrood to the local authority. That’s what we would definitely seek to avoid by working out a clear formula of how money and resource coming down to the Yorkshire level would then be distributed to the local areas.
Q: Where do you think it has worked well?
I think that the Growth Deals were a good example of how it could work. I describe it as the obscenity of the myriad of different funding streams. It means different areas have to compete against each other to get the funding that should be theirs by right, that is based on a very clear formula of deprivation need. That has been whittled away through the way the legislation that has come to alter the funding regime coming out of Europe and into the Shared Prosperity Fund. I am really concerned that it will be undermined even further.
Q: What was it about the Growth Deals that worked better?
You knew what was coming down and that there was a definite sense of how it was going to be delivered on. The fact that it was monitored as well and that there was an accountability. People will look back to those ideas – and the single pot, that was an approach that had potential.
I don’t know why, but housing and transport to seem to be left out of that process. It is recognised that good homes, good connectivity has to be the bedrock of delivering Levelling Up. It’s just so obvious now, but unfortunately, they weren’t part of the mix. I can remember my role as social policy manager with the regional assembly. We didn’t have the remit around housing that you would have thought should be there. We did as best we could. I’d love to go back now and talk to the people who were there making those decisions as to why they weren’t included.
Q: When you look back, what do you think works for driving regional regeneration in the UK? Where do you think we are still struggling?
It’s very difficult not to be too negative, but just the sheer fact that we’re still the most centralised country in Europe – I used to be able to say apart from Albania, but I think Albania has jumped above us now – is an absolute failure of government. It’s unforgivable because we know that decisions that are made closer to the areas involving the people who will be affected by them is the way forward. Until we address that fundamental culture, breaking down the grip that Whitehall has, I can’t see how we’re going to make the progress we need to make. It’s as stark as that.
The successes, in the 1990s, were those incredible big conversations: setting up community gatherings where Tony would come in and just sit down, roll the sleeves up and talk to people. All of those things were really, really powerful. It was a time of enormous optimism against a very difficult backdrop. But then the management of the economy opened up the way for the Conservatives coming in and having a 12-year period of taking away what I believe is rightfully ours. Our communities have suffered. And boy, Covid-19 exposed that in the cruellest way. Very cynical things.
I absolutely believe that public health should be in local government. Local government structures were set up originally way back in the mid-19th century to deal with some of the worst public health and issues and setting up could surge systems as well. All of that municipal stuff happened in the 19th century. I really welcomed moving public health budgets to the local authorities. What we didn’t realise was that took it out of the NHS ring fence, which meant that then government could come in and just slash the budgets. I think this is true of net zero as well – those communities where the health inequalities have gone through the roof are suffering the most. The way that the education system has gone, I really struggle with enormously. SATs results came out last week or the week before, and it was the first cohort where you could see the effect. It was the first and a really significant step back in a very long time.
I’m really excited about what’s happening now in opposition. I’m working with Ed Miliband on energy and working up an alternative industrial strategy. We worked with Greg Clark, when he was in government, he really was going out having the conversations. But that just doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. Picking up what was being developed and creating an opposition narrative for it. I think it’s very powerful, very powerful, and still the commitment to devolution is there.
ENDS