Kate Kennally is Chief Executive of Cornwall County Council, before where she worked for a decade in the London Borough of Barnet.
This interview was conducted on 7 February 2023.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I’m the chief executive of Cornwall Council. I’ve been working in local government since the mid-1990s. I spent a little bit of time in the NHS and in the voluntary sector, but place leadership through local government has been my background. I’ve had the opportunity to work for the last seven years in Cornwall, 10 years in London; and, prior to that, my time was spent working largely around the South East, both in Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, but also then doing some regional improvement work in Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire.
Q: Over the time that you’ve been involved in place leadership, what do you think has been the primary policy success and what is your abiding frustration?
The mid-1990s emphasis, from a place leadership perspective, was around delivering strong public services. It was quite a prescriptive time as a local government leader. There were national standards and national framework. Largely, you were following a script around what good looked like. There was clear investment in exchange for reform.
We then saw a shift away from investing in public services that were quite heavily weighted towards people, towards starting to really think about economic development and to support that growth dividend. That shift really started to come through from the mid-part of the first decade of this century – before the economic crash, before we went into a period of austerity.
There was a slow shift in terms of the public discourse: that public services generally got better, but outcomes at a place level weren’t fundamentally shifting. A number of local authorities hit all the targets, but there were still some stubborn issues around growing levels of obesity or areas that felt kind of left behind.
My authorities were thinking, ‘hang on, we need to be thinking much more about how we move from being a public service deliverer into being a “place enabler”: looking at outcomes at a place level’. You started to see Total Place collaborations, and partnerships started to build.
I think that was a really exciting period. It felt for me that we had a really solid set of public services – they weren’t falling over – and that was then creating a platform from which to move into that place leadership space, with confidence. We then had a set of global circumstances and domestic policies that started to blow some of those things off course. We haven’t lost them, but they’ve then taken different directions.
Q: How do you see the difference in place leadership when you’re in London or the South East compared to Cornwall?
It’s hugely different. I spent quite a bit of time working in an outer London borough, a successful, prosperous outer London borough. Obviously, there were distinctions between communities and different parts of that borough. But by and large, that borough would be successful not because of what that council did, but because it was part of a successful suburb in a global city. And by and large, what that local authority did really didn’t feature too much in either the business’ psyche or in most residents’ psyche, apart from when the council tax bill landed or when the bins didn’t get collected. The contrast to that, in places which are suffering from multiple deprivations or have got a different kind of identity, is remarkable.
I also did some work in Hastings around East Sussex where the role of the borough council, in an area that was suffering from multiple deprivation in largely affluent East Sussex, meant that people really looked to the council to create those conditions for regeneration and prosperity.
In Cornwall, you’ve got the local authority being very active in people’s lives but coupled with a very strong identity. For some, Cornwall is a nation, not a part of England; and Cornwall Council is the place leader for that nation. The regeneration and regional disparities agenda that the council was dealing with was amplified by the place affiliation that the council had.
Your task as a place leader is to build the right partnerships and arrangements that reflect your economic geography. But not just about your functional economic area: it’s a functional social area, a place that makes sense, that has integrity to it (in a way that Avon never worked because it didn’t mean anything to anyone). We can’t draw lines on maps. These things actually have a set of social and economic relationships around them that good place leadership will pick up on.
Q: Another part of Cornwall’s story is that it has experimented with its institutions, its geography, its governance structures over the past decade. Could you tell us more about that?
It certainly helps having sea on three sides. It makes your boundaries much easier to define. But also, place identity goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. You have to find ways to tap into the grain of a place. The formation of the unitary council in 2009, whilst it was an unloved child that came into the world, actually gave a strong identity in its own right. Prior to that, the politics of Cornwall inside Cornwall, the politics of place, was playing out between seven councils, none of which were particularly good. Cornwall didn’t act with one voice. Politics still play out within Cornwall council, but to the outside world we’re Cornwall and we speak with one voice – and I think that that has made a huge difference.
I do think Cornwall, as a place within the UK, is seen as having a distinctive agenda that has got something to say and something to contribute. We found ourselves at a meeting a few years ago that had Sadiq Khan, Andy Street, Andy Burnham and the leader of Cornwall Council. They slightly scratch their heads and said, why are you here? We’d given the leader a prepared script which said, ‘Actually, Cornwall’s an exploded city. Why wouldn’t we be here? We’ve got all of the same issues, all of the same challenges, all the same, opportunities as cities. But we’re just doing it over a much bigger geographical area. We’re here because we’ve got something to say and something to contribute’.
There’s been a new confidence that we’ve been seeking through these governance changes, supported by a strong approach around town and parish councils. We can’t do everything from one place in Cornwall when you have places that have multiple identities. So that coming together was also underpinned by a commitment to devolve to a local level where that made sense. The formation of the council in 2009 also coincided with a movement for a Cornish assembly and the formation of the argument for the protection of Cornish as a national minority. All of those things also came together. Then we caught the wave on the back of the Scottish independence referendum. Place can wax and wane in terms of where it sits on the policy agenda and as a place leader, you have to try and catch a moment to elevate yourself up that agenda.
Q: Do you draw the broad conclusion, having seen it happen, that the move to unitary is painful and difficult politically in advance but that afterwards people look back and say that it was the right reform to make?
There’s still some people in Cornwall who will say that it was the worst thing that ever happened and long-live Restormel Borough council – which at one time was rated as serving no people well with no prospects for improvement. What an institution to keep hold of. But it’s like anything; the politics of identity. When it’s about closing libraries, it isn’t so much about the loss of that library, it’s about that sense of what your authority thinks about your place. Place leadership is about finding the right footprint to do the right job at the right time.
Cornwall is now contributing to the national stage and people can see that: the fact that we got a spaceport; that we had the G7 leaders’ conference; that we were the second area outside of Manchester to have a devolution deal. All of those things are happening because we’re doing that at Cornwall-level.
But there are some things that people say should absolutely be done much more at the local level. It’s our job at Cornwall Council to do that. But would people go back to seven authorities? No. And do I think that it’s a prize that is worth having? Would I say to Devon, ‘Do it’? Yes, I would. Have I said to Somerset, do it? Yes, I have. And Buckinghamshire. Because I think it just makes sense in terms of delivery of public services.
I’m speaking here as an individual. I think that the English local government system is fragmented and incoherent, compared to Scotland and Wales and to Northern Ireland where there is a greater coherence in terms of structure and approach. It has inhibited effective place leadership and devolution – from the Isles of Scilly and Rutland to Manchester and every place in between.
Both Gordon Brown’s paper [Commission on the future of the United Kingdom] and the devolution framework are trying to create a unit that central government can work with to provide effective place leadership. Now it’s putting something on top of, or in place of, existing units, rather than implementing local government reorganisation. But it’s very difficult, for a resident, to sometimes make sense of how all of this fits together. And, ultimately, I think it will change.
Q: Pre-2010 situation, were any benefits to Cornwall from being part of the South-West Regional Development Agency footprint?
I wasn’t in Cornwall then, but there is no grieving for the RDA. Indeed, Cornwall, at the time, set up a whole range of different institutions to make sure that Cornwall’s needs were being addressed. It’s a long way from Cornwall to Bristol. The Tewkesbury question was something that was shared with me: that it’s closer from Tewkesbury to Scotland than it is from Tewkesbury down to the far west of Cornwall. The idea that could all be managed in one place was not something that Cornwall saw served its needs well.
I don’t believe that Cornwall is an island either. I think that Cornwall shares many opportunities that come with the South West. The Great South West grouping is going to be interesting. But to have investment and regional policy directed from somewhere that’s a three-hour drive away didn’t feel responsive to Cornwall.
Q: How about when you were in Hastings, under the South East RDA?
There is good work that regional place leadership can have, but I was working in local government with the RDAs around at that time. It wasn’t always clear what they were doing and how we fitted together.
Q: There has been an increased focus on city-led growth. Clearly that’s not an option open to Cornwall. How do you think about growth where you don’t have a major city?
When I landed the job in Cornwall, some of my London colleagues said, ‘Why are you going to Cornwall?’ Well, why wouldn’t I go to Cornwall? Because the trends that I can see, which the pandemic has helped drive too, mean that the way in which that we’re going to lead our lives in the future in this century are different from how we lead our lives in the last century.
There are three things that I talk about where I think Cornwall has got things to speak to on a national level. First, the whole decarbonising agenda.
Second, to live in a decarbonising way, you need to digitalise how you live. And we have utilised a lot of European funding in superfast broadband rollout. Geography isn’t now measured in miles. It’s measured in nanoseconds in many ways in which that we’re now working.
And, third, how we’re leading our lives a more decentralised way – how we consume, how we socialise, how we work. We’re seeing that in terms of people choosing to live in Cornwall but work remotely. Consuming local food. Wanting to be part of smaller communities. And that was the essence of Covid-19 pandemic. 15-minute cities are driving some of the discussions that are going on within Manchester. The reality is that Truro is a complete 15-minute city, in its entirety. The way Cornwall works is a series of 15-minute cities.
We have the ingredients that other places are now seeking to replicate within city-based economies. And we’ve also got the natural assets that are going to be needed in terms of how we lead our lives more sustainably. We are the green lungs as well for cities.
It needs to be an ‘and-and’ debate, not an ‘either-or’ debate. For me, Cornwall has got these ingredients that I think are going to be features of 21st century living much more than people sitting on a tube for two hours trying to get into central London, paying really high house prices but without some of the elements that you can get through living in a more sustainable way.
Q: A lot of people we’ve talked to would say the London economy has been a strength for England and the UK, but that the bias of public spending on infrastructure and innovation to London has been detrimental to the wider UK economy. In a post-EU structural funds world, do you have the resources to do what you need to do to deliver your vision?
It certainly has been incredibly skewed towards the South East. Equally we’ve done some research, through Britain’s Leading Edge, bringing together areas that don’t have a major city; that are on the periphery.
We can observe that there is a policy corridor: if you imagine the UK as a person, it’s like somebody wearing a sash that starts in the North-West, and travels down through Greater Manchester through Birmingham and then pops out in Kent, having gone through London.
Outside of that sash, you can see some of those more peripheral areas. Actually, if we were still in the European Union with structural funds, would have joined Cornwall as less developed regions because they haven’t been the places that are attracted the innovation funding, the growth funding. It’s not north/south: there is another dimension to the way in which money has flowed that has been shaped by this focus on agglomeration and driven investment into areas of more dense population.
So, for us, the missed opportunity is about harnessing the geo-resources – the tech metals, the natural capital – that is also going to be needed for a balanced economy. I was at a meeting just this week with a major investment company and the biggest investment class that they’re wanting to invest in is natural capital. And where is that going to be? It’s going to be in those more peripheral areas with lower populations where some of those natural capital assets are. As we think about how the economy is moving into those more environmental and sustainable elements, there’s an opportunity for a rebalancing through a confident narrative that areas such as Cornwall can be bringing to the table.
There’s a piece of work that’s going on at the moment – I’m sitting on the steering group – called the 3Ci Project, which is looking across the core cities and London around how to attract investment to help decarbonise private sector investment. There will always be a proportion of emissions that can’t be got rid of, that are going to need to use some of that natural capital investment. Instead of that being something that the cities go off and do, I’m bringing together cities and places like Cornwall for a conversation that says, ‘we’ve got some of those assets for investment, so let’s work together to attract that private sector investment, with government, to do what we need to do in our places’.
We’ve got something different that we bring to the table. It’s about a maturing set of relationships that are needed rather than what has been a competing set of arrangements, that we continue to have, in terms of how we try and drive growth in this country.
Q: We’ve asked you about resources, but it’s also about levers and whether the government’s willing to devolve and allow places to get on with it?
Yes, and this is my sadness. I was given for Christmas a book that celebrated the Jubilee of County Councils in 1939 – 50 years on. The functions and responsibilities that counties had in 1939 make our current devolution ambitions, by whatever government, look very weak indeed. Strong place leadership was absolutely key to addressing some fundamental issues in the first part of the 20th century. I think it’s got an important role to play in this century as well.
Q And if you are picking out for resurgent Cornwall your top three 1939-style powers?
1939 saw a greater responsibility around skills, with that whole piece of our higher education sitting under the ambit of counties.
Second, how land was being used – small holdings; environmental protection; how we’re joining that together… the evolution of Defra and those arms-length bodies should be in the mix.
And third, health services were very different in 1939. There’s a real opportunity for Integrated Care Boards to become a stronger part of that place leadership. That’s a quick answer.
Q: One positive change in the last 10 years is that you now have Cornwall-wide planning rather than seven different planning authorities – how big a deal is that?
It’s hugely important. I’m going to Cabinet tomorrow to see the adoption of a climate change Development Policies Document. I think we’re the first in England to have done it, developed in quick speed, looking at how we utilise our land better in terms of helping us with climate change. A single local plan helping drive growth.
In our devolution deal, the opportunity for a mayoral development corporation is in reality not needed in Cornwall because we are a single planning authority. But there are things that we do want devolved to us: greater ability in terms of change of use; decisions going through a planning framework, whether that’s around second homes and holiday lets – why can’t those matters be determined locally? We get that there’s not a second homes issue in Oldham, but there is a second home issue in Cornwall. Let’s have the right place leadership model that can determine how to deal with that.
Q: What’s your experience of dealing with Whitehall ministers and officials? Often people who haven’t worked in government talk about Whitehall as being homogenous – the ‘Whitehall view’, the ‘Westminster view’ – has that been your experience?
No. Of course, more recently, there’s been a lot of different ministers that have been in various roles, particularly over the last few years.
What there has been is a strong sense of the role of the Treasury. Sometimes the Treasury gets used as the reason not to progress things. Whether that’s fair or unfair, I think that that becomes the default position when things maybe are pushing the envelope or seen as being too tricky.
Sometimes local government and place leaders can be too deferential to Whitehall. One of the good things that has happened with the new Metro Mayors – the Andy Streets, the Andy Burnhams, the Ben Houchens, Tracy Brabin – has been a bunch of strong political leaders that aren’t deferential and have been able to say ‘No, we are an equal but different branch of the governance of this country’. And I think that that makes a difference in helping cut through and find ways to get things done.
Q: Many people have told us how hard they found it was to get particular departments to devolve, particularly in education and skills?
Absolutely. And the Department of Health as well, I think it’s been in that centralisers camp, too.
Q: Who else would you put in that ‘centralisers’ category?
I would have DWP in that category as well, but I think that that is starting to shift with the employment support approach and some of the conversations that have been going on with the trailblazer areas. Universal Credit has been really difficult for them. One of the biggest challenges that we’ve got is going to be the workforce. They do need to work with place leaders to find ways to unlock opportunities, particularly for the economically inactive. They have been difficult – maybe there’s an opportunity for some change there. Defra is just, I think, a wasted opportunity. Maybe because the whole growth agenda has largely been driven around urban cities, but Defra haven’t really been around the table as much as they should be.
Q: How about energy and industrial policy?
They get it. They get that we’ve got resources and geo-resources here within Cornwall. But our grid infrastructure has been set up with regards to fossil-based energy generation. Our challenge is that we’ve got the new resources but a grid infrastructure that reflects old ways of generation. And the investment that is needed to change some of that is quite difficult.
In some ways, it’s easier to go after some of those opportunities in areas where there was previous generation, like up in Teesside or the east coast where you previously had electricity generation and grid infrastructure that is able to export.
Through the Devo Deal, we’ve managed to get partnerships that help unlock things that we’ve got in Cornwall that might not be replicable elsewhere, like deep geothermal or some of the floating offshore wind. That’s recognised as being an opportunity. With a greater focus now on energy security, I feel optimistic that the work on local area energy plans is an opportunity for places like Cornwall to be able to attract more powers and money to unlock our capacity.
Q: At the start, you talked about the reforming centralism of the first decade of the 2000s. More recently there’s been a shift towards more elected local power. Do you think Whitehall is now accepting that’s the right approach?
We’ve been through a series of changes. We had the Thatcher era, which saw centralisation and the stripping of functions from place leaders and regional bodies into Whitehall. We’ve seen the New Labour period which saw the establishment of the devolved institutions and the regions, with the devolved institutions being politically-led – and they endured, whereas the regions, which weren’t politically led, faded away.
During that next phase, the Welsh Parliament has come into being and the Scottish Government has become more distinct and separate from Westminster kind of politics, with political leadership serving populations of one million, three million, five million. But we do England in a homogeneous way, out of Whitehall. I think that those wider trends meant that wasn’t sustainable.
Then there was a really difficult decision to be made during austerity: a period not of investment and growth, but resetting and contraction. I’m assuming that when you’re in that situation [in Whitehall], the opportunity to share some of that decision-making around becomes more attractive than in a time where you are investing. We are a centralised state. We haven’t always been like this. That centralisation accelerated in the 1980s. We’re seeing some kind of trends that are taking us in some different directions now. And I think that, for England and English local government, and Cornwall, we are now in a place where we’re ready and we’re good to go.
Q: Andy Burnham has to agree a spatial plan with 10 different constituent local authorities in Manchester. Andy Street has it even more complicated because he’s got this huge Birmingham with different politics. Is there anywhere else other than Cornwall that is looking to have this power under a single-tier authority?
No. I think that, by function, a Cornwall mayoral level 3 devolution deal, as things currently stand, would make Cornwall Council be the most powerful by function, local government, or place leader in the country. This is subject to public consultation, which is underway at the moment. The decision-making will take place in the first part of this calendar year.
Q: What are the upsides – and are there things that you are concerned about?
When we’re talking to residents and businesses about, they say, ‘Well, what are the downsides?’ There is a strong campaign in Cornwall against having a directly elected Mayor, believing that this governance change is unnecessary particularly as we made the shift to becoming a unitary in 2009. If we don’t proceed, there is risk of a loss of influence as there does exist an implicit league table about where you find yourself. And I want Cornwall to be a Premiership club, not a Championship club. I want Cornwall to be around the table. I want Cornwall to have a strong voice, to be a leader for rural areas, speaking and advocating for what we bring to the UK and to the county. Increasingly under the current policy framework that will be mayors, because 300-odd council leaders are too many to do effective business with. We have a role in attracting other forms of investment into our places, not just the relationship with central government. It’s about how we face out nationally and globally as well. That is a big deal.
Cornwall residents do ask, ‘Are we being bribed with this investment fund to have a mayor? What’s the real added powers that we’re getting?’ And to some this feels very devolution-light. In the level three devolution framework, we get adult education, or mayoral development corporations – but we’re a single planning authority already. There are opportunities around brownfield funding and potentially single transport pots, housing pots, into the future.
My message is, ‘Look, at the evidence elsewhere: strong place-based leadership leads to further deals. With the current policy context, you’ve got to go on this first journey in terms of creating that single identifiable leader that will then be Cornwall’s voice for all of those things that we want to see next’. It seems to me that what we’re getting is three types of mayoral authorities emerging: the Manchester/West Midlands model sitting over a series of boroughs and urban-based economies; the East Midlands, the new kind of county-combined authority headed by a mayor. And then mayoral authorities, of which the most powerful will be those that convert from a unitary council.
They’re still going to have the challenge of what happens with an adverse Ofsted report or a child protection set of issues on their patch that that isn’t something that Andy Burnham or Andy Street has to worry about. They’re still going to have issues around potholes or dogs on beaches – the thing that generates the most angst in Cornwall, it seems.
They will chair a cabinet that is drawn from the councillors. And political realities kick in very quickly if you can’t agree a budget.
Q: What happens if you elect a Liberal Democrat mayor with a Conservative majority?
It is complicated, but is it any more complicated than for the first 12 years of Cornwall Council when there was no overall control? The arithmetic of the chamber shapes and forms the executive and I think that that will be the same if you have a directly elected mayor. And of course, there are examples of this from those local authorities without a devolution deal who chose to make that shift in terms of governance.
Q: Have you got other county councils like Norfolk and Suffolk watching closely?
In places like Norfolk and Suffolk, their devolution deals are mired in discussions with the districts who are not around the table. Those places are very interested in what’s going on in Cornwall.
Q: But you were saying it would have been hard to do this without having already made the move to unitary?
I think that there is a congruence and a cohesion that we have in Cornwall that the unitary helped generate. What we have is a strong team Cornwall approach. Our geography sometimes drives that. But the sense that the council helps facilitate and broker local partnerships, local relationships between civil society, the business community and public sector organisations, is well established.
Q: Some argue that it’s got to be evolutionary on two-tier to unitary because that’s the only way that politically possible?
Well, it’s only been seen as being politically impossible fairly recently. The 1974 reforms were driven from Westminster and implemented across the country. It’s only been fairly recently that we said, ‘It’s too difficult to deal with’.
In this next period of deals, over 50 per cent will be covered by a directly elected mayor. They’re putting a layer in, and the other stuff will happen underneath. I think that local government is sometimes – and I’ve made this point to colleagues in the LGA – too vanilla in how it advocates. It tries to come up with a solution that everyone’s happy with. Sometimes local government needs to come to the debate and say ‘You could do this, or you could do that. This would work in this way, but it would upset this group’ rather than trying to come up with something that is a one size fits all, because it doesn’t fit all. As a result, we’re falling away and we’re falling behind.
Q: You mentioned the East Midlands which doesn’t have Leicestershire as part of it. There is the Portsmouth-Southampton issue. In the end, doesn’t central government have to tell those places to sort it out?
Yes – and they’ll be a bit angsty for two or three years. But what we do as councils is hold that longer term place-based vision. It’s a really important responsibility. Too often we get sucked into the here and now, dealing with today’s problems. That is the vast amount of what councils do, dealing with people’s day-to-day needs. But they also hold the vision and we need place leaders that can do that. Sometimes that isn’t just good enough in this country.
Q: Could the counties steal a march in terms of radicalism over the big urban areas?
Yes, I do believe that. Okay, the rocket that got launched from Cornwall didn’t quite make it into orbit. But who would ever have thought that Cornwall would have a spaceport, would be making that investment and seeing some of those longer-term plays? There is a clearer sense of kind of what we’re trying to do, with our kind of counties strategic authorities and refining that role, articulating and bringing that together, I think the time is now because of all those other trends that I was pointing to, the shift in thinking about what good growth look like? What does prosperity mean? What are the risks and where are some of the opportunities? There are a lot of those that are sitting in areas outside of our city-based economies.
Q: When you look back over the last 30 years of place-based leadership, what is the one thing you would say that really worked and what is the biggest missed opportunity?
European funding for Cornwall gave long-term certainty to make some long-term investment. Bringing higher education into Cornwall, hugely transformative in terms of trying to change the demographics. Long-term investment is key but I think we’ve moved so far away from that at the moment that we absolutely need to get back to it.
I think the other is to try and set the challenge in a way that drives and brings action; seeing how we get the scales of Cornwall PLC to balance; how we reduce the demand side through better public service integration, early intervention and prevention; but also grow the wealth and the income on the other side. That is the task of place leaders. You need to have a balance of measures. You can’t do devolution that just deals with one side of the scales. You need to be looking at those things in balance so that you can take longer-term decisions and make choices and trade-offs in terms of how you work and how you lead.
ENDS