Michael Gove has been the Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath since 2005. He served in the Cabinet of three Prime Ministers, including as Secretary of State for Education (2010-14), Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (2017-19), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (2019-21) and as Secretary of State for Levelling Up from 2021.
This interview was conducted on 21 July 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your roles in growth policy over the past few decades?
I was in the Coalition government between 2010 and 2014. I was Education Secretary. For the following eleven months of that government, I was the Chief Whip. After 2015, I was Secretary of State of Justice, Environment and Levelling Up (the old Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government). At that point, education did not include universities and higher education: further education straddled Education and Business.
Q: What do you think has been the main frustration and the main success in regional policy over the past few decades?
Gosh, where to begin. I think the main frustration is that, basically ever since the 1930s (even arguably before then), one of the fundamental challenges in the UK’s economy has been geographical inequality. Different governments have grappled in different ways with it. Seeking to direct investment, as governments did in the Fifties and Sixties and right up until the Seventies, was well-intentioned and obviously driven by a desire to ensure that whether it was Ravenscraig or Linwood in Scotland or other directed investment elsewhere, that there were jobs to replace those which declining industries were shedding.
One of the problems was that, for a host of reasons, when chill economic winds came as we saw in the 1980s, then those investments, those companies found themselves in circumstances where they couldn’t sustain their continued existence and prosperity. I wasn’t involved, but I remember of course, that there was a strain in Labour thinking in the Seventies and Eighties, led by Peter Jay, that what we really needed to do was to have different monetary policies within the UK in order to try to drive growth.
I think that the consensus which Michael Heseltine started to drive when he was Environment Secretary under John Major and continued in different ways in the 1990s and beyond, had three different parts: how could you strengthen local actors in order to make their areas more attractive to investment? How do you sufficiently incentivise foreign direct investment into the UK, in a way that can act as an anchor for economic growth? (I suppose that goes back to some of the work that Margaret Thatcher undertook). And third, how do you ensure that other institutions for which the state is responsible, like universities, can also act as generators of growth? I think, to this day those three elements – strong local leadership, FDI and strengthening institutions, particularly educational institutions to try to generate the skill base required for economic growth – have been at the heart of things.
The other thing is that Tory attitudes towards local government were influenced by the experience of ‘loony left’ council in the 1980s. From Derek Hatton’s Liverpool to Ken Livingstone’s London, the Conservative Party became…not ‘anti-‘ local government, but certainly sceptical or hostile towards empowering local government. The whole community charge (poll tax) fiasco then further deprived local government of its own tax base and autonomy.
When Heseltine came back to office in the 1990s that did change. In the Eighties, I get the sense that the emphasis was on national efficiency. There wasn’t much thought being given to regional inequality. Obviously, there were people on the ‘wet’ wing of the party who were very worried about unemployment, and worried about the consequences of what would happen after deindustrialisation and the miners’ strike. Their voices weren’t dominant at that time.
By the late 2000s, regions overall were seen as not a devolutionary creation, but as a way of taking power away from districts and counties. In particular, Conservatives thought of districts and counties as our power base. The creation of regional assemblies was seeking to draw power away from those. There was also a straightforward sort of team spirit: regions were Labour’s thing. Regions were John Prescott’s thing. Therefore, we had to mobilise against it. There was an almost sort of instinctive reaction against that, which I think was less to do with thought-through analysis of what regional authorities or Regional Development Agencies might do, and more a case of, ‘If that’s Labour’s way then we don’t like it.’
Q: How were you thinking about regional policy when you entered government in 2010?
First of all, Eric [Pickles] as Secretary of State, was very antipathetic to any form of local government reorganisation, of any kind. In his mind, he had a bargain with local government: we will remove much of the bureaucracy of which you complain and which holds you back. We’ll get rid of the Audit Commission; we’ll give you a general power of competence; we’ll remove ring fences because we know that you’re going to have to face a period of austerity. And the cuts are going to fall particularly heavily on you. His deal with local government was: greater freedom; fewer resources; and don’t worry about any sort of grand reorganisation. We will respect the tiers that you have and the powers that you have, and let you get on with it. There wasn’t a huge amount of regional thinking.
The other thing is one might have thought that the Lib Dems would have been a voice for a stronger regional policy. It did develop, but one of the early decisions of the Coalition years was to end support for Sheffield Forgemasters. Nick Clegg was told by George Osborne that you don’t need to accept this as an austerity measure, but Nick Clegg was determined at that stage to prove that the Liberal Democrats were a credible partner for government, capable of taking tough decisions. So he took that, he accepted that. I also remember Nick Clegg saying that one of the challenges in the North was that because public sector pay was nationally set, public sector pay in the North was crowding out the private sector. We needed to see a slightly more austere and rigorous approach towards public sector pay and towards local government. Obviously people’s views evolved, reality bites, but it was striking at the beginning that regional policy wasn’t a strong feature.
Q: How did those views evolve over time?
I think Vince Cable argued that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills should be abolished – that it was just an organisation for dishing out corporate welfare. Once in government, once he saw some of the things that that department could do, he became a convert to an industrial strategy. I think experience and a desire to act as a complement (not a counter-weight) to the Treasury drove that.
In George [Osborne]’s case, I think most of us when we came in in 2010 hadn’t given a huge amount of thought to local government or to regional policy. We were thinking in national terms. I think that George became, partly influenced by Jim O’Neill and others, more and more convinced that if one could get the cities of the North to live up to their potential, that could have a potentially transformative effect on the UK’s economy. There were people in and around the Treasury making the argument that Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle were simply not, in comparison to European cities of comparable size, pulling their weight economically.
George – by dint of being MP for the constituency that he was in – spent a fair amount of time in Manchester. I think he was impressed by people in Manchester local government, Howard Bernstein and others, and saw that there was potential there for the sort of devolution that he subsequently pioneered. I think it was also the case that Michael Heseltine had an influence. He was brought in to produce the ‘No Stone Unturned’ document on industrial policy. It argued for a particularly strong role for regional development. That definitely had an impact on George’s thinking, because again, he had a regard for people who had actually been in government and had to take tough decisions. The whole: ‘Oh Heseltine, he’s a throwback to the past, he’s a mad Europhile and all the rest of it,’ which some of my colleagues might have articulated, for George was, ‘Well no, that’s nonsense.’ He was a highly effective minister. If he’s going to look at a problem, he will look at it with both a weight of experience and analytical skill.
Q: Was regional agenda within England was seen as linked to questions of the Union, i.e. policy towards Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?
No. The argument that there should be regional devolution, in order to match devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, didn’t have much purchase in the Tory mindset. Obviously, Scotland loomed larger because of Salmond’s securing a majority in 2011 and the Edinburgh Agreement and all the rest of it. But that was seen as a discrete and specific issue which didn’t have much bearing on the arguments that related to England.
The other thing also is, within the Coalition, the Lib Dems made the argument that, ‘Look you’ve only got one MP in Scotland. We’ve got a dozen. Leave the management of Scotland broadly to us.’ Now, that wasn’t completely the case. David [Cameron] and George did take an interest in it, George increasingly so. But the argument was, ‘Leave it to Alastair [Carmichael] and Mike [Moore] and Danny [Alexander] and so on to manage the institutional relationship between the Westminster government and Holyrood.’ The relationship between the Scotland Office and the Scottish government was essentially managed by the Lib Dems.
Q: And what did the politics of the period mean for Welsh devolution?
Wales was held up as an alternative: whatever the reasons, differential outcomes in health – and then laterally in education – were used as an example of the folly of voting Labour. And so read across into that any sort of potential enthusiasm for devolution.
Q: What was your sense around the Cabinet table of the attitude, at that point, of different cabinet ministers and departments to the devolution agenda?
I think that there was no great enthusiasm for it. There was, as that parliament went on, growing respect for George. He was increasingly in command of the Treasury, increasingly seen as the co-pilot of government, so there wasn’t any active resistance. Greg Clark was an enthusiastic supporter and implementer of the agenda. But elsewhere around the Cabinet table, I can’t think of Conservatives who were particularly enthusiastic about it.
I don’t think it was cynicism towards the idea of the Northern Powerhouse. I think that people felt that it was fine, but not absolutely central to our economic strategy or political direction overall. Again, as well as the way that individual ministers bring to bear on these discussions, there’s also the view of the department, which is not uniform. The Department for Education has traditionally been one of those departments that has been most sceptical of local government.
I think there are a variety of reasons for that. One of them is that children’s services departments have performed poorly in Ofsted inspections, consistently. The problems in children’s social care have never been satisfactorily resolved. I think people in local government could argue that there are funding reasons for that. There was a sense that one of the core functions of local government was not being discharged well, and a sense of exasperation on the part of successive ministers and on the part of the officials charged with working in that area.
The other thing is that the whole thrust of education reform, or education change and the drive towards academisation, was almost premised on the basis that schools were better outside local government control and therefore, local government itself was problematic when it came to education policy. The whole true picture is more nuanced than that. But that’s just trying to explain, I think, some of the drivers that were at work, and I think are still at work in the Department for Education.
Q: How did you experience the variation in local government capacity across the country?
I was always anxious in children’s services to try to find directors of children’s services and social workers who were genuinely imaginative, committed to reform. At different times, there was a tri-borough arrangement with Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster, where you did have an openness to reform. Also I remember Allen Wood, who was the Director of Children’s Services in Hackney. I was always anxious to find good people in local government who would challenge.
One of the conversations that I had with [Ofsted’s] Michael Wilshaw is that he found it occasionally frustrating because the approach that local government took towards improvement of children’s services was peer support, rather than proper external challenge. That led to frustrations. There are manifestly some local authorities that have provided effective school improvement support and have provided the sort of leadership that one would want to see in education. Tower Hamlets would be one example of that, when Kevan Collins was there. It wasn’t a uniform picture.
In my time there, I became more appreciative of those people in local government who were doing a good job. The original drive, of academisation and free schools, was there because innovation, strong governance, external support and expanded choice all help, so we argued, to improve standards. In that case, it wasn’t directly an assault on local government. But there was a belief that, at the very least, you needed to have an alternative way of doing things and contestability within the system.
Q: And how did skills policy and devolution interact?
The overlap between the DfE and the Department for Business on this issue is relevant. The joint ministers that we had – John Hayes, Matt Hancock, Nick Boles and others – meant that quite a lot of time was spent by those ministers, essentially, arbitrating between different interests rather than, with the exception of Nick and the apprenticeship levy, really driving policy in a particular direction. There was a succession of different ministers, and it would have required considerable energy and direction to move things. There was no one, no disrespect to any of them, there long enough in that particular role to be able to really push that. I think it was more a matter of inertia, rather than indifference.
Q: There are three different explanations you can give for Whitehall centralisation. First, it could be that the local capacity isn’t good enough. Second, it could that there is a clear national imperative. If you differentiate things regionally or locally, it will lose impetus or otherwise falter. Third, there is the argument that taxes are raised by parliament and spending is accountable to parliament. Which of these three explanations do you think was most important?
On the first one, the capacity wasn’t there in lots of different areas. There were some local authorities that simply weren’t effective, or arguably big enough, to deliver school improvement effectively. The second one, which is a question of uniformity of policy, was about uniformity of accountability. Thinking about how we could reform league tables and how we could strengthen and empower Ofsted was very much in my mind. That wasn’t obviously about the management, or the governance of the schools per se.
On the third, that was also in my mind as well. We encountered examples of terrible failings in children’s services departments, where notwithstanding the fact that this was a core competence of local government, we had to either carry the can or explain. As with the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham, it was the case that, what was happening in individual schools in Birmingham, became a scandal which was laid at my door and for which I had to answer. Some of those schools were academies, others of them were local authority maintained schools. But nevertheless, there was that responsibility.
So, I think all three were at play in my mind. In my dealings with the Department for Work and Pensions, I think that they very much think of themselves as a department which is thinking UK-wide. As you know with welfare and labour policy, there’s scarcely a role for any form of devolution there. And the Department for Transport, I think similarly that local government is there to mend the curb stones and paint double yellow lines. Real proper transport policy is seen as requiring national planning and the delivery of significant infrastructure investment requires strategic national leadership.
I think that in my most recent experience, we had a wrangle with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy over research and development spending. We were arguing that a significant part of the uplift had to be spent outside the East of England, the South East and London. There was institutional resistance to that from BEIS. They thought that it was not necessarily the best way of stimulating GDP growth overall, that we should bet on that which is successful and double down on the Golden Triangle. It took quite a lot of wrangling and persuasion by Andy Haldane and others to get them to change that. I think that there are, and have been, ministers in that department who have been thinking with a regional mindset. I think it’s generally been more resistant to it.
Q: Have reforms since 2010, such as the emergence of Combined Authorities, helped address those questions around capacity and getting the policy at the right level for accountability? Were you right to rely on voluntarism for reform?
The Conservative Party relies disproportionately on local councillors as its activist base. Eric always made the point, when people were talking about local government reform, ‘Do you really want to see half of the people in your constituency association who are delivering your leaflets, attending your socials, supporting you through thick and thin, lose a major part of their motivation for being involved in politics?’ Whatever the right or wrong, the answer would not be in local government reform.
That’s a straightforward political fact. Our people will lose an important role. These are public-spirited people who are rooted in the community, and we will all be the poorer for losing their involvement. That was a significant factor. I think the conclusion drawn, and certainly the approach that we were taking is, find the willing and empower them, show others the way to go. Cajole, nudge, incentivise and hopefully you can gather momentum.
I think it’s demonstrably the case that the creation of metro mayors has brought people, some very good people, into local government who might not otherwise have considered going into politics or certainly not considered going into local government. Andy Street and Ben Houchen, manifestly, but also Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram and, for a while, Dan Jarvis. It’s unlikely that they would have been happy being council leaders, even of Manchester in its own right or Birmingham in its own right. In my party, Ben Bradley, who was elected MP for Mansfield, is currently leader of Nottinghamshire and is hoping that there will be an East Midlands Combined Authority, because that’s essentially where he sees his political future.
I think – on the question of, ‘Why not go the whole hog? Why not do as Michael Heseltine would have wanted, and as Ted Heath shied away from, and fully unitarise local government?’ – that the principal reason for not doing that was small-C conservatism associated with our electoral position, which is entirely understandable. Given that, I think the aim was to try to create models that others would wish to emulate, and within those models have people exercising powers who could both demonstrate (a) that these models worked and (b) that there was a route for people of talent who wanted to have executive political responsibilities and didn’t necessarily want to be in Westminster.
Q: How important is fiscal devolution in making this model work, as in other countries?
I think that it’s a necessary part of the success, or eventual success. We will have to move further in that direction. There has been, during the 1980s, everything from rate capping through to the Poll Tax, an erosion of the tax base of local government. Then there’s the straightforward tension between equity and a further devolution, though it can be resolved in some cases, and also the institutional resistance of the Treasury. Those need to be overcome. That is the direction, but I think it will take some time to get there.
Q: You characterised our policy approach, for decades now, as being one of building local institutions, and attracting or nurturing local business talent. Given that continuity of those broad principles, why have we struggled to make such progress? In fact, why have regional inequalities widened so much?
Well, it’s a huge question. I think that part of it has been London’s success and the agglomeration effect. London is simply more of a talent magnet than almost any other national capital in the developed world. It is fantastic, and one should not wish to undermine London’s success. You don’t want to dampen animal spirits in the South East. I think that’s been one of the principal factors. I think that has meant that some of the natural local leaders that might otherwise have made a difference in different areas, haven’t been there.
I think the other thing is the success not just of London, but of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge. They have attracted not just undergraduates, but also research excellence and expertise. They’re global crown jewels, but it has meant that the talent has been attracted to those areas. Those have been some of the most powerful factors. The other thing is that different governments have tried to have an industrial strategy. But the nature of the UK economy and its continued and increasing reliance on services, again has meant that the North and Midlands in particular have suffered, in terms of both attention and also overall policy design. I think it’s the case it’s not deliberate antipathy, but it’s just the institutional bias in incentives.
Q: How about the distribution of public resources, over decades?
That’s the other thing, as well. For a variety of reasons, transport spending in London and the South East has been massively higher than elsewhere. The big, institutional, government flagship projects which have talent attached to them, have tended to be in the South as well (like GCHQ in Cheltenham). One of the difficulties that I faced was just trying to get Whitehall to think about big new institutions outside the South East – moving our national cyber force to Samlesbury, outside Preston; getting the Treasury to open a second campus in Darlington. It was much more difficult than I’d anticipated. These aren’t massive examples of public expenditure, but they’re significant signs of thinking differently about the economic and political geography of the country. It has been the case that even education spending in London, for very good reasons because of the way in which we calculate deprivation, has been tilted towards the South East.
Q: So for the non-South East regions, where do you think are the most pressing constraints to further growth?
I think the argument of the Levelling Up White Paper, with which I agree, is that there are an interconnected set of things – the Medici model; the Five Capitals… they’re all intended to reinforce the point that it’s not a single thing. If you had to reduce it to one thing, it would be human capital. How can you ensure that people have the education and skills, then the incentives, to work in those areas that have been underserved in the past?
But it’s more than that. In order to ensure that you can make the most of human capital in a particular area, then you also need to have the straightforward transport and digital connectivity that enables people to succeed in business terms, or their companies succeed in business terms. You also need to have the sorts of civic institutions that make it easier for people to determine the shape of the place in which they live and feel greater pride in it. You need to tackle some of the persistent health inequalities that are bad in themselves but also have an impact on economic productivity, overall. And you need to think about the cultural fabric of communities that have had either underinvestment or neglect. All of those have to come together. But I think the first and most important is human capital.
Q: There’s a debate about how we think about cities, vis-a-vis suburbs, towns, rural areas. Could you talk us through how you’ve been navigating that?
Our argument was that Rochdale won’t succeed, and Wigan won’t succeed, unless Manchester succeeds. It’s not either/or. There are reasons why there are towns within Greater Manchester – Bolton and Bury – which are doing better than others – like Rochdale and Wigan. It is worth examining those things in detail. But ultimately their success depends on the success of the core city.
We use the phrase ‘satellite towns’ to identify them. Bolton and Bury are satellite towns, et cetera. We also have the phenomenon of the ‘stranded town’. Blackpool, Grimsby, or also Burnley. They are towns that over the last three decades have lost their economic raison d’être – tourism in Blackpool’s case, textiles and manufacturing in Burnley’s case, fisheries – although obviously there’s still fish processing – in Grimsby. It’s a much bigger challenge there. That is why two of the earliest ‘levelling up deep dives’ that we did were in Blackpool and in Grimsby to try to resolve some of the problems there.
One of the things that is clear is that, in each of those towns, even though you can generalise, there are specifics. One of Blackpool’s problems is very poor housing: a private rented sector which is being used rather cynically by landlords to house welfare claimants, or people who are ex-offenders who recently left prison. Their business model means that a large part of the heart of Blackpool doesn’t have people living permanently with the capacity to put down roots. That means that there is a massive churn in the schools in the centre of Blackpool. One school, I think, has a pupil turn-over of 60% every year, and so on. That has an effect on so many other aspects of what one would want to see in order to see Blackpool regenerate effectively. You can’t fix Blackpool properly unless you fix the housing problem.
Similarly, with Grimsby, there is a similar – though not identical – problem with the state of the private rented sector there. There are also problems in Grimsby in that you have a small local authority that is ambitious but lacks the resource, in terms of personnel, to be able to live up to its vision. You also have business people who want to help but no clear sense of what Grimsby’s future economic mission is going to be.
Q: Does the voluntary approach to reform seen over the past decade create a risk that it is harder for those ‘stranded towns’ to have a chance and their poverty is reinforced?
Potentially. Again, one of the things that we were exploring is having a Lancashire Combined Authority taking in Blackburn and Darwin, Blackpool and Lancashire itself. Similarly, with Grimsby in North East Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire and Lincolnshire itself: is it the case that there should be a Combined Authority? There’s an economic logic, of course, to Grimsby and Hull working together, and naturally they’ve also got the same fire service. But again, there are historic challenges there in that.
I think that our approach is less ‘Let’s leave them,’ and more, ‘Let’s have more and more people embracing deeper devolution so that those who don’t, feel increasingly ‘I better board the train’.’ In the East Midlands, Nottingham and Derby, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire want to work together. Leicestershire will probably join them, leaving Leicester out, with Sir Peter Soulsby as the sort of San Marino of the East Midlands. Over time, the logic will be that Leicester will throw its lot in with that wider partnership. It’s an arguable point, that we should be more directive. I think it’s a genuinely open point. The local politics of it, and the approach that we felt we had to take with, particularly given where our MPs are, was to incentivise, cajole, encourage people to get on board, but not to mandate.
Q: How do you expect Brexit to shape things, especially with the replacement of Structural Funds?
The UK Shared Prosperity Fund [UKSPF] is the principal success of structural funds. It is allocated on a needs-based formula, and it is allocated to, at the moment, local authorities. That is simply for the rest of the spending review. It’s not fixed forever that way.
Separately, there’s the Levelling Up Fund, which is a consolidation of other funds that existed beforehand. There are still various EU projects that are coming to the end of their natural life. As they do so, the amount that will be in the UKSPF will increase. There is scope for using that money differently. I think that it may end up being giving particular local government areas, essentially, their own budget. I think that has to be the way to go.
Q: What do you think are the most important lessons for us to take away?
I think the positive lesson is that there is now a broad recognition across UK politics that addressing regional inequality is urgent, and that it’s not a case of pushing water uphill or attempting to reverse history. It is, depending on your point of view, either a productivity and economic efficiency imperative or a social justice mission, or all of the above.
The second good thing is that there’s a recognition that addressing inequality and developing some form of regional policy and levelling up policy is right. The second thing is that there’s a recognition that that has to be done involving actors on the ground. Whatever model of devolution that you believe in – whether you want it to evolve or to be imposed, whether you want to see more community ownership at a very local level or stronger Combined Authorities – there is a widespread recognition that it’s not about the central direction of capital or anything else.
The third good thing is that there are thinkers everywhere, economic thinkers and others, who are now increasingly converging on this ground. To take a case in point, Onward, which was the Conservative thinktank that was basically set up to continue to champion modernisation, has made levelling up its core mission. If there is intellectual action, that is where the intellectual action is within the Conservative Party and the centre right.
On worries…the UK, and England in particular, is an old country. When it comes to local government, there are traditions and affections, which you have to work your way through and navigate your way around. There are sources of local pride which sometimes militate against the scale of reform that might be required.
The second thing, which is just a concern, is that it’s difficult to make this work because there are so many elements that need to come together. All of us will place a different emphasis on different parts of the machinery required. There is no simple, direct, easy, ‘one, two, three’ set of policies which, if the political will were there, could be implemented and could deliver. It’s a much more complex picture than that. That only makes it more important that we continue the effort.
ENDS