Michael Heseltine served as Secretary of the State for the Environment from 1979 to 1983 and again from 1990-1992. He was Secretary of State for Trade and Industry from 1992 to 1995, and Deputy Prime Minister from 1995 to 1997.
This interview was conducted on 8 February 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your roles in growth policy over the past few decades?
The first role was parliamentary Under Secretary of State in 1970, and then the next would have been Shadow Environment Secretary from about 1976 to 1979, and then Secretary of State for the Department of Environment 1979 to 1983. And then I would have been back in 1990, Secretary of State for Environment until I went to the Presidency of Board of Trade in 1992. I became Deputy Prime Minister in 1995 and that should have been the end of me with the election of 1997. But David Cameron brought me back in a completely un-defined role, first to look at housing for the Conservatives in their manifesto. But one thing led to another, I got more and more drawn in, and I ended up, I suppose you could call it a SpAd [special advisor], but there was no clear appointment. I was just around.
I did then pick up a number of formal appointments. I was, not in any particular order, on the National Infrastructure Commission, which George Osborne set up. I was chairman for David Cameron of the 100 Worst Estates Initiative. I was chairman of the Local Growth Regional Growth Fund. I was chairman of the East End of London Commission. I’ve written a lot of reports.
Q: What is your overall evaluation of growth policy over this period?
The first experience was fascinating because I had never been in local government. But I became the sidekick to Peter Walker in the 1970s, who had inherited the Labour government commissioned report by Redcliffe-Maud. Redcliffe-Maud is absolutely fundamental to this whole discussion. It’s the last, the first and last, serious analysis of how Britain’s central local administration should be organised. Redcliffe-Maud looked at the 1,300 local authorities and recommended that we went to 63, basically unitary authorities, very close to the counties, but actually representing local economies and then with major conurbations having their own conurbation authority above the boroughs that were there.
Peter Walker, before I joined him, had already come to the view that the Conservatives would never implement this policy, not the least reason being that local MPs liked their councillors. They thought that they were an important part of the winning of parliamentary seats. And so getting rid of their foot soldiers was simply not on. I think that probably was the principal problem. But they were also forced by public opinion in the more prosperous areas who didn’t want to be merged with anything that could be associated with central urban Labour.
My first job for Peter was to try and fix the boundaries of the great metropolitan authorities. I think probably what I did would today have been judicially reviewed to oblivion. But I just hired a light aircraft and I went round the conurbations with a map and you could see where they began and where they ended, and I would just tick local authorities in, out, in, out whatever it may be.
Then I had a public inquiry. Of course all the predictable arguments were provided. They were all based on the self-interest of the people living there. But by and large, what I proposed – which was common sense, anyone would have come to the same view – became the boundaries of the conurbation authorities. I then became involved in trying to sell Peter’s programme, which was to go from 1,300 to about 300 authorities. It’s very important to remember why there were 1,300 authorities. Many of them were relevant to an England where the only means of getting anywhere was by horse or by cart or by foot, so you needed a lot of authorities. But of course we were looking at a world of telephone and rail, and train and car and all of these things. So the old position was ludicrous.
I did my best of course to help Peter to get this thing through. I think I had an unease that we were compromising over the two-tier county structure more to meet political requirements than actual administrative sense. Anyway, that was my contribution up to 1972 when I became Minister for Aerospace. I suspect I became Minister of Aerospace because it got me out of the reorganisation of local government, which was causing a lot of mayhem in the Conservative Party. Anyway, that was the end of that.
Margaret Thatcher inherited the leadership from Ted Heath. She didn’t want me in the industrial portfolio that Ted had given me and moved me back to the environment, which I’m very fond of – many of my hobbies are associated with environmental type activities like horticulture and gardening and birds and bees and all that sort of stuff.
As a junior minister for planning under Peter, I had looked at the South Bank of the Thames, which is one of the great urban waterscapes in the world. And it’s difficult to see how any civilised society could have made such a mess of it. And I could see all this unfolding, and I thought, this is absolutely intolerable. I said to officials, get me a plan for an urban development corporation and I will take over control of the south bank of the Thames and bring some sort of quality to the programme. A sort of ‘General Haussmann’ type figure I saw myself as being. Anyway, then I was reshuffled. Come 1979 as Minister of Aerospace, trying to build an airport in Essex, I had to fly over the East End of London, and I found these 6,000 acres of dereliction. The ports had gone and the public utilities had gone. There’s no new housing except council housing. So my first day, literally my first day in my time in the department environment, I drew up a list of 10 things for the Permanent Secretary, including development corporations.
Everyone was against me. Treasury: classic letter, no money. Keith Joseph: ‘Michael, we’re not a great interventionist department, that’s exactly what we’re not going to do’. Margaret called a meeting of the four of us in Number 10. Geoffrey [Howe] said ‘no money’. He said, ‘doctrinally impossible’. Margaret turned to me and said, ‘what the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ I said, ‘Margaret, not a penny more for my budget that has been agreed, so there’s no problem with Geoffrey. Keith. ‘I absolutely salute the direction of travel of this new government. Nobody keener than I am on rising the private sector and all that. My problem, Margaret, is that I’ve been talking to Reg Prentice, who is, as you know, a great convert, having been a Labour member of Parliament in the East End. Now he’s a Tory MP behind us on the backbenches. And he’s been telling me, do you realise that all the councillors down in the East End of London are Communists?’ And for Margaret it was like lighting a blue torch paper. And I got my way.
I got back to my department to be greeted by the Permanent Secretary: ‘what a triumph Secretary of State to succeed against the huge mountains of opposition that you had to overcome. There’s only one problem. It will require hybrid legislation’. Of course, I knew perfectly well, that meant you’d never get it through. And he said, ‘you can’t take action against a specific part of the country’. I said, ‘what’s the solution? Tell me where the second worst area is. Give me general powers and ability to designate by order’. Liverpool was chosen, and hence Liverpool became the second development area.
Q: Is it right to characterise your work as being the exception to a more general pattern of pulling national levers in the 1980s?
It’s a characterisation that has come from people who were around observing the scene. I did what I believe to be right based on the facts, the evidence in front of me. So far we’ve talked about the development corporation. But the idea was born under Ted Heath. And of course, it was no more complex than saying: the new towns were part of the Labour government ideas after the war, I brought the New Towns back to the urban derelict areas. I just did what was sensible. Whether my other colleagues of mine were thinking about other things in different ways, that I don’t know frankly, because it never came up. Once I’d made my mind up what I wanted, I persuaded Margaret, against her official zealots if you like, to back me. And that perhaps is rather more revealing about Margaret, the practical Prime Minister.
Back to 1979. Peter Shore, a Labour predecessor, had created what we called partnerships with the local authorities with particular distressed areas, and he designated individual ministers to work alongside those authorities to find ways forward. So the second question I was asked by my Permanent Secretary was, ‘do you wish to continue with this arrangement?’ So I said yes. Peter Shore did Liverpool, so I said ‘I’ll do Liverpool’. I found a way to get a development corporation there, and there was a magnificent docklands area called the Albert Dock, which was in the process of being taken over and demolished by private developers. I listed it, again compatible with my interest in historic buildings. One other thing I did, which was fundamental to the whole of my thinking: Peter Walker, when I’d been working for him, had devised a grant mechanism called Derelict Land Grant. And the purpose of it all was to get rid of the eyesores in the countryside created by oil extraction, coal extraction, whatever it may be. The great tips that characterised so much of England, and Scotland and Wales. But this job had more or less has been done. I had a budget called Derelict Land Grant, but no land to which it applied. So I immediately said to my Permanent Secretary, ‘we’ll move it into the urban areas, where of course, there were huge areas of derelict land’.
I laid down one condition, and this is the fundamental point that I wanted to stress. Instead of saying this money would be available to the local authorities, I said it will only be available on condition that we pay half and the private sector contributes. Whether I was so prescriptive I’m not sure, but anyway, the deal was quite clear. You’ve got this Derelict Land Grant to clear up derelict sites, providing the private sector delivered an additional use and therefore additional money and gearing. That had, of course, an attractive benefits. In London, I’m told it was £10 of private money for every pound of public money. In Liverpool £1.50 for every pound of public money.
Once you said that the public and private sectors had to work together, instead of shouting abusively to each other from the various bars in various hostelries, they became Bill and Ben. They became mates. They had to work together, and slowly the atmosphere began to change. And that was, to me, a very important lesson.
I didn’t mention the Garden Festival, which was an idea that was developed after the war, in the recently destroyed battlefields of newer cities. In order to get the private sector back, the government cleared up the sites and planted things there so that they were competitive with the green fields that the developers, left to themselves, liked. So Liverpool got the first Garden Festival, again on the development corporation, 600 acres that I had designated.
18 months later, they rioted. And I felt a personal responsibility for all the reasons that flow from the relationship that I had. This was my patch, my partnership. So I said to Margaret, ‘look, of course, law and order is fundamental. We have to back the police, no questions of that. But I think there’s something more profound here. And I want to leave my day-to-day responsibilities to my junior colleagues and walk the streets of Liverpool.’ I walked the streets of Liverpool and the first two or three days. ‘So good of you to come. How important it is you’re listening.’ But of course, day five, somebody said: ‘Well, you’ve been here now for five days. What are you going to do? What are you going to do?’ And of course, I realised the game was up, and so I spent another 2.5 weeks listening, examining, thinking, and at the end of the three weeks, I had a list of projects. I’ve forgotten how long it was now, but it was quite long, including the Tate of the North and the Albert Dock and other important initiatives that, proved fundamental to my thinking.
I realised that, left to its own devices, these things would never happen. Because the one thing you knew about Liverpool or its councillors there were no effective leadership. It just didn’t work. So I became a clerk of works. On every Thursday, I would turn up in Liverpool. I had a team of public sector and private sector secondees, and they would spend the week making things happen. If there were blockages, they’d tell me on Thursday night and on Friday I had it unblocked. Then I go back to my department and home. Come back in the next Thursday. I did that for 18 months. I wasn’t running the local council, but I was deeply immersed in local politics. And then I became Defence Secretary. I think the lessons that I learned were fundamental and they completely changed my approach to the way government worked or didn’t.
I was back there then again, in 1990 and my derelict land grant had of course, brought considerable benefits. But it was all about derelict lands. And the problem that I then came to face was, what about derelict communities? And I decided to apply the principles that had worked for derelict land to derelict communities. This was extremely controversial, because it’s one thing to introduce competition when you’re dealing with just derelict land. When you’re dealing with people in deprived communities and you’re going to introduce the allocation of funds on a competitive basis, you are open to the blatant and obvious charge, ‘You mean there are going to be losers?’ And the answer was, yes, there were. We chose 30 local authorities who had deprived communities, and we said, “There will be 10 winners, and they will get a grant of, £35 million”. That was seven million a year over five years, in order to tackle the problem of a deprived community.
There were conditions. First, you have to put somebody in charge of the process. Secondly, you had to have an executive machine to carry out the changes that were necessary. Thirdly, you had to consult the people who lived there and those who played a role as stakeholders if you like in the public sector, influencing or determining the way money was spent. And you had to consult, for example, the head teachers in the area concerned. You had to talk to the local business people about what they could or could not do.
So 30 local authorities competed, 10 won. And the usual outcry, ‘We were robbed, unfair, it was cheated’ and all that sort of thing. But it had had the most profound effect. First of all, the winners, had produced strategies which complied with those conditions that I listed. Perhaps more important, the losers, having got it off their chests, went to find out how the winners had done it. The change in procedural practices as a result of the introduction of choice and competition was profound.
Local government is organised on a functional basis, reflecting the great baronies of London, and so it’s perfectly possible for the housing minister, the housing boss and the education boss and the social affairs boss and the transport boss to never talk. Their money comes from above. Their plans are devised in London. They don’t need to talk to the rest of their colleagues… But under my plan, they didn’t win. And the most memorable of them all was a nice Labour leader I got on well with called Dick Knowles in Birmingham who lost, and I did the adjudication. Whether you can get away with that today as a minister, I don’t know. Back then I did it and I did Birmingham. He explained the Birmingham proposal, I said, ‘Well what do the head teachers think about this?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ll tell them about it’. That’s the point at which he lost. But, it was salutatory. They had to involve the local people in assessing strengths and weaknesses. I think that City Challenge was amongst the most exciting, innovative thing I did and there are Labour leaders around that I could mention to you who have been extraordinarily complimentary about the way It worked. But in the way of party politics of course, the moment my back was turned it came to an end. I don’t understand from this day why it was ever allowed to end. But that’s what happens with a new minister, they want to do their own things that they devise, their alternative strategies.
Q: How did you carry this thinking forward at the Board of Trade?
My first day at the Board of Trade I said, ‘Well what is our industrial strategy?’ ‘Oh, Secretary of State’, or President as I became, ‘We’re not allowed to use those words”. That is mind blowing, that this great organ of British industrial commercial might, as it was meant to be, was not allowed to talk about an industrial strategy. Not allowed to talk about it. So we tore all that up.
No one is keener than me on the market working, but sometimes it doesn’t work. And I knew enough about how other countries dealt with all of this to know that no one believes in the simplicity of the market working. Before 1990, I spent four years on the backbenches and I was asked to write a book about Japan. I had a great title, ‘Mightier than the Sword: A Study of Japanese Economic Imperialism’. Mercifully, because the Japanese economy fell to the floor, my book was never written as I got back into Government and I handed back the advance.
In the meantime I went to Hokkaido, which is the tip of the northern island, a remote area under permafrost from November to March. I met the Mayor, and there was this guy like a jack in the box, leaping all over the place, saying ‘I’m going to create a world class city’ by such and such a date, and I’ve got this idea, that idea, this project, that project and he was so dynamic. I thought, ‘My God, if only we had people like that working in local government in Britain”.
Q: Where was the anti-industrial strategy view coming from?
Peter Lilley was the outgoing Secretary of State. Nick Ridley would have been on the same line of thought. I had very clear arguments with Nigel Lawson about all of this. They simply didn’t believe a word of it. I think, frankly, Ken Clarke wouldn’t have believed a word of it either.
The most significant thing in my time in the DTI [Department for Trade and Industry] was the competitiveness agenda where I published a document setting out the strengths and weaknesses of the British economy, and indicating what we should do about them. Needless to say, it became an absolute target for Gordon Brown who leapt on me and said, ‘Look, even the government believes all these terrible thing are going on’. My intention was to keep publishing it every year. It didn’t really survive the party political clashes.
The most important report I ever wrote was ‘No Stone Unturned’, which was an extension of my local government and competitiveness agenda and how to make Britain work effectively in the public and private sector. David Cameron asked me to write that report, and I said, ‘Well, it needs to be about industrial strategy’. He said, “No, no, no, don’t, you can’t have that;. I eventually prevailed, and I did so by getting him to agree that I could do a report about Britain’s industrial competitiveness in the light of other countries’ industrial strategies, and that’s how I got the word into the report. But I’ve also got a picture, which I took on my phone, of a poster in the DTI, a couple of years later. ‘Industrial Strategy’. So things came full circle. We were able to talk about industrial strategy, and Greg Clark, who was a formative and innovative minister, was out front and open about it all. I was working for them all that time. And then I got sacked for suggesting that Parliament should have a final say over Brexit, three weeks before the government adopted that policy. So I wrote my own policy document called ‘Industrial Strategy’.
Q: Looking at the reforms of the 2010s, is there a consistent thread from your ideas in the 1980s and 1990s?
It’s an intellectual journey based upon one logical step after another. But absolutely. I came back to join John Major’s government, armed with all the documents from Hokkaido. I’m in a meeting in Number 10, I remember, showing people these documents. It wasn’t going anywhere. But then when I was working for Greg principally and George Osborne, that we managed to get the first Mayor into Liverpool.
Q: When you talked about the City Challenge, it had a set of national objectives, and you were asking localities to bid to you and prove they were good enough to do it. But the alternative in Japan and after 2010, was to emphasise local democratic leadership?
Yes, but from the partnerships of the Derelict Land Grant to City Challenge to the leadership of a community by a Mayor, running the whole administration, is a logical step by step evolution and much influenced by every other country which has a system broadly along these lines.
Q: Did we make a big mistake by not doing that more extensive local government reorganisation back in the early seventies to have larger unitary authorities?
The current conurbation mayors do reflect Redcliffe-Maud’s conurbation authorities. That’s the point. Redcliffe-Maud said that local government should reflect local economic groupings. You get the county structure and unitary counties, but then you get the major conurbations and so you have a conurbation authority, and very obviously you have a mayor for the conurbation, which is what we negotiated. We did both because Liverpool was a borough mayor.
Q: Is the next logical step a local government reorganisation?
There is one area which I must plead guilty of course, I got rid of the metropolitan counties in 1979. And I can only plead in mitigation, Ken Livingston, because there was a move in the Labour Party which persuaded people like me that that we had to do something about it. I regret that I got rid of them. I think I should have reformed them. I plead guilty to that. But the whole process from Redcliffe-Maud has been by consent. What can you persuade people to do? And the dilemma for Michael Gove’s White Paper is that he faces exactly the problem that Peter Walker faced and I faced: there is inbuilt hostility, among the great forces that I listed, to any change. So he’s now embarked on another wave of persuasion.
There’s one interesting exception, if we go back to the 1990s again when I was trying to get to unitary county status. There weren’t any Conservatives of any scale in Scotland or Wales. My colleagues in the House of Commons were wholly relaxed when I said we’re going to get rid of all the districts in Scotland and Wales, which we did, by prescription, on the face of the bill. Of course they wouldn’t let me do it in England. So I set up a commission, and I took the quite cynical view that if we do it one by one, piece by piece, there won’t be a sufficient revolt on the backbenches as one order for one area goes through and we’ll get them through one by one. I put John Banham in charge of that process. It wasn’t a huge success because local resistance was so considerable. But slowly, and particularly under Tony Blair’s government, the counties began to wake up and several of them moved to unitary status. But the Tories were soon back, and they made an election commitment that anyone who was moving towards unitary status but was still in the law courts, would not be allowed to proceed.
Q: Is this something local politics can move towards organically or will Government have to intervene?
I find it very difficult to see how we can do anything other than progress now. Mercifully, the Tories won two spectacular Mayoral victories in the West Midlands and Tees Valley, and so standard bearers of the Tory party are out there and the government can’t cut them loose in my view. If we hadn’t won those two, I hate to think what might have happened.
One other thing that comes out of my competitiveness white paper was the role of the private sector. At the moment, the private sector is as badly organised as the public sector was in my view. You have again tribes: you have the CBI [Confederation of British Industry], you have Chambers of Commerce, you have the Engineering Employers Federation and the Small Business Federation and they’re all different and they’re all apart. And they’re broadly concerned with trying to get a better deal tax-wise, regulation-wise, whatever it may be. What they don’t ever seem to take on board is the role that the Chambers of Commerce take on overseas who are much more powerful, with much more resources, and play a much more constructive role in the role of the private sector. I tried to start these things called Business Links. Needless to say, the Conservatives got rid of them at some stage and put into place the Local Enterprise Partnerships (‘LEPs).
Q: Before you go onto LEPs, what was your view of the RDAs?
I don’t know the answer to that question. They were around and they were controversial. And I’m sure that if I had done a study of them, I would find that there were things that they had helped to achieve.
I would have left the macro judgments to the main conurbation authorities. I think that Manchester and Liverpool were perfectly capable of having a liaison together without about an RDA to bring them all together. But I would certainly have gone from a unitary landscape to Greater Liverpool, Greater Manchester.
As for the LEPs. Business Link was my creation to try and get the private sector to start trying to put their own show on the road and to give them the strength of the Europeans. But they went, a Tory government getting rid of Tory ideas, and in their place came the LEPs.
When they were first announced, the LEPs were really a fig leaf to say, ‘We believe in partnership’. I remember talking to one of the chairman of the LEPs who said, “Well, it’s very good, it’s me and a secretary, it’s a very lean organisation’. I thought it was just a joke. But good fortune put me in a position, working for Greg Clark, where I had money, the Regional Growth Fund that I was chairman of. I started building up the LEPs into a position where they were what I had always wanted them to be. So I arrived just in time to stop the nonsense of the abolition of the RDAs and their replacement by two men and a dog. The LEPs now seem to have got themselves into a position where government is going to tolerate them. But there will be people around who will start saying, ‘Well, they’re not doing anything, they’re expensive, get them off our backs’.
Q: What do you do about the towns which are outside the major conurbation footprints, like Burnley or Blackburn outside Greater Manchester?
I would put them into unitary counties.
Q: Would you require that from the centre, rather than making it optional or evolutionary?
I would introduce major legislation which made unitary counties statutory. And then use a boundary commission to sort out the political and economic boundaries. Things like Newcastle, which is just silly, would be put right. We’re wasting time, and that’s always expensive.
Q: What’s your experience of different Whitehall departments – have you been frustrated that some departments are less willing than others to sign up?
I query the premise that departments have this view. I think the failure is ministerial. The vast majority of ministers have got no idea of what their own personal views are on these subjects. They just go with the drift of history, and they like the idea of being popular in their department, so ‘fighting their corner’ and all that sort of stuff. Not many ministers have any administrative experience, and not many have any understanding of what local government is like.
I’m sad to say it, but the two-party system tends to produce people who come up one side of the social divide. And this is why Liverpool is so important to me. I could see this extraordinary polarised world which was not being addressed in the way that any reasonable managerial assessment would have addressed it. And that’s why in my report, ‘Empowering English Cities’, I have listed amongst the responsibilities of the Mayors for them to produce a strategic plan for the area embracing the main aspects of economic and social behaviour. Michael Gove has gone down that route as well. I think this is where the devolution agenda perhaps loses a bit of clarity. It’s not an absolute concept. It’s a partnership. Central government has got every right to have its manifesto implemented and to be able to dictate the broad views that it was elected to achieve. But bearing in mind, we’re working with Labour authorities, there is a huge common ground about what needs to be done which has got absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with party politics.
I do know that George Osborne and Greg Clark had to go into the corridors of power where I didn’t go, to court to colleagues to try and get their compliance. And George did top slice the budgets of three departments into his single pot. That’s all gone of course.
Q: Is local accountability important and is it a problem that so much taxation is raised centrally?
We could have a very interesting discussion about how you make these authorities more accountable. You would undoubtedly have to address the tax issue. The view I took is that I live in the world of the art of the possible. And the moment you get into this tax issue, you have a quagmire of options and debates. There were many problems: there are too many authorities, they are too close together, there is too much equalisation carried out by the central government in order to deal with disparities. I believed, and still do, that it’s much better to go for what you can get rather than bog the whole thing down in something that will become hopelessly party partisan.
I designed the council tax. I was in a meeting of the European Council of Environment that was thoroughly boring. Everybody was reading out prepared statements. So I said to my private secretary, ‘I’m bored by this, we’re going back to the embassy, I’ve got to sort out this rates business’. Broadly I brought the rates back, with a tiered structure. I designed it all in the British Embassy in Paris, we got it through and nobody’s seriously thought of anything better.
Q: Has London’s success been a drag on other parts of the country?
It’s been incentivised by policy. The policy of nationalisation saw the clear removal of power from small and medium-sized companies to headquarters in London. The tax privileges that were given to publicly quoted companies to take over private sector companies in the provinces were ginormous in their impact. If you had a private business in Manchester and it was worth £10 million, if you sold it to somebody in Liverpool or in Manchester for £10 million, £4 million of that went straight to the Chancellor. Whereas if you took £10 million worth of shares from a public quoted company, you didn’t pay tax at all. I mean, what do you do? We’re all human. You take the shares. So there were massive incentives to draw money to London, to build up London. The newspapers: if you see what’s happened with the polarisation of opinion in London. There used to be quite substantial provincial newspapers. They’ve suffered very dramatically. So I’m afraid it wasn’t just a benign, ‘This is the market working’. This is the market being very severely pressurised by incentives built into the system.
I’m very aware that by and large, British economic policy has been run for the south-eEast of England. Ups and downs of growth rates and inflation rates and all that were geared to what suited London. When the economy began to motor and inflation began to rise, London gained hugely from that process. But it the further away you got from London, the less the benefits actually flowed. And just as they’re just beginning to flow, you cut them off because you had to deal with the problems of overheating in London. So the whole strategic assessment of how to benefit the United Kingdom was actually much more a judgement about, ‘What can we do to improve the position in London?’
Q: Do you think the same thing applies to the allocation of public money for infrastructure or science?
I suspect there was never a strategy worth the name. People don’t have the detailed knowledge of what is actually going on, because, unless you’ve been there yourself, the detail of it has never passed your desk. But I feel very strongly about education. I’ve read some of the Ofsted reports and in one there was a reference to a ‘culture of indifference’ to the quality of education in certain areas. I think of City Challenge. Everybody knows where these places are. The party system doesn’t really cope with that. The Tories don’t broadly have those areas in their domain and the Labour Party want more money to spend indiscriminately across the public sector. Neither are the right way forward. City Challenge is the right way forward, but it ended. I can’t understand how it was ever stopped. David Cameron, to his credit, tried to bring it back. And that’s when I got sacked, but not because of it.
Q: Is there one idea or innovation that has really worked and ought to be taken forward in the future?
The important lesson is how to organise administrative structures around viable economies. That it is central. You then do a SWOT analysis of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You then need a clear plan to exploit or prevent the strengths and the weaknesses. You need somebody in charge, you want money on the capital account that is deployed to encourage the strategy you have delineated. You need it over a long period of time, because there are no short-term fixes. You need to reflect this locally-based strategic approach in a government that reorganises itself in order to reflect the reporting structure you’ve created. That means powerful, coordinated, local public administration in the major conurbations. You need to bring the quangos into a partnership with accountability to the strategy. That’s what I think.
ENDS