Neale Coleman was an aide to Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson as Mayors of London. Neale led work on the Olympic and Paralympic Games at the Greater London Authority (GLA) from 2000, and currently sits on the National Infrastructure Commission.
This interview was conducted on 13 December 2021.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
When I left university I worked briefly for government, on energy policy – back in the 1970s. I then worked in local government for quite a while in London, mainly around housing policy. I ran my own consultancy business briefly in the 1990s and did all sorts of things. We were doing work around skills policy for what were then the Training and Enterprise Councils – one of the whole series of sub-regional, quasi-regional, bodies that have been set up from time to time and generally not lasted very long. They supposedly bring business and the public sector together, and none of them lasted very long, normally for political reasons.
Most notably, for the purposes of this work, from 2000 until 2015 I worked for successive mayors at the Greater London Authority, from the election of Ken Livingstone as the first mayor until nearly the end of Boris Johnson’s time in office. I did very briefly work for Sadiq Khan. I was basically working as a political adviser, a close policy adviser, to successive mayors. I was there throughout the whole of Ken Livingstone’s two terms, which I think were very successful. I was heavily involved in both developing the suite of regional policies around the London Plan, the London Economic Development Strategy and related policies, and in the delivery of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. Obviously, an important part of that was the regeneration and growth legacy for east London. That was always part of Ken’s vision for the future of London which, if you look at the plans produced by his two successors, hasn’t really changed in its fundamental thrust.
I think there’s a critical issue about why regional governance has worked more effectively, most of the time, in London than in other parts of the country. Since 2015 I’ve been working again as a consultant and have been involved in quite a lot of projects around regional growth issues, some of them in London; some of them down in Bristol, which is an interesting part of the country; and some of them on the Humber, which is another interesting part of the country. Most recently, I’ve become a member of the National Infrastructure Commission, which is there to provide government with a long-term view about infrastructure needs and the purposes of infrastructure. Obviously, that’s also taking me into a whole range of issues about infrastructure and economic growth.
Q: What stands out as the key successes of policy, and the key frustration, over that period?
I’m not someone who can make broad statements around this. I’m going to have to plant that in my own experience. I do think that London post-2000 is an undeniable success story. Certainly, London 2000 to 2012 and off the back of a brilliantly successful Olympic and Paralympic Games and everything that came with that. I think it’s a story of setting a vision, setting a detailed plan and then using that plan to drive a whole range of policy actions. The Olympics itself was a huge implementer for the vision in the London Plan of sustainable growth, ensuring London’s growth is contained within its boundaries and therefore looking to focus growth particularly on brownfield land in the east of London.
That was a straightforward philosophy and it drove things and it worked. It worked in particular because the instruments to enable it were there: the London mayoral model, which brought together economic development with the development agency for the region; a transport authority – a multimodal strategic transport authority; and big development control powers for major strategic developments. That is a model that works very well and isn’t a model that really has been tried in other areas for a whole variety of reasons. I think it’s a model which is running out of steam now, both because the Regional Development Agencies [RDAs] got a push when the Tories got in in 2010, and now, because the transport agency is bust because of Covid.
In terms of failure, I think it is really the development of skills policies in the UK across the board. I mentioned the Training and Enterprise Councils. There’s always been lip service paid to transforming vocational education in the country, having it driven by employer needs and investing in a much broader base of skill; providing much greater equality of esteem and delivery for vocational courses compared with university courses. There has been a total failure to achieve that. It hasn’t been done at all. Compare the situation here with the situation in Germany, most obviously. We’ve never got it right. It’s been heavily centralised.
I’m not a fan of the over-centralising mode of the UK Treasury. I think it’s been the cause of a great deal of problems. I think it’s reflected in the fact that the Osborne devolution model, in my view, is a comparative failure. It doesn’t really give effective power and authority – they are on a drip of money from Whitehall. There is a question of how far that could ever not be the case given the economics of their transport authorities and so on. But I think they’ve suffered from a deficiency compared with London in that they have had to corral the lower-tier local authorities, and essentially those lower-tier local authorities have a veto over what happens. There’s a sense in which you proceed at the pace of the slower storm. There’s a risk that you do that. In Manchester that has been overcome to some extent through a lot of hard work, but not completely. I just don’t think that the Osborne combined authorities work effectively.
I imagine one of the things that the government must be looking at is strengthening the powers of the other regional mayors, which I think would be a good thing. I think it then raises questions about how you strengthen accountability. If you get a crap mayor, it’s very difficult to get rid of them or to stop them misbehaving. A small, but I think noteworthy, example is the former mayor for Cambridge and Peterborough – the Tory who got booted out at the last election. He was a maverick nutter who wanted to build an underground in Cambridge and do all sorts of crazy things and didn’t want to cooperate either with Cambridge City Council or South Cambridge. And there’s nothing you could do about that. There was no accountability pressure at all. I suppose, in the end, the fact that he was kicked out at the election shows that ultimately you get there. I think that’s an issue as well in London with the mayoral model and the Assembly. There’s always been this question: should the Assembly have more power? Should the Assembly be perhaps composed of borough leaders?
I think one of the problems is that if you’re the Mayor of Manchester or you’re the Mayor of London, then there is a very heavy accountability on you from the media, from the electorate. I think if you’re the Mayor of Cambridge and Peterborough or the Mayor of the West of England, I don’t think there is as much accountability. I don’t think anybody knows what you do or what your purpose or function is. If you’re bad at your job, you can cause an awful lot of things not to happen without people really noticing.
I am in favour, broadly, of mayors. I’ve always said that if you can have a Mayor of Milwaukee, why not have a Mayor of Leeds? It just seems to me a bit daft that we don’t have strong mayors. I think that then begs the question about what we do regionally. What regional governance fits with that? Can you make it work? We’ve got a bit of a patchwork now, and I don’t think that is a good thing. I know why it happened. But I think this idea that you have one set of powers in the West Midlands and another one here or there – I don’t think it works. Increasingly everything is run by the Treasury. My view of their default view is that the Treasury doesn’t want any money spent.
Q: Why was London given powers and a mayor in the late 1990s while the other metro regions that were abolished in the mid-1980s were not?
London had the GLC [Greater London Council] and that was abolished by Thatcher. London has this big regional transport system which is absolutely fundamental to economic life and everybody’s life in the city. Following the abolition of the GLC, transport in London went to pot. It was very badly run and administered. It was split up into a number of little bits and pieces. There was a particular feeling that it was ridiculous that a capital city did not have any elected governance.
If you were in Manchester, you have this quite small inner urban authority called Manchester City Council. Compare it with Birmingham where you’ve got this vast authority, I think the biggest in Europe – Birmingham City Council. There are problems with both of those, but it gave you an elected authority for the city. In London, you had nothing and it was clearly something that Londoners didn’t support. They were particularly unhappy with what had happened with transport. The Ken Livingstone election was a controversial thing in itself.
I was involved with looking at London governance when Neil Kinnock was the leader of the Labour Party. A colleague and I were doing consultancy at the time and we wrote a paper, which will still be around somewhere, for Neil’s office, setting out a proposal for a new form of London governance. One of the things which people then were very keen to hang on to was the notion this was going to be a very strategic authority. And this was really a response to angst about the ‘loony left’. There was a very tight idea – even when Ken got in – of the new GLA as a strategic authority. Nick Raynsford had worked up the detailed proposals for the Authority. Nick had this idea that there were always these ten personal appointments that the mayor could make and I think Nick’s idea was that those ten people would be technocrats, people who would come in and actually manage functions. In practice, that’s never happened because the mayor has chosen to appoint political apparatchiks like me to these posts. In some cases, they knew a bit about some things; in some cases they haven’t known anything about very much. It didn’t work out as was intended.
In a sense, the critical thing for London was not so much the Authority – except for the development plan, which was obviously a very important function, with the special development strategy and indeed the development control powers. The critical thing was the control of Transport for London and the London Development Agency and their budgets. These are big things. The critical thing, from Transport for London’s point of view, was that it could cover its own operating costs, so it wasn’t 100 percent beholden to the government in terms of its capital spend and so on. It gave a degree of independence and an ability to introduce new operating policies; and we got innovation, we’ve got things like the oyster card, the congestion charge, the huge expansion in buses.
Can you do that in Manchester? I’m not sure you can. You can’t even do it in London anymore because of Covid, which is an issue. Ken was a brilliant administrator, he knew how to run a public body. He was bold in his policies, and clever, he was very good at his job. In that period, everything he did for a time went fantastically – the transport policies, the congestion charge and then winning the Olympics for London. As a result, the case was made for more powers and he did get two tranches of extra powers off the back of the success of the model. I find it hard to put my finger on anything that has happened of real significance either in Manchester or the West Midlands because of Andy Burnham and Andy Street.
Q: Has the post-2000 mayoralty helped to ease tensions between London’s inner and outer boroughs, is it forging a regional identity?
I don’t entirely agree with that because I think that there has been continuing tension between the boroughs and the Mayor. It’s inevitable and it happens everywhere. Go to Birmingham: Ian Ward, the leader of Birmingham City Council, won’t talk to Andy Street, the Mayor of the West Midlands. Go to Bristol, two Labour mayors in the West of England and Bristol, they can’t stand the sight of each other. And that’s all about tension over powers.
I think that existed very strongly in London. I believe that Ken broadly took the right approach to this. He wasn’t going to let the boroughs obstruct strategic policy objectives that he had. He’d talk to them and he’d listen. But at the end of the day, he was going to be the Mayor and deal with matters in the way that he saw fit. When Boris Johnson became Mayor, one of the things he did was to signal that he was moving the other way. In practice, he didn’t really.
I also think there’s been a huge change in demography over this period. One of the reasons why there isn’t so much tension is that an awful lot of people have moved out of inner London to outer London. They are Labour, by and large, and want decent public transport and understand it. I think that’s been a big change. Look at the political complexion of local authorities, there is no single outer-inner London divide now. Hounslow is totally different from Bexley and Bromley for that matter.
Q: How did you manage relationships across different boroughs, the mayoralty, and national government?
One of the problems there is with the boroughs. Often neighbours do not get on at all. If you look at the relationships between, say, Newham and Tower Hamlets or Haringey and Enfield: the same political complexion, never a good word to say for each other. They would never cooperate across boundaries. They often deeply despised each other as with Newham and Tower Hamlets. It’s just a feature of political life.
If you take the Olympics as an example: it was a huge national project, and the boroughs – for these purposes – could be a nuisance. Partly it was the scale of the project. That’s why the planning powers had to be taken away from them and we had to have a separate planning authority. They wouldn’t agree amongst themselves. They were rightly, and understandably, always arguing for their own residents, but that breeds parochialism around their borders.
We needed them to do some regulation and enforcement and to do that jointly. We got them to set up a joint team to do that. We needed them to step up their service provision during the games. And we bribed them with money to do that. And when I had to manage that relationship – I don’t think Ken got involved with it very much – I did it with the chief executives who were mostly sensible people. We had to do the same with Westminster who, as the centre of town, were as important as important as Newham. They were obviously of a different political complexion. We did that brokering all the time.
A lot of that went on and we were constantly sorting out problems for them. When you look at the East London Line, which was a crucial new piece of transport infrastructure, one of my colleagues spent hours resolving issues between Hackney and Tower Hamlets to make sure that that investment could go in, given the planning issues. I was involved in planning the transport infrastructure to support the Wembley National Stadium project and, again, we were working with Brent, Network Rail and everybody. We did a huge amount of fixing of problems and sorting stuff, which we were able to do given the Mayor’s power and position. The planning application that we granted for Stratford in advance of the Games was critical both to the Games and to the legacy.
That was one of the most important things that we did – but we did it from a position of strength, to a large extent, because at the end of the day the Mayor had powers and money. We were able to use that not in a silly or brutal or aggressive way, but everyone understood what the position was. We specialised in solving problems, usually at the borough level and involving discussions with the boroughs.
Q: How was your relationship with Whitehall and did this vary across different departments?
It wasn’t easy when we started. Ken started off from the problem of having stood as an independent. His top priority, in his early days in office, was to destroy the government’s public-private partnership for the Underground. In the end, it fell apart because it was a rubbish scheme.
The correct approach should have been for Ken to be able to raise money, borrow and fund the Underground as he saw fit. That’s obviously the correct approach and that’s what should happen more generally. You have to have that measure of fiscal devolution, which builds in the accountability, and which Ken did have to a significant extent.
If you look at what Ken did with the Metropolitan Police, he did drive through really quite high council tax increases for which he was savagely criticised in order to make very substantial increases in policing numbers in London. In relation to the Olympics, he agreed to a supplementary council tax rise again.
The public-private partnership, and the history of Ken and the Labour Party – and because of the character of the then-Chancellor, Gordon Brown – meant that Ken’s relationship with the Chancellor and the Treasury was not brilliant. Nevertheless, we had to do quite a lot of business with the Treasury, particularly over the Olympics. I did a lot of the negotiating around the various financial deals on the Olympics, mostly with Dan Rosenfield, and we came to a sensible accommodation. Gordon Brown and his advisors, in fact, very substantially increased the Olympic budget.
A lot of relationships were not perfect by any means. Ken and John Prescott was also not a marriage made in heaven. But again, with the Olympics, I was reminded only the other day of the time when we had to sort out a very big contract to put in the overhead power lines for the Newham underground. A huge contract, it had to be let early before the Olympic delivery authority was up and running and we had to sort that out and some complicated land issues. Margaret Ford, who was then the chair of English Partnerships, now Baroness Ford – I had to ring her to arrange a dinner between her and Ken to sort it out and that worked. And they did it.
Halfway through Ken’s first term, as we moved on and as the congestion charge had been relatively successful, other policies have been successful, it became clear that the Prime Minister wanted to change his relationship to Ken and wanted to work out a relationship which had him being readmitted to the Labour Party. A number of Blair’s key advisers were involved in those conversations. After that, the most critical relationship that Ken had was with the Prime Minister. I think, if you’re the mayor of the capital city, you would expect to have a very strong relationship with the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, and other departments as well. I think that ought to apply with other big mayors, too.
Q: Could you tell us more about how you thought about skills policy in London and what would you have wanted to do differently?
It’s difficult, skills policy. If you’re looking at examples where this is successful, you probably go to Germany again. We are not going to create, overnight, German-style Chambers of Commerce, maintained by the private sector with a long tradition. The situation is quite different here. There’s a huge amount of talk about getting employers involved. In practice, what happens in this country is that employers are not involved. What most employers want to do is just make sure they don’t have to pay for training and for skills. You’ve got to change that. I think the apprenticeship levy has been a complete failure in doing that. I think the proposals in the government’s current skills bill for Local Skills Improvement Plans, genuinely driven by employers, is on the right lines. I think there are difficult issues about equality and esteem because there’s always this point about separating sheep and goats at 14. I think that the extent to which employers are engaged with education and secondary education in this country is very poor.
Q: What was the role of the mayoralty in driving the London Challenge and what lessons can we learn about Whitehall, mayoral and borough collaboration?
I don’t entirely think that the London Challenge was Whitehall-driven. It’s a very mixed picture. If you look at Hackney, where I think by common consensus now the education system is excellent, that was driven to an extent by central government and its academy policy but also by Jules Pipes as Mayor of Hackney who got behind that and delivered it. I think if you look at Islington, where I live, the schools have largely not been academised, and yet education performance is excellent. The extent to which the academy policy has driven the London Challenge, and the improvement in results, is again arguable. There are a lot of cultural factors that have driven this. I’m sure there’s plenty of research around about the ethnic composition of students in schools and the extent to which that’s driven a focus on attainment and achievement.
It was very much a borough responsibility. It wasn’t something that, under the Livingstone administration, we pushed for very hard. Under Boris Johnson, there was more of an attempt to do this but it had a marginal impact. So much of this is at the level of the individual school these days. A lot has to do with the quality of teaching and learning. That’s what drives this. A lot of work was done on that across London in schools, post the abolition of the ILEA [Inner London Education Authority], before and after the academy policy.
There is a big issue about the failure to successfully deliver high-standard technical and vocational education that meets employers’ needs. If you look at the way in which further education [FE] in this country was decimated under Cameron and austerity, it isn’t surprising that we’re now struggling with that. It is a very fundamental question of money and staff. If you look at salaries for FE lecturers, it isn’t surprising that the performance of a lot of FE colleges isn’t what we want. There’s no sign that the current government, despite a lot of talk about the emphasis it wants to place on vocational education, is doing anything very much about that. As usual, it’s doing an awful lot about systems and processes, as in the current row about T Levels and BTECs. That is a substitute for debate about the substance of the issue.
Q: If you were sat in Birmingham or Manchester, how would you have viewed the rise and progress in London over the past few decades?
Whenever I’ve talked to Howard Bernstein, he’s very been very clear that there’s absolutely no trade-off between Manchester and London and he wants to see a strong London. That’s why he was desperate to get HS2 to come to Manchester, which he has managed to succeed in doing. The links between London and Manchester are critical and you can see it, quite recently, in the debate around HS2 and the station at Euston. Howard and the Northern Powerhouse people have been very strong advocates of investing in Euston to make sure that the links are strong. There are real advantages for both cities in doing that. And I think if you look at Birmingham as well, you wouldn’t have HSBC and Deutsche and all these people putting back-office and front-office functions in Birmingham if it wasn’t for the notion that there’s going to be even stronger and better connectivity between the two cities.
Q: Is there something we could have been done to help the other parts of the UK benefit from the rise of London more effectively?
You might just generalise that question to whether there are things that might have been done that could have helped other parts of the country – more effective economic development strategies and so on. Obviously, there should have been. The abolition of the RDAs was a retrograde step, both in London but, I think, even more particularly outside London. In London, to an extent, you still have the GLA and it was able to carry on a lot of the functions of the RDA.
There’s no doubt that we are now in the worst of all worlds, with the government systematically unable to invest in London because everybody hates London supposedly and Levelling Up is effectively reduced to a policy of levelling down London, allowing its transport system to decline and being nasty to Sadiq Khan. At the same time, nothing really is being done to address the economic and transport challenges elsewhere. The integrated rail plan is a plan for a very large amount of investment in transport connectivity, mainly benefiting the North, but also obviously benefiting London. A huge amount of it is phase one and phase two of HS2, the connections to London from Birmingham and Manchester. The benefits of that are not going to be felt for a while, as is the way with investment. There’s this short-termism, political cycle issue in British politics.
One of the real deficiencies in British government policy and implementation is that, for a long time, there’s been no effective government sponsorship of major regeneration economic growth projects. Since Heseltine, basically. We had that in London with Stratford and the Olympics in East London. But look at some of the opportunities that exist elsewhere: in and around Birmingham, the investment that should have flown more generally off the back of HS2 around Birmingham Airport and the NEC [National Exhibition Centre] and the new Interchange station there in Central Birmingham; around Piccadilly; in the south of Leeds. There’s been no senior government ministerial or high-level official sponsorship of this. All you’ve had is the Treasury clunking through business cases and saying ‘No’, despite the alleged reform of the Green Book and the alleged greater strategic approach within it, of which no sign really has been seen at all as yet.
Similarly, the whole Oxford-Cambridge project – that is a case study of policy failure. We were supposed to be building a million homes, they’re now eventually putting the railway in. Nothing will happen. Nobody has dealt with the crunch political issues of where the growth should go and now it’s pretty much forbidden to talk about growth there because it’s not Levelling Up, because it’s near Oxford, Cambridge, not near Darlington and Newcastle.
There’s been no effective sponsorship at the centre of London. Broadly my view is the Treasury is a malign influence on these projects because it will not take a broader view. It will not take risks on future income or future development receipts. It just says, ‘Those are ours; it can’t go back into the project.’ That really stymies big economic growth development projects, particularly outside London. The same thing in Bristol – Bristol should be a huge growth area for the whole of the South West and all around it. Trying to get the government to put serious delivery oomph behind what a strong and good local Mayor in Bristol wants to do is proving really difficult.
Q: What do you think is the most important takeaway for us from this conversation?
We haven’t really talked in detail about fiscal devolution: the over-centralisation of the British state is a huge problem and underlies much of what I’ve been saying. Ultimately the only way you can deal with that is through much greater fiscal devolution. Exactly how you do that, which taxes and so on, others are better qualified to opine on. You probably can’t do it in a great big bang. The London example shows that you can go a bit down that road when you provide the transport fare base. In London, when you provide that, and when you’ve got the scale of council tax precepts, regressive and relatively small though that is, you can do a hell of a lot with that and ultimately it builds in fundamental accountability. I’m sure that has got to be a big part of making things better.
There is scope to do this within the existing stuff, like the business rate retention programmes that you can build into regeneration projects. It inevitably raises some fundamental policy issues around transport and infrastructure and net zero has to be fundamentally driven by national government policy.
On the Infrastructure Commission, we recently wrote a study on towns and infrastructure which argues for sensible, needs-based, long-term transport budgets for upper tier local authorities, rather than the position at the moment where there are about 16 different competitive funding streams. It’s just crazy and nonsense. But the Treasury is very against this, and their line always is, ‘Well these people don’t know what they’re doing, so why should we allow them to decide?’ That’s just wrong. You never make progress that way.
The problem is the Treasury doesn’t really have a strategy. The Industrial Strategy, whatever you thought about it, was literally just thrown overboard overnight. We have so many weaknesses: the LEPs [Local Enterprise Partnerships] that replaced the RDAs have been a catastrophic failure; a lot of the core building blocks that many people would think are necessary – like having a strategic approach to growth – are missing. You’ve only got to look at the so-called Build Back Better statement that was produced earlier this year – it’s a hideously poor document which is supposedly now the strategic approach to economic growth. If you haven’t got a strategy and you haven’t got any functioning organisations at a local or a regional level to genuinely bringing together government and the private sector and investors and business, you’re in a pretty poor place.
ENDS