Nick Forbes served as leader of Newcastle City Council from 2011 to 2022. He was leader of the Local Government Association Labour Group from 2016 t0 2023.
This interview was conducted on 3 May 2022.
Q: Could you tell us about your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I have always been interested in regional growth. The sense that I had, growing up in the North East as a teenager in the eighties and nineties, was that it was a region in decline. I vividly remember my careers advisor at school telling me that, if I wanted to make anything of myself, I had to move away to get a career. One of the things that’s always motivated me in politics has been to try to create a greater sense of opportunities for future generations than my generation had. My generation was the generation that left.
I was first elected a Councillor in 2000. At the time, Labour was in office in Newcastle, although I was never anything other than a backbencher. In 2004, the council was lost to the Liberal Democrats, and I became deputy leader of the Labour group. In 2007, I became leader of the Labour group and Leader of the Opposition. That’s a role I had for four years, before we took control of the Council in 2011.
I’ve been leader of Newcastle City Council since 2011, a role which is almost coming to an end. In that time, I’ve sought to have a laser-like focus on creating jobs in the broadest sense: not just bringing investment in, but making sure that people feel as though there’s a benefit to that, socially, within the city and the wider region. That’s highlighted all sorts of issues about the role of councils in economic growth, the levers that we have at our disposal, and how limiting they are in many ways. It has also highlighted what’s led to success and what hasn’t led to success, over the last decade or so, in Newcastle.
I became a leader of the LGA Labour Group in 2016. I’ve been senior vice-chair of the LGA since 2016, and since Keir Starmer was elected as Labour Party leader I’ve also been attending Shadow Cabinet. I’ve seen Labour Party policy from the shadow cabinet perspective, local government policy from the wider local government family perspective, through the LGA, and, of course, city growth issues through Newcastle’s lens. The other thing I’ve done over the last couple years is chair Core Cities, which is the collection of 10 biggest cities outside of London in the UK.
Q: What’s your evaluation of how policy, over the past few decades, has progressed? What has been the key success and what’s your key frustration?
The key success has been relentless local ambition and leadership, to get people into the right place to say: ‘The city not only has a future, but has a better future ahead of it than behind it.’ That’s meant tackling the sense of despondency that there can sometimes be; tackling head on the mindset amongst some – particularly Senior Civil Servants – that the North is a problem, a place where all he have to do is manage decline rather than promote growth. National decision-making frameworks around growth and prioritising investment decisions have led to a concentration of national resources being spent in areas where there’s already high growth, rather than areas where there isn’t.
I’ve had several arguments over the years with people like Michael Heseltine, about whether a competitive approach or a collaborative approach is the most sensible one to take. One of the things that during the period we’re talking about that was always a major sticking point, was the Treasury Green Book rules about growing the size of the economy at all costs, without thinking through the wider social consequences of doing so in a way that advantaged some areas and disadvantaged other areas. It’s perfectly possible to both increase GDP and increase inequalities at the same time.
One of the biggest national arguments that we’ve been making, through Core Cities, is the need for our cities to perform at the national average or above. If we’re able to achieve that, then we’d add the size of the economy of Sweden to the UK’s economy. If we want to do that, we have to have a radically different approach to cities, and city regions, than we’ve had up till now, where, ironically, cities in China have more financial flexibilities and freedoms than cities in England do.
Q: How would you characterise the changes experienced by local government in the early 2010s?
The critique I always had of the Liberal Democrats is that they weren’t a city administration. They were a bunch of ward councillors, who focused on the minutiae of local politics. There’s a big role for that in local government, but to see it as a limit of ambition is wrong. I was very clear even before I became leader of the council, that what we needed was a big, bold, ambitious vision for the city. We could not only drive things forward, but that would help us through the real challenges of austerity years.
I knew that there were going to be many challenges on the horizon around austerity. Part of the counterpoint to that had to be, ‘We deal with austerity, and we deal with the internal politics of that – and reductions in expenditure – but not in a way that gives off the smell of being a wounded animal as a place, and therefore a place that’s not worth investing in, and not worth creating opportunities for the future.’ That tricky balancing act of criticising the government for its approach around cuts, but at the same time, not saying this is a place that’s in decline, was the political conjuring trick that I had to bring off.
Q: What did you think was feasible and achievable for Newcastle?
I spent quite a lot of time the year before I became leader simply going around the city, having conversations with people. I said, I might become leader of the council in the next couple of years, I’d be really interested to know more about your business, your sector, what drives you, what your issues and barriers are.’
I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people in a lot of different sectors. I got the sense that there were cities within the city. Even within particular sectors, there were big companies that had never spoken to each other. When I came into office, I already had a very strong sense that one of the things we needed to do was to strengthen the chains within individual sectors.
For example, we had a big sector of broadly offshore oil and gas on the north back of the Tyne. One of the first things I did was get 20 or so CEOs together in the Mansion House, and say to them, ‘Okay, what are we going to do to make Newcastle a rival to Aberdeen? What do we need to do? How do we need to get there? What does it look like? What do you need from me, and what do you need from each other?’ A couple of things came out of that conversation. The first was, quite a lot of them hadn’t met each other before, which told me something interesting in its own right. Secondly, they were kind of, ‘Can we do that? Can we have that level of ambition? Part of the frustration that I had, particularly at that time, was people assuming that once you become a big fish in a small pond, that was enough, in terms of ambition. There’s something about the North East, where quite a lot of people are happy to be a big fish in a small pond. I always tried to to encourage people to see beyond the horizon.
The first part of my journey as leader was to identify gaps in individual sectors and have conversations about what we needed to consolidate. What do we need to build in terms of relationships, in terms of shared vision, and, crucially, in terms of narrative? How do we tell the story of the place, as the natural home of blue and green energy, or the natural home of life sciences, or the natural home of the digital and tech sector? I recognised that, early on, a big part of my role was simply the convening power of local leadership, bringing people together, banging heads together, giving people a bit of a boot up the backside, and saying, ‘Come on, let’s get out there and do this.’
What dovetailed together was a conversation about regeneration sites. We had a number of big regeneration sites in the city that had stalled for a long time. In particular, what was known as the old Scottish Newcastle brewery site had been bought by the Regional Development Agency (‘RDA’). When RDAs were scrapped, it was centralised as a national asset. I felt very strongly that, having been bought with money allocated for the region, for the government to take control of it, as Eric Pickles did, and insist that anybody who wants it had to buy it back again was a bit of an outrage.
The council and the university put together the pitch to buy it, and also put together the proposal for tax incremental financing to unlock the development on the site. That led to the first big gamechanger in the city, which was the City Deal I signed with Greg Clark back in 2012. I happened to have a look back at that document last week, and it’s interesting how bold and ambitious it was, and how much of it we’ve delivered. The idea behind tax incremental financing was that we would fully ringfence business rates income increases to the local authority for 25 years. That gave us a revenue stream we could borrow against, in order to do the upfront infrastructure. As a result of that, we were able to get development going on the site, in a way that had previously not been possible.
One of the first bits of activity we did – bearing in mind this was also heading into a recession and there was a real danger of losing construction jobs in the city – was commission a building on that site for spin-out companies from the university, to have a location next to the business school. That was partly because we knew there was a space demand for it, but partly, because we knew there something like 340 construction jobs at risk if we didn’t keep them in the city. I knew if we lost construction jobs from the city, it would be very hard to get them back again. It served a double purpose.
That was one of those things where the council making a direct intervention was one of the things that demonstrated to the business community that we were absolutely serious about the future of the city. This wasn’t just warm words. This was the council putting hard cash into something and being prepared to take a commercial risk, because we had confidence that that was going to lead to a benefit for the city for the future. That started to change the mindset of some of the business investors.
To finish off the story of that particular site – although that wasn’t the only site where we got the TIF [Tax Increment Financing] agreement for, the other two were the Stephenson Quarter, and East Pilgrim Street – the other significant gamechanger was the 2016/17 deal with Legal & General, which came out of a conversation I had with Nigel Wilson at Labour Party conference. I said to him, ‘Nigel, why have you not got any investments in Newcastle?’ And he said, ‘Because you’ve not given me anything to invest in.’ I said, ‘Okay, so come tell me what we need to do. Come and tell me what you’d invest in.’ So we came, we had a look, and we followed up the conversation with Legal & General. Legal & General did a deal to do a phased development of the site. Part of that was a speculative agreement to build a commercial development. The first speculative commercial development build in Newcastle for more than four decades. It was a huge symbol of confidence in the city. Lots of other investors said, ‘If Legal & General are doing a speculative investment there, that’s probably a good place for us to think about it.’
Q; How did you find navigating the wider sub-regional, regional and national architecture above you as you made these decisions?
At the time, between 2010 and about 2012/2013, there was a real hiatus. That was the time when the Regional Development Agencies were scrapped and Local Enterprise Partnerships were introduced. Inevitably, in a period of transition, there’s a period of uncertainty and people scratching their heads. I stepped into that space. I’m a great believer in proceeding until apprehended, and nobody said, ‘Don’t’, so I didn’t stop.
One of the challenges about Local Enterprise Partnerships and the way they were structured, is that they kind of saw the world as economically flat and didn’t recognise the significance of cities in terms of economic growth, compared to other areas. That’s not to say that other areas aren’t important, but to ignore the role of cities I think was a fundamental problem from the beginning of the Local Enterprise Partnership set up.
I stepped into that space. Within the council, I didn’t talk about the importance of our economic development function. I talked about the importance of creating jobs, as a way of tackling the social problems that we had in the city. The line that I always used was, Newcastle’s suffered from above average unemployment and below average wages for a long time now. Our job is to switch those around, so we have above average wages and below average unemployment. That was the mantra that my group broadly accepted as our approach internally. That enabled me to, not exactly exempt economic development functions from cuts – we did review them – but to keep significant capacity at a time when a lot of councils didn’t. For me, was an important and powerful statement of intent to the wider private sector. We brought a couple of people in from the private sector to demonstrate that we were serious about this.
Q: What do you mean when you say that the LEPs understated the importance of cities?
In terms of governance (it’s changed a bit since the reviews in the mid 2015s), LEPs were set up as geographical-based partnerships with equal representation from local government and private sector. The private sector representatives on the whole, were pretty underwhelming, and they were not people who had been previously involved in the RDAs. There were people who didn’t really have a great deal of understanding about how things worked or how to operate.
What that meant was a lot of the politics was driven by the local authority geography, and the local authority geography was several councils with an equal voice in the LEP. That meant was there wasn’t any recognition of the different economic importance of those places, either in terms of size or in terms of economic opportunity. It’s very clear that the future of the economy was going to be around the knowledge-led economy. That meant that cities with big universities were going to be hugely important. There was none of that, certainly in our LEP. Talking to colleagues around the country, that wasn’t an uncommon picture: the LEP view of the world is that it was economically flat, certainly at the outset.
Q: Are the Combined Authority mayoralties fundamentally different to that, given that they are based on existing local government structures?
I think it’s about that place-based leadership and the idea that you have somebody really punching the weight of the city in national conversations. And places with mayors tend to be the places that have that.
Although the Manchester model set the template for what came after, the North of Tyne Combined Authority – Newcastle, North Tyneside, Northumberland, and an elected mayor for that area – was more a reflection of huge frustration with the regional politics at the time. Some of our South of Tyne council leaders were basically saying, ‘If we can’t have it, you can’t have it either.’ I felt that negative mindset was a drag on us moving forward. We felt in the North of Tyne that it was better to get something than nothing. To a certain extent, it was the old LEP style of politics, but also I would struggle to point to anything that the LEP has actually done.
The LEP felt like a structure that was imposed on us with no involvement or engagement, no opportunity to shape it. Of course, people’s natural tendency was to go into that trying to fight their own corner, rather than going into something with a shared vision of what they wanted to achieve. The biggest single difference between the LEP and where we were with the North Tyne Combined Authority is that we actively pushed for the North Tyne Combined Authority, specifically because we had a common base between the three council leaders about what we wanted to achieve. We also knew how to depoliticise the geography. The LEP was a structure that was imposed. There was inevitable kickback because it was a government imposition, and also people felt that it was therefore a space where you can play hungry hippos and try to get as much as you could for your place, rather than thinking strategically about the wider geography.
Q: Given your experience with the LEPs, how do you reflect back on the role that the Regional Development Agency played in the North East?
Everybody hated the Regional Development Agencies until they were abolished. Then, suddenly, they were in favour again. Trying to be objective about it, one of the things that the Regional Development Agency did well was to depoliticise political decision making in terms of investments. The downside of that is that there was perception that Newcastle as a city did better out of it than other places did. That’s partly what led to the fallout within the LEP. I remember on several occasions being screamed at, and in one case threatened to be taken out into the corridor, by the leader of Sunderland, about how Newcastle got everything and Sunderland got nothing. That was partly a product of what had gone on in the previous decade before I became leader.
Q: Has that dynamic started to shift with the creation of the Combined Authority?
We came into it from a shared understanding about what we wanted to try to achieve, and partly because through that process we built trust. It does feel different to the LEP approach, or indeed the imposed combined authority approach.
There are some combined authorities that do really well, and there are some combined authorities that really struggle. I think it’s the combination of functioning economic geography and sense of identity that really make them work. London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, largely work really well. I think West Yorkshire will work well. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough? That’s not really a natural area. It’s not really a natural functioning economic geography. West of England again, similarly, it doesn’t really hang together in the same kind of way.
Q: But in the North East, surely the functional economic geography would be bigger than the three authorities that are currently in the North of Tyne Combined Authority?
We’ve certainly had to do some fancy legwork to prove that the North of Tyne Combined Authority area was a functioning economic geography. We did that on the basis of the housing market. But, you’re right: it would have been better to have had the wider geography. The geography of the North East is a bit different, in having two big cities within it, and a smaller city as well with Durham. At the time, we were trying to force it together. I think the reason why the devolution deal that we all signed with George Osborne then fell apart is because it was a bit like putting two piranhas in a small fish tank. We couldn’t help but try to bite each other all the time. Because of the way in which it was approached, the lack of trust that was built into it from the outset.
Q: As we balance these political constraints with the nature of regional economies, how do we prevent places being ‘left out’ of governance reform? Should central government sometimes be more directive?
Part of the problem then is that, wherever you draw the line on the map, you create a boundary. That’s always been the problem in the North East. One of the things that we’re very good at in the North East is paying lots of attention to small differences and creating big issues out of them.
The thing that is different now, compared to even eight or nine years ago, is the post-Covid understanding that not only do we have inequalities in the economy, but those inequalities are now stark and can’t be ignored any longer. Therefore, what we can’t do is simply press ahead with the concept of economic growth, from a national growth perspective, of increasing GDP without also thinking about the human cost, and making sure that that sense of growth is shared more equally and more fairly.
I think that’s one of the big differences between the conversations then and now. If I was to look at the leaders of other authorities, I could see the fear that they had of Newcastle racing ahead, and their area being left behind, in economic investment terms. It’s the same model that we criticised nationally: the idea that the Treasury Green Book approach simply promotes growth at the most convenient cost, rather than a genuine sense of ‘levelling up’, or tackling those inequalities. I can see all of that. I don’t think anybody would go into a conversation now without also thinking, ‘How would we make sure that we took people with us and try to narrow the gap – whether it’s educational attainment, or economic performance, or underemployment, or whatever it might be?’
Q: Does that leave you seeking a voluntarist approach to governance, or something more comprehensive?
I would say heavily incentivised voluntarism as an approach. I think one of the failings of the devolution deal approach under Osborne was to explain in sufficient clarity what the gains could be. I think there needs to be a really big bunch of carrots on the end of the stick, to entice people towards it. I’m not in favour of forcing people into an arrangement, but I do think there is a way of incentivising people’s participation in a way that hasn’t properly been explored before.
Q: What would that look like in the North East?
It’s always difficult in the North East to draw a particular boundary. I think the way that things are falling now feels the most fertile as a way forward: a county deal for County Durham and a deal for the five Tyne and Wear authorities plus Northumberland. Tyne and Wear, a bit like Greater Manchester actually, still has that remnant of the old Tyne and Wear County Council. That’s the structure of our combined transport authority, for example. Adding Northumberland in, although it’s a rural area, gives us a different dimension to the geography. This is of huge value, not least because of the way that people move around Northumberland and relate particularly to the Newcastle economy and Newcastle retail and Newcastle schools and so on. For me, feels like probably the neatest solution. We’re able to build the Durham approach and the six Las [local authorities] approach in parallel, making sure that there are points of intersection where we could stitch them back together at some point in the future.
So often people, particularly in Labour Party, focus on governance of this. In my experience, governance, the powers of the mayor, and who the mayor is, are a sideshow compared to the content of the deal. What are the functions and powers that you have to exercise and what’s the magnitude of funding that you’re able to leverage into the area? We brought billions of quid into the north of Tyne that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
Q: How do you think about the defeat of the North East Regional Assembly referendum in 2004 in retrospect? Was that an irrelevance, a loss, or a relief?
Well, there was a huge tactical error in coupling the referendum on the Regional Assembly with the abolition of a tier of local government. What that did was create an automatic constituency – within the Labour Party, which should have been the progressive party for change – against the change. That was a huge tactical error by Prescott. The other thing that I remember of the campaign is that the Labour party, and the other progressive parties, handed it over to a group of amateurs. They spent all their time making sophisticated arguments about the importance of accountability for decision making, and the importance of representation of the region at national table. The ‘no’ campaign just had a blow-up white elephant saying, ‘Where is it going to be and how much is it going to cost?’
It set back the cause of devolution – having the referendum, and losing it. I remember saying right at the outset of the conversation around the combined authority devolution deal – the first one that we discussed with Osborne – that our ambition should be to get so many powers and so much money out of central government that there was a growing demand for a rerun of the regional assembly referendum. Part of our vision should be that, in 15 years’ time, we want people to be clamouring for greater accountability. The problem is that, often, progressives start the conversation from ‘What does the accountability system look like?’, rather than ‘What are we trying to achieve?’ I’ve always taken the view of, ‘Let’s get on and try to set out what we’re doing, and then the governance should fall into place afterwards.’
Q: What are the levers that have not been devolved that would make the biggest difference in getting things done, locally?
First, the current mayoral combined authority model has different degrees of what you could call ‘economic’ levers of power – an investment fund, transport, housing, skills, those kind of things. I think there’s a big gap around social policy, and I think it’s a mistake to separate out social policy from economic policy. One of the things I’ve done in Newcastle is make sure that we don’t have separate conversations around that, we have one conversation.
We have a City Futures board, which is our economic prosperity board. It’s also our health and wellbeing board, it’s also our COVID recovery board. We have the same people around the table, regardless of whether we’re having a conversation about child poverty or the need for investment in further education. That’s important because it is part of getting everybody lined up and pointing the same direction, regardless of which speed they’re walking.
One of the things I was most proud of was when NGI [Newcastle Gateshead Initiative] – one of our partnership organisations – organised sprints, challenging people to say, “What are the values for Newcastle, what are the values that you want to capture?” They were remarkably consistent across those in the voluntary sector and the public sector: fairness, ambition, pride, and hope. These came through time after time. One of the things that made me really excited was when the CBI [Confederation of British Industry] came and said, ‘What can we do to help tackle child poverty?’ That’s the kind of thing that makes you think, ‘We’ve made a breakthrough here.’ For such a long time, there’s been this stereotype that somehow economic policy is the world of business, and social policy is the world of the public sector and voluntary sector. We refused to accept that there are those boundaries. I think there’s a gap in the combined authority model around social policy more broadly.
Q: Did you consider seeking health and social care devolution, as in Greater Manchester?
I was always a bit more radical than other people in this space. Duncan Selby from Public Health England did a seminal piece of work we commissioned, on the linkages between public health, mental health and employment. That made the economic case for good health and limiting workplace sickness in the broader sense. We’ve always led for the region on the the Workplace Health Initiative, which is an old Regional Development Agency project that we kept going. That was an organisation-based gold standard award, recognising good employment practices.
The reason why we weren’t able to get into the health conversation on devolution was because we didn’t have the right geography. It’s also been true with the new integrated care services development that we’ve not been listened to in terms of what the right geography is from a local government point of view.
I think it’s a false argument to say that the conversation around health and social care integration is somehow separate from the economic conversation, not least because we’re talking about some of the biggest employers in the region anyway. With social care in particular, I think there’s a workforce that is ripe for development – not just for the point of view of individuals’ incomes, but also from the sustainability of the workforce perspective.
Q: Did you find Whitehall, officially or politically side, responsive to your arguments for devolution?
I don’t want to be overly critical of civil servants and ministers. It’s a stereotype. One of the things that Gary Porter used to say, as chair of the LGA, was ‘We all hate each other, but we hate the government more.” That’s a bit cheap, frankly.
There can be, though, a real issue around perceptions of accountability and a need for a sense of control and of drive, in terms of decision making nationally. This can overpower that sense of local ownership of decision making. I think that there is a culture there, of a natural pull towards the centre.
Having said that, my experience of working with civil servants and ministers is that often civil servants would be very good at interpreting what they thought were ministerial views. Then, when you spoke to a minister, you’d find that a lot of that is stuff is made up, or at least semi-invented. I usually found the quickest way to cut through stuff was to talk directly to a minister and say, ‘Can we just get this sorted?’
I remember when I did the City Deal with Greg Clark, there was a whole lot of stuff around, ‘What are our propositions, and how do we put it together, and how does it match with government policy’…lots of civil service conversations. In the end, I just went to see Greg. I said, ‘This is what I want to do, and this is why I want to do it. This is what I need from you, and I think it’d be really helpful if what we could do is signed a Heads of Terms document that sends signals to both of our teams about our joint intent.’ We did that, and I had it blown up on correx boards and we had pictures taken of it. Every time a civil servant said, ‘I’m not sure if that’s really the ministers’ view’, I’d be able to say, ‘He’s signed it here’. I used that as a technique to influence the City Deal. That’s one of the things that we also did throughout the devolution negotiations over the North of Tyne combined authority: ‘Let’s just agree where we’re going, Minister, and then, let’s let the civil servants worry about the detail of our intent’, rather than what our intent was in purpose and whether we’d actually mistaken our intent with each other.
Q: Did this willingness to engage vary across departments? Did you struggle with any departments?
The Department for Education. The Department for Transport. Those are the two that we knew we’d always be up against problems with, for all sorts of reasons. Those were the ones we consistently had the most trouble with.
When we had the North of Tyne Combined Authority (of the seven local authorities), I was our transport lead. I took us through the process of trying to introduce bus franchising, using the quality contracts model. Ultimately it failed because the legislation wasn’t strong enough. We got a lot of pushback because, basically, Stagecoach and the other bus operators were able to lobby nationally against the government backing us. Looking back over that pretty awful period it’s one of those things where the bus companies’ lobbying outstripped the requirements of the travelling public. That tells you that the system is not working properly, and nobody is addressing the failings of that system.
I’d make a similar point around rail investment, rail infrastructure. When the Dawlish line was washed away by the sea, it was repaired within, I think, 10 days. When the Newcastle to Carlisle railway line had a similar disruption due to a landslide, it took eight weeks, and most of the bits of kit that they needed had to be borrowed from Nexus, which is our metro system. There was nowhere in the North East that had the kit that they needed to do it. There’s a regional inequality around transport that is recognised but not addressed.
One thing we’ve not touched upon is that the government is reversing a lot of the funding decisions around devolution of resources. The Transforming Cities Fund of £4.2 billion – half of which was passported to combined authorities – has now been centralised into a bidding pot.
Q: What do you think has made regional economic inequalities so enduring?
I think agglomeration of population size matters, which you improve through better transport infrastructure. Second, I’d point to tackling educational underperformance or underachievement. Those are probably the two biggest single factors in changing people’s mindset.
I remember the London Challenge for education was a game changer for London. You can see the impact of that now. I know there’s an argument about a displacement effect of kids from central London into the outer boroughs, but genuinely I think that was a real game changer. It’s one of the things that, in every devolution deal, I’ve really pushed for an educational challenge for the North East. It’s always been resisted. And I can’t quite understand why, if there’s now an evidence base that it worked in London.
By extension, if there’s been a significant rise in inequality for the last 20 years, it suggests the centralised model doesn’t work. The devolutionary approach is pretty nascent in its development. We’re nowhere near what I think full fruition of that would look like. You’ve only got to look at a picture of Britain at night, taken from a satellite, to see how stark the inequalities around the countries are. It’s very different to Germany. If you look at a picture of Germany taken by satellite at night, it’s a much more even picture of lights.
Q: What are the most important lesson is for us to take away? What has been a key success over the past few decades, and what remains the key challenge?
The lessons I take are the importance of clear, consistent local leadership, able to have a relationship directly with government; an approach by government that is enabling and facilitating and devolving, rather than centralising and controlling; and incremental changes rather than a Big Bang approach. Often what you need to do is build relationships and confidence to give people the ability to step to the next stage, rather than designing everything on a great sheet of paper and having a ‘Big Bang’ introduction. That tends to put people off because they automatically find all of the problems with that.
That’s why I think the journey towards devolution is only just beginning. It’s incremental. It will be patchy. It will not necessarily be linear, because people will go backwards as well as forwards. Ultimately, I think there’s a growing and emerging evidence base of how it makes a difference, both at an individual local authority level and at a combined authority level.
If you look at the savings, to take one small example, that we made in the public health budgets devolved to us in 2013. We’ve probably saved around about 25 percent of the costs of the public health budgets. We had to do that because of austerity, but we’re achieving the same, if not better outcomes, for three quarters of the money. That, I think, is a pretty significant gain, and that’s a relatively small area of expenditure. If we can do that at scale, over a period of say 10, 20 years, the savings to the public purse are significant. The opportunity to create more jobs, and using that as additional investment is great. It also builds two things – that are really difficult, to manage, to measure – that are absolutely crucial here: confidence and hope. You can tell if they’re there, and you can tell if they’re not there.
ENDS