Dame Rosie Winterton is the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons. She has been Member of Parliament for Doncaster Central since 1997 and served as a Minister in the Departments of Health, Transport, Work and Pensions and Local Government, as well as Labour Chief Whip. Before entering parliament, she worked for John Prescott.
This interview was conducted on 11 July 2022.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your role over the past few decades in growth and regional policy?
I worked for John Prescott when he put together the Alternative Regional Strategy, which was one of the first documents to really make this part of Labour policy. He was working closely with Richard Caborn, who went on to be chair of the Trade and Industry Select Committee and was again a great proponent of regional strategy.
I was quite involved during the first part of the Labour government – not as a minister, because I wasn’t a minister at that point, but in some of the thinking about how to take that forward. We had the North East referendum, which went wrong for various reasons. Then I held a number of ministerial posts and ended up between 2009-10 as the regional economic development minister. I was, in a sense, coordinating all the other ministers in Peter Mandelson’s business department.
Q: What are your reflections on the key successes and key frustrations of policy over that period?
It was successful in putting in place a regional structure. We set up the Regional Development Agencies [RDAs]. We had regional ministers.
The reason why you needed the nine regional bodies was because it was based on the figure of five million population. That was considered to be the right amount of people to make an economic bloc. It fitted in with devolution to Scotland, Wales and London. The argument then was much easier to make: ‘Why can’t we have that, too?’
The Regional Development Agencies, I think, were extremely successful. When things got really difficult during the Financial Crisis, I found that, as Yorkshire Minister, I could bring everyone together through the Regional Development Agencies: representatives of regional banks; the Business Link people; the Chambers of Commerce; the Federation of Small Businesses; the trade unions; local government; the universities. We had so many meetings where we could say, ‘This is what we want to. This is the way that we think we can bring people together to get out of the problems that we’re facing at the moment.’ Under Peter, we produced a plan for each area that everybody was signed up for, and everybody recognised as something that gave a direction. It had clear thinking about what needed to be done to support the regional economy.
This is my experience in Yorkshire, with the support of not only Peter as the Secretary of State, but the Prime Minister as well. I could get people into Downing Street like Siemens when we were talking about trying to get an energy strategy, wind farm strategy, etcetera, and where these would be made, how it would benefit Yorkshire. What you found companies like that – big, global players – is that what they’d always found really frustrating beforehand was dealing with 14 different local authorities on planning permission for example. The Regional Development Agency, under Tom Riordan, did all the groundwork so that they didn’t have to think. It was a bit like, if they went to a German Länder, things would be sorted, and you would be able to say, ‘If you need connections with universities to do this, this is how we can help.’
It worked well in that enabling fashion because not only was it a good idea and worked economically, but it had big political figures who would push it through. On the other hand, I think the places where this worked best were those where there was a real sense of identity: Yorkshire and the Humber; the North East; bits of the North West. It may be a War of the Roses thing, but places like this felt like a coherent political body.
Where it was more difficult to work was perhaps somewhere like the East of England, where people didn’t really feel the connections between different parts of the region. It was more difficult to get them to call together because they were quite used to being crossed with each other. You didn’t get the same ability to get a strategy. Nevertheless, we did do that for each region.
On the political side, we did have regional councils. We had select committees for the regions and they would go up and they would ask questions of me, as the Minister; of Tom Riordan as the Yorkshire Chief Exec. They looked at strategies. We were very gradually building up regional accountability. We did that, I suppose, because the North East referendum went wrong. I think the reason for that is at a point much earlier in the process: I think Peter Mandelson said to Tony Blair, ‘You really need to get behind this if this is going to work,’ but instead they handed it over to John Prescott. It did need a bit more oomph. There was a nervousness, I think, amongst some in the higher echelons about the idea that people would want another layer of politicians. I think we could have argued that quite effectively, but that was a shame. That would have given us clout like the Scottish government.
The other reason I think the North East referendum didn’t work was because we weren’t clear about what the powers were. It was all rather vague: a bit of planning and a bit of this and a bit of that. It wasn’t obvious what it was going to do. It didn’t involve the same powers as were given in the wider devolution agenda.
Q: Have the reforms since 2010, specifically the emergence of mayors and city regions, been a step forward in addressing some of those political and accountability concerns?
I think it is too bitty. Again, what is happening is that we’re not clear. In some places, like Greater Manchester, you’re getting a clear idea of what the powers are, so people buy into it. If you were to look at South Yorkshire and probably West Yorkshire, it’s just not clear enough what the powers really are. It’s not an overall strategy. It’s like a pick-and-mix.
To get proper regional buy-in, you’ve got to be very clear on what the overall strategy is. When I was Minister for Transport, it was very good that through the RDAs and the regional councils, the local authorities would actually sort out what the priorities were for the region. They would look at that in the context of whether there was, for example, going to be a big development around the Humber Estuary, and they’d say, ‘We’ve got to sort out this rail route or that road route.’ You did it in a much more coherent way than everybody doing a beauty parade to ministers in London as now: who can lobby the best to get X, Y or Z. We transferred that responsibility to the region and said, ‘What’s going to work for you?’
Q: You’ve also served as the MP for Central Doncaster for twenty-five years. How has the economy of Doncaster evolved over the past few decades in response to these changes?
Under the Labour government, you probably would expect me to say this, the investment was tremendous. That’s when we got our airport; that’s when we got the new bridge; that’s when we got better motorway connections; the education system was improved; the health system was just extraordinary. You see the signs of it all around: a new football stadium and goodness knows what. Now, we have an elected mayor and she’s done a great job.
We went through some difficult times. We had an English Democrat mayor. I still think that the wider regional context and strategy under New Labour was better overall. Now we’re back to this beauty contest, which is your bidding for your levelling up money, bits of money here, bits of money there. There’s no wider view of the coherent strategy for making sure cities like Doncaster can thrive within the region.
Q: How do you navigate the debates about focusing on one town or city, versus the city-region, or the wider region as under New Labour. Is it right to think about there being trade-offs?
At the moment, it’s quite difficult because there isn’t any framework in which to do it. You have strategic meetings with the mayor of South Yorkshire, and the local authorities come together. The Humber now almost feels entirely separate to West Yorkshire. What we tried to do when we have the regional approach was to look at the contribution of the rural areas and how you could improve that. City-regions are in such danger of just focusing in on the city and not looking at other connections.
When we were doing it before, if we were looking to put a university in, businesses would say to us, ‘We’ve got to keep people in the region. How do we keep people in the region? How do we make sure that people from Doncaster will travel to Leeds to go to university but will return and will stay?’ You could paint a picture that people understood. You could say to businesses there is a wider view that we have on connections with the local universities. A big local business like Bridon – a wire-making firm – would [hire] people there from regional universities, doing research work. You could talk about keeping people in the region.
Now, there’s little talk of how a region would develop. It’s more what can we do in South Yorkshire? We don’t have the ability to say that brand Yorkshire and the Humber is known throughout the world, because of tea-making and steel and all these other things. You can’t sell yourself overseas in the same way as you could. At the moment, it feels like everything is very inward looking. We were battling away to get city status, and were looking at how to get things into the city centre, to improve buildings here, there and everywhere. But the big picture is much more difficult to ascertain, and there’s no framework for it.
Q: Where are the main gaps for Doncaster? What is holding back further growth in the local economy?
Post-Covid, I think there will be some big opportunities if the government grips it to say ‘What are the gaps in the labour market and how are we going to fill them?’ When you go around local schools, I still feel that there isn’t a big enough push to help people follow through from what they’re doing at the moment – something like A-levels – to what they might want to do at university and where they might eventually end up.
I know from my work in parliament as deputy speaker: we’ve got problems recruiting people, but we haven’t got a very good way of going out to people and saying, ‘This is how you could come and work here.’ There needs to be much more of an infrastructure through education, through to universities or through to business with apprenticeships and so on.
If you were to say to me at the moment, what’s the real analysis of what path a 16- or 18-year-old growing up in Doncaster at the moment could follow, I don’t think anybody is properly seeing that through. There really isn’t a thought-through strategy and coherent plan, led by ministers, pushing the local authorities.
There’s such a divide-and-rule approach set into the way things are done. You don’t get the feeling of people working together.
When I used to work in government, you did get a proper feeling that the government was committed. We had lots of committees, where everybody would be brought together and we were given our marching orders. It worked, because you did look at some of the big issues. I don’t get the feeling that that is happening at the moment.
Q: What do you think it was about the worldview of John Prescott and Richard Caborn that led to them adopting that approach?
I suspect some of it was their European history. Richard had been an MEP. John had been on the first delegation to the European institutions. I think perhaps they saw the way that somewhere like Germany operated with strong regional government. Will Hutton was writing quite a lot at that time about the state of the nation, and that was influential, as was Bruce Millan and the work he had done as a former commissioner. I suspect that some of that was the background.
It did require quite a lot of state interference, in a way, to set up the institutions. You were saying it needs the state to take a lead and bring people together. Some of that would have come from their background, which would have been very traditional: the state has to play a part if it’s going to make things happen; you can’t just leave it up to local businesses.
Contrast that at the moment with the with the Levelling Up agenda. They’re finding that they haven’t got the levers to do it. It’s a bit like in the NHS, where they abolished these strategic health authorities and the PCTs [Primary Care Trusts]: Conservatives have said to me that what they’ve discovered is that they don’t know how to make change happen without it. When we were doing various things like bird flu, you had to be able to pull the levers. You’ve got to get your strategic health authorities and PCTs to do things. You can’t level up from here. There is a mechanism that is required.
It was all part of the 2010 election: we’re going to save money by getting rid of all the bureaucrats. This was a classic: ‘There are these are all bureaucrats that don’t deliver anything.’ Factor in that some of the most successful RDAs were also probably not in Conservative-voting areas; they didn’t have quite the same reputation amongst business, then it was easy. They were easy meat. Then suddenly they face things like the floods, and they’re turning around and going, ‘How are we going to do this?’, realising they’ve got to cope with X, Y, Z number of local authorities and they’ve got nobody to pull it together for them.
Q: Has London been more of a help or a hindrance in regenerating regional economies?
There were constant arguments in transport about London getting more. As I said earlier, through the regional councils and the Regional Development Agencies, you certainly got the regions to decide what their priorities were transport-wise. It also gave them the opportunity to lobby quite heavily. They would get a collective voice, to say, ‘We in the North, the North East,’ talking about transport up there. It was possible to use the voice of the North much more, saying, ‘Why does London get this? Why does Wales get this? Why did Scotland get this? We’ve got the same population, so we want a bit of this action.’
Where there was always the problem, as I say, is handing over real power – but you couldn’t hand over real power unless you had some properly elected parliament or a mayor, such as for Yorkshire. David Miliband was always very keen on mayors in different areas. John Prescott was always sceptical and said that won’t work. He would say, ‘We need proper regional government.’ There were those who got nervous, going, ‘Oh dear, they won’t like any more politicians.’ Probably, if you needed to do it properly, you needed to balance it with some regional representation. Perhaps in the House of Lords, something like that.
Q: What was your attitude as minister towards devolution and decentralisation?
Well, I was very ‘pro’ it. You could tell which areas were working because in those regional meetings, the regional ministers would be able to put in the argument for how it was going to affect their area as well as their department, because there would be quite often a crossover between two.
There was still some scepticism from some who just didn’t accept it. I think that was one of the reasons why we didn’t develop it possibly as much as we did. As I say, I think in the Financial Crash they absolutely came into their own, because they were able to do an analysis of what was going on. I felt Gordon was very supportive, and it certainly made it look as though we were trying to do something as opposed to sitting back.
(Which is what you feel at the moment: nobody really knows what to do, because there’s no proper analysis of what is happening in each area and therefore what you need to do to help the cost-of-living crisis. It’s just they’re trying to do it from Whitehall, and that is very difficult, without proper levers locally.)
Q: What was the attitude towards regions in departments that weren’t explicitly focused on them, such as health?
Well, in health we did have the Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts as the delivery arms of Whitehall. That’s why, the government – now having abolished them – it’s got a problem, as it doesn’t really know how to cope. If you’re looking at the huge backlogs at the moment, you’ve got to have somebody locally who is totally on it the whole time, saying, ‘Why are you not doing this? Why are you not doing that?’ They call these people bureaucrats when they were the people that made it happen, and they’ve got a real problem at the moment with it not being possible to pull those levers and get the changes.
Q: Were there Whitehall departments that struggled during New Labour to think regionally?
I think if you got Ministers or Secretaries of State that were in areas where perhaps regional identity was not strong, they felt that perhaps where they represented was not part of the bigger picture because it hadn’t traditionally had a regional identity. They would be rather dismissive.
That was quite difficult, because every department honestly had a role to play. I remember, for example, as Health Minister, talking with Kevin Jones about veterans and mental health. You delivered that at a regional level because you would have people at regional level who would be able to come together with psychiatrists and people from the armed forces. You had to make it very much something that you delivered because you’d have the basis in different parts of the region. It wasn’t something really that you could just say ‘You can solve this nationally.’ You had to look at local services.
Skills was probably the department where regional and local government were asking me to push for more engagement. I think that might be an area where the department said, ‘Well, we have a national skills strategy and you’ve got to get on with it,’ so their asks would be more around interpreting what was happening, as opposed to us saying ‘This is what the Department for Education should be looking at.’
Q: What did you think to the level of capability in local and regional government?
I felt that we had some pretty good people at the regional level. When I go out canvassing, you do come across people who said, ‘I was there in the RDA. My God, didn’t we get some stuff going?’ We really pulled some levers. They understood it. The other side of it was actually getting people into the regions from other areas, who then boosted the local economy.
Q: Since 2010, South Yorkshire has seen the abolition of RDAs, the creation of a Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), the creation of a Combined Authority and the debate around Yorkshire-wide devolution. How do you view the debates about where the region should go?
I think the people on the LEPs try, but I don’t think they really know what they do. It’s not clear what the strategy is. I also think even though there was scepticism in some other parts of the country. You’ve got to have a bit of a nationwide approach and I just think it’s so pick-and-mix at the moment that you can’t get a handle on who is making the decisions about what and who’s got what powers. Poor old Dan Jarvis had to keep going and negotiating with Jake Berry about what his powers were, and then when he went, go and negotiate with somebody else. You’ve got your police commissioner; you’ve got your mayor. In some places, the mayors are the police commissioners. It just doesn’t make sense, for business or anybody.
Compared to when we had the RDA, I think there is a lack of coordination, to be honest. You’ve got a mayor who has to bring together all the local authorities, but you haven’t got the direction from government as to what is being tried to be delivered. Then the local authorities have to go off because they’ve got this money that you can bid for, but it’s all got to be supported by an MP. Is this good for the region, or is this a way of getting more money into the high street? It’s a good idea to get more money into the high street, but how does that transform things? What are the transformative policies that it is possible to do with any of this? I can’t see where that is. It’s definitely not devolution or decentralisation of strategic functions, is the reality.
Q: If you look back on this period, what would you say is the biggest success, and what is the biggest frustration or missed opportunity?
I think the biggest success would be in putting together a strategic plan after the Financial Crisis and managing to get a big buy-in for that. I think the biggest failure was probably not getting enough political support in the wider Labour Party and Labour government for what was being proposed for regional government. If you didn’t have that wider buy-in within the Labour government, it was easy for that to then be changed after 2010.
You would have some of the Conservatives in the Yorkshire and Humber region who were absolutely horrified at the idea of the RDAs being swept away, because they actually saw it – particularly some of the Conservative council leaders – as something that had delivered for them. They did feel part of it, and they did see the point. It was a shame that we hadn’t sold it, or we sold it too easily in saying this is just about bureaucrats. The big mistake was to be deterred by the North East referendum, and not trying hard enough to start with. It was a bit lacklustre, but some of that was our fault as well, because we didn’t give them enough powers. People didn’t really understand what it was that they were going to do as a regional government.
ENDS