Tom Walker joined Essex County Council in April 2022 as Executive Director for Economy, Investment and Public Health. He has spent his career in Whitehall, working predominantly in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, most recently leading the Levelling Up Task Force.
This interview was conducted on 6 March 2023.
Q: What was your role in growth and regional policy over the past few decades?
I’m the Executive Director for Economy, Investment and Public Health at Essex County Council. I’ve been in this role for nearly 12 months now.
Previously, I was the Director of the Levelling Up Taskforce – responsible for the 2022 Levelling Up White Paper – working with Neil O’Brien, Andy Haldane and Michael Gove.
I’ve held a Director General role in Whitehall and was Deputy Chief Executive at Homes England when housing was really the central regional focus under Theresa May. I ran the Cities and Local Growth Unit for three and a half years under Greg Clark, George Osborne and Michael Heseltine.
The earlier parts of my career were essentially as a DLUHC civil servant on all things housing, regeneration and planning. My geography project, either at A Level or GCSE, was to compare inner-city Portsmouth and Winchester, where I grew up. I have deep roots in this stuff.
Q: When you look back on policy over that career, what stands out as the biggest success? What is the largest remaining frustration?
The biggest success is the 2014 to 2017 period, which saw the creation of the Combined Authorities and – in the elections of May 2017 – the mayoralties of Andy Burnham, Ben Houchen and Andy Street. That brought a crucial democratic mandate, and has been a source of success subsequently. We saw excitement about them at the time, with The Economist and others writing enthusiastically about those reforms.
My frustration, which I think will be common to many people, is that the reforms don’t stick. The pendulum swings back and forth too quickly, on a time frame that is short. The “stickiness” of reforms and the serious work of lasting institution building is something that we need; we need to cement it and build on it, not dismantle it.
Q: What’s your starting hypothesis for how we make things “stickier”?
Acceptance of the long-term nature of regional spatial disparity is absolutely number one. You have to blend policy interventions in a place, to address specific problems ideally at the best scale. Geography and scale matters.
And you’ve got to remove a bit of the party politics from it, by creating an enduring strategy grounded in solid evidence and with the backing of business leaders.
Those are essential ingredients. Then government has to let go a bit – particularly on control of money – so that those ambitions can be fulfilled. Don’t set up the ‘begging bowl’: of local always asking national.
Q: You’ve already mentioned housing, skills, business support. How do you weigh up the different factors underpinning growth of a regional economy?
The simplest way of putting it is: in the South and other high growth areas, you’re intervening to remove congestion, ease mobility, and perhaps dampen housing affordability; in the North, you’re trying to boost levels of skills, drive up R&D budgets, and to make the city-regions work.
That’s very crude – a massively over-simple distinction between what you’re trying to do in the ‘higher growth’ parts of the country and the areas that are playing catch-up. The exact prescription then varies: economy by economy; area by area.
I subscribe to the ‘functional economic area’ view of the city-region model. Each area has its own strengths, assets, and historic problems. You need a blend responding to all of those things to get the recipe right: innovation; investment in skills; skills aligned to future economic need; going earlier into people’s lives, to the foundation of good education. You see those sorts of interventions in the North East particularly.
You therefore need sufficient ability to tailor and align policies. How do you work out what the challenges and opportunities are? You need some pretty deep analysis. And that analytical capacity has been reduced and removed. The classic is the Manchester Independent Economic Review; Greater Manchester corralled themselves together for that two decades ago, and it endures today. Other places have something like the MIER, but some don’t and are simply responding to what the government is putting on the table.
Q: You referenced the importance of democratic mandate, but you also stressed the importance of the evidence base and insulation from political cycles. What’s the function of a democratic mandate in the regional growth system?
One of my very first jobs was to be involved in the setup of Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). The RDAs did a lot of good work, and you see their legacy all over the place. Some of the things that today’s politicians lay claim to are a result of RDA intervention (particularly land assembly): places like the Advanced Manufacturing Park in Sheffield or the location of Jaguar Land Rover in the West Midlands. They all have their seeds in the RDA model. The RDAs ran out of road politically with the 2010 Government;they didn’t have enough of a democratic mandate. There was an inherent tension with local authorities, which played out through the 2010 Election.
I don’t think the model of the Mayoral Combined Authorities has fallen into that trap. It builds on the best bits of what Greater Manchester did before they had a mayoral model; it takes a lot of the old RDA approach, in terms of the playbook of what you need to do; but it adds in a figure with a mandate – a personality – and who can do business with government. It answers [Henry Kissinger’s] ‘who do you pick up the phone to?’ question, at a scale where there are few enough of them for government to be able to do business with.
Democracy brings in a pendulum that swings. But recognising and responding to the long-term nature of spatial inequality keeps the pendulum away from that swing. We’re not arguing through the mayors about NHS waiting times, or basic school standards for example.
Q: RDAs operated by using a pot of money to bring different agencies and local governments together. Does the mayoral model have enough leverage to broker coalitions successful, as some RDAs were able to do?
The mayors are at a smaller scale, geographically. I think a good mayor has greater leverage – through personality and their democratic mandate. If their leverage is increased by greater control of more resources, we should absolutely do that.
We use ‘mayor’ as a shorthand, but the combined authority model has many strengths. The clue in the name. You’re not creating a US Governor. You’re not creating a US City Mayor. You’re creating a figure who corrals.
When the RDAs were set up, English Partnerships still existed (later becoming merged into Homes England as the Homes and Communities Agency). The housing budgets were kept out of RDAs, and there was always a tension between their two sponsoring departments in Whitehall.
You’ve got to make that leap towards local control of resource. I think we’re closer now, but you have still got these big national bodies – Environment Agency, National Highways, Homes England – where you got to have a really mature dialogue to be able to get resources locally.
Q: How important was the role of business leadership with RDAs? Has the Mayoral model weakened that business voice?
It’s really important that any mayor worth their salt has a very senior business advisory council alongside them. Part of the problem for the RDAs was the absence of democratic leadership.
The Local Enterprise Partnership model shows that you can risk tying business leaders up in the administration of public money: that can either go well or it can go badly.
The question for me is, ‘what do you want the business leaders to do? What is it that they are bringing to the table?’ That is not the same as administering public money.
Q: Is it a problem that places like Blackburn or Burnley are outside of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, despite strong functions economic links to the region? How far can the voluntary, evolutionary approach to reform take us?
It was the right approach up until 2015. I think it is no longer the right approach. There’s an emerging consensus about the importance of leadership. Had the government, in say 2010 or 2015, published a White Paper with a blueprint, then the opposition (I don’t mean party political, I mean “the forces against”) would have seen that progress was not made.
I think, for some time now, we’ve reached the moment where you could roll out the model [of MCAs]. It needs tailoring, because England is such a complicated patchwork of history in different forms of governance. But there’s a big opportunity to move this whole agenda to the next level, to more consistent use of powers.
Q: And what if that cannot be a voluntary process, due to a lack of local agreement? Should central government tolerate places being excluded from reform?
It gets much easier for places to agree to reform if there’s a genuine offer in return. Make the prize big enough, and places will step forward. I don’t mean giving away sweeties or financial incentives, just ‘here’s the opportunity to run your economy, your geography, in partnership with national government’.
I think we’re at a point where there may be one or two tiny pockets where it’s very hard to make the voluntary model work, but that is a task for national government. I don’t think it has to do it in a thumping, ‘we’re doing this’ way. But unless the centre leads in the most difficult places – difficult for legitimate reasons of geography, history, politics, whatever – you won’t make progress. I think a cross-party approach would ease that.
Take Leicester and Leicestershire, which are not currently due to be part of the East Midlands Combined Authority. You can do one of two things, assuming you want to do something: either say it’s part of the new East Midlands Combined Authority (taking you almost back to the RDA geography, but with a mayor; or you could say, ‘The moment you start doing that, you’re losing identity’ and enable Leicester and Leicestershire to have a county deal. You’ve got a couple of choices. Some people would go to the bigger, regional scale. Others would say the identity of Leicester and Leicestershire is more important.
But doing nothing should not be an option; you get there through a bit of dialogue. This is a relationship-based business. It is a dereliction of national government leadership, I think, to say, ‘we don’t really mind’ – given the scale of challenge that we face in the country.
Q: The RDAs were hampered by their lack of role in planning. The London Mayor has more planning powers than the Greater Manchester or West Midlands Mayors. Do the Combined Authority mayors have the right powers over planning?
The Combined Authority model is the right one, and Combined Authorities should have a planning role. I would start with an economic strategy which has a spatial element and dispense with unanimity voting requirements – which give any individual partner a veto.
(You could have perhaps a two thirds majority; but don’t let one authority block the mayor and the Combined Authority. The Mayor and Combined Authority have got to be able to move forward.)
The challenge is always around housing numbers, particularly in the South East. I think you have got to pull apart: first, what twenty year investments do you need to do for the economy over the long run? And then, how do you approach housing?
You can apply this to the County Combined Authorities too. Counties come in many forms: you’ve got the pure “two tiers” of Suffolk and Norfolk; and you’ve got places like Essex, which includes two unitaries. We’re applying this model in a slightly different context. But you want the same sort of recipe: what is the economic strategy for the place where the Combined Authority sits? There are elements which should absolutely be in the mix, potentially including housing. Ideally, you should set a long-term plan. And that’s before we get to net zero climate adaptation and other big challenges that are coming. They can only be solved on that scale; it’s the only place you can properly reconcile the politics.
Q: Are there situations where the model is not appropriate? Take Cornwall, which has recently rejected a county-based mayoral model?
It’s very particular to Cornwall. Cornwall unitarised within the last ten years. It hugely reduced the number of elected members. It has six MPs. It has a very particular identity and pride. They had a ‘light’ devolution deal in 2015, that moved them along the path. There is no blueprint for England because every bit of England is different.
I think it so depends on where counties come from; their history. People within other counties will look uneasily at the Cornwall model. I’m sure there are individuals within councils who look rather jealously at the Cornwall model. I don’t think you have to go as far as Cornwall [moving to a single public authority for the whole area] to get the benefits. Even within Cornwall, the constitution of Cornwall will bind them.
What does history tell us? Consensus outlasts any flashy idea. Whatever your model, the ability of local partners; of elected politicians; of business leaders, to come together, with themselves and with national government, is the recipe. I wouldn’t get too fixed by the sort of quirk of history of Cornwall. Those conditions are replicable, even if the governance model is different.
Q: How important is having a directly-elected mayor, as we experiment with other models for devolution?
I think the Mayoral Combined Authority model has many virtues; but it is so immature (operationally speaking), even six years after those first mayoral elections. We should build on it.
Pluralism is the right approach. The devolution settlements in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are a different kettle of fish; I think you should discount those as comparators. London is, in some sense, the oddity. Why didn’t Manchester emerge with a London-style model? But the Combined Authority does the thing that you don’t have in London: true collaboration (if it works) between the constituent members and the directly elected mayor. If anything, London might be the place where you need a refresh.
The issue the Levelling Up White Paper grappled with – clear now in the next wave of deals, with the ‘county deal’ model, is: how can you apply the model outside of core conurbations? That’s why a bit of plurality really matters. I think you can justify a certain deal in Cornwall, but you don’t necessarily need or want to replicate it for Norfolk or Suffolk or Lincolnshire, or wherever else in the country.
Q: You said earlier that it was politically helpful Mayors weren’t responsible for NHS waiting lists. But we see Mayors pushing for more expansive roles, away from their core economic development role – including in the NHS and social care. Is that an issue?
It shows the unevenness of the accreted landscape.
Shifting economic development is necessarily a long-term agenda; and requires work at a particular economic scale (of the mayor or Combined Authority).
Once you’ve got a successful institution and have an elected figure playing a convening role (which everybody will say, in this country and abroad, is the value of a directly-elected leader), then they can then take on wider “convening-based” powers. NHS Integrated Care Boards might be one example; Police and Crime Commissioner roles another.
I would start by thinking the core purpose is to address long term economic development. That takes you to the geography and to the sorts of powers need for a long-term strategy. And you can add from there, rather than starting with the other things and trying to bolt on “the economy” as an afterthought.
Q: Do you think your views on the importance of long term local leadership was widely shared within Whitehall?
I don’t think it is widely accepted. There’s not a conspiracy against decentralisation, but people and departments are tasked with delivering specific pledges, very often with national consistency at the core.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I mentioned waiting lists earlier. You could talk about basic levels of attainment in schools. You can talk about access to services. That is in our political DNA, and it flows from the very way that we construct budgets. It flows from the strength of HM Treasury, which flows from the strength of the Chancellor. I don’t think local growth is well understood. My general impression is that understanding of the priorities of cities and places outside of the South East is limited. It’s hard-wired into the way that we manage public money and political priorities in this country.
Q: Why – despite a commitment to local and regional growth, and the backing of senior politicians and officials – has Whitehall struggled to change on regional policy?
I think it’s because politicians, political parties are elected on delivering policies in vertical silos. That is reinforced by Secretaries of State who are very powerful and are always aware they have limited time to drive a particular set of reforms. We have a weaker system of local government than we did, so why put your eggs in the local leadership basket?
That is further compounded by the way that public money is administered and controlled: the voting of money to departmental budgets; the personal accountability of the Accounting Officer; the role of the Public Accounts Committee. It drives a set of behaviours, which are self-reinforcing.
Then there’s party politics. I’ve definitely heard it said, ‘Why would we put more control in the hands of people from a different political party?’ There’s are crude considerations at play there.
Q: How would you describe different departments’ attitudes towards devolution?
I think it’s the “trumping of other priorities”. Keir Starmer has published five missions. He’s also backed Gordon Brown’s report on the Constitution. How those two things come together is not quite clear. Will the missions be grounded in local delivery, if Labour wins? The Coalition Government and agreement came into force with decentralisation absolutely at its core, but the Lansley NHS reforms and Universal Credit…those trains left the station within weeks of the government being formed. At the same time, the Government was pulling back on regional policy and looking to local authorities to carry significant cost savings.
We’re approaching a point where there will be a General Election. Whoever wins, I think there’s an opportunity to align policy agendas. I don’t think that alignment has ever been there, even under John Prescott’s Ministry, which was created specifically for that purpose.
If you want to drive an agenda of empowering local places, and to cede or move power from Whitehall, it has to be driven from at the very least, Number 11. But ideally Number 10. Number 10 alone, I think, will struggle. The high point – in the time that I have worked on this – was when George Osborne, John Kingman, other leaders within HM Treasury backed the agenda, following Michael Heseltine’s blueprint, with Nick Clegg’s support and Greg Clark providing the creativity.
Given that, on any rational reading, local government has reduced capacity, it’s easy to see why people would say, ‘I’m going to have a reform with central pots of money that I allocate and performance manage centrally’. I think that’s perfectly rational in the circumstances. Quite a lot of these policies are rational on their own terms. The trouble is, you add up those rational things, and what you end up with is a very atomized system, which doesn’t work.
You might say that skills is an area where you need a high degree of experience among people who are commissioning. The counter-view is to say that when there’s been a national crisis – housing people from Ukraine; responding to Covid; the move from national testing to local intelligence – that, if you do trust local leadership, you get the right answer, better answers and speedier response
I think the moment we’re in is so interesting because you’ve got that recent experience against a backdrop of distrust. Somehow local government, whose budgets have been much reduced, continues to deliver services to residents’ satisfaction. I think this a moment in time.
If leading city region Mayors were in front of the Public Accounts Committee on what they have actually delivered, it would sharpen up the whole system. At the moment, DLUHC gets blamed for not getting its money out of the door quickly enough. DLUHC is nervous to do that because one can point to projects and ask ‘do these economic interventions actually work?’.
If you think your aim is to turn around the North East so it has productivity on a level with London, of course you’re going to fail. But can you stimulate economic growth where it wouldn’t otherwise happen?
The whole points of this policy agenda is displacement, and yet displacement is the very thing you should avoid doing. It’s too lazy to say, ‘It’s the Whitehall machine’ or ‘It’s the Treasury’. I feel passionate about this because I’ve been in the Civil Service machine pushing this agenda. I’m not commentating from an academic point of view. I have an experience in Essex which further reinforces what I think, but the actual work of getting it done — I think we should invest a bit more understanding in that.
Q: Is the influence of London on the UK economy a positive or negative?
It’s a positive. Name me a country that wouldn’t want to have a top three, top five, global city at the very heart of its small geographic footprint? Undoubtedly a positive.
Remember, London was shrinking until the early 1990s. The London of now is not the London of even 30 or 35 years ago, but undoubtedly a positive.
There’s lots that you can unpick. London has some of the deepest internal disparities, which is why the economic outlook has got to be combined with social justice and outcomes for individuals. Any debate that simplifies this is too loose. It’s a positive. But don’t neglect the problems of London.
The question is, how do you harness that benefit? It makes fiscal devolution hard because the start point is so uneven. You have to have redistribution built in, and that’s a very challenging dilemma.
Q: Is there one lesson learned that you would really want at the centre of a future policy, what would it be?
So much of this agenda is relationship-based: whether it’s relationships between business and civic leaders; between national and local leaders; relationships in the system. You’ve got to be centred on a more outcome- and problem-based “in-the-round” approach to policy making. You are trying to change the outcomes in Blackburn, not at the aggregate level of national measures.
For a great innovation – which you can read in the archive from 1981 – see the ‘It took a riot’ memo, by Heseltine. The prescription is there: put a very powerful team right into the heart government, in Number 10 or HM Treasury (assuming there’s a political will to do this).
To drive the agenda through Whitehall, it has to be grounded in people who’ve actually done hard yards in real economies, in real places, who are also capable of getting things done in very complex organisations. This is phenomenally complex work. Heseltine did a report interviewing the six mayors in 2019, which I helped by doing a bit of background work. That has got some very solid prescriptions.
We need to take an emerging model and commit to it. Ideally on a cross-party basis. There are thousands of people who will say that it’s the wrong thing to do, that you can’t do it because you think local government lacks capacity or capability or because local government are all set against progress. But if we are asking the question, ‘How do you run this country more effectively? How do you drive growth more evenly?’, then you have to find a path.
ENDS