Examination of Witnesses (Questions 640
- 659)
WEDNESDAY 27 OCTOBER 2004
SIR JOHN
EGAN
Q640 Mr Chaytor: The thrust of your
report and your evidence today is that London, if it is to be
a world-class city, has to have this total inter-connectivity
but if you are saying that it is the leading city in terms of
quality of life and—
Sir John Egan: In terms of wealth
creation, it probably is already. How is it going to maintain
that and how is it going to house another million people over
the next 10 years? That is the kind of thing we have to think
about. How can it maintain this position? I think that London
is absolutely vital for the rest of the country. I think it is
the reason why Britain is prosperous. So, the fact that London
works and works well is utterly essential to the well being of
the nation as a whole.
Q641 Mr Chaytor: Are there no parked
models elsewhere of cities that London should be learning from?
Sir John Egan: I do not think
it was in my remit to be doing that and we did not do that. We
looked at particular communities overseas in terms of how to build
friendly housing of high quality and low cost with low CO2 emissions,
for example, but we did not look at how Paris or New York ran.
Q642 Chairman: Forgive me for not
knowing this but are you still Chairman of London First?
Sir John Egan: No. I was a vice-chairman
of London First for many years. I think I might be a vice-president
still but they are not very important!
Q643 Chairman: London First is not
very important?
Sir John Egan: No, the vice-president
is not very important. Vice-chairmen are far more important than
vice-presidents and I think I am one or the other but I am the
least important one!
Q644 Mr Challen: Can I just clear
up that you are saying that all bodies should use the relevant
indicators and do not have any choice about that?
Sir John Egan: Yes, I believe
that is the case but do not think my word is law here. I am just
saying that personally that is the view. We have asked, however,
for the national centre for sustainable communities to basically
operationalise our goal as quickly as possible in order that it
can be used operationally for some of the very reasons you were
raising. We were not sure that, in the time we had available,
we had done a good enough job. We felt that a better job could
have been done.
Q645 Mr Challen: I am just wondering
how this might have worked in practice. London is a huge travel
to work area covering many, many authorities and some of these
will have conflicting priorities. Some will want to minimise transport
infrastructure and others, perhaps in the city, will want to get
more employees in and may not be so concerned about the impact
on the environment beyond their immediate boundaries. How would
you see these people complying with these indicators? How will
they actually be able to do that on a practical level? The probable
spatial level under transport connectivity is just at a district
level and that is not adequate to—
Sir John Egan: No, I think I said
that transport is probably going to have to be done at a regional
level.
Q646 Mr Challen: I am just looking
at the ones in the 50 that you have chosen and it is numbers 34
to 37 and they are all at district level.
Sir John Egan: They will be more
to do with the connectivity within the place and also to outward
levels where there is more prosperity.
Q647 Mr Challen: Do you want to comment
on that particular question about how these different bodies .
. .? It is okay to say that individual people are simpler beings
than authorities, Government and the rest of us but, to have sensible
and meaningful indicators, we have to have sensible and meaningful
ways of implementing them, interpreting them and getting results
out that are useful rather than simply having a tick-box approach
where everybody tries to manipulate the results to show that they
have done a good job and then you come along and ask other people
if they are happy and satisfied and some of these other indicators
and they say that they are not, which seems to me to be the history
of indicators.
Sir John Egan: One of things I
was chairman of for a while was the Central London Partnership
which sought to get common cause between all of the Central London
boroughs. It is quite clear that the Central London boroughs do
realise that one of the things they do is create employment. They
know they create employment for other places. So, you have a population
there but what you are doing has to create wealth for other people
as well. For example, one of the most difficult ones is Westminster
where not only is it a huge place for people to live but they
are also the biggest single tourism product in the whole of the
United Kingdom and there is a conflict there. I just simply think
that it is the job of people to understand where they are and
to understand the nature of the people who depend upon their city
and do the best for each one of them and, where compromises have
to be made, they are sensible enough to make good compromises
on the basis of the people whose services are required from them.
Q648 Mr Challen: The Government do
not seem to be too impressed with the idea of having these 50
indicators exclusively for sustainable communities and they do
not think they should be adopted into the community strategies.
Are you satisfied with their response to your suggestion that
they ought to be?
Sir John Egan: No. This is not
the end of the story. We have to operationalise them and make
them work and you cannot say that they cannot work until you have
tried.
Q649 Mr Challen: Would you be happy
for local authorities, say, to include many other indicators and
perhaps even argue that they are more important than those you
have chosen? Where do we get to with this process of having indicators
if this is more permissible?
Sir John Egan: Have you followed
what I am trying to do? The key is delegation of authority from
the centre to local authorities. There has been no way of doing
that. People have vied with each other and governments have vied
with each other to emasculate the authority in local authorities
and how are you going to get leaders to actually give leadership
to their communities if all the authority has been stripped from
them? This is a way of delegating authority to local authorities.
It is a way of being able to say, "If you can improve the
sustainable of your community, we will delegate authority to you."
I have asked that, that is what my report has said and I think
they have been less than warm in answering up to that, but I do
not think that they are going to make sense of this problem until
they take delivery of it.
Q650 Joan Walley: And ownership too,
presumably?
Sir John Egan: Yes. It is a huge
point that, if we want to have communities that work, they are
not going to be designed from Whitehall. Let us be really realistic
with this one. That is what they have to be able to do.
Q651 Joan Walley: I think the implications
of what you are saying to the Committee are huge, particularly
in respect of governance and local democracy and, in a way, need
to be reflected in terms of funding arrangements provisionally
from central government and it is difficult to see how, with the
different partnerships that there are, local authorities can take
the lead and ownership of some of these delivery mechanisms because,
at the local level, often you will find that the skills or the
drive simply are not there because they are under pressure from
so many different quarters.
Sir John Egan: The debates we
were having about these key performance indicators are very important
because I want to see all of the national service givers working
in common cause with each other and being judged collectively
by the same audit process. Then we can see it working.
Q652 Mr Francois: You are making
an argument for the devolution of power to local authorities.
Sir John Egan: Yes.
Q653 Mr Francois: To encourage people
locally to take ownership of the process.
Sir John Egan: I was asked what
skills were required and I said that one of the fundamental skills
was the skill of delegation from central government to local government.
Q654 Mr Francois: In principle, I
concur with you on that. You also talked about the importance
of carrying local people with you and you made that point in several
contexts in the discussion this afternoon, but you have also said
that it is very important that there is regional planning. Is
there not a contradiction in the middle of all of us in that you
want to see authority devolved to the local level, you want to
work with local authorities, and actually those local authorities
under regional planning have no control over the most important
decision which is how many houses they have to accept?
Sir John Egan: Let me come to
the key point here. I think that two or three things are going
to be designed and planned at regional level. Prosperity will
be a regional process. Let me give you an example. We had all
those race riots up in Burnley and the general notion was that
there were not enough jobs in Burnley. Burnley is not going to
solve its unemployment problem itself but the place where they
can resolve it is in Manchester. There are enough jobs for all
the people in Burnley actually in Manchester if you had good enough
communications from one to the other so that people can live in
Burnley and work in Manchester, the answer is that you could do
it. You will not plan the prosperity of Burnley from Burnley.
That has to be a regional thing and that will mean regional transport
systems are required. That is why I say that there is an absolute
key. I think it is important that this relationship between regional
and local authorities is restricted to a number of the key things
that are best done at regional level and clearly prosperity is
one and transport is another. If you are going to choose where
the Royal Opera House goes, you have to maybe do it on a national
basis. The big things that people require for cultural and other
issues will also be planned on a regional basis as well, I am
sure. That is the way it is. So, you will just have to have a
regional say and then a local say.
Q655 Mr Francois: With respect, we
are not talking about opera houses, we are talking about thousands
of houses with all the infrastructure implications of that. How
can you take local authorities with you along the lines exactly
that you have been advocating if they do not actually have a say
in the most vital question of all which is how many they have
to take?
Sir John Egan: At every meeting
I have had with the Cabinet subcommittee, I have asked them to
stop talking about houses. I think they have done themselves no
good at all by talking about houses. There was a picture on the
front of the Economist when it was announced of a plane,
a great big 747, flying over the south east dropping houses.
Chairman: It was in the Spectator.
Q656 Mr Francois: We know the picture.
Sir John Egan: What they should
have done was to talk about communities and that we have to expand
communities and the only people who will do that well will be
the local authorities.
Chairman: The division bell has gone
and we are going to have to break. We would very much like to
come back and get into the whole issue of skills which is really
what you are here to talk about in the first place.
The Committee suspended from 4.50 pm to
4.55 pm for a division in the House
Q657 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask about
the recommendations you made about skills, in particular the question
of the National Centre of Excellence. Your recommendation in the
report was that this should be in place or the board members should
be in place for late 2004 with the centre up and running for 2005.
Can you tell us where we are at and is that likely to happen?
Sir John Egan: As far as I understand,
it is possible to happen, yes.
Q658 Mr Chaytor: Being "possible
to happen" is not the same as "likely to happen".
Sir John Egan: I think the timetable
is that it will be up and running during 2005.
Q659 Mr Chaytor: How will it relate
to the other skills problems because, in the skills sector at
the moment, there is a huge proliferation of funding bodies and
advisory bodies and sector skills councils that are now gradually
getting up and running? Is that is not just a question of another
quango that is going to muddy the waters? Is there not going to
be more inter-agency rivalry between who does what, quite apart
from the professional bodies for architects and engineers, planners
and so on? Do you not think there is a danger of agency proliferation?
Sir John Egan: Let me first of
all say that this whole area requires further research and I wanted
the centre to be connected to one of our great universities in
order that high-quality research could be done.
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