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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1524 House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL government COMMITTEE
INTRODUCTORY HEARING WITH THE NEW SECRETARY OF STATE, department FOR COMMUNITIES AND local government
WEDNESday 12 JULy 2006 RUTH KELLY MP and mr peter housden
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 60
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee on Wednesday 12 July 2006 Members present Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair Sir Paul Beresford Mr Clive Betts Lyn Brown Mr Greg Hands Martin Horwood Anne Main Dr John Pugh Alison Seabeck ________________ Memorandum submitted by Department for Communities and Local Government Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ruth Kelly, a Member of the House, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and Minister for Women and Mr Peter Housden, Permanent Secretary, Department for Communities and Local Government, gave evidence. Q1 Chair: Welcome, Secretary of State, to this introductory hearing. I understand you want to make a brief statement to start us off. Ruth Kelly: Yes, please. Thank you for allowing me to make a brief statement; it is good to have this opportunity to come before you at the introductory session. I look forward to maintaining a good relationship both with you, Chairman, and also members of this Committee. I was delighted when the Prime Minister asked me to do this job. The creation of a new department is a terrific opportunity for bringing responsibilities for race, faith, women and cohesion together with housing, planning local government and regeneration. I think the Department for Communities and Local Government has a huge role to play in driving social mobility and promoting economic inclusion. There are some key elements to the communities that we want to create. They should be strong and cohesive, places in which people feel comfortable and actually want to live; they should have a vibrant civil culture, a strong local economy, and also be sensitive to the environment. By making communities work, we will help people fulfil their potential. I am very, very pleased to also be Minister for Women; it is something that I have always felt passionately about, even as a backbench MP; it was something I campaigned on and wrote about, and I am pleased to be doing this work across government as well. In regard to the priorities for the Department, on housing I would like to see a new right to own for people living in social housing, enabling more people to own a home of their own. I want to explore how social housing can help create mixed communities, and I have asked John Hills to report to me by the end of the year on the future role of social housing in the 21st century. I am driving forward our work to increase housing supply, doing this in a responsible way but in a way that protects the environment. I want to help first-time buyers and key workers to get a foot on the housing ladder. Later this year we will publish a White Paper on local government. This will drive forward our agenda for strong and accountable local leadership with clout to get things done and improve the quality of life of local people, making it easier for citizens to improve their neighbourhoods, greater personalisation of local services and ensuring we have globally competitive cities. Underpinning this there needs to be a strong local government finance system, and I look forward to Michael Lyons reporting on that later this year. Since taking this job, I have also been struck by the importance of the Department's economic contribution. The State of the Cities report showed the improvements of cities in driving economic prosperity. Our work to improve the quality of place is critical I think for attracting businesses, jobs and investment, and we are working with Kate Barker on how the planning system can better deliver economic growth and prosperity alongside social and environmental goals. I would just like to say a few words about my new responsibilities, which fall within the scope of communities for the first time. By bringing together responsibilities from across government for social cohesion and equality, I think we have a tremendous opportunity to advance the Government's commitment to social justice. I want DCLG to be a champion of equality across government. We must take on discrimination and inequality in all forms - race, faith, gender and sexual orientation - and for this reason, the thinking on the discrimination law review will be developed in the context of the equalities review which is being led by Trevor Phillips. To bring the work of these reviews more closely together I am pleased to announce that it has been agreed that responsibility for the equalities review, which is currently under the Cabinet Office, will also transfer to DCLG. The outcome of the discrimination law review work will be proposals for streamlining and modernising the discrimination law, which we intend to publish around the turn of the year, leading subsequently to a single equality bill in this Parliament. A key priority for me also will be tackling extremism. Following the tragic events of 7/7 we need a new kind of engagement with Muslim and other minority ethnic communities, which enables the voices of Muslim women and young people to be heard. As part of this work I am delighted that Darra Singh has agreed to chair the new Commission on Integration and Cohesion. Across our agenda I also want DCLG to be at the heart of the Government's work to tackle climate change. We will work actively to achieve our long-term ambition to move towards low-carbon and carbon-neutral development and to achieve more sustainable forms of energy. The Department published last week plans for re-shaping the structure and ways of working within the Department; and I believe the Committee has copies of those plans. Peter Housden, Permanent Secretary of the Department, will be very happy to take any questions you may have. Thank you for the opportunity to set out a few preliminary thoughts. Q2 Chair: Your predecessor department was criticised for having an enormous and diffuse agenda that any department would find hart to meet; and also - this is not a criticism but an observation - delivering a huge amount of its programme through other departments and other bodies, for example local government. What measures have you taken with the new reorganised department to give greater clarity so that everyone in the Department is clear how their work fits into the overall aims of the Department? Ruth Kelly: I think that that is a very important point. It is both a challenge to cover such a wide area of domestic policy but also an opportunity. We at DCLG should of course not just be representatives of local government; we should be thinking about the citizen first and foremost and how local public services are delivered in places that best respond to the needs of citizens and communities. That is fundamentally what we stand for - vibrant, mixed communities where people want, and are proud, to live; and to link up to economic opportunities so that people have the opportunity to fulfil their potential through those communities. As we integrate the work that has come from the Home Office on community cohesion and faith and race issues and so forth, together with the women and equalities unit of the DTI, I think we have an opportunity to think about communities in a much more rounded way. We can think about what makes them work. It is not just about having its tenure in the community; it is having different types of people living there as well, and having different sorts of opportunities available for the people to live there. The reorganisation that Peter is now heading up in the Department is specifically designed to integrate those completely into the mainstream of how we think as a department and what we are about. You are absolutely right to say that we work through influencing other departments to a large extent. We have a big challenge to think through how we deal with external stakeholders and other Whitehall departments and how we influence and motivate them towards our agenda. One of the signs of success of the Department would be to get other departments to think not just about their own particular policy priorities but to think about how they are delivered in local places. If we manage to do that, I think that will be a sign of success. Q3 Anne Main: Secretary of State, can authority tell us exactly what is being done, because in regard to your predecessor department there was an inability to communicate your vision outside the Department; the people outside the Department were not buying into this vision, and often there was too great a reliance on other departments supplying the wherewithal to do the environmental structures and so on. I know you say it would be a success if that were to happen, but what has been put in place to make sure it does happen, since it is quite obvious that it has not happened in the past? Ruth Kelly: Let me just for a moment state that I have been very impressed by what I have found in the Department that I inherited. Its track record is something to be proud of. For instance, if you look at how local authorities are ----- Q4 Anne Main: Can I ask you to address the question, please? What has been put in place to address the concerns that were raised ----- Ruth Kelly: Absolutely, I will, but I just want to challenge the premise of the question, which is that ----- Q5 Anne Main: Well, I do not! Ruth Kelly: Well, in context it is important that we understand that the Department has already achieved significantly, and therefore the reforms that we undertake are - yes, trying to raise the Department's game, just as throughout Whitehall we try to raise the game in general of the civil service and make them more outward-focused and outward looking; but also use the opportunities afforded by bringing the other bits in to re-think how we work as a department, and that is where Peter and I have been jointly working. In fact the Department is going through a completely radical restructuring to make sure that our new responsibilities are effectively integrated and that we re-group in a way that I think is very radical and innovative. I am sure Peter would like to take you through the detail of that. Anne Main: Briefly! Q6 Chair: Briefly; I suspect we might return to this. Mr Housden: I think the key reform here is the creation within the Department of a group responsible for what we call places and communities. This has three key functions. First, it is to orchestrate, plan and deliver our conversations across all the ministries in government that have responsibility for local areas, to bring that sense of place that the Secretary of State referred to at the heart of the policy. As we are developing proposals towards the local government White Paper at present, that is the forum and that is the pattern of engagement we are using. The second point is that the Committee, with its own ODPM responsibilities is aware, we have in place a framework of local strategic partnerships which enable all of the players in the local area to come together to form a vision and to organise and orchestrate public services towards that vision having communicated and consulted local people, backed by the local area agreements which give greater funding flexibilities to implement that vision; so a stronger focus on place in our Department across government, local strategic partnerships and local area agreements. Thirdly, we are the responsible department for the Government Office Network. That, too, will form part of our group responsibility for places and communities. We think that will give a stronger end-to-end focus on place. Ruth Kelly: If you look at how the Department will work in the future, not only are we going to have departmental grouping just looking at place, but on any specific project or programme people will be brought together with new programme executives who will draw from each part of the Department and feed into the delivery of the particular programme. For example, in Thames Gateway, the leadership of that would be officials brought in from the housing side, the planning side and all the different areas to drive forward the programme in a co‑ordinated and coherent way. The whole of the Department has been restructured, so both internally and externally we have the capability of leadership and the tools to deliver change. Q7 Clive Betts: Does this signal a change of thinking by government departments in terms of their willingness to co-operate? I do not want to go into the example of regional government but when we considered the Regional Assemblies Bill it was absolutely clear, whatever the Government's agenda, that the Department of Education, the Department for Transport and the Home Office did not want to give up one single power on that agenda, and there was a resistance to co-operate in any way. Are we seeing a real change in attitude and thinking? Ruth Kelly: I think there is a change of attitude, and if you look back nine years there was a completely different culture in Whitehall. It was partly because of the situation we inherited, which no doubt you will recognise. It meant that strongly centrally-driven directives were often the way to boost the performance of local authorities and raise the improved performance flow of public services. Over time the capacity of local government to deliver has improved, as the quality of local public services and indeed the investment from central government has gone in. The willingness of Whitehall and indeed ministers in government to trust local government more to deliver has also increased. I recently made a speech to the Local Government Association and said that I believe we have now reached a tipping point where there is a much greater willingness in Whitehall and in Westminster to trust local government to devolve more powers to them, because the framework had frankly become too driven by central governments rather than allowing local government to respond to the needs of local citizens. Q8 Greg Hands: Thank you for coming to us today. I have two very specific questions, which should have very quick answers. What is the current estimate of the cost of the restructuring and the re-branding from ODPM to the new department; and, secondly, how many staff from the Department are still being supplied to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and most specifically the number of press officers who are working for the Deputy Prime Minister from yourselves? Ruth Kelly: I can answer the first question, and Peter can follow up with the arrangements with the ODPM. The re-branding exercise cost between £8,000-12,000. Clearly, it would be inappropriate to retain the name of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and given that we have completely new responsibilities added to the old ones, I think it was wise and will be considered wise by stakeholders to change the name to reflect the new responsibilities. Mr Housden: We have the order of twenty staff who are on secondment to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. I do not have the breakdown by discipline here with me but I will put the breakdown in writing. Greg Hands: Would it be possible to say how many of those press officers --- Q9 Chair: You will get the answer in writing. Mr Housden: I do not have the breakdown of the disciplines with me, but we would be happy to provide that. Greg Hands: But it does include a lot of press officers? Chair: Greg, you will get the information afterwards. Greg Hands: It is a perfectly reasonable question. Chair: Yes, it is, but he does not have the detailed information here. Q10 Sir Paul Beresford: I am delighted to hear you say that you want freedoms for local government. Local government has heard this before from minister after minister after minister. How sure can you be that it is really going to happen because in the past these freedoms were sent down but we then found that there was a check back the other way. Second, I like the way you are talking about - the Government's phrase about stakeholders. With the Local Government White Paper coming forward, are your ideas going to be imposed or are local people going to be able to have a say in it and vote if you want any changes in the strata of local government; if there is any threat to anything, are the local people going to have a say? Ruth Kelly: The first question is - paraphrasing: why should anyone trust us now to devolve when people in the past, particularly when they are in opposition actually, talk about devolving power to the local level? I think we have fundamentally transformed the quality of the public services delivered at local level, partly because we have increased by 39 per cent in real terms the investment that has gone into local government after a series of significant annual declines in investment to local government, partly because they too have raised their game. I think the quality of leadership in local government now is significantly better than it used to be; also because we have achieved some of our ambitions, quite frankly, from central government. Take two examples: one from my own department is the recent homes expansion. When we came into office in 1997 we inherited a backlog of £19 billion in repairs. It made an enormous amount of sense to say to local councils that they should fix this; that they should invest in making sure that homes were brought up to decent home standards. They are well on the route to achieving that. By 2010 the vast majority of homes in the social sector will be brought up to that standard. It is right to say that now there may be other issues also directly of relevance to communities and that local authorities should have more discretion as to how they spend that money, whether on community facilities or on parks or street lighting or other community facilities - so more discretion once those initial goals have been achieved. It is the same issue actually in education, which of course I also know well - literacy and numeracy: it was right for the Government to come in in 1997 to introduce the literacy hour and the numeracy hour, to drive up standards to such a point where it is becoming possible to introduce a greater element of peer review, of self-evaluation and to change the inspection regime. Q11 Sir Paul Beresford: Can I stop you briefly and come back to the last question, because I am aware we have three-quarters of an hour and everybody wants to ask you questions. I was asking you about the White Paper. Ruth Kelly: There will be a huge range of issues dealt with in the White Paper. I am not going to go into all of them now, but how you cam empower local people and give them a greater say over services and make sure that services are personalised, appropriate to the individual and the communities; how communities can shape services and have more power. All of this is about trusting people. Q12 Sir Paul Beresford: If this structural change is proposed, will local people have a say? Ruth Kelly: It depends what you mean by "structural changes". If you are talking about structural changes to enable local people to ----- Sir Paul Beresford: No, structural changes to local government. At the moment we have got two tiers and we have an imposed regional assembly. Q13 Chair: Can we have a brief response to that? We are coming back to local government. Ruth Kelly: I did not realise you were trying to get at that restructuring. I tried to set out the position last week, which is that I am far more interested in outcomes for citizens than I am in lines on maps, and that is a clear point of principle. I will be outlining in the White Paper how we intend to take this process forward. I have said that there will be a short window of opportunity available for people to make a case for restructuring; but I expect a small number to go ahead, and they must have a broad cross-section of support and meet the criteria set out in the White Paper, but of course people will have to wait for the White Paper. Q14 Martin Horwood: I would like to add my thanks to you for taking the time to come; you are very welcome. In one of our recent reports we made a couple of recommendations relating to the climate change PSAs. The first recommendation was that it might be a good idea for the Department to sign up to it, because ODPM was not signed up to it; and, second, that a good first step might be to make the Code for Sustainable Buildings mandatory rather than voluntary. I would be interested to hear your response to those two ideas. Ruth Kelly: I certainly think it is a big opportunity for the new Department in meeting the overall government ambition for climate change. I think DCLG should be a major part in that agenda. We are currently preparing a new PPS on climate change, which will include an expanded role for renewable energy, for example. In yesterday's Energy Review it was also the case that there was a very significant role for improvements in energy efficiency directly related to the buildings regulations policy that we have in DCLG. At the moment you are right that there are minimum standards and there is a code. I think we can get industry to change, to work with us, by clearly setting out a direction of travel, so that they know where the Government wants them to get to in the future. That will help us achieve that end. I think that that is a sensible way for Government to proceed. I have also said - and over the last number of years we have achieved something like 40 per cent energy efficiency for new homes - that we have a stronger ambition of perhaps moving to carbon neutrality over the longer term. The way to do that is by having a voluntary code which, over time, is ----- Q15 Martin Horwood: You have answered my second question by saying you think a voluntary code is sufficient. You did not quite answer my first, which is whether the Department should now sign up to the climate change PSA or have that ambition at least? Ruth Kelly: I have made very clear that we have an important role in climate change. I would like to see that reflected in our ambitions from the Department. Precisely how we frame our PSAs is a matter for ----- Q16 Martin Horwood: If you are not really going to answer that question, that is fine. Would you be happy to see the inclusion of measures to support micro-generation in the Code? Ruth Kelly: I think there will be a big role for micro-generation, particularly in the Thames Gateway. Our approach to these issues is to try and encourage local authorities to take the issues of climate change much more seriously. For instance, absolutely fantastic results have been achieved by Woking Borough Council through micro-generation, among other initiatives. If we can encourage local authorities to play a full role in the climate change objective, I think encouragement and incentives at this point is the right way to go and there can be huge gains to be made. Q17 Martin Horwood: But there is a fundamental problem, is there not, with a voluntary code and this type of issue, that a private developer will never spend that extra couple of thousand pounds on building a property - and they have told us this - if they cannot be sure that there is a level playing-field with all their competitors, and that everybody has to do that. It is not as if it is a huge cost in the context of building a whole property, but they need it to be mandatory in order for everyone to have to do it so that they can justify the cost; otherwise there is not much of a price premium attached to micro-generation measures on properties. Ruth Kelly: I think you are under-estimating how quickly the industry is changing. The issue of climate change has risen massively in profile. I was talking to members of the industry yesterday about this and other things, and they absolutely share our ambition. They want to work with us to deliver this, and of course over time we will be thinking about the best way of making that happen. Q18 Chair: Can I move on to PSA7, which has been transferred to you from the Home Office, and in particular ask you about the issue of challenging the ideas of extremists within the Muslim community. We know that this issue was raised with the Prime Minister at the Liaison Committee, and considerable concern was expressed also by our colleague the MP for Tooting, that the Muslim working groups had set forward various recommendations which had not been taken up. Will your Department be looking at the work done by those working groups, trying to engage with them to get them back on board? Ruth Kelly: Yes, we will. We intend to publish a progress report on the recommendations next week. I am sure your Committee will be interested in looking at that. I think a huge amount has happened over the last year, not all of which has come across in the reporting of this issue. There were three major recommendations to come out of the working group, as well as a number of not insignificant but perhaps less high-profile recommendations. Progress has been made on all those three high-profile recommendations, for instance the road show of ----- Q19 Chair: But, Secretary of State, the issue was that while the members of the working groups themselves felt that some recommendations - you are right - had been taken forward -the broad range - they did not feel they were still engaged in the process. That is the issue. Ruth Kelly: Let me respond directly to that. First, there is an argument to be had - and I am not sure the views of the individuals are completely representative of all of the hundreds of people on the Preventing Extremism Together working groups. When we publish the update of how Government has done in implementing the regulations and how the Muslim community itself has done in implementing the recommendations, people will be surprised at the progress that has been made, particularly the more important recommendations. Second, you are absolutely right that it is important to stay in contact with people who have made a major contribution towards helping us think through these very, very difficult issues. Over the summer Phil Woolas, the Minister for Local Government and Community Cohesion, will be re-visiting all of those areas that were first visited by Hazel Blears and Paul Goggins in the road show, and we will be meeting with some of the key parties of Preventing Extremism Together. I am co-hosting with Phil a breakfast on Monday morning to deal with faith day problems but also later in the afternoon we will be talking to representatives of Muslim communities and young people to think about where we go from here. You are right that we engage with people who have made a huge contribution and that they feel that we are responding to them. It is just as important for the Muslim community itself to take up the challenge presented by the recommendations. Q20 Lyn Brown: I am glad to hear you talk about some of the views coming forward, obviously, as a representative of the Muslim community. There are two things I want to say. My own constituents talk to me about their concerns about the representative nature of the groups that were established, not least because we have a very, very large Muslim community in West Ham and East Ham, in the borough that I come from; and there did not appear to be anybody from any of those Muslim communities from Pakistan, India or African Muslim communities represented there at all. It was difficult for them to engage, given that they were such a large community with those working groups because they did not have somebody there that they could go and talk with. We have moved on as well from when those groups were established. We have now had concerns raised with us about the way in which the anti-terrorist legislation is being implemented and the impact that it is having on some of our communities. I wondered whether or not, in your community cohesion work, you will be looking at that area of work and seeing what we can do to take a different step or an additional step forward. Will you be involved in local government in that? Ruth Kelly: They are very important questions. First, the work we did in the working groups in Preventing Extremism Together was a major step and the start of an ongoing conversation that we have not just with the Muslim community but with other faith groups and people of no faith as well, in how we create cohesion at local level and prevent extremism. There may be extremism in the Muslim community, but there is also concern about the rise of the far right and other forms of extremism which society also has to grapple with. You are right that the concerns presented by the working groups are not the only ones of concern to Muslim communities - and in fact the Muslim community - even the expression is quite difficult - because they are so diverse and vary from some of the poorest groups in the country to some of the wealthiest. We have to be quite careful about how we deal with these issues. You are right that we need to continue that dialogue and work with other departments within government, particularly the Home Office, on some very sensitive issues on policing and so forth; but local government increasingly has a really important role to play in this. That is why bringing these different responsibilities together under this new Department of Communities and Local Government, is a really important step. I think that a lot of what really works in terms of community cohesion is determined by what is delivered by civic leadership at the local level. The new Commission on Integration and Cohesion led by Darra Singh will be finding out practically, in a hands-on way, what is working in communities, where they have best coped with change, and what brings problems as well so that we can learn from what works. Q21 Martin Horwood: I was interested in your opening remarks, when you mentioned inclusion. Until very recently, social exclusion was a key remit of the Department, and this is still listed on your website as a key remit. Obviously, there is now an overlapping of responsibility with the Cabinet Office and with the new task force on social exclusion. I am just concerned that in that reshuffle of responsibilities nothing is lost in the wash. Is there any residual part of the old Social Exclusion Unit still in your Department; and, if not, what has happened to the long list of quite interesting reports we were told about in the annual report of ODPM last year, including young adults with troubled lives, service delivery for people who move frequently, excluded older people and so on? Can you assure us that none of that very important work has been lost? Ruth Kelly: I think the reorganisation makes an enormous amount of sense. It is right to think specifically about problems of groups facing particular issues of social exclusion, for example children in care, or young women who become pregnant - teenagers, or individual families with an extraordinary degree of associated and complex problems. Q22 Martin Horwood: I am sure that is - I asked you a specific question. Ruth Kelly: I am coming on to that. It is important to give the context. It is right to have that, and a sharp focus on that, together with our role as the department of place thinking about social exclusion and deprivation in places. That is how we have split the responsibilities, with the Cabinet Office and Hilary Armstrong thinking about groups and individuals and how they fare in society, recognising that more than 50 per cent of the socially excluded do not live in deprived areas, with our Department thinking about social exclusion and policy for social exclusion in areas, and area-based policies. I think that that makes sense. That means that we have some of the individuals who were in the Social Exclusion Unit still working in our Department. In fact it has been split 50/50. Q23 Martin Horwood: That answers the first question. The second was the list of reports we had in the annual report last year. What has happened to all of those? Ruth Kelly: The individual policy recommendations are owned by the Department that has direct policy responsibility. That has always been the case and will continue to be the case. Q24 Martin Horwood: So you are confident that none of them have been lost. Ruth Kelly: Yes. Q25 Alison Seabeck: With the White Paper fairly imminent, will it reflect on the effectiveness of local government scrutiny, and obviously its accountability and moving that agenda forward? Are you confident that you can measure its effectiveness? Ruth Kelly: That is a very interesting question. The answer is that scrutiny is hugely important and I think under-developed. I think it could be taken to a new level. The last Local Government Act talked a lot about the role of the executive member and the leadership in local authority areas. I think there is potential for a new re-invigorated role for the ward councillor as advocates in their communities, championing their communities, bringing different parties together, and making sure that services respond to the needs of individuals and the communities themselves. They also should have a stronger role in scrutinising what is happening at local authority level. It may go beyond the level of what is directly delivered by local authorities to what is happening in a particular place. That is something I want to explore in the White Paper. Q26 Alison Seabeck: Would you consider drawing people from outside the local authority into that scrutiny process - bringing outside bodies in? Ruth Kelly: How you develop the scrutiny role is one of the issues we will think about over the summer in the run-up to the White Paper. There is a huge potential here to improve the way scrutiny is carried out, what sort of services are scrutinised and who does it. Q27 Alison Seabeck: The issue of accountability links into the ODPM's agenda of double devolution. What priority has that had, and are you close to understanding how this idea, if you like, will work on the ground in terms of the way communities would understand it? Are you getting closer to getting to understand how you think it might work? Ruth Kelly: What I have seen is some incredibly exciting innovations in different parts of the country. Yesterday or the day before I was in Lewisham looking at some situations in which, for example, the community was able to manage or even own assets themselves and run them in a way that met the needs of the community. That is the sort of thing that I think we can make much easier to happen than the case at the moment. There is a huge tier of bureaucracy surrounding that sort of local management of ownership of assets. First, you need to know how well a local service is performing relative to other services in different local authority areas and different parts of the borough. You then need a mechanism that says that if you have a problem it needs to be much easier to fix it than at the moment. Third, it should be possible, where a community has the capacity and the desire to want to manage that particular community asset, for that request to be seriously considered by the local authority. Q28 Alison Seabeck: There are all sorts of models out there, and I have some on my own patch, where you can see they are working towards developing this sort of idea, and they are all quite varied and different. But overlying all that is a concern both from the general public as well as local authorities, and I suspect central government, that there are issues around standards, probity where assets and money are concerned. If you are going to devolve sums of money to some of these groups, what discussions do you have in the Standards Board for example about how they would be involved - or would they be involved? Ruth Kelly: Again, the local authority would have to be confident in the capacity of the local community to run or own an asset. I think this comes down to how the local authority exercises its commissioning role in general. Of course, it has to have confidence in the way that it does that and the way in which standards are being met. This is something we need to think through in the run-up to the White Paper but beyond that as well, even getting to the point where we have the community's roles seriously considered by the local authority is quite far ahead of where we are at the moment. Trying to cut back some of that bureaucracy is quite important. The detail of how that would work in practice will have to be developed after that. Q29 Clive Betts: Can I get an assurance that in devolving powers to the local level and asking local authorities to devolve power to the neighbourhood level, that we are not going to be prescriptive from the centre about how that should be done; in other words we are not going to say, "we will devolve power to the local authority as long as you take advantage of our wonderful offer again to have elected mayors, which you have not taken up in the past, or that you can have powers as long as you devolve to a specific form of neighbourhood government", rather than allowing each local authority to work through its communities and how it wants to do that? Ruth Kelly: What really matters to me here is the principle that there is neighbourhood engagement. Quite how that is carried out, I think there is a strong argument for looking at local authorities and allowing innovation in relation to that. We set out in the White Paper the way forward that that there may be some role for prescription - I am not saying there is no role for prescription. But it will probably be more enabling than a precise form as to how it should happen. I cannot answer all your questions now because that is the policy-making process that will go on in the run-up to the White Paper. You are also interested in whether there is some sort of deal here where we would say to a local authority, "you have to have a certain form of leadership in relation to certain powers". My answer here again is based on principle: I think that the more powers that are devolved to the local authority level, the more important it is that there is strong stable leadership, which is accountable to people. That could be through a mayor but it could be through a number of other forms. Again, we have not prescribed the approach; I have not said that there is a fixed blueprint that I would adopt in that area. Q30 Clive Betts: You talked before about other departments being engaged to trust local authorities. Given the importance of local transport for sustainable communities and particularly in terms of public transport trying to deal with the issue of social exclusion, are you having discussions with the Department for Transport about how local authorities could have more powers to influence and determine local bus services? Ruth Kelly: Yes, we are having discussions both at official level and also at political level about how to respond to the cases that have been made by local authorities in city regions, which include a vast array of issues, but of course also transport. Q31 Dr Pugh: Reading from your speech, the sentence which says, "at the crucial local authority level we need stronger accountability to citizens", I am not sure who "we" is in this case: do you mean stronger accountability to citizens? I think that in your neck of the woods, and certainly in mine, the local authority has to put itself up for election three out of four times - but central government, we ourselves only head up to the electorate once every four years or five years or whatever. Can you anticipate that in a local authority the test that they need stronger accountability to citizens would turn back on you and say, "why do they need it when we here, in this place, do not?" Do we want more elections for local government, fewer elections to local government? What are we talking about here? Ruth Kelly: You are not asking me about national government here, are you? Q32 Dr Pugh: No. You have made the case saying we need stronger accountability to citizens, and I was aware that in an awful lot of local authority areas, they have elections and they take place more often than not; and that seems a strong form of accountability. Presumably, that is not what you are talking about, and it is a greater form of accountability than we have here. Ruth Kelly: There are several forms of accountability of course. What I think is important is that the citizens know who is taking the decisions. It is pretty fundamental. If they know who is taking the decisions, then they can vote for them at an election, praise them if things go well or indeed blame them if things go badly. That is just one issue that I am very concerned about. Q33 Dr Pugh: And they do not know locally who is making decisions? Ruth Kelly: The other issue I am concerned about is that local leaders of places ought to be able to develop a vision for the future for their place. That means having some sort of mandate which is strong enough for them not only to develop a vision but also ----- Q34 Dr Pugh: Is that not what an election is supposed to do? Is that not what happens at central government ‑‑‑‑‑ Ruth Kelly: There are all forms of elections: direct elections, indirect elections, annual elections, non-annual elections, elections for leaders, elections for ward councillors - they provide different forms of accountability. Q35 Lyn Brown: Crudely, if you are going to ask local government to give up stuff to the control of local people rather than under their control - and in London one presumes the additional powers asked for by the elected mayor will take some powers away from London boroughs - I am just wondering if you were thinking of giving them anything juicy, and whether or not that might be in the White Paper? Ruth Kelly: I am obviously not going to comment on the GLA Review, which is being announced tomorrow - I am sorry to disappoint you! The principle of devolving more to the borough level and devolving more from government to perhaps the city regional level, is a good one. I think there is scope there for us to think really seriously about where powers should be located and what would be the appropriate level; or whether it should be at neighbourhood level. I want the White Paper to think through those questions. Q36 Anne Main: This is very important. When we are talking about people needing to know who is making decisions, it would be disingenuous if we did not accept that there are levers and carrots and sticks and all the other things that trigger decision-making at local level. It might be looking at the local authorities making that decision, but it is put in an invidious position where it has to make a decision. I think we have got to be a bit more open and honest about what pressures are put on local authorities, and not just say they need more say about what they so, if we do not actually give them the wherewithal to do it. Would you agree with that? Ruth Kelly: The question is, should we devolve them? Anne Main: No, funding. It has got to accompany it. Q37 Sir Paul Beresford: It is not just funding; it is funding and freedom. It is no good saying to them, "you have got the opportunity here of going for it; and by the way we need to see your plans and approve them before you do anything": that is what is happening. Ruth Kelly: I think we have moved in the direction of giving local authorities more flexibility, but not sufficiently. The advent of the local area agreement process was a big ambition for the Government but has not yet transformed things at the local level. People say that it is quite bureaucratic. There is an opportunity therefore through the new annual rounds of negotiation to make it less bureaucratic, to give local councils more flexibility over their duties and to streamline the management system as well. Q38 Anne Main: Ambitious ----- Ruth Kelly: That is what I am talking about. All of these things fit together. Q39 Martin Horwood: In the answer you have just given you were skipping deftly from the devolution of power to local government to devolution of power to regional government and back again. I think you are absolutely right; it is critical that people know where decisions are being taken; but is it not a problem that the answer in a lot of cases now is regional government where there is no democratic accountability? Ruth Kelly: There is some democratic accountability at local level and another form of accountability which is indirect accountability. Something like 60-70 per cent of the regional assembly members are councillors, so there is a form of democratic accountability. There are appropriate powers at that level, and appropriate powers devolved to others as well. Q40 Greg Hands: On local government, the Prime Minister's letter in appointing you on 9 May specifically talked about mayors, and in your reply, dated today, you say, "I believe we are at a tipping point in our democracy where we can usher in a new and unprecedented era of devolution." You are basically agreeing with the Prime Minister entirely but there is no mention of the key word "mayors" in there, and I am wondering why that is. Why is there no mention of mayors? On regional government, can you confirm your predecessor's policy that if there is to be significant regional reorganisation, for example city regions, that that would be subject to referenda which he promised to ourselves on this Committee not so long ago? If there are referenda, what happens if the referendum is passed in the city region, but specific areas vote "no": would those areas still be included in the city region, or would they be allowed to opt out? Ruth Kelly: In response to the Prime Minister in paragraph 10 I specifically talked about elected mayors. That is the first point. The second point was about city regional government. I think it is too early; we have not even - I have made clear there is no single blueprint for this at all. It is very much grass-roots driven. Cities and city regions have come to Government - they have been asked to - presenting business plans, saying, "this is our ambition for 10/20 years' time; this is how we intend to progress from where we are at the moment; but these are the barriers that are holding us back and these are the powers we would like from government to help us realise that ambition." We are in the process of talking to those or examining their business cases and talking in Whitehall to other government departments about the issues mentioned already and others, and thinking about how to respond to them. We are in the process of doing that. Q41 Greg Hands: You are correct that you mentioned mayors but it is the centrepiece, in my view, of the Prime Minister's letter on the specific question of local government reform, yet your answer just uses an elected mayor as an example of the difference clear and visible leadership can make. There seems to be quite a big difference and I wondered what your personal viewpoint is on directly elected mayors. Do you think they have been a success? Obviously there were a few but there have not been many recently. Do you expect to see more directly elected mayors? Ruth Kelly: I think they have been a success, yes. The evidence on particularly visibility and whether the local citizen knows who is taking the decisions is quite impressive in the areas in which we have seen them. I think the Labour Mayor of London has been a success and is widely recognised as having been a success by Londoners, and seen as a success nationally. There is an opportunity for civic leadership to be combined with a different form of accountability. What I would not say is that that is the only way of achieving it. There are other ways of achieving civil leadership as well, and that is why I am engaged in a debate with local authorities and cities about the way forward. Q42 Dr Pugh: I want to get on to regeneration but can I start from the point in your speech. You talk about giving cities the tools that they require to compete successfully. What tools did they tell you they did require? Ruth Kelly: Different ----- Q43 Dr Pugh: Or are they simply the tools you think they require? Ruth Kelly: No, these are the tools that they say they want. We are looking at business cases. It is quite interesting: I think transport has been mentioned by practically everybody. There is also a common desire to see more influence over skills, delivery in inner cities and city region; and there are various degrees of requests for more influence over housing, planning and economic regeneration. Those are the major areas that have been highlighted. Q44 Dr Pugh: With regard to current tools like neighbourhood renewal funds, the new deal for communities and single regeneration budget, which are all ending, are those no longer tools for the modern age or are you evaluating their success in deciding how to change them? Ruth Kelly: Of course we are, and I think the evidence suggests that there have been very significant improvements in those areas. We will always need an area-based response to deprivation and economic regeneration. Q45 Dr Pugh: Does any of the evidence indicate they have not been that successful in all cases? Ruth Kelly: I think the evidence suggests, for instance on crime, that crime has fallen significantly across the regeneration areas, but also on education. Clearly, we need to be sensible and evaluate what works and what does not work, and learn the lessons from that as we go ahead. However, the evidence suggests that they have been important in improving the educational standards and reducing levels of crime. Q46 Dr Pugh: So they remain in the toolbox, or something like that! Ruth Kelly: Yes. Of course, through the spending review process we always evaluate our policies and see how we can improve on them. Q47 Clive Betts: This Committee recommended three years ago almost a single pot for regeneration, where local authorities were given responsibility in general for regeneration, with a view to them then looking at the particular needs of their areas and spending accordingly, rather than having different pots of money in Whitehall, where you have to jump through a whole series of hoops to get access to. Ruth Kelly: Those are the sorts of issues that are coming through in the business plans that are being presented to us by city regions. Sheffield, as I am sure you are aware, has ideas for economic regeneration. Others have different proposals. One of the issues and barriers they are presenting to us is the fact of having to combine different funding streams for different times for different purposes. Q48 Clive Betts: Is one issue on the operation of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act? One of the things that I think was absolutely right is that each local authority was given responsibility for drawing up its own consultation arrangements within its area rather than being prescribed by central government. Are we going to have a review of the Act, particularly on that issue, to see how well the various arrangements with local authorities are working and use those that are working well as examples of good practice for other authorities? Ruth Kelly: I am not going to comment on that specific issue. I am very keen that we do evaluate what works and what has not worked, and I will certainly go away and think about that and take that forward. Q49 Clive Betts: Could we have a note about how you will proceed? Ruth Kelly: Yes. Q50 Martin Horwood: I am sure you have read our report on housing stock and affordability - perhaps used it as bedtime reading! There were a couple of things in it: we said a simple supply and demand model cannot be applied uncritically to the behaviour of the housing market and house prices, and we said that it is unclear what impact the Government's objective for increased house building to 200,000 by 2016 would have on affordability; and finally that demand-side factors such as income levels, interest rates, the availability of credit and taxes would also affect the price and affordability of private housing. I would not necessarily expect you to agree with me that your predecessor's approach to housing supply and affordability was somewhat simplistic and rather focused on housing supply as a one-trick answer to the problems of affordability; but would you at least reassure me that you are doing what you can to talk to Kate Barker as well as the Treasury about other methods of tackling the problem of affordability? Ruth Kelly: First of all, Kate Barker's report was an excellent report, which recognised the need for additional homes. As I remember it the report was encouraging the Government to go even further than we have set out in our ambition to build 200,000 homes. The second point is that housing supply is clearly a very significant factor affecting affordability, but you are right that it is not the only one. We need to do more also to make sure that people have affordable homes to live in, particularly on the social housing side, but also encouraging some of the 90 per cent of people who want to own their own home, giving them the opportunity to buy an equity stake. In my letter to the Prime Minister, which I responded to today, one of my big ambitions for the Department is that we really encourage and expand and incentivise home ownership, giving people the opportunity to buy a share in their property where it makes sense for them to do so. We have to look at all of these things in the round: invest in more social housing, build more social homes, encourage people into home ownership where they can afford it and where it makes sense for them, but also increased housing supply to respond to the demographic and other pressures. Q51 Martin Horwood: What about the availability of credit; would that be something you would encourage the Treasury to look at as an influential factor in affordability? Ruth Kelly: Of course the availability of credit is always a factor but the best single thing the Government could do is to create a stable economic environment. Chair: I encourage the members of the Committee not to go through all the recommendations because we will get a Government response. Q52 Anne Main: The interim report of the Barker Review placed great emphasis on the importance of the planning system to deliver economic objectives. Several leading figures have complained that the environmental objectives were not stressed enough within the report. Can you assure us that other factors than just the economic factors will be taken into account, particular stakeholders who have concerns about the environmental impact of building so many houses so quickly? Ruth Kelly: Are you talking about Kate Barker's first report on housing or the second report on planning? Q53 Anne Main: The interim report, the second report. Ruth Kelly: Because there was an issue about the environmental consequences of building new homes which we have addressed, but another issue is how you make more land available more quickly where appropriate so that we can respond to the pressures of globalisation and attract new businesses and so forth. Q54 Anne Main: There have been concerns about making land available quickly; that people will look at ease of developing land rather than putting money into developing brownfield sites. Are stakeholders having a greater say, because there have been a lot of issues? Ruth Kelly: I think Kate Barker's report gave quite a lot of weight to environmental considerations, and one of the things about the interim report is that it looked right across the piece at the various objectives of the planning system, and it set out an analysis of how the current system worked against the objectives of where we have to get to; and I think the environment was taken very seriously. Q55 Anne Main: You do not think that local people feel they have not had enough say; that it will be much quicker to bring land on line but they want scrutiny through local ----- Ruth Kelly: It is very important. Of course there will be scrutiny. I do not think the answer to all this is to cut local people out. In fact there is a very, very important role for local people in all of this, particularly determining where development is appropriate and where it is not. Q56 Alison Seabeck: In your position as Minister for Women and Secretary of State with responsibility for equality and helping promote a more strategic approach to gender equality across government with colleagues and other departments, are you confident, given your experience as a backbencher and a minister, that your officials are picking up on equality issues that undoubtedly arise in policy papers across your desk; and more importantly, once they have been picked up are they vigorously pursued both within your Department and outside? Ruth Kelly: There are two different things. First of all, there is a very clear priority which was set for me and my Department as Minister for Women, which is the right one, which is to make sure that we deliver on the Women in Work Commission's report; and that will be not just as a department but as a government. My role is to make sure that we understand exactly what is happening and that we push other departments to deliver against that, and within six months we have clearly set out an action plan which is credible, with stakeholders' measures, and that is a big priority of mine. The second thing is that there are issues which just come across my desk that are not necessarily directly related to DCLG - although some of them will be, such as violence against women, domestic violence, human trafficking and so forth - and indeed thinking about community cohesion - Muslim women and how engaged they are. Meg Munn, who is the Deputy Minister for Women and Equality, sits on five different cross-government committees which pull some of these issues together and make sure that action is pursued. Q57 Greg Hands: I would like to ask questions about diversity training. I asked your predecessor what was in place for ministers in terms of diversity training, and I had an unclear response. He told me that new ministers are offered an induction course following a general election or substantial reshuffle, and it was unclear who had actually undergone a course of diversity training and, if so, when. Would you in your position push the compulsory diversity training for current ministers and future ministers following a reshuffle? Ruth Kelly: Do you know, I think my Department is a model of diversity! All but one of the ministers in DCLG is a woman, and therefore we have greater representation than other government departments. The issue of how you train ministers is not just in diversity, but how you induct ministers into their job. It is an issue. I am not going to sit here and prescribe how we deal with ----- Q58 Greg Hands: Diversity training in Britain today is a major part of major corporations, the private sector and other public sector bodies - local councils, the NHS. They all have compulsory diversity training. Does it not seem out of kilter that the Government, which is supposed to be promoting the equality agenda, does not have compulsory diversity training for ministers? Ruth Kelly: You might think that the role of a minister is not one that is replicated in other places in society. I think ministers need an understanding in awareness of issues. That is really important. Q59 Greg Hands: You need an understanding. You set an example ----- Ruth Kelly: We are setting an example. We also have PSA targets specifically about these sorts of issues, and a programme within our own department to deliver it; and that is mirrored in other Government departments. We are, for example, introducing, as a government, a new gender duty on local authorities, which will ask public authorities to think about how they promote equal opportunities. That is the sort of thing that really needs to be actioned. Q60 Chair: Can I point out that as Members of Parliament we do not get any diversity/gender/equality training. Personally, I think it would be an excellent idea. Thank you very much, Secretary of State. We look forward to rehearsing these issues with you again. You have set a very ambitious programme and we will certainly hold you to it. Thank you very much. |