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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 977-v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS COMMITTEE
IS THERE A FUTURE FOR REGIONAL GOVERNMENT?
Wednesday 7 June 2006 Regus Temple Quay Bristol, 1 Friary, Bristol BS1 6EA
MS BRONWYN HILL, MS BRYONY HOULDEN, CLLR JILL SHORTLAND, MR CHRISTOPHER IRWIN and CLLR BERT BISCOE
Evidence heard in Public Questions 404 - 492
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee on Wednesday 7 June 2006 Members present Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair Sir Paul Beresford Mr Clive Betts John Cummings Dr John Pugh ________________ Witnesses: Ms Bronwyn Hill, Regional Director, Government Office for the South West; Ms Bryony Houlden, Chief Executive, Cllr Jill Shortland, Deputy Chair, South West Regional Assembly; Mr Christopher Irwin, Chair, TravelWatch South West; and Cllr Bert Biscoe, Chair, Cornish Constitutional Convention, gave evidence. Q404 Chair: Can I welcome you to this evidence session being held here in Bristol today which is part of the Select Committee's investigation on regional governance. The Select Committee Members who are here were in Exeter and Exmouth yesterday and Bristol this morning, and we met with a wide range of stakeholders from the region in both of those venues and we were also, in the case of Exmouth, looking at our other investigation, which is about coastal towns, but we are not talking about that today. We will be asking various questions. Because there are so many witnesses, can I ask that you do not all respond on every question otherwise we will not get through everything. If you have got something burning to say that you do not get a chance to say, I am sure you can slip it in on the next question. I am relying on people to be self-disciplined, I do not want to have to cut people off but I will if they go on. Can we start from my right, if you could just say who you are and who you represent. Ms Hill: Bronwyn Hill, Regional Director, Governor Office for the South West. Cllr Shortland: Cllr Jill Shortland. I am Vice Chair of the Regional Assembly and will be the Chair in July. Ms Houlden: I am Bryony Houlden. I am the Chief Executive of the South West Regional Assembly. Mr Irwin: I am Christopher Irwin. I am the Chair of TravelWatch South West, which is a community interest company there to promote the interests of public transport users. Cllr Biscoe: I am Bert Biscoe and I have lost my voice a bit. I am the Chair of the Cornish Constitutional Convention. Q405 Chair: Thank you. One of the points that a great many people have made to us over the last day and a half is that the South West has the greatest intra-regional disparities of any English region. Can you briefly comment on the reasons for the disparities and how your organisations are tackling these disparities? Ms Hill: I think partly because it is a very big region. In geographical area it is broadly the same size of Wales with a population the same as Scotland. It is a very large region. There are obvious differences between those parts to the east and north, which have an economy more like that of the South East, compared with the far South West which is more rural, more low wage, and its position is acknowledged by the fact that it will be getting convergence funding in the new European Union programmes. That is a very brief overview. How does the Government Office help? We try to bring together different Government department programmes to bear on the problems of this diverse region. To give you one example: we have done a lot of work with the current European programmes in Cornwall and an illustration of the work that we have done is persuading the Department for Education and Skills to support a combined university for Cornwall, which is about using higher education as a driver for regeneration and growth in Cornwall. Although it is still early days I think that will be a very important investment in the economy of Cornwall. That is one example from me. Q406 Chair: Do you wish to add to that? Cllr Shortland: Yes, please, if I could. One of the very early pieces of work that the Assembly did was to pull together all the different partners in the South West and produce a document which I have got a copy of here if you have not seen it called Just Connect. It is an integrated regional strategy for the South West region that runs from 2004 to 2026. We have begun a review of the Integrated Strategy to see how the partners are beginning to use it. I should have said that one of the aims of this document was to address deprivation and disadvantage and reduce significant intra-regional inequalities. Just to give you a couple of examples of the feedback that we have had so far: English Heritage say that it is a very good piece of work and it is going to be useful for them to consider when they review their strategy; the Environment Agency talk about regional water resources for the future, which is quite topical at the moment with the water problems in the South East, and say they want us to help them with their revised strategy that starts in 2007. This is a piece of work that we have done that is hopefully going to enable all the partner organisations to look at those inequalities. Mr Irwin: I just want to try to illustrate the causation of disparities by taking one sector, which is the transport sector, where you can see very clearly one of the things we have made progress on over the last two years. You will know about the devolution of advice on regional funding allocation and I was one of those involved in the steering group on that work. One of the things that came out very forcibly and illustrates an underlying cause of disparity was the difference in strength of the different local authorities, particularly reflecting the personalities, largely the county surveyors or whatever their modern title is, in terms of putting in bids for central funding. For example, and I say this with Bert sitting on my right, Cornwall, along with Gloucestershire, were seeking allocations of funding six times as much as their pro rata share of RFA transport funding compared to Bristol which was about twice the level. If you have that sort of situation where the personalities and force of local authorities drive public investment in public good things then of course you tend to get more distortion. One of the good things over the last few months is that the region, pulling together as a whole through this regional funding allocation process, has corrected that distortion and now you get something that is much more coherent, much more related to the Regional Spatial Strategy with its emphasis on the importance of the city drivers. Q407 Sir Paul Beresford: One of the things that has become apparent in spite of what you have just said, and I recognise this is a Christmas turkey question for some of you, is if you have got all of these effective sub-regions, why not get rid of the Assembly, have the sub-regions instead as co-operatives or whatever, and they pull together on other issues such as the one you have just discussed, a reduction in bureaucracy, corroboration of like-with-like and probably more harmony? Mr Irwin: I see it not in terms of either/or but of horses for courses. It is a question of ensuring that you have the functional arrangements designed to deliver the best results. I am just using transport as a simple example which most of us understand. The biggest problems we have in terms of transport in this region are, first of all, of a rail network with congestion around Reading, which is outside this region, and, secondly, congestion in this area, the West of England, around Bristol where the motorway network and rail network are heavily congested. Arguably you do more for the far South West peninsula by spending money in Reading or around Bristol than you do anywhere else but it is very, very hard for a county surveyor to come back and say, "I want to give my money to Reading or to Bristol" if they are in a more remote place. The region can take that view and lock it in with the other policies, and that is what we have done effectively with the endorsement of every single local authority and all the principal stakeholder groups in the region. Q408 Chair: Cllr Biscoe, do you want to comment briefly on that? Cllr Biscoe: I think that the disparities we experience derive from the size of the region, the geography of the region, which creates an urban north and rural south. A necessity to generate standardised approaches to things if you are going to have a region that has got to take a view on things creates difficulties for places like Cornwall which has a very distinctive profile with the Objective 1 programme that we are just completing and the convergence programme that we are just about to open up. There is no doubt that Cornwall responds very well to being dealt with and treated as a regional unit in its own right. Ultimately, you have to come back to the question about democratic comfort: where do you think you live, who do you think you are, and how do you sit with your neighbours. In that sense I think the disparities within the South West as it is currently structured will never go away because quite clearly Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly see themselves as very particular and very different. They have their own brand, their own identity, which is recognised in a variety of ways, not least in the Government recognising the Cornish land. If we try and force these artificial macro-regional structures on to places like Cornwall, or indeed Bristol, Gloucester or Dorset, then I think there is going to be genuine discomfort which will mean the region will never resolve itself in democratic terms and you will never get the buy into it that you need in order to make it work. Q409 Chair: Just for the sake of clarity, and briefly, would you be satisfied with three sub-regions where I guess Cornwall would be in with Devon, or is your preference for Cornwall to be by itself and you do not really care what the rest of them do? Cllr Biscoe: We feel very strongly that Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly as a unit functions very well. It generates a dynamism which is what we want from the regions. Our experience tells us that forced marriages with Devon do not work. In 1996 the Plymouth Business School produced a paper which was a comparative study of deprivation and poverty - I cannot remember what the basket of indicators was - and that quite clearly demonstrated that if you put two chunks together Devon appears poorer than it really is and vice versa. The recommendation, which we followed, was to disaggregate Cornwall and Devon as a construct for the application of Regional Development Funds for that region. Q410 John Cummings: The Committee have been told that the North East and other regions have successfully aligned their major economic and spatial strategies. Do you believe that the regional institutions have been successful in aligning their major strategies? Ms Houlden: I would say undoubtedly in this region we have worked very closely to align both the Regional Economic Strategy and the Regional Spatial Strategy. For us, the timing has worked quite well because the RES was being reviewed almost simultaneously with the Regional Spatial Strategy and it is demonstrated very clearly in the Regional Spatial Strategy where the economic elements of the Spatial Strategy were drafted in the main for us by the Regional Development Agency to ensure there was that close synergy between the two documents. Cllr Shortland: I just want to add to that. Of course, it does not matter how well we locally in the region align those strategies, the delivery of those strategies, both the RES and the Regional Spatial Strategy, are dependent upon other bodies aligning themselves as well. I am thinking more directly of the Government funding bodies, the Government agents, if you like, who provide the funding for the region, needing to make sure that they are aligned behind those strategies. That can be quite difficult in terms of delivery. Q411 John Cummings: So you are saying to the Committee that you have been successful in determining a shared regional agenda between yourselves and other partners? Cllr Shortland: Yes. In this region we have worked very well with the other partners. What is necessarily difficult for us is working with the Government Office because the Government Office is constrained by the fact they look to Government rather than necessarily looking to the region. Mr Irwin: Can I just amplify that because that is an issue that will affect other regions. We have just had experience in this region of the main railway franchise being re-tendered and there has been quite a lot of national coverage about it, but in the region it has been a highly sensitive issue. The mismatch between the DfT's specification for that franchise and the aspirations of this region - we are anticipating a growth rate of between 2.4 and 3.2 per cent for the next 20 years, at the higher end of that range - the pressures, the implications, the congestion issues and so on, and the DfT specification for that franchise, which was really a low-cost, economise where you can franchise, gives rise to two points. One is central Government policy not chiming in, as has been said, but, secondly, the lack of deliverability in Government Office where we have discovered lately that there are only seven staff concerned with the whole of the one billion pound budget for transport in this region. Q412 John Cummings: If you have succeeded in determining that shared regional agenda, can you tell me what the agenda contains? What have you agreed to? What have you determined? Ms Hill: I was going to come in on an earlier point. Q413 Chair: Do that and answer John's question as well. Ms Hill: I agree there has been a lot of good joint working between the RDA and the Assembly, I hope facilitated by the Government Office, to produce a Spatial Strategy which is about this thick - there is a copy of it in my desk - and it is quite difficult to summarise. I am sure we could leave one behind. It sets out a long-term strategy for the region up to 2026 and deals with waste management, transport strategy, it is quite a difficult document to summarise. There has been some very good work on that. I should just point out that it is now out in the process of consultation in the region so we are not at the end of the story yet, there will be an examination in public next year at which the Government Office will represent the views of Government, so in some ways I have to slightly reserve my position but that is not to undermine what people have said. It has been very good joint working. To answer Chris's point about railways, I think the region itself in its advice to Government on the regional funding allocations exercise highlighted the difficulty of joining railways into the Regional Transport Strategy when we do not have information about the amount of budget that is available as we are beginning to do for Highways Agency roads and local authority schemes. We have registered that although, as Chris points out, as I work for the Government it is not for me to comment on some of Chris's other opinions about the franchise. Q414 John Cummings: Do you think you are getting sufficiently clear direction from central Government about the development of regional policy? Cllr Shortland: Personally I think we have had a lot of direction from central Government. Q415 John Cummings: Sufficiently clear direction? Cllr Shortland: I think the Government has been very clear about their direction. What we have done in the region is to say their direction does not necessarily fit with what matches into the South West region and, therefore, our Regional Spatial Strategy, the Regional Economic Strategy, the Integrated Strategy, may not be a natural fit with what central Government wanted us to do. Cllr Biscoe: I do not think it is necessarily perceived as being a natural fit in Cornwall. Q416 Chair: I understand that. Can I briefly ask about rural communities because the witness we are having at the end of this session suggests that in the North East rural communities have been ignored in the Regional Economic Strategy. Is that your experience in the South West or are rural communities included? Cllr Biscoe: As the Chairman of the rural Cornwall Partnership, which is a delivery partnership which delivers the RDA's rural renaissance strand in Cornwall, and a number of others as well, a couple of what are called key funds from the Objective 1 programme and it is very much rurally orientated, in the last couple of years we have seen a greater willingness on the part of the RDA to delegate funds and to enable the capacity to work in Cornwall to deliver those funds where they are needed. That has become quite effective. It has been slow getting off the ground and there is a disparity between the appraisal processes that we would normally use and the very bureaucratic approaches the RDA takes. That is not to say it is not thorough and not helpful, it just takes a long time. Firstly, it has been a Zen-like process, wearing them down to delegate, but now we have got there things do seem to be moving forward a bit better. Q417 Mr Betts: I have a question for Mr Irwin first, if I might. We had passing mention of this yesterday, but other people have raised it with us as well, and that is there are some organisations which appear not merely to be unaccountable to anyone at the regional or sub-regional level but which also are not involved. One of them was referred to as being the Highways Agency and another being various aspects of the railway system. Would you like to comment on how you are experiencing that and whether you are getting any more positive signals from any of those organisations about a willingness to join in? Mr Irwin: I think the answer is in broad terms it is deeply unsatisfactory. It is deeply unsatisfactory because particularly in the rail sector - Highways have shown a greater willingness of late to engage in these matters - there seems to be a separate agenda which is being followed, and that is quite proper, understandable central Government priorities, but is at odds with the regional concerns expressed here. There is that issue. I think there may be a way forward. Certainly in the work of the Regional Assembly in terms of its scrutiny work it is beginning to prove possible to draw in other key agencies that play a major part in regional delivery. We have just done an energy review, for example, in which all the main energy players at one point or another have taken part in workshops, bilateral meetings and so on. We are having a review of sustainable energy strategy in the region. I think the Highways Agency will go that way. There is a real problem with the rail sector which is still thinking in a very centralised way and in national policy terms seems to be following a line on rail development that is at odds with both regional strategy and that of the commercial operators. The missing link in the whole thing, and this is not at odds with regional strategy, is effective planning of sub-regional transport networks. As you know, we have no PTEs in this part of the world or anything analogous to that. There is a crying need here in the West of England, or if you go to the Plymouth/Exeter area, for some sort of mechanism to draw together all the interests, all the parties involved in public transport provision in those areas if it is to make a sustainable long-term contribution. Q418 Mr Betts: So you saying you need the mechanisms in those areas but also you need willingness from the centre to let go. Mr Irwin: I look to a Government Office that not only challenges what is done regionally but champions what is done regionally back to the centre. In a way, psychologically we feel very isolated. We make noises, we write letters to the Regional Assembly, to Derek Twigg saying, "Please can we have a meeting to discuss the carve-up of our railway lines", but with the exception of Alison Seabeck, who is a Member of your Committee, who has been amazing on this, it is very, very hard to make real entry there. There is a great gulf between our policy aspirations here and the ability at the centre to grasp and deliver. Q419 Mr Betts: Can I come to Cllr Shortland and the Government Office. Is it just the Highways Agency and the transport bodies? We have heard from a number of people that the LSCs are almost totally detached from the whole operation, from what is going on in terms of your arrangements at regional and sub-regional level and your scrutiny powers, and the Health Service might just be waking up to the fact there are other players in the game but it is rather belated and a little half-hearted. Would that be fair? Cllr Shortland: I think that is fair. What I would say in their defence ---- Q420 Mr Betts: You are not here to defend them! Cllr Shortland: What I would say is these partners have been willing to engage in the discussion processes. Their difficulty is that we may come up with a set of criteria regionally that we would like everybody to be part of in terms of delivering but they have their own masters in terms of their Government departments and when those areas conflict you have a real problem. The analogy I would give you is the same with local authorities in terms of local authorities have been able to secure, through the Government's Local Area Agreements, freedoms and flexibilities to use Government funding in a slightly different way that meet the needs of their locality. What I am saying to you, and one of the things I am going to be working on as Chair of the Assembly, is we are looking to see if there can be some kind of bridge at regional level to try and engage the Government departments slightly differently in the region, look at freedoms and flexibilities, which means Government funding can be used in a slightly different way that would meet the needs of the Regional Spatial Strategy, the Regional Economic Strategy and aid our speed, our delivery of those strategies. Q421 Mr Betts: You want the power to scrutinise the Health Service and other bodies? Cllr Shortland: That is probably one of the things we would be looking for. At the moment there does not appear to be anybody, other than a single Government minister who has the power to do it but I do not think they are, doing that scrutiny work. Certainly they are not challenging those bodies to say how they are aligning their delivering to the Regional Spatial Strategy or the Regional Economic Strategy. Ms Houlden: Can I just briefly pick up the LSC point. I think it is worth saying that one of the early scrutinies, in fact the third scrutiny the Assembly did, was on the Skills Agenda. As Chris described in relation to the energy debate we have held, we managed to get all of the LSCs around the table for that scrutiny and I think it was the first time they had come together as a regional grouping. Out of that scrutiny of them it built a much better regional dialogue between the LSCs themselves. Although we did manage to make one step forward, if you like, there are still a lot of further steps we would encourage them to make in terms of regional dialogue, but we have made some progress. Q422 Mr Betts: Can I focus specifically on the regional office. What we are hearing is a lot of frustration around Government departments which are still working to very centralised targets but probably are not very good at understanding how they fit, along with their neighbouring departments, into regional and sub-regional strategies that are worked out at local level. Is your job not to reflect that concern back to ministers, and are they listening to you, or are you not reflecting them? Ms Hill: It is our role. First and foremost there is almost inevitably a tension between national Government policy, on the one hand, and the views of regional and, indeed, local authorities, as Jill has said, on the other. Part of our role as Government Office is to mediate between the two, to facilitate dialogue. We cannot devolve every single problem to statutory regional and local stakeholders but it is our job to make sure that at least the two sides are engaged in talking to each other. I would say, slightly in defence of the regional LSC, that they are very good at working. There is a Regional Skills Partnership that is engaged with the RDA and business and employers about skills and training. Clearly that does not go as far as some regional partners would wish but they do quite a lot. They also work with sub-regional partners, like the West of England Work Initiative, looking at skills and training needs in the Greater Bristol area. Q423 Mr Betts: People say they work but their ways of working are so inflexible and it is so determined from the centre that they cannot join in in a meaningful way. Ms Hill: We have said that. The regional directors, as a network, meet regularly with ministers and permanent secretaries. David Rowlands, permanent secretary from DfT, was at a recent meeting and we raised this issue with him about the perception in the regions that DfT railways does not engage as fully as partners would like, and he agreed to take that away and think about it. That may not be the only answer but what I am saying is we do act and influence. I would draw the line at joining in lobbying campaigns against the Government for which I happen to work, I think that is slightly career threatening in many ways. Q424 Sir Paul Beresford: It has been tried in the past, but would it help if you had a minister not from the area but representing the area and their portfolio, whatever their current portfolio is, included looking after a particular region? You could get at the minister, the minister could get at you and they could go back and get at government. Mr Irwin: One of the tests must be is that minister dedicated to that one region or are they trying to look at all regions in one? Q425 Sir Paul Beresford: Dedicated to one region. Mr Irwin: It has to be the former, I think. May I take this opportunity to amplify something Bronwyn said and move away from theory and talk about a real example. I mentioned just now the growth rates we are looking for in this region over the next 20 years, the growth in population of 780,000 or so in this region over the next 20 years, and the importance of connectivity between this region and places like London and Birmingham and so on. One of the real issues we have had, and it has not been possible to move Government Office on it, is the issue of Crossrail. Crossrail is going to be using the Great Western Main Line between Maidenhead and London which will reduce the capacity and robustness and reliability of services running from the West of England, Wales and the South of England into London. As a Regional Assembly we unanimously decided that we should petition on the Hybrid Bill on Crossrail that is going through at the moment. We urged the Government Office to take this forward and personally I have been very much involved in lobbying colleagues and friends in Government Office on this. So far it has not proved possible to get any measurable response as a result of Government Office intervention on DfT matters, although the Regional Assembly continues to have to pursue the petitioning of the Crossrail project with very limited funds on a matter that is enormously important to the economic vitality of the region in the long run. Q426 Dr Pugh: I have some sympathy with you because I sit on the Crossrail Bill and have heard the petitions. I can tell you if off-licences in Mayfair can petition against it I see no reason why the South West should not be able to. Maybe I have already compromised my position saying that much! Can I direct my remarks to the Assembly. Your submission has a number of suggestions for simplifying regional governance structures and stopping duplication and similar bodies doing similar things, so we are talking here really about a cull. Who is on the list? Cllr Shortland: Shall I give you a list? Q427 Chair: Yes. Cllr Shortland: One of the difficulties that we have found has been it is a huge amount of work and effort to try to get all the different bodies together. There are too many bodies to get in the same room let alone around a table. It is quite difficult to understand where each of those different bodies are coming from in terms of just putting together the Regional Spatial Strategy and the amount of time on consultations and everything else and trying to understand why different organisations cannot come to consultation meetings or why they have to go back to their government masters in order to be able to sit down round the table with us and have a discussion about what is best for the region. I suppose I am quite naïve in terms of I am a local councillor and therefore I believe your first port of call is to do what is right for the people you represent. Some of these agencies' first port of call is to do what is right for their government masters, never mind the impact or the outcome that brings to the people they are supposed to be working for within the region. Q428 Chair: Can you give a concrete example? Cllr Shortland: I hate to keep going back to the Highways Agency and the transport issue but when we sat down as a Regional Assembly to talk about the regional funding allocations and discovered that the regional funding allocation was just over £80 million a year yet there is over a billion being spent in the region, where is the rest of the money going and who is responsible for it? We were not even allowed to talk to the people who are responsible for the rest of that funding. Q429 Dr Pugh: What you are suggesting is not simply that other regional bodies co-existing with you should go and you should do their work, or their work should be duplicated by the Regional Assembly, but that some national functions should be subsumed under the Regional Assembly. Is that what you are saying really, that you have in mind clearing up the confusion of tourist boards and things like that? Cllr Shortland: I am not suggesting that we, as a Regional Assembly, should subsume all of that work. What I am saying is the regional producers that are producing these regional strategies need to be able to deliver them and unless we have some potential impact upon those partners, or those other bodies - I am quite interested by the suggestion of a minister for the region but ----- Q430 Dr Pugh: That is not the same as your submission. Your submission says "streamlining the number of organisations". This is not streamlining the number of organisations, this is altering how the organisations work together, is it not? Ms Houlden: There was a separate issue that we were flagging up as part of our evidence which was about not a plethora but a large number of small organisations in the region with a regional remit and this is saying we are at fault as well because we have set up as regional partners a number of very small regional bodies. I use the regional observatory as an example, which is our data intelligence gathering organisation, which was set up jointly by the Government Office, the Regional Assembly and the RDA, and we felt it needed to be an independent arms' length organisation but when you are trying to be pragmatic you look at it and say there are only five members of staff, is it really sensible to set up a small organisation like that standing alone which therefore has to have its own chief executive, its own equipment, it is own personnel function and its own finance functions, or should we deal better with each other as the big regional players and say one of us could subsume and manage that and still retain its independence for the region. Another example would be Equality South West where we have just set up an equalities body between us all and, again, they have got about five members of staff. There are economies of scale you could create by bringing them into one of the other bodies. Q431 Dr Pugh: What you are saying is there is a good prima facie case for reducing the number of organisations, although you do not have a definite hit-list written down in front of you here and now? Cllr Shortland: When you look at all the different organisations you have got to ask what are the functions of those organisations and what outcomes are you looking at in terms of the role of that organisation, and does it make sense for it to be a separate stand alone organisation. I think if the Committee were to look at a list of all the organisations in the South West, which I am sure the Government Office can provide for you, you would see when you think about those outcomes there have got to be some economies of scale where you can say it would make sense if those organisations were running to one chief exec, to one body of people, rather than lots of others. Q432 Dr Pugh: There would be a cost saving. Ms Houlden: I think I can give you an example without going into boring detail. Although I bill myself as the Chief Executive of the Regional Assembly, the officer support I run supports three separate regional member organisations: the South West branch of the Local Government Association and an organisation called the Provincial Employers. They are run under me, so a third of my cost goes to each organisation, and they have only one head of personnel and only one finance person running across three organisations. It is about looking for economies of scale and always looking at how we improve the way we work and reviewing the way we set things up and saying, "Is this still fit for purpose?" I think the Assembly is open to looking at what is fit for purpose. Q433 Dr Pugh: While we are on the subject of culls, we interviewed the Bristol unitary authorities this morning and discussed with them the benefits to them of the Regional Assembly and, to be fair, their defence of there being a Regional Assembly was somewhat muted. One answer was they were needed because somebody had to scrutinise the Regional Development Agency but they did not make an overwhelming case for having that either. Other authorities were less keen on it, perhaps they felt they were working quite well together as a partnership and doing most of what a Regional Assembly might be thought to be doing. If the South West Regional Assembly were to fall under a bus or be pushed under a bus this afternoon, what effect would that have on Bristol and the area where they already have a good partnership in place? Mr Irwin: I sat on the panel that went through the West of England's proposals in relation to the Regional Spatial Strategy, the joint study area proposals from the four authorities. It was very, very striking that it needed the catalyst of outside people, in this case a group of Regional Assembly members, to help navigate through some of the challenges that for a long time have confounded local politicians mindful of their next election. We found one particularly extraordinary thing that I could not find any justification for in any of the policy guidance or anywhere in the regional strategy thinking, namely to create a sort of ghetto of low cost new housing in the Bath and north-east Somerset area, not in Bath itself because Bath is too beautiful to accommodate such things but out in Norton Radstock, formerly known as the Democratic Socialist Republic of Norton Radstock! Q434 Dr Pugh: You are saying there is nowhere in the length and breadth of the unitary authority that can deal with this, you need to get somebody from Devon or Cornwall to tell them what to do? Mr Irwin: It facilitates. Just to take it one step further: I have just read stupidly, but actually it was of great interest, every single local transport plan for LTP2 in the region. It is amazing when you look at them that each one stops at its boundaries. If you have got a bus route, for example, between Taunton and Exeter, you get to the Somerset frontier and the bus route ceases, there is no overall planning in that way. There is a sort of lunacy there. It is anti-people to think like that and it is poor planning to think like that. To some extent, without the pressure of a regional transport strategy to draw these things out you do not find these disadvantages. Q435 Chair: I can see a number of people trying to get in. Can we have a brief comment from Ms Hill? Ms Hill: Just a brief comment on the issue of small regional bodies. Whilst I can see the pragmatic case about support systems, I think a lot of them value their independence and I suspect there would be quite a lot of debate regionally about whether they could maintain that independence if they were part of the Assembly. I just mention that as it is inevitable that those questions will be asked. Q436 Chair: Cllr Biscoe, when you answer this question could you also answer the question what aspects of policy, if any, you think could actually be determined more effectively at the regional or possibly sub-regional level if Cornwall is not to be regarded as a sub-region in itself? Cllr Biscoe: But as what? Q437 Chair: Sub-sub-region. I suspect I know what your answer will be but I am not trying to prejudge it. Cllr Biscoe: If you stay with the macro South West? Q438 Chair: Yes. What do you think should be done at the regional level? Cllr Biscoe: Firstly, with regard to the conversation can I say it is very interesting to sit here and listen to regional institutions justify their expansion and tell you what a wonderful job they are doing. I hope that you put yourself on the end of the people who have to do business with them because it is not quite as rosy as they make out. There are two fundamental issues about building up the South West Regional Assembly into some great regional dinosaur and that is it has no democratic legitimacy whatsoever and the people who pay their taxes will simply demand that they can vote and elect people to sit on this because it sits in the middle of a fully democratic set of structures as a cuckoo in the nest and is neither one thing nor the other and people do not recognise its legitimacy. I am sorry, but they do not. You show me a politician who stood for a local government election, either this year or in the county council elections the year before, who put anywhere in their election leaflets that they represent somewhere or some body on the Regional Assembly. They did not do it because they knew they would not get any votes. With regard to your question about aspects of policy, I read the other day regional boundaries are porous, but I think all boundaries are porous because you do not set yourself up in isolation from everybody else. I reject the view that LTPs stop at county boundaries, that is simply not the case, or certainly not the case in Cornwall. We have great interest and great discussions on issues around Bristol, and have done for around the last 50 years. In terms of the rail network we have always had to talk to people about everything that lies between the River Tamar and Paddington because it is of immense interest to us. Equally, with shipping we have to talk to other people in those circumstances as well. There are aspects of policy which you have to deal with on a macro level. Whether in the process of creating a region with which nobody identifies, particularly in democratic terms, you are creating institutions that will effectively do that business for you is the fundamental question. For myself and the organisation I represent, we very strongly feel that regionalisation is the way forward but we do not feel that the regional map, the regional constructs we have at the moment are effective. In terms of the aspects of policy, there are many of them - transport is an obvious one, spatial planning is another, I accept that entirely - but it is the regions we are dealing with and the one we find ourselves within, through no fault of our own ----- Q439 Chair: Apart from the fact you are the other side of Devon. Cllr Biscoe: You may well see it like that. If you live in Cornwall what you actually see is yourself on the end of a supply line which starts in London. Why have we got one district general hospital that serves one-third of Cornwall? Why have we got three postcodes in Cornwall and one sorting office? If you start from London and radiate out you end up forgetting about the bit at the end. The issue about peripherality does come from that perspective very much. Come and sit in Cornwall and look out from there and you take a different view. Q440 Mr Betts: Can we get on to the issue of whether we call them city-regions or sub-regions and whether there is a case in this region for their development. We talked to the West of England Partnership this morning and had some discussion with them about whether they are a city-region or a sub-region which happens to have a city in the middle. They agreed there was something there which was an economic entity that needed some government working relationship of some kind. The argument then is whether Plymouth might or might not need something, maybe Exeter, and then we have the issue in Cornwall of what has been called a "distributed city-region" potential. Can you tell us how that might start to work and whether you would still need a region to pull all that together or will it be separate? Cllr Shortland: One of the things we learned when we started the Regional Spatial Strategy process was that the Government's intention was in planning for the future Regional Assemblies should have regard to travel-to-work areas and sustainability, particularly in terms of housing development, and therefore look to the urban areas to increase the housing rather than rural areas. Very, very early in the process the initial consultation work that we did came back and said, "That is madness in a rural area like the South West region". Just for your information, in the South West region survey work that we did over 90 per cent of all residents said they recognised the South West as being where they lived and of the Cornish 96 per cent said that they lived in the South West in terms of a region, so they do know they are in the South West region. One of the things I want to make clear is if we are going to have city-regions there would only be the Bristol area that would be covered by the city-region. There needs to be something for everywhere else. The South West as a region has one of the largest void areas of the whole country in terms of travel-to-work, and Chris might have a map showing that with him today. Of course, the West of England Partnership you met with and spoke to today have a huge travel-to-work cross area. Here is the map which shows it all. The West of England Partnership are quite right in saying they are pretty much okay if whatever happens to them happens to them, but if you look at the rest of the region there is this massive void that does not show any population majority having a clear travel-to-work area. The rural areas have a huge part to play in the South West region, particularly small business, market towns and their hinterlands, as well as the sub-regional partnership areas that are named in the Regional Spatial Strategy. Whatever the final definition of a city-region is, and we have not been given any kind of indication as to what that really means but working on the basis of what we know already, it would be wrong to assume that you can have even the major joint study areas in the Regional Spatial Strategy and ignore everything else, you have got to have something for that hinterland area. Ms Hill: I think Jill is right that you cannot focus on Bristol only. I am not sure that city-region is the right word once you move outside there. I think the Government has recognised that there are other cities and towns in the South West where the growth of their economies is quite important not just for them as individual towns but for the wider areas they serve. We are planning to have a summit to look at the issues facing those smaller towns and cities. Again, it depends how you count them because some of them are joined together. Bournemouth and Poole, for instance, which by the way do produce a local transport plan jointly, would be treated as one because there is conurbation population of nearly 300,000. The key Cornish towns would also be treated as an urban area in recognition of the fact that the urban form is very different in Cornwall. We are hoping to have that summit fairly soon to look at the specific issues facing those cities and towns. It will not necessarily be the same as those for Bristol and the West of England but there may be some similarities. Q441 Mr Betts: Cllr Biscoe, you have got everything you want then, have you not? Cllr Biscoe: We have got five Cornish towns that each stand as towns being lumped together as an urban unit in order to fit into a model of how to make policy that Cornwall quite does not fit into: "How can we do that? Oh, I know, we will lump those five towns together". Sometimes it is seven, sometimes it is 15, sometimes it is 18, I have heard so far. It does not make sense in terms of spatial planning for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly as a whole. What it means is we have artificially created a principal urban area in order to fit in with a model that has got nothing whatsoever to do with us. You talk about disparities, this is one of the starkest examples of how we are being moulded like plasticine to fit into a standard model that does not apply to us. The results of this will be that as time goes by if we do not do something about it we will end up reversing all the progress we have made in Cornwall because we will be moulding Cornwall to be something that it is not. Mr Irwin: I just want to make the point that there is no one right way. You need models that reflect the function you are trying to address. To take the discipline of transport, in this region in opinion poll after opinion poll the paucity of public transport is identified, along with the lack of affordable housing and low wages, as one of the prime concerns of people in this region. We know that national policy, sadly, is not delivering for us in this region. We know that local policy, with the exception of Cornwall which stands out as having remarkably strong transport provision, with the help of Objective 1 I hasten to say, overall neither local transport provision nor national provision is working for us. If you look at the way the market is working, you have got a single dominant operator in the form of First Group with a railway franchise and a series of bus operations that really point to concentration. We have to tackle that because this is a matter of great concern both to people living in the region and to those who think they understand how to put the economy right. Mr Betts: So actually getting some powers to regulate the buses at local level with these partnerships might be a good idea. I will not pursue that too far. Q442 Dr Pugh: I will turn to the Government Office now, if I may. Things are changing, are they not, there is a new wind flowing through which talks about getting more experienced staff, it is no longer a form of colonial government, an advocate for the region, and so on. Are you happy and comfortable with that? Have you got the resources to move in that direction to acquire a new, more proactive role? Ms Hill: I believe we have but I think it will take us time to do it. I do not think we can make the transformation overnight that the GO review envisaged. We are working on our plans as to how we respond to that. As well as the fact that the Office is becoming more strategic it also relies on Government departments rationalising and reducing the number of grant programmes we have to administer, for example. Inevitably, in terms of our own staff we would want to do a lot more learning and development to improve our capacity. Q443 Dr Pugh: So in terms of supporting that new role, the Government departments differ in the readiness with which they embrace it and develop it? Ms Hill: I think all of them have signed up to it is the proper answer. The devil will be in the detail and how it transforms over a period of two or three years. To take an earlier example around Local Area Agreements, some funding has been dovetailed into them from the Home Office that would have been unthinkable two years ago. There are signs that they are coming together and helping us be more joined-up and supporting our work with local authorities. Q444 Dr Pugh: In terms of expertise, did you provide the administration for the development of the regional transport priorities? Ms Hill: Sorry? Q445 Dr Pugh: Did you provide the backing for that administration? Ms Hill: It was a co-ordinated exercise. The Government Office was asked to co-ordinate with the RDA, the Regional Assembly and lots of other bodies, including the counties and unitaries. Q446 Dr Pugh: How many transport experts have you got on site? Ms Hill: There are eight people in the transport team in the Government Office. Q447 Dr Pugh: They are expert in their field, are they, or are they simply in the team? Ms Hill: We have a mix of expertise. Some have more of a public transport background, some have more of a roads background and some are support staff, so it is a mixture. We do not have any people who are professional railway engineers or timetabling experts. Q448 Dr Pugh: Have you anybody with a transport background? Ms Hill: Yes, I have a transport background. The director of the team has a transport background. Personally, I am quite well off. I know Chris would like to have more but I think we do very well. Q449 Dr Pugh: Were you heavily dependent on consultants? Ms Hill: No. To tell you the truth, with the help of the Regional Assembly we did employ consultants originally to help us with a framework for doing a prioritisation exercise but that was not successful for various reasons. It was two members of my transport team in the Government Office who came up with a different methodology which, with some work with partners, has proved reasonably successful. Ms Houlden: It is one of the examples where partnership working has helped reinforce, if you like, where there have been gaps in the organisation and we have used our expertise well together. For the Assembly, in particular one of the things it has done in particular is demonstrate the value of our partner members. 70 per cent of our members are elected councillors but 30 per cent are partners, and obviously Chris Irwin is one of those partners and because he comes from a transport background he can bring that expertise into the debate. We have pooled our resources in a way that has made the process work effectively for us. Q450 Dr Pugh: Going back to a specific point, how many PSAs are you implementing in the Government Office at the moment? Ms Hill: I think it is roughly 40. Q451 Dr Pugh: What is it going to reduce to? Ms Hill: I do not know because departments have been asked to look at that in the Comprehensive Spending Review. Q452 Chair: Thank you very much for your evidence. If there are issues which you think when you go away you should have made as additional points then by all means submit them as written evidence. We have found our two days in the region extremely helpful, useful and interesting, not just for the information it has given about the South West but in the shaping of our thinking about the whole regional issue. Thank you very much indeed. Cllr Biscoe: Could I invite you to come and have a look at the other side of Devon and see what the view is like from there. Q453 Chair: I have been to Cornwall, and other Members have. Cllr Biscoe: Let me show you. Chair: Thank you. Witness: Professor Neil Ward, Director, Centre for the Rural Economy, University of Newcastle, gave evidence. Q454 Chair: Thank you very much for joining us, Professor Ward. You were in the previous evidence session, were you? Professor Ward: Yes. Q455 Chair: Excellent. Can I start by asking if you could say what you believe to be the risks to peripheral areas from the establishment of city-regions? Could you give some examples where peripheral areas have suffered from the establishment of such entities? Professor Ward: I think that the risks to rural areas from an urban-centric approach to sub-national economic development are about being seen as at the margins and second order areas, the hinterland, the backcloth. In that sense you do not really have to look for examples of where city-regions have been established and, in fact, I question the idea of city-regions being established anywhere. We have had quite a strong urban-centric approach to economic development for about 20 years now, since the time of Michael Heseltine, where we have had lots of investment on urban regeneration, physical infrastructure of cities, inner city centres, so we can see what some of the implications of that over the last 20 years have been in England. At the same time, I think over the last six or seven years the counterpoint to all of the investment in urban renaissance, and particularly in the pushing of rural affairs down to the regional level from a national framework, has been a dismantling of rural affairs policy, a dismantling of rural development. There is a lot of rhetoric about inclusive, integrated regional development, that regions are about urban and rural areas together. I am not sure that you were quoting me quite correctly when you said earlier on that rural communities are being ignored. I do not think they are being ignored, they are talked about quite a lot, it is just that there is not much material action or careful analysis of how the rural economies can contribute to regions under city-regions. Q456 Chair: Apparently the people in the public gallery are having some difficulty in hearing you, so if you could try and speak up. Remember that you are not just speaking to us but to the public gallery as well. I know you have obviously done a great deal of work in relation to the North East, maybe you can explain what evidence you have got that a more thriving Newcastle city-region would be a threat, rather than a boost, to the prospects of the rest of the region? Professor Ward: I am not arguing against the growth and development of cities. It is great for cities to do well and thrive. With all of the public investment that has gone into cities like Newcastle and their city centres, and from the amount of public investment that has gone into something like Newcastle Quayside or the Grainger Town initiative, one would very much hope that there would be some rewards from that in terms of rising productivity and GBA and the region should benefit from that. Where the problem lies is when you have a city-region based approach to regional development when cities are seen as principal drivers of regional economies and then become heavily prioritised within regions. That is what has happened in the North recently and that is what seems to be being talked about in the South West as well. In the North East our Regional Spatial Strategy and Regional Economy Strategy both talk in terms of limiting development in rural areas, so the proposals are for a sharp paring back of building new houses in rural districts so that new housing can be concentrated in the cities. Q457 Chair: Is it not simply a fact that the cities are the major sites of economic activity and not the drivers? Professor Ward: It is a fact that the majority of the population live in cities. My question is, is it something about the cityness of a city that contributes to urban growth, to national growth, or is just that cities are increasingly effective at grabbing their share of national growth? It could be the latter. I think the jury is out on that. I am completely unconvinced by this large pile of evidence, which is called the evidence base, which argues that we need to concentrate on the cities for national economic growth. I do not think there is anything necessarily innate about urban economies and sublimation of glomeration economies and untrained interdependencies, as it is talked about it, that means that is a more worthwhile strategy than thinking about economic development generally. Q458 Mr Betts: You have been rather critical of the concept of the Northern Way and the attempt to see it as the growth points of the North being based on Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool. On the other hand, do you not recognise in any shape or form that nationally we have a very unbalanced situation where London is such a dominant powerhouse of economic activity in the country compared with other countries which have cities of more equal size? If we are going to have a counterpoint elsewhere which can attract economic activity and growth, not on the same scale but at least on a more equal scale, you have to develop something like the Northern Way. Is the concept not right in that sense? Professor Ward: I am really pleased with the idea of a Northern Way, which is about addressing the productivity gap between the North and the South and thinking about the North as a single entity as well, the three regions together, and trying to get over that rather artificial carve-up. In that sense I welcome the Northern Way. The Northern Way very quickly translates into a strongly prescriptive city-region approach. It was interesting coming down this morning reading through all the evidence you have received that both ODPM and Northern Way say in their evidence it is not really clear and there is confusion about what the city-region is and how it should be defined, but then they quickly move on to argue that it is a good thing to have a city-region approach. In the Northern Way the city-regions are almost a political mechanism. On the one hand they are talked of having fuzzy boundaries, flexible geographies, different types of spatial entities for different functions and, on the other hand, 90 per cent of people live in them. How can you say that without having a sense of a boundary in them? The problem is it is a very slippery entity, the city-region. Trotsky's quibble with Lenin about substitution was that the party substitutes for the people and the organisation of the party substitutes for the party and central committee substitutes for the party organisation and the chair of the central committee substitutes for the central committee and in the end the chair of the committee is the people and vice versa. That is what you get with city-regions and regions, you end up with the core of the city centre, Newcastle Quayside, becoming the North East. Q459 Mr Betts: I am not sure the Chair of the Regional Assembly would necessarily agree. Professor Ward: These categories are slippery and vague. Q460 Mr Betts: Are you saying that concentration on things like the Northern Way and city-regions means that the Regional Assembly and the North East Government Office have given up any sense of being advocates for, or trying to develop effective policies for, rural areas? Professor Ward: There is plenty of talk about rural areas and rural development, but at the same time the real material, the facts of life in our Regional Spatial Strategy are less developed than in rural areas, less new house building, a rapid paring back of new house building. If you think about the North versus the South, one of the competitive advantages the North has had over the last ten years has been lower housing costs, cheaper costs of living to live in the North. For those people who are in, if you like, footloose jobs and can locate in lots of different places there have been advantages in locating in the North. With the affordable housing crisis that has crept up on us and the gap between the North and South and house prices narrowing, that is no longer the case. Housing affordability is a huge problem in rural areas. It started in the South and now spreads across the whole of rural England. Q461 Mr Betts: Are your concerns mirrored by what is happening in other regions as well? We heard today in a private meeting that in the Greater Bristol area the people are working effectively together. How you define what a city-region is, they basically said it is the economic footprint of Greater Bristol. Most people, whatever they call it, seemed to accept that was a concept they all understood and it was a real entity. People have also said to us they felt the RDA in the region were now more effectively dealing with rural issues than they were five years ago when there was an agenda and things were being done. The two things ran in parallel. There was the development of a city-region type concept in Bristol but an addressing of rural issues in the rest of the region. If that is happening there do you think this is just a problem you have got in the North East? Professor Ward: No. There are issues in other regions as well. It is good news that there are people who can speak broadly about the rural development initiatives in the South West and the role of the South West RDA but that would not be representative of all of the English regions. You can go to the East of England and East Midlands and other regions and hear a different kind of message. What is very interesting from hearing the earlier session is the extent to which regional development in the South West was about connectivity and there was a lot of talk about transport and the relationship between the South East and the South West. There is a sort of development dynamic which is affecting the South West of England which is to do with growth coming from the South East relating to the Bristol City region and deeper into the South West but probably not throughout. I think it is very important to think of the rural areas within regions in terms of their place in the national regional geography as well. In the North of England we are not seeing that kind of flow. There is still a flow from the North to the South, there is a North/South problem in terms of population loss from the North and overheating in the South. The South West is benefiting more from growth in the South East than the North of England, which is part of what the Northern Way is about. Q462 John Cummings: In your remarks you have noted that across the North implementation of city-regions is running ahead of a formal Government statement of its city-regions policy. Would you happen to know why this has happened? Are there inherent dangers in anticipating central policy in this way? Professor Ward: Why it has happened is a very interesting question. I would say that there is a sort of technocratic elite which is based in the larger cities and it suits their interests to talk about city-regions. Q463 John Cummings: Are you saying it is city-led? Professor Ward: Yes. Q464 John Cummings: The "city" being the City of Newcastle? Professor Ward: In the Northern Way you would look at Leeds and Manchester, and a dialogue between Leeds and Manchester, as the origins of the Northern Way idea, thinking about the flows and relationships between Leeds and Manchester, because there is a lot of rich exchange there. Then there was a sort of, "Well, we had better think about the M62 corridor to Merseyside and over to the Hull ports" and there was this notion of an M62 super-city for a little while. Q465 John Cummings: The Northern Way has been with us for a while. Professor Ward: Yes. Q466 John Cummings: City-regions just seem to be coming on stream now. Why are we ahead of the game in the North East? Professor Ward: The Northern Way has been part of a driver for the city-regions agenda, I would argue. You can see concentric circles. Initially it was about Manchester and Leeds and then the M62 corridor and there was a feeling of, "We had better involve the North East as well, so there was the A1 corridor, but that feels a little bit half-hearted, and then Tees Valley, and we will draw the line at Carlisle and that will not be a city-region in the Northern Way". Q467 John Cummings: Why do you believe this is happening? Why are we taking the lead in the North? Why are we running ahead of ourselves? Professor Ward: I think the city-region agenda is running ahead of itself and I think it is because it suits the local interests of the larger metropolitan authorities. Q468 John Cummings: Do you seem the same impetus coming from what is awfully termed as the hinterland ---- Professor Ward: No. Q469 John Cummings: ---- in suggesting that perhaps the same enthusiasm does not exist within county councils and in district councils within those counties? Professor Ward: You can look through all of the evidence you have received. Interestingly, there were even people from the professional associations like chief economic development officers who talked about "over-emphasis on city-regions"; police officers, "an unhelpful complication"; Unison, "city-regions driving roughshod". It comes from the cores of the cities. There is a rationale for improving cross-boundary working in urban authorities and there is a sense that something like Tyne & Wear is five authorities when in the entity of Tyne & Wear as a conurbation, let us say, in transport planning, economic development, spatial planning, it is hard to involve all of those authorities and come to a common vision. I think there is a momentum behind city governance but the city-region thing is a wider concept and it is drawing in just part of the surrounding rural areas which is seen as being about travel-to-work in the commuter zones. Q470 John Cummings: What do you believe the dangers are in anticipating a central policy in the way this is occurring in the North East? Professor Ward: Well, you never know when your minister is going to be moved and have to deal with something else! I think there is a rather delicious irony that David Miliband is now responsible for rural affairs and rural development, so I am sure he will find it interesting engaging the city-regions from a rural development perspective. Q471 Dr Pugh: You are putting forward an extremely heretical hypothesis, a very interesting one too, but you are suggesting that it is a kind of conspiracy hatched out in the town halls of the major cities. Are you convinced of that and have you got evidence of that, or is it more likely that it is simply a scheme thought within Whitehall as a good thing to go for? Professor Ward: I would not want to argue that it is just cooked up by metropolitan authorities. It suits a particular interest there in terms of gaining more investment. Q472 Dr Pugh: There could be a bandwagon worth joining? Professor Ward: Absolutely, yes. It has also won hearts and minds in the centre of government, it is a big fad at the moment. The number of little pamphlets you get that tell you the city-region approach can solve social exclusion, poverty ---- Q473 Dr Pugh: Going to the evidence base for a moment, if we may, surely it is the case that if a city declines rapidly then so does the hinterland and so do many associated towns in the area because they are all affected by it, and therefore if you put it in a negative way it is in the interests of everybody to have prospering cities within the region. Professor Ward: Yes. Urban/rural relationships are very important and one of the most important ingredients of the economic development prospects of rural areas is their relationship with neighbouring cities. The difficulty is when you have got this notion of a city-region which is banded and there is an idea of beyond the city-region. When we explored the city-regions in the 1960s they had comprehensive coverage, everywhere was in one city region or other in the model, but that is not the model now. Q474 Dr Pugh: Are you suggesting they are falling between the interstices of the city-regions so there could be appreciable economic growth which will not receive sufficient attention from the Government because there is an emphasis on the city-region agenda? Professor Ward: Yes. I think those voices will be marginalised around the table. The development of the North will be all about cities. If you try and transcend that idea of the three regions and take away their boundaries and look at the North of England, one of the distinctive common features of the North of England is the Northern Uplands, which are sparsely populated and very attractive to migrants from the South or from elsewhere, and there is lots of potential for business growth there. It is not ever going to drive the national economy but it can contribute to the development of the North and it is very hard to articulate that kind of message when ---- Q475 Dr Pugh: Would it help everybody if we did have not fuzzy boundaries and a lack of clarity but a map in which England is defined and city-regions shaded and coloured and we would all know where we stand? Professor Ward: I would not be particularly excited about that. I am not convinced on the very idea of city-regions. If we are going to go along that road and we are going to have a national framework for city-regions, which is being talked about in the ODPM report, then there does need to be a national rural counterpart to that which is about rural development in these areas beyond. Q476 Dr Pugh: Since you see the influence of Westminster to some extent in forwarding this agenda and popularising this agenda, would you argue that Westminster should back off a little bit and leave regional policy more to the regions? Professor Ward: Regional policy does not feel as if it is of the regions. That is not how it feels in the North. Our regional agencies feel like they are agents of the centre rather than of the region. Q477 Mr Betts: I did not follow your comments about Tyne & Wear. You said there was a case for having something but I was not sure what the something was. Professor Ward: Within the city-region agenda there is a lot that is very interesting, and I could get quite excited about, which is to do with thinking more carefully about how cities work, overcoming the problems of cross-boundary working. Tyne & Wear has five authorities. You talk of Newcastle, but there is North Tyneside, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland. There are five authorities. There was once a metropolitan authority. I would not want to argue against a city-region agenda which is about thinking how those urban authorities might think and work more collectively as one. Q478 Mr Betts: That is exactly what is happening in the Greater Bristol area, as I understand it, it goes from Manchester and they want an executive board essentially dealing with transport issues, economic issues, skills issues, that transcends one local authority boundary and is part of a slightly wider economy. Professor Ward: Yes. Q479 Mr Betts: So you have a problem with that? Professor Ward: No, I have got no problem with that. What is happening though is city-regions are being talked of more broadly than that, bringing in the rural hinterlands, and as a governance structure and a means of prioritising investment that almost replaces the region. The Regional Spatial Strategy for North East England talks about two city-regions being the priority, that is Tees Valley and Tyne & Wear, and includes the surrounding rural hinterlands which are quite attractive areas and there are lots of people who want to move to those and invest in development. Q480 Mr Betts: So it is not the actual concept of city-regions, it is the fact that they would get priority for funds, if you like, that is your problem? Professor Ward: It is the issue of Cornwall, it is the issue of looking at this from the perspective of Berwick-upon-Tweed, from all of those places beyond the city-region. Q481 Mr Betts: We have taken evidence in the South West and I have not heard one person say to me "It is terrible that in Bristol they are trying to develop this concept of a Greater Bristol or West of England Partnership", most people have said "If Bristol gets working better and its economy does better, we will all benefit". Professor Ward: I think in the South West region the parallel is stronger with the North West where there is a more comfortable arrangement between "That is where the city-region is and this is the rural area", so you have got Devon and Cornwall and then you will have the Bristol city-region. There is less of a sense of interdependency between the two and it is the same in the North West where the city-regions are right in the far South of England. Mr Betts: I am not sure because when we were talking to the people in the four unitaries around the Bristol area they have got some quite large rural elements which are part of that sort of sub-region. They were saying that was the strength of it, that they were being brought into that arrangement. Q482 Chair: The Forest of Dean. Professor Ward: That the Forest of Dean is being brought into Bristol city-region? Q483 Mr Betts: Certainly South Gloucestershire is there, is it not? Professor Ward: That is in quite a different relationship to the Bristol city-region than somewhere like Cornwall. Q484 Mr Betts: Cornwall is not going to be part of the Bristol city-region. No-one from Cornwall is arguing that the city-regions should not be operating. What they were arguing for was some sort of form, not city-regions as such, a way of working which might replicate some elements of that in a Cornish town setting. Would you not see that happening in some parts of the North East? Professor Ward: No. That is more likely to happen on the north-west side of the North of England where the city-region is not becoming so dominant within the region and there is greater comfort around the idea of there being a distinct rural area that is relatively remote and peripheral from the city-regions, like Cumbria. The North West is quite flat at the top and then it comes to a very narrow channel and out at the bottom with the city-regions right at the bottom of Liverpool and Manchester. In the North East the rural areas would hug the cities and are all within an hour or so of the cities and it is as if the development has been more and more focused on the cities at the expense of the more remote rural areas. That is not the case in the Forest of Dean. Q485 Mr Betts: You say in your evidence that the Government has got mistakes in its regional agenda. How would you do things differently and how do you think they should be funded by Government? Professor Ward: One of the mistakes in the regional agenda was the proposals for devolution to the North East were not strong enough. It is going to be a real shame if history gets written that the referendum was a vote against regional devolution because the referendum was a vote against the particular proposals and the debate in the North East was very much about, "This Assembly is not going to be able to do anything, its hands are tied, it is going to be weak". It was imposed on the region really. Central Government support for it was rather later and half-hearted really. It was a poor public debate, quite last minute, and people were complaining about there being another tier established, the Assembly was already there and politicians were going to be abolished through the requirement of removing a tier of local government. Q486 Sir Paul Beresford: Perhaps they were voting for it to go away, they did not want it elected or non-elected. Professor Ward: The vote for it to go away was not very effective because it is still there and I know people who are rather surprised at times when they find the Regional Assembly is still there. Sir Paul Beresford: Sad, is it not? Q487 Chair: Professor Ward, can I just clarify some throwaway remark you made about housing so I can be clear about this. Are you suggesting that housing growth where it occurs should happen more in rural areas? Is that what you are suggesting, or are you just suggesting it for the North East? Professor Ward: Am I suggesting it just for the North East? No. I think that house building and economic development often go hand-in-hand. We have a rather simple and naïve national vision which is about preserving the green land: "Don't build bungalows and concrete the countryside". That is a perspective that is very, very South-East centric. That is about London and the South East's growth pressures. That kind of idea is going to be very, very damaging to rural economic development if that gets imposed in the far North. Q488 Chair: So you are suggesting that there should be more housing growth in rural areas apart from the South East? Professor Ward: Yes, I am suggesting there should be more housing growth in rural areas. People want to move to rural areas and they are becoming increasingly exclusive places which are the preserve of the very affluent and that is as a consequence of there not being enough house building. Q489 Chair: I thought the evidence about housing pressures on rural areas was precisely that people are moving there and the difficulty is the people who live there already cannot buy housing. Professor Ward: Absolutely. Young people on modest incomes have to leave the rural areas and go and live in towns and cities because they cannot afford to get on the housing ladder in rural areas. Q490 Chair: To go back to what you were suggesting, and calm down Sir Paul, because I think you were not suggesting that this applied to the South East but to everywhere else, and presumably not to London since London is not rural. If you built more houses in the North East in these attractive landscaped areas, what is to stop them simply all being taken up by us incredibly affluent people down in the South East who like to nip away at weekends and get these nice houses in these attractive rural areas? Professor Ward: There has been an Affordable Rural Housing Commission which conducted an inquiry in the first part of this year which has put out a set of proposals. There is a need for social housing, affordable housing, tied more for local people and that should be some help. You could impose taxes on second home ownership in an attempt to generate benefit from that. Second home owning is not necessarily going to help the dynamism of local rural economies in areas like the North East of England. You need house building linked to an economic development strategy, which is about attracting people and businesses creating self-sustaining local economies in rural areas. Q491 Chair: I think we would probably not dissent from that, but why in order for that to happen is it necessary to put a brake on the growth of cities? Professor Ward: I do not want to put a brake on the growth of cities. What I want to challenge is the idea that house building in rural areas is a brake on cities. We have a regional housing allocation, unfortunately, which means there is a zero sum gain and the city-region argument is used as an argument to hoover up the housing allocation within the cities and pare back in the rural areas, which is going to make these rural areas increasingly exclusive places and is going to damage their economic prospects, particularly for entrepreneurial migrants, which is one of the big strategic priorities in the Northern Way, attracting entrepreneurial migrants to the North of England. They are not all going to want to live in yuppie flats in front of the canals in Manchester, Leeds and overlooking the Tyne, some of these people want to go to market towns and attractive rural villages and run their businesses from there. Q492 Chair: So you want more housing and more affordable housing? Professor Ward: Yes. Chair: Okay. Thank you very much. |