Examination of Witnesses (Querstions 282-299)
MS JANE
THOMAS AND
COUNCILLOR CHRIS
FOOTE-WOOD
27 MARCH 2006
Q282 Mr Betts: Welcome to our evidence
session and, again, I give apologies for the Chair, Phyllis Starkey
MP, who is in her constituency on important business this afternoon;
you are welcome anyway. For the sake of our records, could I ask
you to introduce yourselves, please?
Ms Thomas: I am Jane Thomas. I
am former Director of Campaign for Yorkshire, which then became
the Yes for Yorkshire campaign.
Councillor Foote-Wood: Chris Foote-Wood,
Vice-Chair of the North East Assembly.
Q283 Mr Betts: Can I just make it
clear, as you have asked me to, that actually you are here in
an individual capacity this afternoon, not on behalf of the Assembly?
Councillor Foote-Wood: That is
correct.
Mr Betts: Thank you very much indeed.
Q284 Anne Main: In your representations,
you were both highly critical of the lack of accountability of
quangos. If you were to try to make them accountable, to which
regional bodies should they become accountable, if you think they
should be accountable?
Ms Thomas: I think the fairly
straightforward answer is to a directly-elected regional body.
In the interim period, I think that there is some discussion about
moving towards a regional executive. I think that we are in a
new era to have a debate and dialogue about best regional structures,
but it is very, very obvious to me that we have got an enormous
amount of regional architecture, at the moment, that we ought
to develop and build upon and probably streamline in a much more
effective way. In some ways the architecture is there, you have
got that with the embryonic regional assemblies, you have got
that with the RDAs, and certainly you could meld those into a
regional executive, but the long-term answer, for me, is to have
a directly-elected regional body.
Councillor Foote-Wood: It is in
my evidence, the land of 100 quangos, and in the North East we
have well over 100 government quangos. Really it is the lack of
co-ordination and the inefficiency of these numerous organisations
that I firmly believe that, for regional government to work, and
we have this very dissipated regional government, these quangos
need to be responsible to a single body, a single organisation.
My preference, like Jane's, is for an elected assembly, but that
has been rejected, as you know. The alternatives would be either
to use the existing regional assembly or to set up a regional
executive, but I do emphasise, from my point of view, and we want
to impress on you, that one organisation needs to take responsibility
for co-ordinating all these regional quangos, otherwise it will
never work.
Q285 Anne Main: Thank you. You said
there are 100; do you think that is too many, could they be made
more efficient, more co-ordinated, or more attuned to local conditions,
dispensed with?
Councillor Foote-Wood: Certainly;
absolutely.
Q286 Anne Main: Absolutely, dispensed
with?
Councillor Foote-Wood: They could
hardly be less co-ordinated than they are. I do believe that the
success of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly has
been due to Parliament giving those bodies responsibility, an
overview of all their quangos and I think that is an essential
element of what needs to be done. To me, it is self-evident that
they ought to work under some kind of umbrella.
Q287 Anne Main: Okay, but did you
say you still wanted 100, or is that too many?
Councillor Foote-Wood: Certainly
the number could be reduced. Each of these quangos has its own
board which is appointed by government ministers, and in my estimation
there are about 1,500 of these people, far more than there are
elected councillors. Quite honestly, I do not see why each of
these quangos should have its own individual board; certainly
the jobs they do should continue but why have 1,500 appointed
members when you could have a single body responsible for all
these quangos?
Q288 Martin Horwood: You seem to
be suggesting that, if a proposal came back which did confer those
kinds of powers on a North East Regional Assembly, you might be
in favour of an elected assembly. Do you think actually there
is the stomach in the North East for a second referendum, or would
you be heading for just a second fall?
Councillor Foote-Wood: No. Martin,
I do agree with your suggestion that it would be pointless having
a further referendum; the way that public opinion is at the moment
certainly it is against it. I am only expressing my personal view.
As a practical person who tries to make things work, I am looking
for a better solution in the interim. If we did have a single
body, if, for example, the existing Assembly were given responsibility
for these quangos, could prove itself, then perhaps, as with Scotland
and Wales, 10 or 15 years down the line public opinion might be
different, but I cannot forecast that. I accept the present position.
It has been rejected; we will have to look for other solutions.
Q289 John Cummings: My question is
directed to yourself, Jane. No disrespect Chris, but the lady
is much prettier than you. Jane, you criticise the devolution
of budgets to sub-regional bodies, in your evidence. In an ideal
world, what do you believe should be devolved and to whom should
it be devolved?
Ms Thomas: I think it is quite
an interesting debate about the double devolution agenda at the
moment. I think one of the things which are becoming evident is
that the state is getting bigger at a regional level and accountability
is getting less. One of the things which are happening on top
of that is also that we are having the establishment of quite
a number of new initiatives which are drawing down massive budgets.
Somebody mentioned in previous testimony the LEGI budgets but
also initiatives like Pathfinders, and things like this, and they
are drawing down a large amount of state funding, where the accountability
principle I do not think is melding with any local authority accountability
and certainly is falling outside the remit of any other sort of
democratic accountability. Sub-regionally, there is an awful lot
that is happening and some of it is very positive. The Pathfinders
in Sheffield is going to be very, very good for Sheffield, but
it does beg a much wider question, which has not gone away with
the North East vote, which is about governance and how we are
spending, or quangos are spending, public money.
Q290 John Cummings: Could you give
an example of what you would devolve?
Ms Thomas: What I would devolve
down at a sub-regional level, I am very interested to see the
new localism have some teeth to it. I would like to see local
authorities have greater powers but I think they should be bedded
within a formally-elected regional body, where there is money
devolved down to a regional level, so you have a proper, multi-levelled
governance arrangement, as we have in Europe.
Q291 Sir Paul Beresford: That has
been rejected, so what would you do instead?
Ms Thomas: It has been rejected.
I think we can dissect the North East vote till the cows come
home and there has been ample discussion this afternoon about
why it did not happen. I do think there is an issue about what
was on offer and I would have to say that was not what we would
have argued through Campaign for English Regions; real devolution.
It was not devolving budgets.
Q292 Sir Paul Beresford: Hang on;
let us go back. It has gone. Chris Foote-Wood says it has gone,
so what would you have instead, to answer this question?
Ms Thomas: I think there are a
number of opportunities, in terms of constitutional reform, which
are opening up other avenues to explore this, and we have been
talking this afternoon about House of Lords reform, about having
a genuinely reformed second chamber where you could have a regional
list. There are very many opportunities, with the new localism,
about where you could think about having much more empowered,
genuinely empowered, local authorities. I think you could sit
within a powerful regional executive with some statutory rights
an awful lot of overseeing and steering, in terms of taking some
guidance from those properly constituted bodies.
Q293 John Cummings: Basically, you
are accepting that the 100-odd quangos that you have at the present
time in the North East, placed in your document, are going to
continue for the foreseeable future?
Councillor Foote-Wood: Yes, because
you could argue that most of these quangos, if not all of them,
do a useful job, as far as a particular sector of government is
concerned; what I am concerned about is the lack of co-ordination.
I would suggest to you, colleagues, that one way of doing that,
without creating any new structures whatsoever, would be to give
the existing regional assemblies the power to agree the budgets
and business plans of the quangos. At the moment we are responsible
for overseeing, if you like, the Regional Development Agencies,
but we do not have any carrots and we do not have any sticks and
the Regional Development Agency does not have to do what we think
it should do.
Q294 John Cummings: Are you saying
that the Assembly should really have more teeth?
Councillor Foote-Wood: Absolutely,
John, I totally agree with that, and I am saying that a simple
way to it is give us budget approval and we will start getting
co-ordinated; no doubt about that.
Q295 Mr Betts: Can I bring you back
now to the sub-regional level, where I think you have said that
you have got some reservations about the sort of regional approach,
because you think it will be at the expense of the areas around
the city and that it will tend to concentrate resources in the
city. Is not there also the possibility that areas around cities,
which currently are not involved in the decision-making process
of the cities but are still affected by them, will actually gain
some influence over that process, if we have some sort of city
region model?
Councillor Foote-Wood: Mr Betts,
if I may, I believe we are talking about two different things
here. As far as the present sub-regions are concerned, unlike
Jane, I support that system, because, with our agreement, the
Regional Development Agency in the North East has devolved 75%
of its decision-making to the sub-regions, right across the board,
which I support totally. I do have reservations about the city
regions, for reasons with which I am sure all Members here are
familiar, that there is a danger that the outside areas, the rural
areas, as you suggest, Mr Betts, would be affected by decisions
over which they had no control.
Q296 Mr Betts: Is it not the other
way round, that currently they are affected by the decisions and
they have no control? The classic case is in Sheffield, where
a bit of our economic hinterland actually is in other regions,
not being with the local authority areas, and there is no involvement
or influence over what happens from those areas but in Sheffield
clearly decisions are being made which affect them and they have
no influence over it?
Ms Thomas: To answer concerning
Sheffield, I think it is quite an interesting one about the city
regions. I was one of the authors of the Sheffield City Region
Development Plan for the Northern Way, so I have some interest
in this. I think you are right, in a way it is drawing different
players and bringing different people to the table, and that is
really, really important. The problem for me is that the city
region still has not tackled head-on either the governance issue
or the accountability issue, and that was the one thing that the
regional agenda and the regional debate did attempt to do. City
regions have got a role to play, I think, in the future, certainly
in determining some of the economic issues, some of the productivity
issues that we looked at a lot with Sheffield and, in particular,
the bit of north-east Derbyshire which has been drawn into Sheffield
City Region, which is very much part of the economic drivers of
Sheffield. I believe that the economic case for city regions should
run parallel but it does not answer the governance and accountability
things, which really, I think, was being asked with this particular
submission.
Q297 Alison Seabeck: You have answered
some of it with your response to Mr Betts' question, but two follow-ups
from that. How easy will it be, in your view, actually to define
a city region?
Ms Thomas: I think there is not
a "one size fits all", there never has been. One of
the things that Northern Way has thrown up, which has been very,
very interesting, is some sort of debate, a regional debate, about
what we think about place and space, and for different people
it means different things. Mr Betts will have as much a feel about
Sheffield as I have, in terms of the Sheffield City Region; there
is some resonance around that. Certainly in terms of `travel to
work' patterns, leisure patterns, and things like that, there
is the emergence of some fear, but boundaries can be history's
scars, can they not, and you have to be very, very careful. Barnsley
now is in two city regions. Stephen Houghton, the Leader of Barnsley,
just thinks this could be a win-win, so I think it depends on
your outlook as well, and I would agree with that position. I
think the one thing that we have learned in the last five years
is that we can get too hung up on lines on maps.
Q298 Alison Seabeck: Are there some
key powers which city regions ought to have, if they are going
to be economic powerhouses in their own right? If so, from where
would they be drawn, given that you have got this boundary issue
and people are protective of their own boundaries and their own
responsibilities; how would you break all that down?
Ms Thomas: This is deja vu
again, is it not, it is exactly what powers regional government
should have? At the end of the day, if you want people to deliver,
and coming back to the really important Treasury report on productivity,
the one thing which came out of that productivity report, which
I think was critical, was that we need different levers, we need
different tools and different mechanisms in different parts of
the country to respond to very different things, especially labour
market issues. That was really interesting in the Treasury report
which came out last week, about labour market issues being very
different in London from outside, in a lot of the country. If
you see city regions as being an economic driver and wanting to
address productivity issues and wanting to address PSAII targets
then the same sorts of powers need to be devolved to them as we
thought should have been devolved down to regional government
to address exactly the same questions.
Councillor Foote-Wood: I would
demur on that, in that, if you gave powers to the city regions,
presumably that is taking them away from the region. Why I support
the region primarily is that it gives a proper balance between
the cities and the rest of the region and sees fair play between
them. We accept the crucial position of the cities as economic
drivers and certainly we would do everything possible to support
what they want, but not at the expense of the rural areas.
Q299 Martin Horwood: Councillor Foote-Wood
has said almost what I was going to ask Jane Thomas, in response
to what she has just said. It is almost like a variation of the
West Lothian question, I will call it the Cheltenham question,
if you want. If the new drivers of regional government are going
to be city regions, how do towns like mine, which is 110,000 people,
very vibrant, economically, socially and everything else, find
our place in this new set-up?
Ms Thomas: I am not convinced
that city regions are the answer to the question, actually, and
that was why I was saying that city regions are interesting. I
know that there has been a lot of interesting academic debate,
and indeed there is a lot of evidence to suggest that city regions
can be powerful drivers. For me, there are two caveats. First
of all, a lot of the research that has been done, from Salford
and other places, has looked at European and American examples
of city regions, where cities are nested within a devolved form
of government, whether it is a federal system or regional government,
so it is not a perfect science to draw on European examples. The
other thing is that I think the jury is still out in terms of
GVA benefits, in terms of what cities can do. I think it is interesting.
I am glad that people are looking at devolving powers and decisions,
because, inevitably, the city regions debate is coming back to
the same debate that we started out with, the Campaign for the
English Regions, which was looking at ending the quangos, looking
at accountability and looking at moving away from a London-centric
focus, which I think has led to a two-speed economy. It is a good
debate but I do not think it answers the central and crucial questions.
Mr Betts: Thank you very much indeed
for your evidence today.
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