Examination of Witnesses (Questions 404-419)
MS BRONWYN
HILL, MS
BRYONY HOULDEN,
CLLR JILL
SHORTLAND, MR
CHRISTOPHER IRWIN
AND CLLR
BERT BISCOE
7 JUNE 2006
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, Government 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 SouthWest, 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 language. 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[1].
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% 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 Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Rural 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—
1 Index of Local Conditions: Relative deprivation
in Devon & Cornwall by Dr Judy Payne (Universities of
Plymouth & Exeter) 1996. Back
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