Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee Minutes of Evidence


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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