Examination of Witnesses (Questions 420-439)
MS BRONWYN
HILL, MS
BRYONY HOULDEN,
CLLR JILL
SHORTLAND, MR
CHRISTOPHER IRWIN
AND CLLR
BERT BISCOE
7 JUNE 2006
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 na-£ve 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.
| 
