Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 513-519)

MR PAUL ROGERSON, MS NICOLE BROCK, MR MICHAEL FRATER AND DR SIMON MURPHY

12 JUNE 2006

  Q513 Alison Seabeck: Thank you very much for coming. First of all, can I offer the Chair's apologies, she is in Iran today. If you could start by identifying yourselves for the record, please, your name and your role?

  Mr Rogerson: I am Paul Rogerson , I am the Chief Executive of Leeds City Council.

  Ms Brock: I am Nicole Brock, I am Head of Regional Policy at Leeds City Council.

  Mr Frater: I am Michael Frater, I am Chief Executive at Telford and Wrekin Council.

  Dr Murphy: I am Simon Murphy, the City Region Project Director.

  Alison Seabeck: Thank you very much. I am very grateful to you for having rushed here having had a horrible journey from the West Midlands.

  Q514  John Cummings: In your submission, that is the submission from Birmingham, you describe the role of city-regions as "building urban and regional competitiveness and reducing regional imbalance". What do you mean by "regional imbalance"? Can you tell the Committee what you can do to reduce it, and how will you do it?

  Dr Murphy: The regional imbalance is in terms of the prosperity gap and the GVA figures between the best performing parts of the United Kingdom and those that are currently under-performing. Our estimation is that the city-region at the urban core of the West Midlands is an under-performing region. How we would close that gap is by targeting strategic decision-making on certain key policy areas, namely transport, housing and sustainable communities, competitive locations, economic development if you will, innovation and enterprise, particularly skills and employment, and the area of creativity and culture. We believe by taking decisions at a city-region level across eight council areas, working with partners such as the Development Agency, the Learning and Skills Council, the Regional Assembly and the business community, all of whom since we submitted our evidence have agreed to join the executive board, so we have a very broad based executive board taking these decisions in those policy areas, taking decisions on a collective basis across a wider area, will enable us to take strategic decisions more quickly and to spend public and private monies more effectively and more efficiently than currently is the case.

  Mr Frater: As well as imbalance between regions there is intra-regional imbalance within the region as well. There is growing evidence that there is an economic fault line that runs broadly north/south through the West Midlands and to the west of it, places like Telford, where I work, and Stoke where there are significant challenges. Telford's GVA is on a par with the likes of Stoke, Blackburn, Grimsby, at the bottom of the league, so there is an opportunity to address imbalance within the region as well as between regions.

  Q515  John Cummings: Do you think that this is a role that all cities can play or should the Government be concentrating on the development of only a few city-regions?

  Mr Frater: Like many initiatives, this is an initiative that started within local government from the eight core cities which had been working together for some years and proposed this idea to Government. It does seem to me that certainly the starting point has to be the major core cities outside the capital. Whether there is advantage for other towns and cities to follow suit, for example in our own region Stoke-on-Trent are proposing that they will form their own city-region which makes a lot of sense as they really look equally to the East Midlands cities, to Manchester and to Birmingham, I think Stoke-on-Trent will demonstrate whether this is a concept that is applicable, as it were, at the smaller city level and at the town level.

  Q516  John Cummings: So you are not averse to more cities being brought under the umbrella of city-regions?

  Dr Murphy: Currently Government is inviting us to describe to them how we would actually run a city-region in the urban core with the West Midlands. We are doing that in terms of the governance models we would put in place, in terms of the policy areas where we believe this wider base of decision-making can have a strategic impact in terms of closing the prosperity gap and increasing the quality of life for our citizens. I guess if the model is proved to work in one or two areas, or maybe more, it is something the Government could consider rolling out across the whole of the country and inviting other areas to look at city-regions also. We, and Leeds, I am sure, are by no means the only two within the country currently working on this agenda but we are responding to encouragement from Government to come forward with our proposals on how we would do it ourselves.

  Q517  Mr Betts: I just want to explore with you about the fact that you are developing a City Region Development Plan—this is Birmingham—and you have already got a West Midlands Spatial Strategy in existence. Are you intending for your plan to supersede the Spatial Strategy, is it going to be a part of it, or is it a building block towards it? What happens if there is a conflict between the two? Presumably you want your plan to be the one that is taken account of and perhaps the Regional Assembly's efforts are not worthwhile any more?

  Mr Frater: If I could start the answer to that. Within the region I have the responsibility for the strategic overview of the Regional Spatial Strategy and I am also, as it happens, the recently appointed secretary to the Regional Assembly, so I would be in serious trouble with my colleagues if they thought the Regional Spatial Strategy was going to be subject to being driven just by the eight authorities. The answer is no, I think we see the Regional Spatial Strategy, which is currently going through its first review, particularly in light of the housing numbers, as being the principal means of achieving housing growth. The RSS as currently formulated, and I do not think that will change fundamentally, sees most of that growth taking place within the existing metropolitan areas. In that sense there is not a fundamental conflict between the two. The challenge with the new housing forecasts is how those numbers are going to be achieved across the region, not just within the major urban area, certainly in the short-term.

  Q518  Mr Betts: What happens if there is a conflict? You would have a particular problem wearing two hats in a conflict.

  Mr Frater: Indeed.

  Q519  Mr Betts: How would a conflict be resolved? If the Assembly organisation has a view on life and the Regional Assembly does not share the same view, you have got a problem, have you not?

  Mr Frater: We would have if we allowed that situation to develop, but I do not believe we will. Firstly, the Regional Assembly chair sits on the shadow board for the city-region. Given the nature of the RSS, which is not going to fundamentally change—it will change in detail but not in principle—which already declares that the majority of growth should be within the major urban areas, there is not going to be a fundamental conflict there.

  Dr Murphy: Can I add a point to that which Michael was making about the executive board that will be running the city-region. It will have the eight leaders on it in terms of its governance structure but there will also be the chair of the Development Agency, the chair of the regional Learning and Skills Council, the chair of the West Midlands Regional Assembly, as Michael has said, and also a business representative. Some of the issues that you are raising there we hope would be dealt with by the executive board before they ever became an issue in terms of conflict. Currently there is a review of our Regional Economic Strategy which is driven by the Development Agency and we are working very closely with them to ensure that our City Region Development Plan and the new RES complement each other and, indeed, within the Regional Economic Strategy the city-region working is seen as a delivery mechanism for some of the key aspirations that will be within that wider West Midlands Regional Economic Strategy from the Development Agency.

  Mr Frater: We have developed the programmes for the Regional Economic Strategy review and the Regional Spatial Strategy review so that they run in parallel to the same timescales so we can have read across between the two.


 
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