Select Committee on Communities and Local Government Committee Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-53)

RT HON HAZEL BLEARS MP

10 JULY 2007

  Q40  Anne Main: On the regions, you have just mentioned a few very positive attributes where you could see a minister championing a positive event. How about a negative event in as much as if the region and people within the region are unhappy about some of the things the Government wishes the region to deliver via regional governance, would the Minister for the Regions be an advocate for the unhappiness as much as for the positives?

  Hazel Blears: If you are going to have governance which actually has the broad support of the country then it is important that government hears the bad as well as the good. Not just hears it but also, where it can, responds to it and tries to meet the concerns that people have got. I think one of the reasons for people's disaffection sometimes from the political process is that they think that somehow politics is conducted in this place completely distant from their concerns and the realities of their day-to-day lives, and therefore the more you can do to have people on the ground—whether it is local councillors, whether it is Members of Parliament in their constituencies, whether it is these new regional MPs or whether it is ministers—actually listening and feeding things through to government the better.

  Q41  Anne Main: Can I give you a "for instance"? If a region is unhappy say for example with the housing allocation that we were talking about previously where a target has been set by the Government and it does not wish to sign off its regional plan because it is unhappy that it will not get the infrastructure, would that minister be an advocate for the region or would he be an advocate for the Government within the region in trying to get the Government's wish through? Where would the priorities lie?

  Hazel Blears: Clearly, as Mr Olner said, these are very new appointments and I think it would be important to work through the kind of contribution that the regional ministers can make. I certainly do not see them as agents of central government being sent out in order to impose central government policy on the regions. That is not my idea of a modern democratic constitution. Equally, I think that they will have a responsibility to perhaps discuss, explain, broker, negotiate. The way in which democracy works is when people come together. They do not necessarily get 100 per cent of what they wanted but what they do want a sense of is that people are engaged and prepared to listen and sometimes prepared to change what they do as a result of the representations that are made. I think this level of contribution can actually help in that progress.

  Q42  Chair: Will they be advocating on behalf of the regional MPs or the regional assembly or some other regional body?

  Hazel Blears: I think that is part of the discussion that needs to be had. They have been in place I think for probably a week to ten days and those are important issues that do need to be explored, both with the regional ministers and indeed the departments as a whole.

  Chair: Can we move on to the issues about communities and back to you, Anne.

  Q43  Anne Main: You have made various observations about communities describing them as the equivalent of "motherhood and apple pie", and saying there is a vague sense of people being nice to each other and not a governing narrative. Would you like to give us a firmer vision of what you think a community is and what your sustainable governing narrative is for these communities?

  Hazel Blears: I think communities come in all shapes, sizes, backgrounds: a complete diversity, and also I do not think communities are simply geographic. There was a leader in the Guardian last week that said that because I was born in Salford, raised in Salford, educated in Salford and lived in Salford then inevitably that I would look at communities through a very narrow prism of geographic place rather than in other perhaps more modern ways.

  Q44  Anne Main: What are they apart from being anything and everything, which you have just said?

  Hazel Blears: What I wanted to say was that I do have a strong sense of place and geography in terms of communities. I do think it is important where people live—who are their neighbours, who are the people in close proximity to them—but I of course recognise that there are also different communities of interest, different communities now who are linked in ways that are not simply about where they live but perhaps about where they work, what their interests are, and that the implications of technology and the way in which people communicate in different ways these days has had a huge impact on determining what a community is. My Department has to be able to respond to that myriad of different shapes and sizes of communities. What I think it is about is where people have their day-to-day experiences has a real impact on what they are able to achieve for themselves and their families. If you live in a community that is not safe, for example, where you do not feel comfortable going out in the evening if you are an older person or a young family, then you are not going to be able to take advantage of the many, many things that are on offer in order to improve your education, to improve your economic prospects, and therefore for me what communities are about are not just simply an end in themselves but making places that are strong, that have a good environment, as you have pointed out, where housing is affordable and of a decent standard, all of these are platforms for people to succeed in and for me I want to build the kind of communities where every single person has the chance to get on in their life and do well.

  Q45  Anne Main: So that does sound like motherhood and apple pie. Perhaps you would like to talk us through the community kitty. How would it work?

  Hazel Blears: I do not accept that it is motherhood and apple pie to want to create the kind of place where people want to live and work and bring up their families. I think it is ambitious, I think it is probably bordering on idealistic—and I do not mind being idealistic—at the same time I am pretty realistic as well about what can be achieved. In terms of the community kitty this has a more jargon kind of name which is "participatory budgeting", and basically what this is is an attempt to bring people together in a local area or from a community interest and for them to have a role in determining what would be the priorities for their area or how that money should be spent. It has taken place in about a dozen areas so far and what has been interesting is that when you moderate the debate properly you set out the range of options that people have got, you facilitate debate, you do not simply have a tick box vote, then you actually get a pretty considered view from people about what the priorities are. They understand that there is not a bottomless pit, they understand they have to have trade-offs, and they understand they have to make some tough decisions. Going through that process has resulted in people making better decisions, obtaining better value for money and signing up to the results that have come through, and when it has been properly facilitated by local government, not bypassing local government, then in fact those local authorities have felt strengthened as well. I will just give you one example, I think it was in Bradford where they had a group of young people come together to decide what some money should be spent on. People were worried that these young people would decide to spend it all on skateboard parks and Internet cafés and on all the things that were important to them, and in fact what they did after a discussion was decide to vote for quite a bit of the money to go to services for older people, so again there was a community cohesion benefit in terms of inter-generational work coming out of that process. I think it is a genuine concern and one that I am alive to. I do not want the usual people who have the loudest voices to have the most say. But again I do not accept that it is not possible to reach people who do not normally have a say. What you will find is that if you ask people to come and have a discussion about what is happening in the local park, you will probably get far more of them to come than if you say, "Would you like to have a general discussion about local government?" and therefore making it real to people. I think that is how you reach the people who would not normally take part in this kind of deliberative activity.

  Q46  Chair: Can we just explore that example you raised. Was it in Bradford?

  Hazel Blears: I think it was in Bradford.

  Q47  Chair: What exactly were the young people being asked to do? Were they being asked to look at a slab of the local authority's money and being asked how they wanted it allocated or were they being asked about spending it specifically on young people?

  Hazel Blears: I am not sure of the detail to that extent but my understanding is that it is different in different areas. For example in Sunderland I think they were looking at their New Deal for Communities budget, so that was a large amount of money and then they were having a community discussion about how that should be spent. In other areas it is a smaller pot and some of it might have been specifically for youth, some of it might have been more general for the community as a whole. I do not at the moment have the detail on that discussion. It was just interesting I was told by my officials that what came out of their initial discussion was that they also wanted to see things that would help the older people in the community, and for me that was very heartening that you did not have a group of people who focused solely on their own needs, and I think that indicates that you do not always get the loudest voices making the decisions.

  Q48  David Wright: I will ask you the same question I asked you under another heading. How do you get the worst-performing authorities then to do this kind of thing because unless you have some kind of organised approach or some kind of national commitment you will get very good local authorities doing this, you will get some pioneers in this area, but you will also get slow starters and you will get people who do not start at all. How are you going to get people to start?

  Hazel Blears: There are two ways I want to think about that in this agenda really. The first one is working very much with local government themselves through the LGA, making sure that where there are these good things going on that the LGA works to try and spread that good practice. We have got some mechanisms now that we used not to have through the peer improvement process, that again is relatively new but very welcome in local government, and then there were some of the harder performance management framework routes that we might look at in the longer term. We have now got local area agreements which have covered virtually every area in the country and I want to look very closely at those local area agreements to see whether or not we can factor in some of the community involvement issues. I think at the moment many of them are a conduit for national priorities being delivered at a local level and I want to see if we can make those local area agreements more about what the local area wants to achieve as well, which will mean central government maybe taking a different attitude, and so I think there are some leaders in the system through that LAA process and we will be able to get a broader spread of this kind of activity going on. However, I think you have got to do it in two ways. You cannot simply say it is top-down, you are all going to do this whether you like it or not, because then what you get is people going through the motions of doing it and on this agenda if you want it to work people have to see the benefits of it happening and they have to be quite committed themselves because some of it is quite difficult managing those relationships, so you have got to do a bit of both.

  Q49  Mr Betts: I think it would be a good way of encouraging more widespread understanding of examples of good practice in this regard, which I think is something we can perhaps encourage. Can I pursue two areas on devolution. It is relatively easy for the Secretary of State to give commitments on devolution. We have had the issue recently on waste which this Committee is about to report on where the Government position was basically that it is up to local authorities how they decide to collect their waste within a general legal framework, but there are other areas which are a bit outside your remit where local authorities may still have a role, and I just wonder how far you are prepared to weigh in and challenge other government departments on behalf of local authorities? The first area I want to explore is the issue of health where we have a Health Service which is still pretty centralised. If the Government wants to push responsibilities down to a lower level of the Health Service we still then have got the problem of accountability. How do you see local authorities playing a greater role in that issue of accountability and what happens in the Health Service at local level?

  Hazel Blears: I think this is a big issue for the whole Government, that if we are really serious about moving from a top-down target culture from the centre into more local accountability, then we are seeing a big shift from a vertical relationship with all of our delivery partners into more of a horizontal accountability and this is big government business I think. Obviously in CLG's field we are moving from 1,000 indicators to 200 indicators and 35 targets. What is the nature of those targets, how do we free up local space and all of that is a dialogue that is going on, but if this is going to be a general shift across government not just in local government but in health and in policing—and I think in policing they are moving from a huge number of targets into probably just 14, so again as you push down you have got to have more accountability at local level because this is public money that is being spent and therefore there ought to be that. It is not really about me challenging other government departments. I would prefer to put it as how do we all work together as the departments that actually make a difference to people's lives out there, because health, policing and local government are the key components of that, and how do we work on better integration of the accountability mechanisms. When I was the Police Minister I did quite a bit of work around how did we get a relationship between local government and the BCU—Basic Command Units—the superintendent level of policing. We had the crime and disorder reduction partnerships. We then brought in safer neighbourhood teams, which had to report back to local people to set some of the local priorities, and there were some models around whether or not we might have a bigger input from local authority into some of that territory. The same is true with the Health Service. Increasingly relationships are closer. They are starting to pool budgets. You have got section 31 partnership arrangements between health and local government now and I think the ground is fertile, shall we say, for exploring this at this moment in time. I think there is a great opportunity, so it is not a matter of me going to other government departments and challenging them to let go. What we have got to create across government is a sense that this is the direction we want to move and to explore some models for greater accountability and integration at local level.

  Q50  Mr Betts: You may feel there is some point you might want to challenge on this, even if you cannot quite say that this morning, and that is the issue of public transport at local level. It is one of the issues that frustrates councillors and it frustrates MPs in terms of the services we simply cannot deliver to people outside London. Bus services are an awful lot worse than they were 30 years ago (because of deregulation some of us would argue) but we have a new Transport Bill now with powers for the bringing in of quality contracts, different sorts of powers that can be exercised at a local level. At the same time the Government is talking about devolution to local councils and giving more responsibilities and powers to them. We have a Transport Bill which effectively says it is all right, the passenger transport authorities can begin the process of moving towards quality contracts, but having decided they want to move down that route a traffic commissioner can come in and completely countermand their initiative. That is not really a very good example, is it, in a new draft Bill of the Government's commitment to devolution and support for local authorities?

  Hazel Blears: I am loath to comment on the detail of a draft Bill which is the responsibility of one of my colleagues.

  Q51  Mr Betts: Exactly. I was asking you to challenge it.

  Hazel Blears: I appreciate the point that is being made. Just from my own personal experience in Greater Manchester, we have had huge problems with our bus services, with gridlock in central Manchester because everybody wants to do the profitable routes and nobody wants to do the other routes, so I entirely understand and appreciate how salient this is with the public and getting bus services in the right place at the right time is key. Again, it comes back to what kind of community we want to build because transport is a key component of that. I have no doubt that I will be in discussions with my colleague in terms of getting that balance right. I suppose again it is fair to say that we all want to move towards devolution but there will be some tensions in how far we can do that and at the same time maintain economic competitiveness, maintain the infrastructure of the region; and we are going to have a sub-national review fairly soon so a stronger voice for local authorities but at the same time ensuring that we can deliver on the things that are necessary. That is always going to be the subject of negotiation and debate. It is not all one or all the other. Sometimes people will feel that the balance perhaps is in the wrong place and that is why we have to have that kind of challenge around that.

  Q52  Mr Betts: I am just looking for some sort of reassurance that you recognise that there is a general Government commitment to devolution and that may sometimes go beyond the boundaries of your Department and you have a general responsibility to try and ensure that the Government as a whole is keeping to that agenda.

  Hazel Blears: There are two areas. Obviously the Prime Minister's statement on the constitution last week gave us a very strong steer that what we want to see, he called for a "reinvention" of politics in terms of the settlement, and I think there is a very strong steer in terms of devolution in that statement. And the second area on which I do think I have got a wider responsibility than just our departmental business is the engagement agenda, about how we make these words actually be real on the ground for people so they do feel that they are able to have an input and challenge into the whole range of things that the Government is doing, and this whole business about people being disaffected from the process I do see as a personal responsibility to try and ensure that we take steps—and across government as well.

  Q53  Chair: Thank you very much indeed, Minister. That is a promising start to what we hope will be a constructive dialogue between us. Thank you.

  Hazel Blears: I am very grateful, thank you very much.





 
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