Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620-639)
RT HON
HAZEL BLEARS
MP
12 JANUARY 2009
Q620 Anne Main: I think if you read
our report on that, Minister, with all respect, it was the pace
of change, it was the fact that local areas felt imposed upon
in terms of how much was expected to happen and without any real
consultation with how they could deliver it locally and it was
that tension which was reflected in the range of councillors that
were suddenly elected, for example, in Barking and Dagenham who
were supported by BNP (British National Party). That came through
really, really strongly from various ethnic groups that were there.
It was the fact that the community felt imposed upon and were
not consulted with. That is why I am saying other departments
can wreck your consultation or wreck your desire to have local
democracy working at a local level if people feel imposed upon
by other departments who say, "We're actually going to deliver
this agenda".
Hazel Blears: That is why it is
important that we have a system, as I was explaining, so you do
not just get one-off decisions that can cause huge difficulties
locally, and that is why I think we have more work to do with
other government departments to try and make sure that the conversation
that happens through the local area agreements, the relationships
that are built up with local partners, are robust, strong and
sustainable. That way I think you minimise the prospect of people
being faced with surprises from out of the blue which are difficult
for people to cope with, and I acknowledge that. I think we have
more work to do on getting those relationships right, but this
is the first time we have had a system that enables that to happen.
Q621 Mr Hands: Can I just come in
on that, Secretary of State? How much work have you done with,
say, the Home Office representing local authorities? It is not
just about other departments delivering to local authorities;
it is also representing the views of local government to other
government departments. How much effort have you put in in recent
months to represent the views of local authorities to the Home
Office in regard to immigration?
Hazel Blears: I think it is fair
to say that my relationships with the Home Office are second to
none. A huge amount of the work that the Home Office has responsibility
for impacts on local communities, whether it is immigration, whether
it is guns, gangs, knife crime, young people or antisocial behaviour.
All of these are absolutely top priorities for local communities.
That is why many of the indicators are in the top 35 priorities
that are chosen. My relationships with the Home Office are extremely
good. I personally, as does the Home Secretary, put in a huge
amount of effort to making sure that we are informing people about
the views. In fact, the Home Secretary has attended, together
with myself, various joint meetings of local government and policing.
We work very closely on the Preventing Violent Extremism agenda.
There is no question about that.
Q622 Mr Hands: Okay, but the question
was how much have you represented the views of local authorities,
both collectively and individually, to the Home Office on the
subject of immigration. Your comments were about the immigration
free-for-all, for example. Is that something that you have said
to the Home Office you believe is what local authorities are feeling?
Hazel Blears: I have communicated
the views of local authorities after holding round tables, so
they are not my own views but the views of local authority leaders,
both to the Home Office but also more widely across Government.
If, Mr Hands, you had seen the Migration Impacts Plan that we
published about six months ago you would have seen that that was
a document based on a cross-government approach, not just Home
Office, not just CLG, but looking, for example, at Children, Schools
and Families, at the impact in education, the need to get extra
teachers in, the impact on the Health Service. It drew together
the responses and the practical things that we could do to ensure
that the impact of immigration on some of those communities that
have not experienced it before was mitigated as far as it possibly
could be.
Q623 Mr Hands: So can I ask you if
it is your view that local authorities do think there is an immigration
free-for-all in this country, or is that just your own view?
Hazel Blears: No, and that is
not what I said. The situation is that we did have a massive spike
in asylum applications some years ago. That has now reduced dramatically
in this country, and I think the introduction of the points system,
the much firmer immigration system that we have, the border controls,
which are now much more rigorous than they were previously have
helped achieve that. If you talk to people in local government
they will acknowledge that some years ago there was a big increase.
I think it is a different situation now. It is still there, particularly
from eastern Europe, but I think most local authorities will acknowledge
that steps have been taken to try and ensure that the impact of
those changes to communities has been mitigated as far as it can
be.
Chair: Just before moving on to Dr Pugh,
can I make the point that it was the lack of local tax autonomy
and the lack of flexibility on the part of councils to raise additional
finance which exacerbated the inability of the councils to respond
to rapid change? That is a very strong argument as to why greater
flexibility on the part of local councils on the financial front
would enable them to respond to rapid changes in a local sense,
whether it is migration or anything else.
Q624 Dr Pugh: Can I ask you about
Whitehall culture? Do you think within the corridors of Whitehall
there is a good understanding of local government or in fact much
respect for local government? My suspicion is that there is a
slightly dismissive attitude towards local government.
Hazel Blears: Because I am an
optimist I think it is improving. I think probably in the past
there was not a great deal of experience of local government finding
its way into Whitehall. I think many of us have now tried to get
secondments, exchanges, have tried to get some of our civil servants
working in local government and in local delivery organisations,
and I think there is a much better understanding of what local
government can do. If there was not I do not think you would have
seen the sign-up to local area agreements in the way that we have
seen happen in the last 12 months; I genuinely do not think you
would. If there was not respect for the fact that local government
has improved its performance dramatically in the last ten years
to the point where four out of five are good or excellent, again,
you would not have the trust of the centre to be prepared to depend
on local partners to deliver the PSAs. We have many more central
techniques for trying to get round that system, so I think it
is getting better.
Q625 Dr Pugh: I am moving onto local
area agreements, but can you give us any kind of figures or data
that indicate the number of top civil servants in your own Department
that will have local authority experience? Have you any idea what
percentage of them would have either worked for a local authority
or been on a local authority?
Hazel Blears: I do not have the
figures. I think it is an excellent question and I will find out
because I would love to know.
Q626 Dr Pugh: Could you couple that
with a note on the number of heads of government offices in the
various regions that have had direct experience of local government?
Turning to local area agreements, they sound a jolly good thing,
but if, say, by happy mischance they should all be lost one day--and
they do contain a lot of things local authorities would do anyway
along with a couple of things they say they are going to do because
the Government wants them to do them—but if Local Area Agreements
disappeared how would things be different on a day-to-day, practical
basis?
Hazel Blears: First of all I think
you would lose your focus on the things that really matter. When
we had 1,200 priorities it was very difficult to say that anything
was a real priority. When you have 35 it is more realistic to
be able to say that we are going to focus all our efforts on these
particular things that local people have told us are important
to them, so I think you would have less focus. I think you would
have much less systems change to draw in the other delivery partners,
whether it is Jobcentre Plus, whether it is the Health Service
or the police, or, indeed, the private sector and the third sector
which are essential partners of the local area agreement. I think
you would probably also see much wider variation in performance
because it would be very difficult to see who was really good
at doing whichever bits of business there are.
Q627 Dr Pugh: So your honest belief
is that there would be less partnership working around and less
focus? Local authority activity would be more diffuse?
Hazel Blears: I do not think it
is the agreement per se, the words on paper, that give
you that but the framework that says to local partners, "The
idea is that you all sit round"—in a meeting like this—"and
say, `What are our top problems here that could be different from
another place and how are we going to bring our energies, our
money and our skills and expertise on those things that really
matter to local people?'".
Q628 Dr Pugh: And if a formal agreement
was not there that would happen rather less?
Hazel Blears: I think so.
Q629 Dr Pugh: We mentioned briefly
before multi area agreements and how they fit into the local agenda.
I think you said that the more of these there were the more local
authority would be dispersed from the centre. There is a trade-off
here though, is there not, because if, just for the sake of argument,
Salford agrees to a multi area agreement in the Manchester area,
the priorities are not necessarily the top priorities of Salford;
in every respect they will be the top priorities that are shared
right across the piece. If you are an ordinary citizen of Salford
though and you are looking at it and you are told that as a result
of this agreement with the other authorities there is more freedom
around, how would that register? Might you not think you have
actually lost just a little bit of control over what is happening
around you?
Hazel Blears: If the alternative
is that those decisions are made in Whitehall then if those decisions
are going to be made in greater Manchester you might feel that
you have got a little bit more influence, a bit more power, because
you elect the people who do it.
Q630 Dr Pugh: But you might think
that some of your metropolitan district powers have been sucked
upwards and there has been a loss there as well as a gain from
Whitehall.
Hazel Blears: I see the point
that you are making. That is absolutely the reverse of what we
want to see happen through the multi area agreements.
Q631 Dr Pugh: Is it? That is very
interesting.
Hazel Blears: This is genuinely
about, on strategic issues like transport and skills which cross
local authority boundaries, inevitably, and drive the economy,
drawing powers down from Whitehall and certainly not up from the
local level. That is absolutely fundamental to the MAA as a concept.
It is about saying that where you are up for this, where you are
ambitious and you think you can deliver, then the challenge is
to the centre here and to myself and colleagues to say that we
are prepared to let go. In fact, the best way to deliver on benefits
and skills in some of these areas is at the sub-regional level,
not at the national level.
Q632 Dr Pugh: Thanks; that is helpful.
You did say earlier on that the basic policy of the Government
was that if people were doing well they would be given more freedom,
and "doing well" was your expression. When you talk
of Haringey social services and so on you can clearly identify
what doing badly is all about, but would you not acknowledge that
at times "doing well" can be a matter of political contention
and debate? If I can give a historical example, Derek Hatton thought
he was "doing well" when he was building lots of council
houses in Liverpool but central government did not. Can you not
see that it is not as straightforward a principle as you might
think?
Hazel Blears: Yes, I can see that.
What I would say is that if you have a system and I am sorry to
say this "S". word so often because I am not a technocratic
junkie, but I am quite excited by the LAAs, the MAAs and the new
comprehensive area assessments. I never thought I would be excited
by alphabet soup in this way, but if you have a system for saying
locally what really matters to you, when you have a system that
says in your sub-region how you are going to drive the economy
and how you can get more freedom to do that, and then if you have
an inspection regime that instead of, as the CPA (Comprehensive
Performance Assessment) did, measuring an individual's performance,
but actually measures whether you are making a difference in your
whole community and that the measures in that CAA are much more
about citizen perception—what do people think, whether the
outcome is right, are you doing a good job, are you doing a better
job than you used to do, you have got bottom-up pressure then
in a system which genuinely means that the centre can step back
because you will have got more of this grit in the system.
Q633 Dr Pugh: So a local authority
that satisfied its citizens, even if it did not do exactly what
the Government wanted it to do in terms of priorities, would still
be considered by the Government as "doing well" in some
sense?
Hazel Blears: I think so, and
again one of the reasons that the CAA is quite a big shift into
citizen perception and outcomes which will be measured under the
place survey and some of the citizenship survey is to say, "What
do your people think of you?". The police have just changed
their performance framework so that they only have one target
now and that target is about local people's confidence in whether
or not the police are doing a good job locally. That is a massive
change in a performance framework to citizen perception and I
think that is really quite a dramatic change.
Q634 Chair: Can I just ask about
the money in relation to local area agreements? Where money is
being pooled does your Department have information on how much
of that money is coming from local government and how much from
the other partners? If you do not have it now can we have it later?
Hazel Blears: Certainly. I do
not have that information with me but I will certainly ensure
that the Committee gets it.
Q635 Chair: The perception is that
it is largely local government money that is put in and not much
else.
Hazel Blears: And not other people's;
right.
Q636 Andrew George: On multi area
agreements can I just be clear how "multi" multi area
agreements have to be? In other words, could it simply be a partnership
of two authorities, just so that I understand the basis for what
you are thinking in your Department, the size, either in population
terms or numbers of authorities?
Hazel Blears: We have not got
a strict limit. This has been again a very bottom-up exercise
in that people have had to volunteer. They have had to come forward
and say what their plans are. I have been quite heartened by the
fact that it has not all been about urban cities. We have got
Bournemouth, Poole and Dorset working very well. We have got PUSH
(Partnership of Urban South Hampshire), which is South Hampshire,
and I think north Kent at the moment are in dialogue about these
issues. There was a sense when we first started on this agenda
that it would just be the Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Nottingham
places, but actually groups of local authorities are now seeing
that they have things in common around their local economy so
that by coming together and pooling their abilities and their
competencies they can make quite a big difference.
Q637 Andrew George: Just extending
that to the concept of city regions, you said, I think in November,
that the Government wants to place those on more statutory footing.
I just wondered how you see the roadmap to delivering city regions
generally.
Hazel Blears: It started as very
much a voluntary process, "If you want to do this and you
want to get these powers, band together, come forward with an
application. We will see if it does deliver and then we will sign
your agreement". In the Bill now we have the possibility
of having a statutory basis, so you can become an economic prosperity
board—not another level of government, not a bureaucracy
but simply a more effective unit of organisation. If you have
a statutory basis then you are a legal personality, so clearly
the prospects of more devolution are more secure because if you
do not have a legal basis then the governance agreement that you
have reached could be quite fragile. One partner could walk away
and if that happened you would not any longer have the system
to deliver it. That is the next stage, if you want to be an economic
prosperity board, and again it is voluntary, if that is what you
want to do, and then the announcement at the PBR that we would
be looking for at least two areas which want to go even further
on this agenda.
Q638 Andrew George: Just to finish
off this point, on the issue of the city regions in the Local
Government White Paper about three years ago there was a recognition
that there would be a rural equivalent to city regions where it
did not fall within the hinterland of the city region. Is that
something within the Government's thinking at the moment, that
a rural equivalent to city regions might be brought forward?
Hazel Blears: I am just thinking
about Cornwall at the moment. It is going to be a big unitary
authority.
Q639 Andrew George: What a very good
thought.
Hazel Blears: I do not know why
I think about Cornwall when I see you. Obviously, that is a unitary
and a very big unitary, and therefore will have a lot of clout
and ability to make a difference. If I think about one of the
agreements I have just signed this afternoon, that is Pennine
Lancashire, not something people would normally associate with
a city environment, but they have got a lot of relatively small
towns which could be quite isolated up in Pendle and Accrington,
and what they have decided is that transport is their big issue:
how do they get better transport links so that they can access
more economic drivers? They want to come together on that. We
are not hidebound in one model. It is really, as I started with
in this evidence, what makes a difference for the people out there
in terms of their economy.
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