The Balance of Power: Central and Local Government - Communities and Local Government Committee Contents


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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