Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
20-39)
MR PETER
HOUSDEN, SIR
BOB KERSLAKE,
MR RICHARD
MCCARTHY
AND PROFESSOR
STEVE FOTHERGILL
11 JANUARY 2010
Q20 Mr Mitchell: That needed to be
done, did it?
Mr Housden: There was a legal
requirement to do it, but actually, the communities themselves
were not wanting to have unsightly, dangerous, unusable land,
in huge areas. I mean, the acreage of pit sites typically—
Q21 Mr Mitchell: I can understand
that, it is an eyesore, but on the other hand, there is a kind
of romantic attachment to it, and it is more important to get
viable vibrant companies there than to have beautiful landscaping.
Mr Housden: Bob Kerslake might
want to talk about this, but one of the things that English Partnerships
and the Homes and Communities Agency have done through the life
of the programme is to look at the totality of that land and say
where and what types of land could most readily be converted for
industrial use, and bring jobs into the coalfield.
Sir Bob Kerslake: Yes, just to
add a few points on that, firstly, it is right to say there were
legal requirements on the UK Government for remediation. Secondly,
you cannot create the platform for employment or housing unless
you have remediated the land, and something like 1 million square
metres of employment space has been established by the programme
to date, something like 2,600 houses are complete. You could not
have achieved that unless you have done the remediation, the two
things have to sit hand in hand.
Q22 Mr Mitchell: How much of it has
been taken up in fact by employment?
Sir Bob Kerslake: Substantial
amounts of it have been taken up, as the NAO Report says, but
not all of it yet. It is always the case that the take-up—full
outputs will take longer than the timescale for the physical remediation.
Q23 Mr Mitchell: Having done it up,
you will then sell it on.
Sir Bob Kerslake: Absolutely,
if you look at the case of Glasshoughton, in fact, as one of the
positive examples of a site that is both completed, generated
employment activity, and in fact a net receipt has come back as
a result of the selling on of land.
Q24 Mr Mitchell: The number of jobs
created, and the claim in paragraph 4.6 that 75% of them "would
not have happened without the initiatives", I mean, that
looks very tentative. The estimate is based, it says, on benchmarks,
and does not draw on a representative survey of businesses and
households to identify whether jobs are taken by people outside
the target areas, and it emerges further on that 43% of the jobs
created are taken by people from outside. These are very back
of the envelope calculations, are they not?
Mr Housden: The figure we recognise,
I think, is 38%. I think one of the things that is important to
recognise here, and the Report pays testament to this, is the
depths and the longevity of the deprivation in many of these areas
is such that you have a shortage of skills particularly, a lot
of people with poor health, so the available pool of labour at
the time when these programmes were running at their strongest
will have been smaller than it should have been. If you are looking
particularly for additional skills, those may well come from people
outside the area. So personally, I was not surprised by that balance,
and 62% within the coalfield area seems to me to be a credible
number. It is not an exact science, doing all of this, but we
have had a range of evaluations in addition to the current NAO
one: an organisation called SQW did an independent evaluation
for us, the Audit Commission did one in 2008. So we feel we have
a reasonable factual basis, Mr Mitchell, for those estimates.
Q25 Mr Mitchell: I accept what you
are telling me about the deprivation, broken down people, in a
sense, broken by mining, but on the other hand, it was also an
industry which had skills, and a lot of very tough and adaptable
workers, and a lot of those would have gone, if they had any sense,
and got jobs outside, in Sheffield or Rotherham or wherever. Do
you have any calculations about that?
Mr Fothergill: I think it is important
to put these coalfield initiatives into context. They are only
part of the overall jigsaw of what has been going on. There has
been a lot of other regeneration activity, led by other parts
of central government—
Q26 Mr Mitchell: But not co-ordinated.
Mr Fothergill: —or European
funding or local authorities. We do have a handle on overall what
is happening, and I think it squares the circle and fits in with
the 150,000 figure that was mentioned by the Minister, because
actually if you look at the growth overall of jobs held by men
in the coalfields, the numbers are towards the 150,000 mark higher
now than—well, those are the extra jobs that have been created
in the coalfields, compensating for the loss of around about 200,000
jobs in the coal industry. Some of that has been to do with the
general growth in the national economy, but some of it is undoubtedly
the result of the very specific initiatives which have gone ahead
in the former mining areas.
Q27 Mr Mitchell: When you say created
in the coalfields, you do not know how many have actually gone
to work outside the coalfield.
Mr Fothergill: There has been
a flow in both directions. Rather like Peter Housden, I think
the 62% of jobs going to residents within the coalfields seems
a very reasonable figure, because there are two-way commuting
flows. The days have gone when the labour market operated on a
highly localised basis, when there was a place of work and everybody
who worked there lived a couple of hundred yards down the road,
and walked to work. These days, labour markets operate over wide
geographical scales, so if you are creating jobs in the coalfields,
you would expect some of those jobs to go to non-coalfield residents;
but equally, if you were creating jobs in adjacent areas to the
coalfields, in the likes of Sheffield and Leeds, for example,
you would expect some of those new jobs in the cities to be filled
by commuters from the coalfields, and that is exactly what has
been happening.
Q28 Mr Mitchell: But we do not know
numerically which pays, the regeneration of Sheffield, which was
going on apace, or the regeneration of the coalfields. Which gives
a better return?
Mr Fothergill: We do know the
balance of the overall numbers, we do know that numerically, there
has only been a really quite modest net increase in out-commuting
from the coalfields, so mostly, the balance in the labour market
has not actually been restored by, on balance, more people having
to travel to work elsewhere. A great deal of the balance has been
restored by new job creation within the coalfields themselves.
Q29 Mr Mitchell: Well, the point
about the Report is that these initiatives were badly co-ordinated.
A suggestion which came from the Select Committee I think two
years ago, that some of the initiatives should be better co-ordinated,
led to a co-ordination committee which has not done very much;
is that correct?
Sir Bob Kerslake: I think there
are two points I would make about that. One is to say to make
an impact in terms of co-ordination, it is not just about the
coalfields funds. Steve has said actually, when you go to a place
like Sheffield, South Yorkshire, there is a whole range of funds
going on, European, other government funds, and the key challenge—
Q30 Mr Mitchell: You are very lucky
compared to Humberside.
Sir Bob Kerslake: We did reasonably
well, let us put it that way, but I think the key point I would
make is that it is the local co-ordination that tells you whether
you have got the impact right, and there is plenty of evidence,
I think, in South Yorkshire, for example, of all the different
funding schemes being co-ordinated, both within the coalfield
areas and indeed beyond. So actually I think there is an issue
about national co-ordination, but I think at local level there
is a very strong story to tell.
Q31 Mr Mitchell: From the map at
figure 2 on page 12, why do some coalfields benefit from one initiative,
some from another, and not many from all of them? How is that
decided? What does that mean?
Mr Fothergill: Can I take that
one, because I think in many respects, I have probably been responsible
for drawing the original coalfield map that everybody uses. Firstly,
you have to remember here that not all of the former pit sites
went into what is now the Homes and Communities Agency sites programme,
so there were obviously going to be some mining communities that
were not covered by action by HCA or EP previously. Also, there
were a small number of sites brought into the programme that had
been lying derelict for so long, and I am talking here—
Q32 Mr Mitchell: In other words,
before the closures of—
Mr Fothergill: —right back
to the 1960s, that I think it was argued for example by the Coalfields
Regeneration Trust that the communities that were around those
sites were no longer coalfield communities, so there was in some
instances going to be a disjuncture between on the one hand a
sites programme, which was dealing with the physical dereliction,
and community programmes, which perhaps were more attuned to where
mining communities were still very much alive and kicking.
Q33 Mr Mitchell: Does it not create
a patchwork quilt? Why not put them all in one lump, with one
regeneration sum programme?
Mr Fothergill: It is very attractive,
but on the ground, I think it would be a great injustice to some
of the former mining communities to exclude them from some parts
of the initiative, because they did not have a site that was included
in the English Partnerships/HCA programme. There is obviously
in some instances going to be disjuncture. Ashington is a good
example; in the former pit sites in Ashington in Northumberland,
the dereliction was addressed early by the County Council in particular.
As a consequence, Ashington, which claims to be the biggest pit
village in the world, does not have a site within the HCA/EP programme.
You would not wish to exclude Ashington from the activities of
the Regeneration Trust, just because of that historical process,
and just because they were so keen to tackle their problems before
central government.
Mr Mitchell: I would just rather more
was done for South Yorkshire but Northumberland, but never mind,
that is a partisan point.
Q34 Mr Bacon: Mr Housden, you said,
in talking about why there was not as much co-ordination as there
should have been, that there was not a reliable means to bring
the different departments to the table. Why not?
Mr Housden: Well, it is a good
question. I think the circumstances before 2008 were really when
Communities and Local Government wanted to draw the attention
of other departments to the needs of particular communities, it
was an uphill struggle. I do not think there was a culture that
was interested in bending national programmes to particular circumstances,
so it was all ad hoc, let us have a meeting to do this, or the
other. Our own Select Committee, for example, talked to us with
justification about coastal communities in the past. What happened
in the 2006 White Paper, and live from 2008, was there was a common
cross-government mechanism endorsed by the Treasury to create
in each of 150 principal local authorities, sorry about the jargon,
a local area agreement, where national and local priorities were
brought together. This enabled those authorities serving coalfield
communities to really prioritise those with government. Then underneath
that, as Bob and Steve have said, the real meat of the co-ordination
is at local level, where you get the agencies pooling their programmes.
I am not trying to wriggle out of the point here, I think we should
have done better in terms of—
Q35 Mr Bacon: Being a central department,
why did not the Cabinet Office process, through a Cabinet committee,
identify earlier that there were a lot of different departments
here who were interested, or who ought to be interested, and drive
co-ordination?
Mr Housden: Well, again, I think
that is a good question. What you did have at the beginning of
this, you will recall, was a very strong political impetus, the
original report was signed by four Secretaries of State, but to
my knowledge, there was not a Cabinet Committee established to
drive progress, perhaps that would have been a good thing—
Q36 Mr Bacon: You think that should
have happened?
Mr Housden: I think that would
have been a good thing.
Q37 Mr Bacon: Did anyone suggest
it? If you have four Secretaries of State signing off on something,
presumably they all have their own civil servants, who have all
advised them, "Minister, sign here". Does no one in
the civil service say, "Hello, would it not be a good idea
to have a Cabinet Committee on this?"
Mr Housden: John Prescott is sort
of a one-man Cabinet Committee, I am sure he led this with huge
drive and e«lan. I do not know the answer to your question,
whether that was suggested or not, I think it would have been
a good thing, but I am not trying to wriggle out of saying that
notwithstanding what ministers might have done, I think my department
could have been more skilful and more persistent in bringing departments
to the table on this thing. I think where we have got to now though,
Mr Bacon, is a better place, because we are not about a series
of ad hoc requests, would it not be a good thing to think about
X or Y—
Q38 Mr Bacon: Can you just remind
us of the departments: Children, Schools and Families, DTI or
BIS; who else apart from you?
Mr Housden: The Department for
Transport have made important contributions, and the Department
for Work and Pensions similarly, who do employment and benefits
and so forth.
Q39 Mr Bacon: There has been some
talk about interdepartmental budgets held interdepartmentally,
it is an interesting concept, but it has as many possible risks
as advantages, namely that nobody is accountable, but it also
would focus minds if the money is being spent in an interdepartmental
way. Do you think that would have helped, or would it have not
made a difference, or would it have made things worse?
Mr Housden: I think you could
solve the question of accountability, but I am not sure it would
help. The problem always with ringfenced budgets is it creates
incentives for people to only put that amount of money on the
table, so if you pooled a budget from four departments and called
it coalfields, that means everything else would just shrink away
from it. I think Mr Mitchell's questions are brought out quite
clearly, what you have got is quite a complicated picture where
in the north-west, for example, there was quite strong eligibility
for European and other types of programme, so if you were dealing
with the coalfield, there were all sorts of other things you could
mix and match. Other areas are less eligible and therefore had
a different sort of service. So to be clear, I doubt whether in
this circumstance a pooled budget would have made a huge difference.
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